Meet The Players

Here's another old friend. I built this 1932 Ford pickup truck (pretty much to this point) between 2007-2008. It features a 360 cubic inch DeSoto Hemi that was built by John Beck of Pro Machine (same guy who built the 5000 horsepower '34 roadster and the Mercury Flathead in the Tsukagawa Deuce). This motor has been fitted with a bitchin' set of vintage Hilborn stack injectors that were modified to use modern electronic fuel injection. It's the best of both worlds, the look of mechanical Hilborns with the driveability of modern EFI. This motor made 400-ish horsepower on John's engine dyno, and was hooked to a Tremec 5 speed stick.

The truck sits on a new 1932 Ford passenger car frame built by my friend Gary Maxwell at Blackboard Hot Rods and the suspension is all standard Pete & Jakes reproduction early Ford stuff. There's disc brakes up front and a new Currie 9" Ford rear. I chopped the cab about 5 or 6" (can't quite recall at this moment), built custom floors, built the lakes headers, built everything that wasn't bought.

When I downsized in the spring of 2008, I took on a contract position with another shop in Huntington Beach, CA.  The client lives in North Carolina and he decided to have the truck completed to a running driving point before it was shipped back to him, so it went to another shop located  about 20 miles from me. That shop owner and my client knew each other from Winston Cup racing so it seemed like a good fit for everyone.

Unfortunately the truck sat for three years at the other shop with very little work done. About 4 months ago the client contacted me and asked me to take the job back and complete it to the running, driving point we had talked about three years earlier. After four months of back and forth and back and forth and on and on the project finally arrived back at my shop.

I'm really happy to have the opportunity to finish what I started, even if it's not under the best circumstances. It's a really cool truck with patina, stance, and technology. Check it out!

The track has the most bitchin' patina with original door lettering still present from the 1940's. Here you can see the 1936 Ford headlights on the headlight bar I made, the handmade lakes headers with turnouts and the steel wheels. We even have DeSoto dog dish hubcaps from the 1940's to match the Hemi!

This thing really has a nice profile. The chop is just right and the stance is spot on. The bed is a reproduction '34 bed that I shortened and modified to fit the passenger car frame correctly.

This is the star of the show, 360 cubic inches of Hilborn injected DeSoto Hemi! It's well dressed with plated and polished bits.

The interior is just as I left it three years ago with a 1940 Ford steering column, matching steering wheel, '32 passenger car dash and Stewart Warner Wings gauges. There's a Tremec 5 speed manual transmission hook to the Hemi as well. For some reason, the pedals were cut up and tacked back together, not sure why. So that's first on the list to make right.