Front Engine Dragster Hidden in the Woods (we bought it!) - Hot Rod Hoarders Ep. 9

on this episode of hot rod waters we're going to get a run engine dragster out of the woods and we're going to put it back together using parts that have been stashed away for over 50 years the dragster was built and raced by Jim Smith of Dayton Tennessee him and his brother Tom built this car from nothing and made this thing a competitive car in the local ranks and raced it Herrmann drag strip brainerd Optimus drag strip which was in Hickson Tennessee at the time and then Loudon drag strip as well so a few years ago my dad and I went to visit Jim he was doing pretty bad with his health and you know we wanted to go to talk cars and maybe take his mind off of it a little bit and you know at the time I was really into documenting old drag cars and drag strips and things cuz I've just written a book called lost drag strips and you know we've really just fresh on my mind it was something I'll enjoy talking about anyways so going to his house talking about the old drag car that was a lot of fun and of course I'm you know scribbling notes as fast as I can just trying to document this stuff because I know that that information is not gonna last forever you know people don't last forever and Jim had so much stuff just packed into his mind so many very very precise memories about this car and the other cars that he's built but I wanted to document that so that it didn't just get lost someday Jim built a dragster out of driveshaft tubes and ran it for a couple of years and it was a small-block Chevy powered and he eventually wanted to build something better so he started from scratch this would have been in the 1961 offseason heading into 1962 Jim was a talented fabricator and he was not afraid to try anything and you can see that with this car you know he built every single square inch of it he used an inch and five-eighths to for the majority of the chassis he did use a little bit smaller tube for the truss supports but the majority was inch and five-eighths he gasps well it and the the only curved piece on the whole car is that main tube that goes around his head and he couldn't bend it and nobody around had the equipment to mend it aside from the local plumbing shop so he took it there brought her back home welded it to what he had already assembled and he had his bare chassis back in the early 60s Jim didn't have access to all the tools that we have nowadays you know his main tools were a torch and that was pretty much it you know he didn't have TIG welders and plasma cutters and all these things that we have now that make fabricating a little easier I mean he really did it the hard way the front axle is just a simple round tube axle it has a torsion bar front suspension that Jim built from scratch and at the time most of the dragsters especially in this area still had a leaf spring in the front so torsion bar front suspension was pretty high-tech stuff of course the car didn't have any front brakes that's really normal for dragsters and it had motorcycle front wheels and still had the motorcycle front tires as well the rear end is a Buick housing that Jim had narrowed and he actually cut and welded the axles together on this thing he had checked with a local machine shop to see about tooling to have the axles respond and it was too much money for him so he just cut him and welded them with a nickel rod you can still see the nickel kind of shining on against the rust and these things held up for three years of racing with a nitro burning Hemi engine Jim drove to Mableton Georgia to get this 354 cubic inch Hemi engine out of a junkyard Jim was on a pretty tight budget but he knew where to spend the money the first thing he did was disassemble the engine and he sent the cam core to Bruce Crowley to have him regrind the camshaft with lobes that worked with his combination on top of the Hemi engine is a wind drag star intake manifold and it has six stromberg 97 car breakers which jim modified to use with alcohol and nitromethane the fuel system on this thing was crazy it had an aluminum fuel tank that jim had made and it was held in place with two Springs from screen-door this car didn't even have a fuel pump it was actually a hand pump that Jim's brother Tom would run up there pump the system jump in there push car push him off and then when they got up to the line Tom would pump it again right before Jim would hit the throttle and go down the track the car had no transmission he used a direct drive system that Jim built from scratch he actually used a drum to make the clutch cam in the inside of there had a 52 pound Dodge truck flywheel and a Velvet Touch dual disc clutch and then the rest of it was made out of a drive shaft and input shaft it was just kind of all pieced together to connect to that Buick ambulance rear end when I asked him about what kind of ETS that the car ran he couldn't really remember anything specific but he did remember the fastest speed it ever went up which was 157 miles an hour and you know after three years of testing and tuning and experimenting with different fuels and just basically blind by the seat of their pants the Smith