ABANDONED Dragster FOUND in a Tennessee Scrap Pile (We Find its History) - Hot Rod Hoarders Ep. 24

on this episode of hot rod horrors we find an old rusty dragster and i track down its history dating all the way back to 1957 in california [Applause] we drove this old frame in a couple years ago and it's taken this long for me to document this car i mean this thing sat for months without me even knowing any part of its history and one day it just seemed to click and it kind of sent me on a journey of finding old pictures and it at least gave me some things to search for so i'm going to explain some of that here of how i documented this car and then explain the car's history because it has even though it just ran for a few years it does have some killer history and just cool stuff to share so hang tight with me let's follow along on the journey of this car some of our old drag car barn fines and things like that i don't really have any information to go by when it comes to researching these cars sometimes you know it's a local contact who helps me gain a little bit of information sometimes i just have to go to the internet and search sometimes i don't get any information at all well in the case of this car it did have some pretty distinct details but i was just coming up empty on any kind of searches for local drag cars that kind of match this thing nothing was lining up for me so i kind of took a break i realized that this thing could have just been a home built deal that never even seen the racetrack who knows with this kind of stuff so i just took a break and one day i decided i was going to dig around a little bit on facebook and i found some information that led me down a road of tons of information i mean it went from zero information to i'm pretty sure i know what this car is so i posted a couple of pictures of it and somebody pointed out the odd shaped main frame rails this thing does have an oval shaped tube for the main frame which is not normal so that was a really big clue in leading me further down the road with this thing that oval shaped tubing for the main frame rails is pby wing strut material that was used in aircrafts in world war ii this stuff is actually made of 4130 chromoly which is state-of-the-art material compared to just regular old steel that most tractors were built out of and this car from what my research showed was built by joe ito and he used this pby material on a regular basis so that kind of helped me tie up some of those loose ends as far as who may have built this chassis luckily the peterson publishing archives have been made available to the public they're digitized you can just flip through like a million literally a million images online so that gave me something to search when i found out this was a joe ito car i could just type in ito in the search bar and that actually brought up some results because one of the photographers visited his shop photographed an incomplete dragster for a magazine feature and that let me get some really good up close details of that particular car which i thought may have been my car so a closer look showed me a little bit of differences in some of the gussets some of the brackets but you could see that pby material on the main frame rails and you could see sort of a pointy roll bar which was kind of a trademark of my car as well so even though there were some big similarities i was able to cross this one off the list this was not the right car because of those differences but it did lead me to continue searching for joe ito chassis cars and i found several finally after basically days of just i can't think of anything other than searching for this dragster chassis i found the right car i mean it clicked immediately when i saw just the thumbnail of the picture i clicked on it was like that is the car and that led me down another road of further exploration and research and just relentless digging through archives and pictures and stuff like that and it it nailed it down i mean this is the car from there i found that this dragster was owned and raced by tets ishimaru and he was a japanese guy who fully embraced the southern california lifestyle as far as hot rods and motorcycles and stuff like that and he built this dragster obviously with the help of joe ito on the chassis but he built this thing and raced it for a few years so this car raced all over southern california in the 1950s it raced at lions riverside san fernando and lots of other smaller tracks around the area and some big major moments in this car's career was going to the nhra nationals it went two years in a row 1958 to oklahoma city and 1959 to detroit michigan so the earliest picture i found of this car was either late 1957 or early 1958 i know what you're thinking the roll bar design is totally different i see that but this car did have this style roll bar in 57 and 58 it was changed and i can show you on the car itself where the old roll bar was cut off and the new roll bar was welded on the original setup on this car included an inline six cylinder engine and it took me a little bit to figure out exactly what this was because most inline sixes have the intake and exhaust ports on the same side of the head and if you'll notice on this picture it has five two barrel carburetors on one side of the engine and then a split header on the other side of the engine so that's a pretty exotic setup and what i found was this is either a chevrolet or more than likely a gmc inline six cylinder and it has a very rare wayne 12 port cylinder head on it in 1958 a new series of