The Ultimate Pre-War Jalopy Shop Truck - Hot Rodding 101

hey guys Matt iron trap garage and today we're doing another entry into our hot rodding 101 Series where we are giving you the breakdown of some of the different cars that we have friends have and some of the things that go into building a car that has the look that you're going for So today we're talking about our Roadster pickup project so we built this project not too long ago and just basically got it on the road this car this truck is built to be like a pre-war or or just post-war type hot rod that was built from extra stuff laying around much like guys were doing that were small on a budget or they were going to junkyards and things like that with just maybe a little bit of a Twist a little higher end but we took a look at a lot of the old photos and old books that are photos from the dry Lakes era the Heyday of dry Lakes racing which is like pre-war and and into just post-war and we took some of the samples of some of the shop trucks some of the the Roadster pickups that were actually running at the Lakes and a lot of those and uh we were able to grab some ideas and examples off of that and that is what we have here so this truck is really kind of the essence of early traditional hot rodding um this truck is much of that so uh breakdown on the build basically it is a 28-29 Model A pickup Roadster pickup that is on a Model A Frame we basically a lot of the trucks or cars of that area that were built in that early style they would either leave the splash aprons on the side because he had to pull the body and they would pull the fenders off race on the weekends throw their fenders back on and drive around day to day some of the vehicles as things started getting evolving and people were having um vehicles that were they were running no fenders on or were modifying heavily they started to take the splash aprons off and you start seeing trucks like this so we're running around there were literally like shop trucks and they were doubling as advertisement for maybe a speed shop or a hot rod shop and also Transportation so we kind of took that idea with this so as a Model A Frame underneath of it that we basically just left alone it's just stock we have the Roadster pickup that is sitting down on the frame like it should be but we stripped off all of the extra stuff it now has hydraulic brakes on it all the mechanical brake rods and stuff have been removed in extra brackets and things like that have all been taken off of it as far as the suspension goes on this particular car we have a heat and dropped old drop axle on the car is a 1932 to 34 front axle that has been heated and like taffy dropped more drop was one of the common companies early on that we're doing we're doing drops like this with a stock type spring on it with 32 purchase so it's basically like a 32-34 front end that's been heated and dropped the wishbones have been split with some plates simple plates have been added to the outside of the frame and we basically set the height of the plates uh the length of the plates to set the Caster to get the car so that it steers uh correctly uh in the rear end of the car it has a 46 to eight I think basically an early V8 banjo rear with a drive shaft and torque tube that we shortened to match the model a uh wheelbase it has a stock Model A Wheel wheelbase on this as far as the brakes all around go it is just early Ford juice brakes so to speak on this car we've used an uh old Yankee kit that allows you to use the original model A Center cross member and you can use stock Model A pedals on the V8 Transmissions pretty slick kit keeps it looking old by using Model A pedals and it actually is a little bit easier if you're doing this so big shout out to them on that so if that's the suspension the brakes on the car moving to the drive to the powered plant and the drivetrain on this the engine is a 1937 Ford flathead V8 so that year was kind of a transition year for over Ford and it was the first year that they got rid of the water pumps in the heads and they moved the water pumps into the block and they had the center water outlet but it still is 21 stud quick way you could tell 21 stud is if it has three bolts down the center of the heads that is a 21 stud hat so 37 is kind of a neat year you started seeing this engine get used a lot and in a lot of the early hot rods because it was like the new hot engine to use this particular engine is a truck engine that actually had this McCullough supercharger kit on it we found this complete engine just as you see it in a garage in North Carolina in a state we were buying a number of things from the gentleman this for many years apparently the folk Wars it was pulled out of a truck these early McCullough kits were sold basically to people with trucks initially to give them a better performance when pulling a load in these big trucks but obviously the hot rodders grabbed onto them and started putting them in cars like like this so This engine is basically stock it's side still as a stock distributor we just did a remote coil here to get rid of the coil that's on top and it still has the supercharger kit bolted on to it and they make not a lot of boost a lot of people think that it's insanely fast they are more of a get it's more of a gimmick nowadays there's a lot better ways to make Power Flats but they are very unique looking this particular kit I think is dated 