Brothers had this thing figured out after three seasons of running this car the local track started cutting the purse for the dragster classes and they were actually adding to the person super stock and the gasser classes at the time and you know this was just discouraging for Jim and he actually decided to take the car off the track and you know took it apart and eventually put it out in the woods with a few other old cars that he had in its collection after we expressed interest in buying the old dragster you know even more stories came out about it you know it just really kind of opened Jim up to talking about it even more and when he had an idea of what we wanted to do with it it was even better he knew that we were never going to put this car back on the track again because the cars been sitting in the weather for decades so it's rusty it's rough it's not something that you could actually drive anymore but the history is still there the parts are still there the story's still there so we wanted to get it out of the woods and put it all back together thankfully Jim allowed us to do that he allowed us to go back in the woods and explore you know look around and try to find where all the parts work and he gave us some good ideas where to look but it was still like a scavenger hunt we really we had a great time looking for all this stuff and you know we went out there it actually took a little while to find the chassis because it was just kind of sinking down into the ground had a tree growing up through the middle of it and it was just you know a little bit of a surreal moment when we finally found it so when it came time to buy the car and get it out of the woods we recruited some help of course we had Kyle sat in there his brother Jesse and then one of my dad's best buddies Denny George he came to help us and you know we we had one of the best days ever digging that car out of woods I mean I there's no contest I mean we had fun digging that 55 Chevrolet up but this was a little more rewarding because we got a lot of good stuffs you know it wasn't at the end of the day we had a lot to show for it so it was really excited so we had to cut the tree down and get the chassis out we also have to dig because the thing and just sunk down into the ground but once we got that out of there you know then it was time to start finding other stuff we found the brake drums we found axles the only thing that was really missing was the rear end housing and Jim had told us that he had but some other racer borrow it to set up another chassis and he just never got it back so other than that Jim pretty much told us where everything was he told us where to look for instance the engine block the cylinder heads they were in the barn which was packed full stuff and kind of a little bit sketchy because there was not even really a path to get in and out of there but we got all that out the front wheels and tires were sitting there I stood the tire still held air I mean it's just crazy that they were still pumped up after all these years then the flywheel and the clutch you know we loaded everything up and I mean we were excited we came over the hill and went to talk to Jim and telling him all the stuff that we'd found and he said well what about the headers and what about the clutch can what about this and that and we were like what we didn't find any of that he said well did you look in the blue car we went back to the woods and started looking inside of all these old junk cars and open the back door of an old Plymouth or DeSoto or something and there were the headers there was the clutch can there was the driveshaft you know more parts just adding to our scavenger so what we needed to be able to finish this car were some wheels and tires for the back we needed a rear end housing we need it stuff like valve covers timing chain cover oil pan stuff like that to really just kind of make this thing look like something again so we're always scrounging around the swap meets we had a set of old pie crust slicks with steel wheels they're not exactly authentic wheels they're too smoothy wheels you know originally Jim had a set of Buick wheels on there that he had flipped around and reversed and all this stuff we didn't have that we just had what we had so that's what we put on the rear end is a 8 and 3/4 Mopar that my buddy Kyle he cut it down and and narrative for us so that it fit in the car ride and then welded some brackets on there so we could bolt it into the car then we had lots of other people donate parts just because they wanted to be a part of the project one of my favorite parts of the car are the motor mounts they are Ford flathead v8 60 connecting rods and they're perfect they fit to the inch and 5/8 frame rail just bolt the rod cap on there and then the small end of the rod goes through the motor mount bolt on the side of block it's just a genius idea so one of the things I do as a side job is I write in photograph magazine articles and that was part of the process of getting this thing up woods was photographing it for an article in Hot Rod Magazine and this was you know kind of a dream come true for a lot of us so after we pieced this thing