Featured History Why don’t I see Plymouth/Chevy Hot Rods?

The numbers.

 

Well, the fact that we're discussing why there aren't more of them tells me that my Plymouth Coupe will be quite unique. Refreshing among a sea of Fords. And I like that. A lot of people do. And I don't give a flying dick if you don't think it's cool.
I say it is.
And so am I.
LOL

 

Wow! I was making a list of possible events to attend this fall, and the Gathering at the ROC was one of them.

 

Another ridiculously priced one. Seen it over 6 months ago. Not a true roadster I’m guessing. There is a similar one for sale out in BC, and a true roadster, for $25K. Saw a pair of Chevy’s for sale yesterday, one was a pickup IIRC, but now can’t find the ad. If I find it, I’ll post it. I think he was only asking CAN$2.5K for the pair, but was hard to tell what it really was and what shape.

 

This is my 40 Pontiac I have never seen another one in a show. I do have most of the trim for it but need clips.

 

In 1957 Henry Ford II went all out with the 1957 Ford. His goal was to outsell Chevrolet. Chevrolet had been in the top spot for a couple of decades.
Chevrolet had outsold Ford since the 1930s.
In ‘57, Ford offered more models under the same platform than any time before or since.
Ford outsold Chevy in ‘57.
The tri-5 Chevy was long in the tooth and Ford went all out.
Second verse sounds like the first.....
Although the 57 Chevy was outsold by Ford, it became iconic as a used car much like the outsold 30s Fords.

Plymouth.....
In the 30s Plymouth was a solid 3, sometimes threatening Ford.
In a lot of ways Plymouth was a better car than the Ford or Chevrolet.

 

When I first started hanging around live guys- garage and boiler room - that were hot rodding since the fifties, and drag racing in the sixties, I got all the sage advice. Steel is real, no four doors, no early wood bodies, coupe or hardtop is what you want, sbc stuff interchanges from 1955 to 1995, ford interchangeability changed every six months, flatheads rule, flatheads are boat anchors, 32 ford grille is iconic, hot rods don’t run 6 bangers, it’s just a model A, real hot rods have three pedals, buy it, wash it and drive it, and on and on. Then I found the hamb where a lot of that continues. Some of it you relish, some of it becomes a barrier. Out of all this I get - if you don’t love it, don’t buy it. Take your shot, do your best, use your skills, or develop some, have fun - share it here- pictures or it didn’t happen.

 

My taste when it comes too hot rods are kind of basic, I perfer a fenderless A ford roadster in a rough condition, if i feel taking it for driftig on a gravel road, just do it....
But too be honest my dream hotrod is my lastest post, this Chevrolet roadster is almost perfect, I would change the front tires to a pair of black bias and put a bench seat in.
I wouldnt mind if it had an sixshooter, its enought too scare the normal people, but this actual car has an 383 sbc and its insane, I love it

 

Cant find the photo right now, but on the rear end of the Chevy roadster its signed, "who the fuck is Henry Ford" i think its briliant.
I know its controversial but its just my taste

 

Several years ago I was briefly participating in this forum with a different username and eventuality, for various reasons, stepped away (perhaps even got banned as my original username & password didn't seem to work), but a friend notified me of this thread and asked if I could share my experiences & views on this particular topic, so here we go.

First, let me introduce a “1932 & ½”, i.e. PB* Plymouth Sport Roadster which I acquired in 1989 and subsequently rebuilt ** as an (early 1950s period correct) vintage hot rod in early 1990s. After my first ever in-person sighting of one unrestored, original configuration example in late 1980s and having no interest in Fords of the same period (see some of my reasoning below), I sought out to find one, but being much rarer than I realized, it took a while, maybe a year or two and I even paid more than anyone at the time thought made any sense.

*There are/were two significantly different Plymouth models made in 1932, first being PA’s which essentially were carry-over production from1931 Plymouths due to 5+ month production start delays on PBs and other than drive train, PA & PB have almost no interchangeable parts, especially body or frame components, hence my reference to mine as a“1932 & ½”, which BTW was also the last model Plymouth offered with a Roadster body styles, one being a Business (w/full trunk) & the other Sport (w/rumble seat).

**My PB had been “hot rodded” & “channeled & customized” in late ‘40s/early ‘50s in New York from where I found/bought it and where it had been last registered in 1951 (after buying the car, I received (& for sentimental reasons, still have) the 1951 registration/title + one plate, all having been assigned to its serial number back then. While it was missing an engine, transmission, hood side panels, front floor & some small bits & pieces, it was otherwise relatively complete and had ample evidence suggesting it likely one time had some type of V8 (perhaps a Ford ?) engine in it.

