THE GUNNER'S MATE -

[Music] hey guys how's it going today listen I'm gonna take a minute and do a little bio on my 32 Ford now I know a lot of times on TV this car actually was built on TV and you don't get all the details on TV that we do to these cars when we're building them because we could film for a hundred hours and you're gonna get 43 minutes of it and so you get you don't get to see everything so I'm gonna just take a minute go through this car and and let you guys know about my 32 Ford now 1932 was a very interesting time because you were at the peak of the Great Depression you know Henry Ford had a ton of money when he was building this car so it was a time when Henry Ford actually developed his v8 engine which was an affordable motor back then he built those motors for production but 1932 was the first v8 that Ford put in one of his vehicles that was in a production line that actually could really go out and be affordable to buy now 32 they didn't sell a lot of cars because of the depression there wasn't a lot of people buying them they were taking their cars from the 20s and the 30s and putting truck beds in them and doing all kinds of stuff to upgrade their old car so they could keep driving it the cool thing about the 1932 is it's a one year only car so there's no parts that are interchangeable so you can't take a 33 or a 31 and any of those parts are gonna interchange with a 32 is one year only so the car actually is very rare it's a very desirable if you have a steel body Henry Ford car you're very lucky because they're getting very rare to find and very hard but anyway let me walk you through this car and show you a few things [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so in 1945 when the war was over you got to think a lot of these guys were getting out of the war they were like okay what are we gonna do let's start building some cool cars well in 1932 before they went to the war these were the cars that their mom and dad would buy in brand-new off the showroom floor so buy I would say the 1950s they were taking these cars they were doing some really cool stuff with them you know they were putting big flat heads in them they're put superchargers on them they were the ones that were actually inventing and creating the performance parts that we know today you know like these flat heads that are in here they were building lots of different companies started building performance heads carburetors intake manifolds and they were trying to make these cars go faster I think they were actually the forefathers for the performance industry that we we know today like a lot of people get on the computer they disorder apart and it shows up well back then these guys were actually building these parts in their machine shop and selling them to the public just to the race industry a lot of them guys were trying to set set land speed records back then and this was in the mix of it this year right here this is the car they use this was this was it and so it's really kind of a cool piece of history in the performance world to actually have a 32 Ford because they were doing so much with them back then but I'm gonna get into the motor a little bit but before we do that I want to talk about the front end of the car the headlights on this thing are 1932 Ford truck headlights these came on the bigger trucks they didn't come on this car but I really actually love the big headlights it fits the era but they're just bigger they look better I really like them the Crossman the crossmember for the headlights here I know that you I was saying that we can't interchange parts from the 20s but this actually came off a 30 31 Model a and I just cut it down and welded it and made it fit on the front this v8 emblem right here these are the old mechanical brake rods that were in this so these cars used to stop mechanically on on a push-pull system basically and so as you can see I stepped it up to it juice brakes this is probably a mid-40s setup right here that we had laying around the shop that I incorporated into this so we had juice brakes on it so it would would stop let's open the hood here at the motor okay now there's there's about two or three things on here that are not period-correct for this year so when we built this car we wanted to keep it from I would say no more than 1950 we didn't want to exceed 1950 was in 1950 and down because you got to figure the guys that were getting out of the war in World War two by 4647 they were you know they were busy man they were wanting to do stuff they were you know the skilled guys that got out of the war so we wanted to build it like they would have built it back then and you know as you can see in here we have a this is a this is a 49 Merc motor that's in its 255 cubic inches it probably makes right around 100 horsepower you know you can see that these come with a dual water pump system so there's a water pump pulley here and one over there this is a flat head design and the reason why they call this a flat head design is because of the the cylinder head you can see is actually flat but the valves are in the block they're not inside the cylinder head like a lot of times they're inside the cylinder head these are actually in the block so that's why they call it a flat head so they ride the pit the the valves right right alongside of the piston it's kind of a neat design they actually Rev pretty good and make pretty decent horsepower so what they are you know this one here's got an often hauser intake manifold with two Stromberg carburetors on it so it does run it's snappy and you know surprisingly it runs a little bit better than you would think I mean for something that is that old I can see why these guys love these flat heads back then because they do make they Rev they actually make some rpm and they run pretty good the cool thing about what we did is we found the generator off of 47 Diamond t truck that I had laying around the shop now I know on TV we don't get to show you a lot of the details that go into these but this is a generator off a truck from 1947 that would have been something these guys would have been doing back in 1947 I mean if there was a rec truck in the junkyard and they needed a alternator or generator this is what they would have done so we put this this 47 diamond T generator on here which actually works beautifully for a 12-volt system because we we have it running on a 12-volt system the steering in this whole operation basically is out of the 47 diamond T so the drag link actually came out of the 47 diamond T all of this came out of the 47 diamond key and the steering box so it's actually out of a two and a half ton truck it makes it really nice to steer this thing the way that it's set up here reduced into the steering as you can see underneath the dash you can kind of see the steering box right