Of course, it helps when you have your own hot rod shop and spend a lot of time attending swap meets to source the cool early Ford parts that would make or break the look of the car. Even so, there are still plenty of areas where Steven invested time rather than money, and that’s something all of us can do. As with all of his builds, he simply had a plan and stuck with it: “We wanted to build a turn-key car in 60 days to showcase at the Victorian Hot Rod Show; something simple and a nice driver with the right look,” he says. “So after the XR was unveiled at Summernats 33, we didn’t stop – [wife] Kathleen and I did a lot of the assembly after work so we could keep the shop running and weren’t taking time away from customers’ cars.”
After doing a bit of a stocktake in the workshop, it turned out they had most of the bits on hand to finish off the roadster. “I had a diff housing and a centre, all the radius rods, a set of Rod-Tech four-bars and coil-overs,” Steven says. “I only had to buy the axle and spring for the front end; I had everything else. We bought everything we needed during the build so there were no extra costs at the end.”
This story is from the July 2020 edition of Street Machine Magazine.
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This story is from the July 2020 edition of Street Machine Magazine.
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ROYAL CARRIAGE
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EVER WISH YOU COULD HAVE A BRAND-NEW VERSION OF AN ICONIC 1970s AUSSIE MUSCLE CAR, FULL OF THE LATEST TECH? DRIVE SOUTH IS WORKING TO MAKE THAT A REALITY