In the Valley of Fire, during VLV20 weekend in 2017:


Traveling around Grand Teton while on a 2700+ mile road trip in 2017:


Crossing the high desert between L.V. & Death Valley, 01/'23:


Deep in the Death Valley, 01/'23:


Traveling through Astoria, OR. while on a 3500+ mile road trip, 09/'22:


As for the historical(?) claims of no Chevys or Plymouths having been used in building hot rods back in the day, while true to some extent, there’s a lot more to it than just scouring through old, period magazines. Most people tend to forget or not understand that Model T’s, A’s, B’s & V8 Fords were in their days equivalent of Honda Civics or Toyota Camrys, etc, i.e. inexpensive, had much larges production scale (compared to their contemporaries), which obviously led them to be cheaply/easily obtainable, hence more “popular”(like Taylor Shift or what-/whoever is the most “popular” in music today ?), especially among the youth who decade or two later bought, hot rodded & also used them as daily drivers, just like couple of generations later the youngster are/were doing same with countless 10-20+ year old Camrys, Civics, Subarus, etc, but their “popularity” also made them commercially viable subjects/targets for huge variety of aftermarket custom & speed equipment businesses.

OTOH, there is and has always been a following for “oddrods” of all sorts, but due to lack of easily commercialized presence in the popular culture, especially in print media and therefor lack of access to easily/readily available equipment & parts support, they just have been in the shadows of hundreds of thousands (or with all the replicas, are they now already in millions and growing ?) of late ‘20s/early ’30s Fords. Also, if one looks at period magazine advertisements, there were heads, intakes along with numerous other speed & custom equipment offered for various other brands also, but obviously all were a lot smaller “market segment” than Fords.

Also for me, being fairly tall (5’11”) with long legs, Fords, especially A or ’32 Roadsters don’t offer enough cockpit room to accommodate reasonable comfort for long distance travel, which I enjoy & do plenty. My PB is much roomier due to having longer wheelbase, which same as ’34 Ford.

 

I hear you ! When I first got my PB Roadster running and drivable around 1991/1992, one of the first out of town (short) trips was to attend (& hopefully participate in) LA Roadsters Fathers Day show, only to be denied entry combined with several individuals looking down their noses and making snarky comments like “What the heck is that contraption* ?” & “This is a show for nice cars” after which my passenger (old enough to having been driving & living in the mid-1950s in SoCal) got out and tried to explain to these sanctimonious gate keepers (all wearing LA Roadsters jackets, hats and other club swag, so no mistaking who they represented) about period correct hot rods, but I asked him to stop, get back in the car, after which we drove away and I swore to never attend or support any event these kinds of wankers are organizing.

*I built the car to appearance & configuration like it still is today, except it was clean, fresh and had not yet endured +/-100.000** miles it has since. And yes, she still has 80-90% of her original wooden body & door frame work. Some of it, along with the original cockpit floor & lower footwell sections, were missing when I acquired her, so I just made replacements myself, out of wood obviously.

**40K+ miles in just past 10 years, almost 12K since I rebuilt the engine 2.5 years ago.

 

NZ 34 Plymouth build started in 59 and finished in 61, Allard heads and manifold, Ford chassis shortened.

 

Thanks for sharing. Definitely on my bucket list to do something like that.

 

Another thought. In 1945 wood body frames were only 20 years old. Today that same wood frame is 100 years old. Now when I think about it, if my Dad were still alive today, he would be 103. The guy in my avatar picture. He told me stories about a guy in Fullerton, Ca, Fred Upshaw whom used to build hotrod flathead Model A engines. Going back WW2. Even in my 20's I would go over to Fred's house there in Fullerton. However none of us believed he built the best A-B engines. But he did have a nice 30-31 pickup always parked in front.

Now days just about anyone can get some Harbor Crapp metal working tools and do body repair in their shop. BUT look at the price of wood or wood kits. That's why you rarely see anyone working on a Model A four door. Like my Brother had to. The wood was the price of the whole car.

 

The flat head motors (inline 4, 6, or 8 cylinders or the V8s) pretty much all had the same issues and restrictions. The guys that had enough understanding of their function, often had to think (or imagine) outside of the box of standard training to make any performance gains. Some of those out of the box things worked in various levels of improvement, some were huge failures. The things that were easy to copy were quickly copied. The more complex things may or may not have been developed, but many successful designs became businesses for the designers to produce and sell those products to the guys that could afford to buy them. Selling those products provided more funding for the designer to do more research and develop more parts. A lot of the recognized big name performance parts companies sprang up because someone that company was named after found a way to get a more HP out of the flathead motor design.

As far as the wood thing, wood working may have been far more accessible then then it is currently, but it still added another level of cost for materials, and a huge investment of time to fabricate the wood parts and install them into the car, before you could start building your hot rod. There are a lot of different pieces of wood to form into the body shape, under that tin shell. Probably no one was making patterns, you would have had to create and hand form every piece that needed to be replaced.

You could probably go to any junk yard and buy a Ford (or most other metal body cars) for less then the cost of the wood, and start building your hot rod immediately.

 

Chevys are dumb. Here’s mine…

 

My 32 Plymouth Sedan. Early 70's build.

 

This Plymouth is out of NJ.



A local NY Pontiac hot rod survivor


My friend Sean's 34 Chev sedan still Blueflame powered too!


The 30 Chevy built by Pete Flaven of Boston Mass the car is now here in NY.