1938 or 39 on the 37 engine and we just have a single carburetor on a single Stromberg 97 on there the kits were originally meant to be used with one carburetor a lot of times when you see these on cars nowadays people are putting two three carburetors on top of it and it starts stacking the carburetors up pretty high but they were originally meant to be used with one carburetor you just change your Jetty and your power valves to make up for the additional power that comes from the Supercharger so uh the engine like I said is pretty much stock internally the transmission that's on the car is basically just like a 36 Ford uh top shift transmission that would have you know become behind any car from this era but it was basically a stock Type transmission uh the rear in it is a 46 to 48 Ford transmission uh rear that's in the car with the drive shaft and torque tube shortened to match the wheelbase on the uh the Roadster pickup the rear spring is actually a 26 27 T Spring by using that spring on a Model A it actually lowers it a little bit it's had some leaves removed and has been like de-arched it's an old hot rod spring that I found somewhere in my trousers literally like in the scrap pile at a guy's place that was at and I was able to identify it and use it on this project so these are all the little tricks that these early cars they would be doing you take a go to the junkyard to get a V8 rear you put the 20 6 27 rear spring on it to drop the the vehicle a little bit and so on and so forth so we have essentially a you know all items you could have pulled out of a junkyard in the early days to build this particular truck and the gears in the rear are I think 378s in this so it doesn't have a real high top speed without the RPMs getting kind of crazy but it is great for around town especially with a stock engine it still feels peppy around town but you're not probably not doing cross-country Journeys with gearing like this all right so the wheels and tires on this we mentioned the brakes are are uh actually I gotta look at it the bricks are 3940 Ford uh juice brakes we opted to put a set of 44 style uh wheels on it uh these particular wheels are the solid style wheels that came out in 40 and they were used until 48 and even into later into the pickup trucks and eventually went to 15 inch these are 16 inch wheels uh with kind of an iconic Tire combination with having the 750 16 rear with the 550 16 Front gives a nice Tire rake to it gives it that you know kind of aggressive old-school hot rod look to it painted the wheels black and just put a set of later early Ford hubcaps on there to complete the look they're just like dog dish caps and again this is just stuff that we were thinking if you went to a junkyard you just grab the 40 breaks grab the 40 Wheels you grab hubcaps off something else and you slap it all together so now for styling on this on this particular vehicle a big thing with this early style is not super overdone or overstated a lot of the jalopy so to speak they were running around at the dry lakes and on the streets these were just average guys or kids that were running around with stuff they didn't have necessarily a ton of money or a lot of resources so you're not going to see real crazy except for some of the early Bears cars and stuff like that you're not going to see a lot of smoothing and things like that so that's why this body is kind of left like brush painted black uh with some of the little rustles and things like that on it so on the front starting in front I used a 32 Ford Grille that is an original grill that we found we basically just brushed it painted it to match everything else it has a 32 Ford V8 radiator that has the correct orientation and number of ports for the flathead V8 that we have in it the headlights are these uh BLC um headlights that we call like the Gumdrop headlights because they have a little gum drop uh marker Lane on the tap that we've actually wired in turn signals so these flash for the turn signals in the top which is pretty cool we used a uh old Chrome uh headlight bar that was cut down many many years ago and turned into like a headlight bar that floats so it actually has a little bar that goes in the front almost like a Nerf Bar bumper or grille guard and it also holds the headlights and mounts right to the frame I just made some little tabs that allow it to bolt on that again is something that we just found in our travels the shocks on this has a set of tube shocks that I've actually added these are like modern so to speak Chrome tube shocks that we added old 50s or 40s uh chrome ribbed chrome uh exhaust tips onto and a TIG welded a washer on there and put that right on with our with our Mount and now the tube shocks look old school like the old aircraft ones that would have like ribs or have a shield that goes over top the uh we used F1 Ford pickup shock mounts on this that are just heated and bent to fit the frame that is kind of like the most common uh way to do shock mounts when they were converting over to tube shocks a lot of the cars in this period that we're shooting for of like that 48 um to 50 kind of time period that we built this this truck to uh you were starting to see tube shocks that were on pickup trucks in the junkyard or you could walk in the dealer and get these parts and that's what we opted to use on this particular vehicle so the pipes I think are a huge thing on most all hot rods