Building cars is a family thing for us. After World War II, my dad built racing cars - midgets, hot rods, that sort of stuff. He actually raced for a while himself in the San Francisco Bay Area and was the а first to hit 100 mph on the Oakland Speedway. When I was a kid, I always hung around the workshop with dad, helping him out, and kind of got the knack of it.
After I got out of the navy in the late '60s, I started building aluminium bodies on racing cars: midgets, dragsters, funny cars, and sporty cars. I also started building motorcycle petrol tanks for the Harley-Davidson XR-750 flat-trackers in the early '70s.
I've been a fabricator, building cars and parts for other people, almost my whole life. But a little over a decade ago, I bought this '34 Ford. That's the year that Fords started having nicer lines - a more flowing look. I looked for a five-window '34 coupé for a long time and paid way too much money when I finally found one, but it's what I wanted.
It was a running car, but it needed help. It was just in primer when I bought it. It had a Chevy 350 in it, which I'm not particularly fond of - I'm a little bit of a purist. To me, a Ford's a Ford, and a Chevy's а a Chevy. It sat with me for years, then I finally decided I'd just take the car apart and do a restoration on the thing - reassemble it, paint it, and everything.
I stripped it down to the bare frame, but the further I got, the more problems I found. This is where the car really became a project.
Bu hikaye Popular Mechanics South Africa dergisinin May/June 2022 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye Popular Mechanics South Africa dergisinin May/June 2022 sayısından alınmıştır.
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