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"I was a teenage hot rodder!"
Are there any of us guys that never used a clothespin to attach a baseball card to the frame of their bicycle so
it would flap in the spokes and sound like it had an engine? I used two of them. I rode a twin.
I have a good recollection of the evening of my sixteenth birthday. It was March 7th, 1968. There was a 1930 Ford
Model A sedan that appeared in that day's paper, and naturally since the asking price was the same amount as I had
to my name at the time, and since I had the same amount of common sense as I have now, I went to have a look at it
with my life savings in my pocket. It was a dark and cold winter night, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The car was sitting
in a snowbank, looking very much unwanted and unloved. Being both a motorhead and a meathead, I vowed right then
that I would save her.
When the snow melted in the spring I went to collect my first car, and realized that one should never buy a
forty-year-old car when it's buried in snow. Rust, penetrating oil, broken bolts and rotted wood became my new
hobbies, and I began to appreciate some of the reproduction stuff. As a matter of fact, after deciding I had just
gotten mad at my once-beloved bucket of rusted and fatigued parts for the last time, I sold the car to a
restoration type who was really happy with it.
I wasted no time in ordering up a T-bucket body, pickup bed and frame, along with a Minnesota Auto Specialties
four-inch-dropped tube axle, and had Jim Babb make me one of his beautiful brass radiators. Instead of fighting
with old steel parts that had been together so long they couldn't understand being torn down, now I was making and
buying parts. I was getting somewhere.
The hot rod progressed, and I was starting to realize what a pain this car was going to be when it was done. I had
bought a GMC 6:71 blower from Bob Buccini, who ran a BB/Gas dragster out at our local track at the time, Keystone
Dragway. The way I was planning on building this car, it should have run in the nines.
But a T-bucket was never my dream car. Spending 300 bucks for a body and bare frame seemed to be a practical
alternative to an unaffordable and hard-to-find original car in nice shape. (When the body arrived, I inspected it
thoroughly for rust, and found none.) It's pretty hard to spend thousands of dollars on bodywork when all the body
you have is a 'glass '23 T that you can carry with one hand.
1972 brought the so-called rebirth of hot rodding. One of its effects was to drive the price of Deuce parts out of
sight. By this time I'd spent enough time thinking about what I wanted to build and what I wanted to do with it
once it was done that a Deuce roadster I could run on the strip and the salt flats started to make sense, if I
could afford one. Right on cue, Mike Martens, in Mendota, Illinois, announced in Rod & Custom that he was
custom-building 1932 Ford frames, with hand-fabricated rails. I called him up, and he sounded real, so I sent him
about $450 for a fully-boxed Deuce frame with mounts for a Chevy engine, four-speed and a Jag rear end.
Unfortunately, between playing drums in rock bands and traveling constantly as a result, I was never able to
complete that car and parted it out. The frame went to a couple who lived in Edmonton, Alberta. I'd like to know
what's been done with it, since it was the first reproduction 1932 Ford frame in Canada.
'29s on Deuce rails,
Deuces, the '33 and '34 Fords, the '39 and '40 Fords, the '40 and
'41 Willys coupes...I love these cars. Here's to sunshine, a winding road and a healthy, strong hot rod.
All text and images on Roadsters.com are Copyright 1996-2007 Dave Mann |