especially if the exhaust is exposed this I build a kind of traditional set of torque tube headers as a lot of times they're called or drive shaft headers they use a 1935-36 Ford drive shaft those two years used a kind of unique drive shaft on Ford for I don't know why that basically was a piece of tubing that tapered at either end and was large in the center you can literally cut them in half cut the spline sections off the ends and you can create these kind of zoomy type headers that slide in and fit the tubing very very well you just kind of relief cut the ends you can slide a tube right into it and then you can build your pipes and make a bunch of noise a lot of the early dry Lakes cars and Hot Rods this is what they were doing and then some of them if they were driving it on the street they'd put a pipe out the bottom that would run underneath the car and run all the way out the back today's world we get a little bit less trouble for loud exhaust with a lot of modern muscle cars running around we don't get as much trouble so we're running them with just some baffles inside the pipes but certainly you could run a pipe underneath with full exhaust and make it very very quiet but the pipe space that we just come up right out they go alongside they run right underneath of the body and kind of hide that model A Frame and goes right underneath the door which I think is pretty cool the windshield on this this is a old Chrome reproduction I guess you could say maybe not even reproduction replacement Chrome windshield frame that we chopped down with a set of um kind of reproduction shops and Polished um windshield stanchions a lot of guys would just take their stock ones and cut them what's neat about these is we've had a couple sets before they used to sell and I think after 30 31 came out with adjustable windshield frame like this you started to see aftermarket ones like this so this one you can actually adjust the rake of the windshield which is pretty neat so we chopped the windshield I think it's about two inches of a chop on this particular car and I think it gives a nice look it's not over chopped but it definitely looks a little less dorky than the stock 2829 windshield frame inside the truck as as far as the styling goes we have one of the kind of uh major pieces of this aside from the the blower on this thing the the McCulloch kit on this is a dashboard it has a 1932 slash 33 Auburn Dash now a lot of people call them boat tail Speedster dashes but pretty much every 32 33 Auburn got a dash that looked like this so they came also in like the four-door sedans and things like that and the early hot Riders were grabbing those dashboards and the gauge panels out of those things as they were fine image junk yards and stuff slapping them in hot rods some of the most famous hot rods of all time iski T is a good example of that has that Auburn Dash panel in it or Dash in the car so it kind of a little known fact is the Auburn dashboard itself is actually a really good fit in a Model A all I had to do was trim down the sides just a little bit and I hammered and dollied the edges so that it flowed into the into the windshield stanchions here and when this is all mounted in there it almost looks like it came in the car factory it's kind of crazy how well it fits the car you get that great gauge panel that is one of the most beautiful gauge panels of all time in my opinion with this great store wanted gauges in there and you have all your holes for your switches and things like that on there which works out really nice the steering uh column on this car we're going to kind of go over because we're doing the interior this actually has a 34 33 30 4 Ford steering boxing and I moved the steering box back just a few inches to allow us to have some room for header clearance and engine clearance and it also gives us a steering box that is a little better a little better steering than a 30 uh the model a 28 to 30 steering box and by having it 32 to 34 you get a little bit better steering on it you can run any kind of keyway steering wheel which worked pretty much from 32 all the way to 48 you can slide right on there we basically changed the steering column a little bit as far as the angle goes I have a 40 Ford steering wheel on there which just slips right onto the 34 column and we have it hanging underneath there with a modified bracket off some kind of other old car I don't remember that fits under there and all kind of looks stock we have turn signals on this as I mentioned on the headlights we have a little old-school turn signal stock on it um real sparse interior on these early cars like this unless it was something that was a higher end build a lot of times it was just something like this like a military blanket just thrown over top of a sea and the guy was just driving around like that with rubber floor mats or maybe no floor mats at all no door cards in the car um in the truck because I think that's that Sport and look that it just has to look cool be fast and make a bunch of noise all right moving back on the pickup truck uh and getting into kind of the rear part portion of the look of the truck it has a stock length model a bed on it so a lot of as the years went on and hot rod and you started to see with t-buckets and things like that people started to shorten the bed to give it a little more squatter kind of appearance the earlier pickup trucks they literally