My Kind Of Hot Rod

A few weeks ago, Bryan Rusk told me about a model-a coupe that he wanted to shoot. “It’s a great car,” he said. “But none of the magazines are interested in featuring it. It doesn’t have a significant history and it’s not a well financed and super glossy Riddler contender. I thought it might be something you would be into.”

At first, I was a bit defensive… I mean, what the fuck did Bryan mean by that? Did he think I had lower standards than a magazine that can’t even stay in business for longer than a couple of decades at a time? Good god man… I ought to… And then, he sent over a picture.

In just about every way, Jim Luke’s model-a coupe is my kind of hot rod. I started The Jalopy Journal and the H.A.M.B. because of cars like this one. We host The Hot Rod Revolution (canceled again this year dammit) for cars just like this one. And in my head, when I think about traditional hot rods, it’s cars like this one that I imagine. There’s nothing fancy, fussy, or vain about it… It’s just a casual hot rod built to be driven hard.

Stay with me here, but imagine you owned two hot rods. The first is none other than the Doane Spencer Roadster. You paid well into the 6-figures for it and lost a wife because of the purchase. It was all worth it though because it just might be the most gorgeous ’32 roadster ever put together. It’s your pride and it’s your joy. It’s absolutely perfect in every way imaginable.

Your second car is Jim Luke’s coupe as you see it pictured here.

Let’s also imagine that there is a reliability run in Southern California that you want to hit. You live 900 miles away. You’ve got two options:

You could trailer the Doane Spencer to SoCal. Of course, if you do that you will need to find a local hotel with a parking garage and 24 hour security. You will also need to prospect your route to the run as well as the route itself to ensure there are no pending dangers. With all of that out of the way, all you have to worry about is your white knuckles as you drive a car worth more than my house on city streets.

Or you could skip all that bullshit, hop in your model-a coupe, drive 900 miles to SoCal and enjoy a relaxing reliability run through the hills of Pasadena with your friends. (Editor’s note: Jim actually did this in the coupe)

Which one are ya gonna bring? With such exaggerated terms, it’s easy to see that if you are into this thing of ours for the pure enjoyment of it all rather than the vanity, the “casual” hot rod is the hot ticket. To me, it always has been… and Jim’s car is a great example of this. It’s casual in that it doesn’t feature a high dollar paint job, a chrome bill approaching 6-digits, or an interior by the latest big name, but that doesn’t mean that Jim just threw this thing together while turning his back to the details. He was just smart about the details he did tend to.

It’s a hot rod, so lets start with the motor. Overhead guys can piss and moan all they want – at the end of the day, NOTHING is cooler than a flathead Ford. Jim treated his 21-stud to just enough to make it sound good and run hard. There’s a healthy cam, a cleaned up crank, a pair of nickel plated Ford heads, an Edmunds intake, and a couple of Strombergs, but you won’t find any exotic and/or super rare speed parts here. It’s simple. Tried. True.

The rest of the drivetrain sticks to the motif. A ’39 trans gears the power and a stock Ford banjo puts it to the ground. It’s all suspended by tube shocks running from Ford axles to a model-a frame. From there, split bones and massaged springs complete the task of stance. It’s an early look that works to tone down the hard chop as well as the aggressively drilled juice brakes, but lends credence to the canvas hood straps, stock ’32 shell, and brown paint.

Then, there’s the interior. It would be as basic as an a-coupe could be if it weren’t for the flash of a ’36 dash. A ’40 wheel, stock gauges, a fancy column drop of some sort, and… Hey, it’s a hot rod! Nothing done to the interior is gonna make it any faster, right? That’s all she needed.

So, three paragraphs. Really, two and a half… That’s all it took to list the mentionables of this car in feature form. I’ve always felt that anything more typically elaborated on a car that is either beyond my means or out of my scope. To me, Jim’s coupe is what simplicity should be. It’s a period piece, but one that doesn’t take itself too seriously and one, of course, that begs to be driven. Popularity be damned, this is absolutely my kind of hot rod.

Enough words though. Check this thing out:

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