v8 engines was introduced for mercury edsel and lincoln passenger cars this series of engines was available in several cubic inches and configurations but the 430 cubic inch version for the lincoln seemed to be the most popular for hot rodders because it made the most power it was biggest so tets actually put a brand new 1958 lincoln engine onto this dragster in 1958 and went drag racing with it at this point it had a log style intake manifold with eight two barrel carburetors it had open headers i don't know exactly what else it more than likely had a custom grind camshaft maybe had some head work done as far as porting who knows there's not a whole lot of information on this setup in these pictures you can see the front axle is a drilled high beam axle that's been dropped and it also looks like it's been chrome plated so that kind of tells you that this is a pretty high end car another big clue as far as identifying this car are these giant radius rods they're much bigger than what you'd see on a regular hot rod or dragster and they go almost all the way back to the center of the car and just in trying to identify the car i was able to pinpoint exactly where those mounts go also notice on these early shots that he's running standard hubs with no front brakes and he's running just regular old steel wheels with passenger car tires you can see a quick transition on this car when he was preparing it for the 1958 nhra nationals in oklahoma city the car made huge changes he had a completely new induction set up going from the eight two barrel carburetors to a potvin blown setup with a two port hilbert fuel injector and he also changed over to a standard dragster type spoke wheel on the front so you know he's making big changes along the way you know in the middle of the season to try to prepare for the biggest race of the season and to put this into perspective we're talking about hauling a car from southern california to oklahoma city for the nationals that year that was a big deal you only hauled that great of a distance if you thought you had a chance of winning these came from the peterson publishing archives and there are some extremely well detailed shots of this car that's competed in the a dragster category no nitro this was on gasoline only but a super competitive category back then i don't really know how much success he had at the nationals i don't have record of that and i don't see any other pictures of this front drive setup on the supercharger so it may not have worked to his advantage he may have just kind of scrapped the whole idea because in 1959 he came out with a new setup he also updated the roll bar back then there were no store-bought blower kits for a 430 cubic inch lincoln v8 so he had to fabricate all of this stuff i mean the from the intake manifold that accepted the 671 supercharger to the pulley system which was actually a chain drive this thing had a chain driving the supercharger instead of a belt and you know in that case he also built a guard to go around that chain the most pictures i have of this car is from the 1959 season it seemed to have some pretty good success it ran a lot of big races so that always helps when it comes to finding old pictures if it ran out of big race chances are there was a magazine photographer there it also helps when a car goes a lot of rounds at a big race like the nationals because in that case that's more opportunities to be photographed and that was the case in the 1959 season tetz went several rounds in the a gas dragster category and knocked out some pretty heavy hitters along the way hot rod magazine would send you know several photographers there to shoot from all different angles and they would just fire away in all of these races and the end result in this case is about 20 something pictures of this car from all different angles from the front the side the back you know all different spots on the track this thing got covered heavily and it was included in hot rod magazine print coverage but outside of that you know these other 20 pictures were unpublished for many many years one of the best pictures of the car in my opinion is from december of 1959 from riverside iconic racetrack iconic car iconic picture number one it helped me identify the car because it really gave me a clear shot of that frame rail the gussets the little support rails the brackets everything about this car i can pinpoint it right here i can show you the bolt holes for the tin work that go you know the body that goes around so this particular picture by doug peterson that helped me really nail this thing down and say for sure 100 this car matches my car moving on to 1960 the car got a paint job i can see in this one picture from lion's drag strip that it has some new sponsors it's got iski and wyand on there where previously it had herbert cams and it had h garage you can see that this car is progressing it's picking up sponsors it's picking up speed it's obviously had a successful 59 season so the 1960 version does have some changes you'll notice on the the engine itself pretty much everything looks the same but it does have a hillburn 4-port fuel injector instead of the old style 2 port one of the coolest things to me is while i was doing research on this car i found a guy who actually had video footage of it running and it came from a guy named jianji nakamura and he was around back then at lions and riverside and all those tracks in southern california and he watched this thing run you know is this the car that you always wanted to watch it was a good running