there how its set up in there how we mounted it and it actually works really well it's a great great little [Music] okay so as you can see inside this car we have a 1944 - unit which is the most notorious car it was it's probably a side of the 32 Ford the 1940 Ford is probably almost as popular there was not very many of them made because of the war they were kind of the beginning of the round around car in that era in nineteen by 1940 these guys were running moonshine during the week and then they were running their cars on the racetrack during the week so they were pretty serious about their cars and in 1940 was right around that time and they're very classy - I wanted to put it in this car because it goes really good with this this 32 and it just gives it a little style [Music] okay let's talk about the chop on this 1932 now the 32 33 and 34 looks super awesome when you chop them I mean they look good either way if it's a full fingered car they look good just stock anytime you take the fenders off him I'm thinking dude we got to chop this thing it makes him look at we've probably got a five and a half inch chop in this car the cool thing about the chop on this that makes it very special is that my dear friend Jean Winfield he is gonna be 92 years old this year he chopped this car with me when he was 90 he came to welderup we chopped it on TV 90 years old I asked Jean I said hey when was the first time you ever chopped a car and he goes ironically I chopped in 1932 Ford when I was 13 years old so this guy's been chopping cars seriously for 75 80 years you know what I mean it's it's pretty cool to have a guy come in the shop that's been doing this so long and do this with me it makes the car special to me that his hands touch this car and and helped me with the chop on it it was really cool like when he was torch welding all this together and what I mean by torch welding is you use a torch and tie wire and you weld all this together with a torch and tie wire and then you hammer weld at which you take a little dolly on the back side and you hit it with a hammer and you kind of flatten the well down it looks it starts looking good now I wanted it to be kind of crude I wanted this thing to look like we chopped it in the 50s you know what I mean you know back in the 50s they didn't really have mig welders they didn't have two guelder's okay they had a torch and tie wire and that's how they would have done it back then and you can see all this is just brazing where patches and pieces of this 32 have been put back together because like I said this car spent a lot of its time upside down in a ditch somewhere so you know all this has kind of been repaired but as you can see and really gives it a sleek look you know there's been a little bit of pie cutting here to get this to line up sometimes you have to cut and pull this a little bit and get it get this to line up right here there is a little bit of work you know cutting pie cutting it here to kind of shrink it down to get it in to fit the car now what they typically would have done back in the old days is they would have taken lead and leaded this all in right here and and made it smooth okay and a lot of the old guys like Jean Jean Winfield is a lead slinging son of a gun I mean this guy can put some lead down and make a car look slick and when they're done with them they look like a brand new car but I wanted mine to kind of look old I wanted you to give it an old look and I didn't want it to look like it's been you know tons of time of body work in invested in this car I wanted that crude look like these guys threw this car together in 1950 and they went and raced it and that's that's what the look is the the top of this car right here believe it or not is a 1965 Ford Mustang lid so this was cut out of a wrecked Mustang and then we louvered the heck out of it and welded it in here it kind of has the same shape as the roof of a 32 so it turned out really good the louvers are just for ventilation driving across the desert out here it just flows the air it it cools the engine down it's just in it's a cool look basically more than anything it just looks fricking cool you know that's what I love about it you know you can see back here we have just regular old military tires on it I think the military tires really give it a look of of World War two and something that the guys would have put on back then for traction if they were out racing on the the salt flats or if they were out in the on the beach somewhere a lot of these guys go races on the beach even today I'd you can see the trunk actually works got a set of jumper cables in there just in case and an extra gallon of water because it does puke a little water once in a while so as you can see in my door panel I carry some Marvel mystery I mean these cars run good on it you put in the crankcase you can put in your gas they say the Marvel Mystery Oil is what actually won the war so and I believe that my grandpa use that stuff religiously and it's it's just really cool stuff and as you can see in here I have a seat out of like a thirty thirty-one two-door sedan car and I use it for my front seat right here and it worked out really good it's old it's raggedy but it looks good in there and I'm just reassured the seat wanted to give it that old vintage look in here something that they would have done probably back in you know the 1940s or 50s [Music] okay so we're gonna run this thing over to the lift I want to put it on the lift get it in the air to show you guys the underneath of this thing it's pretty simple but it's kind of cool so let's take it over the lift and get it in the air so you guys can see what's underneath it [Music] so what we got here is basically an old-school drop axle now whoever built this axle back probably in the 40s did a hell of a good job this is what you call a heat and beat job so what they did is they heated this and beat it around and they made this drop axle so this drop axle probably is out of a 1930 or 31 Ford and what they would do is heat him up and Bend him and they would make a drop axle which would lower the front of the car to give it kind of a cool hotrod look the way that these wishbones are set up in the front he's really cool first of all what I'd like to explain is this particular piece of iron right here is very unique because there is one weld seam down the middle it goes from round over here to oval down here now that's a Henry Ford design that most people still to this day don't know how to come up with this idea it's really cool how this was made but this is a actually a really awesome suspension setup as you can see how this works under here if I move the front end you can see how here's your center point right here your Springs out here right and then these are basically your trailing arms here and you can see how this thing