Choppin' A Chevy Part II - Tech

This is the second part of two stories highlighting what it takes to lower the lid on a '33/34 Chevy coupe. Marcel De Ley and his two sons, Marc and Luc, did the work at Marcel's Custom Metal Shaping. In the last issue of STREET RODDER, we showed what the coupe looked like as it arrived at their shop, the initial work on cutting the roof apart, and then lining up the pieces.

In this installment, we'll show how Marcel's put those pieces back together, reworked the rear window area, and filled the top. A future issue will showcase how the guys went about cutting down the doors to fit their new openings (while adding suicide hinges in the process).

As shown in the last installment, there is a lot of wood used for structural integrity inside Chevy coupe bodies. All of the wood from the beltline up has to be removed before the creation of new metal pieces can begin. At this point of the chop job, the wood slats used to support the vinyl insert in the rooftop are the only pieces of wood left in the interior-everything else has been removed.

There are probably as many different ways to chop a coupe as there are coupes, but here's the way Marcel's did it: The roof was cut into two pieces-a front half and rear half, split at the middle of the door opening. But when Marc made his cuts to the rear section of the roof (just above the beltline), he went up and around the rear window, leaving it to be modified after the initial chop had been tacked together. Though he did a 2-inch chop on the posts, he decided only a 1-inch chop through the rear window was enough. Proportionally, it was the right thing to do, as a 2-inch chop in the rear window would make the window opening too small for the size of the roof. So the overall chop became a two-step program: Cut the roof into two halves, and then chop the rear window.

One of the most important pieces of information needed when doing a chop, or any other work that requires welding, is to pay close attention as to how the pieces fit back together, literally. If there is too much of a gap between two pieces, then you'll either have to fill it with weld (not a good thing to do) or make the gap a little larger and then fill it with a new section of metal (making more work for yourself in the process). If the pieces overlap each other, even slightly, the weld itself will not be good and you'll have to hammer on the area, thus stretching the metal and creating waves or dents (and again creating more work for yourself).

So, rule number one, along with all those other rule number ones, is to take the time to accurately mark and cut what you're working on so the pieces butt up to each other, with a gap of only 1/16-inch or less. That's what good welders do, and that's what you should do too!