Folks Of Interest Lee Chapel's Tornado

Hello: If you are looking for Lee Chapel's Speed Equipment, and what left of the Tornado Streamliner here is some ifo. Carl Schmid, 6101 East Ashley Lane, Stockton, Ca.,95215, U. S. A., phone # 209-931-3361. I visited him yesterday, and saw his collection. He bought out Lee Chapel's Speed Shop from his estate. The body of the Tornado was left in Bonneville when it crashed in 1953, but he has the rest of the parts. Quite a collection of parts. My Dad was Bob Allinger, and going back 60 was amaizing to find that Carl lives just 20 minutes away.
Mariella

 

hmmm

 

Hi Mariella,
You could helped me. I seek photographs where documents on the “Lee chapel Tornado” with pressures of the color. With an aim of being able to reproduce the model on 1:43 scale.
Thank you.

Marc

mdk.be@hotmail.fr

 

Mariella hasn't been on the HAMB since May of 2010. I doubt she will see your message.

 

Here is a photo of Lee's race car at the 1949 Oakland show.

 

Beautiful, but Im going to take a guess that it took off like an airplane & crashed. Quite a piece of work for the times.

 

i have a 1949 Mechanix illustrated with the Tornado on the cover and a short article inside. it's for sale in the classifieds (shameless self promotion)

 

Don't see much mention of Lee Chapel -- if I recall correctly, he opened a speed shop in the '20s on San Fernando Road in the Valley and ran a Chev roadster pre-WWII, then built his own overhead valve heads for flatheads, which he ran in the "Tornado" streamliner....hope someone follows up on the lead from a couple of years ago, would be neat to see what is left (if the story is true?)

 

Tornado headlight bracket. Pretty crude casting by today's standards but Lee sold a lot of them for $15 a set in the '50s. That would be about $150 in today's money. Uses to go to his little store on 13th or 14th street in on Oakland. He tried to sell me a set of his overhead conversion heads for $250 in about '60 I only paid $100 for my whole 47 Ford two door. I thought he was crazy.

 

Here's the cover of my Lee's Speed Shop catalog from 1950.

Has the Tornado heads listed for $750.00 a set. A pretty good hunk of change for 1950.

Mick

 

Lee had a race car friend, George Rokutani from the Oakland area, who was relocated to the Twin City area at the beginning of WWII. George was an exceptional engine man and mechanic. After the war he had a shop called "Motor Repair" in St. Paul that was the hang out for all the out of town IMCA Big cars (before they were called Sprint Cars) for the 10 days of the State Fair.

George also ran an IMCA Big Car and Lee had provided him one of his rare Tornado OHV conversion engines that was run in that car.

For pictures of the Tornado engine here is the link to Bill Smith's Museum of American Speed and his Tornado.

http://www.museumofamericanspeed.com/Ford-Flathead-Tornado-OHV,21394.html

 

Thanks for posting it was very interesting.