actually off-road would be really well it's really kind of a neat simple suspension setup [Music] it's got the old juice brakes meaning the juice means that it runs on a hydraulic oil that basically stops the brakes and makes it more it just makes it more efficient it's quicker more dependable the mechanical brakes you always had to adjust them there was always a problem with them so this makes it a lot better we've come back through here we got a three-speed transmission we've got zephyr gears in it and they're cut so when we have this apart Merlin went inside this transmission and cut the gears in it so when you shift it see a lot of these month these transmissions didn't come with sync rolls meaning that when you push the clutch in you can't just go to another gear you got a you got a double clutch them a lot of times well this one here with the cut the cut gears in it you could just basically ship through the gears and it turned it into a hotrod transmission let's see what else we got under here if we move on back to the back here which is pretty cool we've got a 1938 Ford rear-end out of a truck so we have this lay in our junkyard in the back it's a banjo style rear-end meaning this is the banjo style because it looks like a banjo kinda I mean it's pretty obvious it's got the rear unit spring in the rear and it's pretty much set up kind of like the front so these things actually articulate pretty well going through you know ravines they were set up to be off-road basically back then because they didn't have asphalted roads very much but this was actually the torque tube out of the 38 Ford and as you can see right here we had to cut it right here and shorten it because in a truck it's a little bit longer we had to shorten this down and couple the drive shaft inside of there because inside of here is a drive shaft about that big around and we basically sleeved it welded it together and we made our own we lengthen it to what we needed for our own drive line so I just wanted to kind of get you guys underneath this and see what happened and you know like I said on TV you don't get to see all the details you what I'm doing here with these small episodes of detail for these cars is to show you guys the ins and outs of everything that we pretty much did to this car I could probably go on and on and on and on for days there's so many details and so much little tiny stuff that you would probably get bored and then click off the [ __ ] and I watch it no more so I don't want to get that crazy but I did run you through a bunch of the details and a lot of things about the car why I build a car why I love this car look at the end of the day this is a classic when I drive this thing down the road people just they almost get in car wrecks looking at it because they don't they don't even know where it came from they think this is from another planet this is an old classic car that is a part of our American history it's been through a lot of things I mean it's seen a lot of stuff in its life I mean this car is about 85 years old so it's it's pretty special to me so it's one of them one of my one of my cars that I can get in the shop hit the key fired up and go drive it around it smokes a little bit makes a lot of noise the transmissions growling the little flat heads popping and make it all kinds of racket but that's what makes it so cool [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the inspiration for this car was my grandpa Keith Crabbe he was a Gunner's Mate on a destroyer ship from 1942 to 1945 now I heard all kinds of horrible stories of world war 2 and what happened my grandpa really didn't talk about it a whole lot but the stories that I did get out of him I was just completely blown away by what those guys had to see compared to what we have to see in today's day and age back then you know you went out on that destroyer ship or you went out in the field and you were gone for three years you didn't get to you know send selfies to your girlfriend you didn't get to send pictures you didn't get to text there was none of that he was like see you later I hope you make it back alive and if you don't you know thank you for fighting for our country basically so I named the car Gunner's Mate my grandfather sat on the destroyer ship and watched horrible things that you can't even imagine happen through a you know scope like he was watching where everything was landing the bullets were landing and when they were bombing hero Jima back in back during the war my grandpa was horribly terrified with the fact that his marine soldiers were getting blown up on that island and he could see it and he knew it and there was nothing he could do about it he died the day he died he was talking about it I remember cuz I was there the day he died he was telling me about what happened so I I called this car the Gunner's Mate I don't think a lot of people know what a Gunner's Mate was but basically they they were aiming these guns to where they were going they were loading the shells in the big the big guns he said that the shells were just this big around and that long and they put in there close the door boom and then pull the shell out throw another one in I mean they were just firing as fast as they could go it was all manual back then you know there was a story of my my my my grandpa's brother and my but both went to war at the same time world war two they were out in the South Pacific both of them on one was on a carrier and one was on a destroyer and I know after Pearl Harbor got bombed they thought each other might have got in that bomb you know they got blew up in Pearl Harbor but they were both luckily out at ocean they called ahead my grandpa knew what battleship that my my uncle was on and he called up there and he said hey is there any way that I can see him you know I mean I just want to talk to my brother and he goes well as a matter of fact our ships pulling out of Pearl Harbor now as they were pulling in they both ran out on the bow of the ship and waved at each other as they went by it's a pretty cool story I mean to think two brothers that are probably you know only you know a year and a half apart get to see each other and wave as they go by it was pretty cool story but I just want to let everyone know this car to me is meaningful because of that and the history and the great country that we live in is because of those guys so that's that was my inspiration for the Gunners made

Channel: WelderUp

Views: 199,233

Keywords: Steve Darnell, Race, Desiel, Rat Rod, Drag Race, Drag Strip, BURNOUT, GASSER, OLD SCHOOL, OLD SKOOL, CHECY, 1955, 1955 CHEVY, 1955 CHEVY SEDAN, CLASSIC CAR, HOT ROD, WELDERUP, WELDER UP, CUSTOM, CAR BIO, 1932 ford, ford, flat, head, motor, flat head

Id: pQ1sGTjjw28

Length: 25min 23sec (1523 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 03 2019