I'm no kind of a mechanic and can't start to give you any advice on your restoration, but I love the old cars and look forward to you finished project.
I do remember back to 1948 when my dad showed up in the middle of the night in our home town in Texas, packed my mother and 3 kids in the middle of the night, loaded the 8 foot trailer he was towing and we all headed for West Texas.... the car was a 30's model copue (2 seater) that he had bought a couple of years earlier and drove to a job in west Texas. We left with my two sisters sitting in the seats with my parents, My little sister was straddling the gear shift and my older sister was between Mom and the door.... I was stretched out along the back of the seat in the back window. Not sure how long it took us to get there, but we likely look like the Beverly Hillbillies and we tooled along. He later took the body off the coupe and added a sedan body that had been burned out... our interior lining was Masonite.
Dad later traded the modified sedan for a 1941 Ford which we drove in West Texas, up into the Panhandle, then back to East Texas where we originally lived. Dad drove that car for nearly 10 or 12 years until he went bar hopping in about 1957 or 58 an drove it off into Cat Creek near where he lived.... ...My parents were separated by then and he was likely in his cups when he went bar hopping. I still remember that old Ford... it was some horrible shade of green.