together me and Kyle put it up on his rollback we took it back to the woods that we dug it out of we set it up and I did a photo shoot on him again for the magazine but I'm so glad that I did that because I mean it produced some of the coolest pictures that I've ever taken I mean in my whole career it just was a cool moment to be back in the woods where this thing had spent so many years and just the car it was almost like it was alive again even though I know that the engine is junk everything on this thing is seized up and it's rough it's dusty but it was just like the car lift so you know that was a fun experience I know Kyle enjoyed it too and one of the most fun things to me honestly is the fact that this is an active cow pasture so like when we were doing the photo shoot cows were kind of coming up and get curious about what we were doing and looking around and I make sure to get some of those guys in the background of my photo shoot so I could always remember that because I just thought that was fun and cool and just added to this car story another fun thing that me and Kyle did was we loaded the car up when we took it up to the assisted living home for Jim was statement his health was bad you know he needed assistance 24/7 I feel like we kind of brightened one of his days by bringing that car up there and one of the things we did too was take a picture of Jim with the car with one of his old trophies from harriman drag strip and you know that was just a priceless picture and just a fun memories for all of us including Jim's two daughters Angie and Jamie and you know just one of those things that none of us will ever forget because emotions were high because Jim wasn't doing well and you know he hadn't seen this car together in decades he didn't have a lot to say and I just know that part of the reason was because he was just overcome with emotion and we all were so a few months after all this I sent him the pictures in the article on the car and it came out in Hot Rod Magazine and you know we were all thrilled and Jim was thrilled to see this car that he built in the history on the car be published and in such a big magazine and part of the big reason for that is that he read Hot Rod Magazine in the 60s when he was building this car and that's actually one of the reasons that the car you'll notice that it's a longer than those old pictures that I have and that's because he saw an article with Don Garlits where he had stretched his car and it helped it handle and work a lot better so he did the exact same thing he cut it and added 30 inches to it unfortunately Jim's health continued to decline and he eventually ended up in a local hospital and his condition didn't get any better so they transferred him to the hospital in Chattanooga and it was kind of strange I actually was in the same hospital at the same time because my little girl was having some kind of freak kidney issues that required a lot of surgeries and hospitalization and you know we were both there at the same time and unfortunately you know his health was going down while higher experience was you know on the on the climb you know we were doing better and the day that we got to come home was actually the day that Jim passed away and you know that was that was a hard time because you know we were we had such mixed emotions we were happy because our little girl was doing well but you know heartbroken for Angie and Jamie and just the situation in general because they don't make guys like Jimmy more people don't do the things that he did that's part of the reason it makes this car so special and makes this story so special is the fact that we were able to get it out of the woods get all the information that we could possibly get from Jim and put it back together show it to him before you know he passed away so the timing of all this could not have been any better all things considered but again you know we just hated to see him go so soon [Music] and it's part of the reason why I wanted to shoot this video I know that I did the article in hot rod and that that article will live forever but I wanted to be able to tell the story in a little bit different way and again just make this last a little bit longer tell more people about it and the more people that hear about how Jim built this car the better you know I think it inspires people I think it really affects people to know that drag racing is not just a professional thing that you can't afford people really did build stuff with their own hands and you know this car proves it [Music] you

Channel: blown64vette

Views: 387,683

Rating: 4.910583 out of 5

Keywords: front engine dragster, vintage dragster, slingshot dragster, hemi-powered front-engine dragster, dragster, front engine dragster build, slingshot dragster build, front engine dragster rescued from the woods, hot rod hoarders, barn find, dragster barn find, barn find dragster, drag car barn find, hemi dragster, 354 hemi, blown64vette, jim smith dragster, hot rod magazine, unearthing a legend, tommy lee byrd, abandoned drag car, drag car, drag racing, hagerty, hidden, nostalgia

Id: DFesa4M2nwE

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 16 2019