car through all of my research on facebook i'm finding bits and pieces and i'm just putting them together to be able to document this car one day you know i felt like i had found it all but there was still you know 1960 was the last that i knew of this car so i'm digging for more and i find a comment that somebody had left on one of the pictures of this car and the guy said that his buddy bought the chassis from tets which is huge this is like a monumental breakthrough of finding more history on the car so the guy said that tetz hung it in the rafters of his shop which was in los angeles and that they used to go hang out there him and his buddy and his buddy talked him out of it he made him an offer on the chassis got it down out of the rafters and sold it to him that was around 1965 when that exchange happened the guy didn't ever really do anything with the chassis it kind of just sat around he eventually sold it around 1970 and from there i don't know exactly what happened what transpired and i especially don't know how this thing went across the country because by this point it was extremely outdated it had no historical value at that point and you know there was really no purpose in dragging this thing from california to its eventual home in tennessee so that brings us to the car's modern era i bought it from bb brown he's a nostalgia drag racer from north georgia he just kind of had it as a project decided to let go of it we jumped in to buy it so i asked him where he got it from he told me it came from kenny buckner and his dad in cleveland tennessee i happen to know them so i reached out asked where it came from and it turns out kenny's dad bought this thing from just a guy who was selling some furniture so he checked out the furniture had no clue but looked in the backyard and there was just a scrap pile and this thing was sitting in the backyard and he ended up getting the car sticking it back together just kind of getting it up on wheels and uh getting it rolling again and they just kept it around they had no real intentions of selling it until bb pretty much talked him out of it you know he wanted it really bad for a project he just never really got around to putting it together so that's kind of how we ended up with it so one thing you will notice is on my car it has a round tube completely straight axle and that's been changed at some point i don't know when exactly the dates going back uh ken said that he thinks that it was around the year 2000 when they got the car so you know we do have a gap from 1970 to 2000 of i don't know what happened to this car i don't know if the guy moved and he carried it with him for some reason i don't know if the thing got sold in like a auto trader type magazine or hemings magazine or something like that but i can't imagine it being worth any money definitely not worth enough money to pay for having it transported all the way across the country i have no clue why this thing ended up in tennessee i'll still continue researching that forever until i find out why but i'm just happy that we got our hands on it that we were able to nail down what this car was so many years ago i want to say a huge thank you to the guys who helped me document this car with pictures video and information even if they didn't realize they were helping me the work that they put into digitizing their pictures and their video and just putting the information out there is huge it really helped me to nail down the history on this car from start to finish and it's just awesome guys like dave sorenson doug peterson gianji nakamura and thomas who is in charge of digitizing the peterson publishing archive as far as restoration goes this thing is rough i mean it's going to need a lot of work structural and cosmetic there's a lot to it you know something that could be 10 or 20 years down the road for me i don't know and i may never restore it but at least now that i know what this car is it gives me a direction to go because we had thought about putting a ford flathead v8 maybe an old hemi some kind of motor on here to kind of make it look complete but now that we know that it had a 430 cubic inch lincoln that's the direction we're going to go you know try to replicate what this car was but for right now i'm happy with just having it here at the shop being able to tell this story being able to continue my research on this car it's really a pretty iconic piece it's uh you know it's not fully complete but it's one of my favorite pieces of our collection don't forget to hit that subscribe button hit the notification bell give me a thumbs up and leave me a comment i always like to see the feedback and i like to interact with you guys so just stay tuned new videos every friday be sure to check out my merchandise i got t-shirts and all sorts of different things with the 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Channel: Hot Rod Hoarder

Views: 336,110

Rating: 4.9256043 out of 5

Keywords: abandoned dragster, hot rod hoarder, california dragster, tets ishimaru dragster, aa/fuel dragster moonburst, drag car, abandoned drag car, dragcar find, dragster, hot rod hoarders, dragster in a scrap pile, front engine dragster, historic dragster, historic drag car, nostalgia dragster, tets ishimaru, Joe Itow chassis, Joe Itow automotive, lions drag strip, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1958 NHRA nationals, 1959 NHRA Nationals, drag racing history, Lincoln dragster, hot rod Lincoln

Id: IXYE9z4-1hE

Length: 17min 38sec (1058 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020