just left the bed on there they threw a stock bed on the frame and there you went where they took a Roadster pickup and just started modifying it so we we found an original paint bed from one of our viewers um that we were able to purchase and this has it's either original paint or an old brush painted job or something but it looks the part match it the body matches and it is stock length bed on there with the original wood floor in it which is really cool what I found was for a gas tank in the bed is an old keg it's actually dated in 1947 and this keg was already turned into a gas tank for a stock car way way back when and surprisingly it's in great shape with them being stainless steel someone welded a neck into it and some of the um some of the fittings into it so that we basically just worked with what was there made our fuel line come up into that and the nice thing with those like half kegs is that they think they are like 13 or 15 Gallons so you get a ton of fuel in there and it is a lot better than using the cow gas tank which in our case was very very Rusty and rotted out and full of junk so in the back all the way as far as styling goes we have that really cool tail light so for me we were adding turn signals in a stop and a brake light to the to the vehicle I wanted something that was really neat so the the taillight then it's in the back is an aftermarket item that is really really cool with the arrows on it we think it is like a 1920s or 30s era accessory part but it is kind of a nice part that sits in the back under the bed and is kind of centered really nice you can see the tube shocks that are Chrome coming up around it and I think it's a nice little bit of bright work to add to this to just make the truck just one step above what the average guy might have had back then but still keeping with that early styling all right so that's a quick rundown on the truck of all the major pieces and what gets it sitting and looking how it looks to get that early kind of dry Lakes jalopy look that we were going for with it so now we're going to start it up take it for a drive around some back row country back roads and show you guys what it's like to drive one of these and we'll give you a little more info as we're driving the truck alright so this thing I had it running a little bit just to warm it up so we'll see how it does but it has the Auburn gauge panel like we mentioned and we just have a key in here with a push button start which again I think is kind of old school so [Applause] so at idle it's got a sound to it with that exhaust and one big thing I think that's really neat with those um with the drive shafts type headers or the torque tube headers is it's a it's a quite thick wall tubing so it gives a really deep sound that you cannot replicate with normal exhaust tubing that's just one of the things with cars with torque tube headers it gives a really great deep sound so I think we are ready and because this is an earlier transmission it's not as good as a 39 it's still transition but got to be a little more careful when you're shifting with it just happened by the way rear string on it Model A type spring it's much like my Model A coupe where it rides pretty rough you're going to feel the Bang You're Going to Hear rattles I don't care how tight you build it you're gonna rattle this has those uh it has bed chains on it so you always hear them rattle when you hit a big bunk [Music] [Music] [Music] has a definite difference with driving a 32-34 steering box it's better than Model A but don't get me wrong it's not like I have one steering box that's like power steering so you still drive this thing and it's hard to steer but it's world's better than a than a stock Model A Box so I think it's a nice fit for this type of build when you're doing that early pre-war kind that's or host for type build it's again you could have just got some old jalopy 34 out of the junkyard and stole the steering box oh foreign number one don't rip when the cops coming the other way with loud exhaust he'll do a UE in no time all right so that is a little ride along with the Model A Roadster pickup hopefully this video is helpful in letting you know what parts and things it takes to get a vehicle that looks like this if you're trying to build something is from that dry Lakes Arrow or the 1940s to real early 50s and you want that kind of jalopy type dry Lakes look this is definitely some of the pieces that were really common and as I say in a lot of these videos this isn't the strict rules this is just how we built one that is inspired by a lot of those old Don Montgomery books and uh old pictures and things like that and I think we did a pretty good job of getting it close close to nailing it and uh hopefully it gives you some inspiration as well so let me know what you think down below of the Roadster pickup and what your favorite dry Lakes era hot rod is thanks guys catch you later [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: IronTrap Garage

Views: 36,501

Keywords: irontrap, iron trap, iron trap garage, irontrap garage, matt murray, hot rod, street rod, rat rod, traditional hot rod, barn find, barn find hunters, kustom, trog, the race of gentleman, vlog, the hamb, jalopy journal, model a, model t, roadster, coupe, picking, american pickers, early ford, ford

Id: IxEROqEbn58

Length: 23min 35sec (1415 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 30 2023