 

I tend to like my off brand choices to be different I think bodies are built better (no structural wood) and have nicer body lines. They are also more roomy than their Ford counterparts. I also tell people that they can keep their valuable Ford stuff but if they want to get rid of that Dodge and Plymouth junk feel free to leave it in my driveway and I’ll be glad to take care of it for them!!

 

My Grandfather who would be about 104 today had a welding and repair shop in Northern CA before and after the war and he always spoke fondly of his pre war cut down Chevy he had as a young man . I think was a 1925 and how it had a upside down air plane carb and a way to adjust the fuel mixture on the fly and how he hand painted it black lacquer with a brush in a field and taking my Grandmother for a ride and dating in it . He was a Chevy guy until he died and he hated fords . He said the early Chevy was a better engine than the Ford .
Sadly there are no pictures of it to be found . All I know was it was a stripped down chevy roadster but it does show kids then did hot rod them .
Story goes his boss had a auction for it because it was left with a unpaid bill at the shop he worked at and they had the auction at two in the morning and Gramps was the only one there to bid on it for $15 and then he built it up. He talked of some different head on it
Id give every dime I have to be able to talk to him again . Miss him he toaught me to wled and we built my first engine in his shop .

 

Pre 1936 GM for the most part the body was a wood frame with sheet metal tacked on it with brad nails. I had a 34 Olds sedan that was a great looking car but the best thing I do with wood is split it for firewood and am not much of a wood worker.
I remember my dad telling about his family having an old Chevy touring car as the family car and he and his buddy went to the local (still there) wrecking yard and bought a decent same model sedan body for 5.00 and swapped the sedan body for the touring body so his mom and younger siblings would have a closed car to ride in in the winter. I'm thinking that they did the body swap at the wrecking yard. Still I lost track a long time ago of all the old GM bodies that I looked at that had all the wood rotted out of them.

 

I really like this one

 

They definitely weren’t built back then:

Must be AI. All the mag articles from the 50s-60s about them must’ve been chatgtp or something also. Everyone knows nothing but fords were ever hot rodded.

 

You're welcome.

Do you mean building or buying a reliable period correct roadster that can be used for serious driving and/or using it for such ?
As mentioned, I built mine +/-35 years & +/-100.000 miles ago (from a literal basket case, in less than year) and will continue racking up miles, hopefully long into the future. For what else would I had built her ?

Here she's in Joshua Tree driven/enjoyed by a friend and his wife visiting from Europe last May.
It was a rare opportunity for me to see her in action "in-the-wild" from a spectator point of view (I even shot several videos).
Plenty of my friends have driven her, but on most occasions with me as a passenger.

 

1932 Chevy Hot Rod circa 1980’s
that I transported from the Midwest
to the Pacic Northwest several years ago



Jim

 

Yes. Would love to tour Canada and the USA. I love driving/travelling, so it’s a no brainer. Issue again for me is cost of these things. Was very close about buying a Ford Tudor a few years back, but pulled out because it felt like a scam. Been looking on/off ever since. Being more of a Mopar guy, I’m kind of drawn to that Plymouth I posted, but not at that crazy asking price. Would love to build an early Mopar hemi at some point as well. They’re always one or two for sale locally on FB. Been watching Jamie on Dead Dodge Garage lately talk about his stash of earlier hemis. Haha!

 

@Ziggster I wanted to add that while I built mine +/-35 years ago from a literal basket case, I did it in about a year's time and with a shoe string budget.

Obviously, there were much more used parts and parts cars readily available around here, including in numerous self-serve wrecking yards, at that time and I got "lucky"(?) with the engine (276" DeSoto), which a friend essentially gave me and it turned out to be a pretty good working (allegedly "rebuilt" ?) unit that lasted over 30 years & nearly 100K miles as is.

Heck, when it finally conked out about 3 years ago, I spent more money on its rebuild than I had spent buying and building the entire car 35 years ago. And mind you, I didn't waste any money or time on bling as none of that makes it run better or more reliable.
I just wanted a reliable mill that will hopefully give me another 30+ years and 100.000+ miles. So far, in less than 3 years since the rebuild, I've got almost 12.000 miles and counting ...

So what I'm saying or suggesting is that if you have (or anyone has) a real desire to build or buy and drive the crap out of a vintage hot rod, you better quite wasting time on Facebooks, YouTubes, etc (incl. internet forums like this) and get busy.

There's an old wisdom that goes something like "Nobody on their deathbed ever wished they had driven their ****** less !". I know I won't.

P.S. Finding an old 1950s Chrysler/DeSoto/Dodge Hemi isn't that difficult (easy for me to say as I have a bunch, both in & out of cars), but building one to be practical & well working road engine can be a challenge to say the least. Most people seem to focus and IMO, waste money on bling & wow factors, but then again, they do same with entire cars also, rather than making them good/reliable drivers and that's why you/we don't see them often "in-the-wild".

 

Re the guy that claims non-Fords were never hot rodded back in the day. Ignore him, he makes the same claim every time somebody posts anything about non-Ford hot rods. It's best to just ignore guys like that, they're just looking to stir up controversy.

 

Nothing out run A v8 Ford. Like the first muscle car.