Good questions Bill. In all honesty, I have no idea how many hours are in that buck but it's a lot. I'll ask Dad tomorrow and see what he thinks, but I suspect that he could probably duplicate it in maybe 80 - 100 hours knowing what he knows now. I wouldn't be surprised if there were double or triple that many hours in this one because of all the nifty things we learned along the way. There were a lot of little 1/8" strips of wood glued onto the ribs in places, just to get the contour "just right", and all of the ribs in the rear were re-made at least once. Then there was that whole "moving the body back 6 inches" deal, which necessitated cutting out some of the inner bracing and relocating the cutouts for the rear spring. There was a huge learning curve for all of us, but so far we're pleased with the results. Another reason I don't know how much time it took was because there were a lot of "30 minutes here and 30 minutes there" work sessions. Often we'll sit down to eat lunch and study the project while it's quiet. Once we're done eating it's not uncommon for one of us to jump on a project and get a few minutes worth of work done before time to get back to work.
In regards to the wood, that's another story in and of itself. We started out using whatever scraps of plywood we had around the shop but quickly realized that it was going to take WAY more than we had. Dad happened to be surfing the local Craigslist one night and ran across some fellow with pieces of birch plywood (can't remember if it's 1/2" or 5/8") for sale for either $1 or $2 each (boy, my memory is getting worse...
). Anyway, they were all the same odd size of something like 23" by 47", and the guy said he had all we could possibly want. As best we can tell they were drops from a cabinet shop that this guy had saved from a big job, and we were all too happy to take them off his hands! I think there ended up being 60 or 70 pieces total.
Funny you mention this fitting a Model A chassis because we were discussing that very thing a few days ago. I haven't taken any measurements but my guess is that it could be adapted with a little effort.