I've always had good luck with impulse buys, but this one might have broken my streak. While visiting relatives last winter I did my standard tour through my uncle's wrecking yard and spied a shoebox Ford with louvers on the hood - a '50 Club Coupe with a '51 hood and Chevy grille with a few extra teeth. Oh, that's cool. It has a flathead (that runs like a champ!) with Red's headers and Smithy's glasspacks. I snapped a photo and went on my way, looking at other cool stuff. After getting home I couldn't stop thinking about the car. A couple months later I called my uncle and settled on a deal that I thought was great, so I sent him a check. After a long wait, a trailer was finally headed to southern Nevada from northern Oregon, pulled by a friend from Arizona. So I finally got my dream car. I have rescued a lot of cars from the crusher in my time, most of them not worthy of the H.A.M.B., but I'll mention them here: a '52 Ford 1-ton dually (my first car) with a swapped-in 352; a '52 Chevy 1/2-ton pickup with a '54 235 I-6; a 54 International (yeah, I was a country boy, lotta pickups back then). Okay, then I got civilized: '67 Simca; '65 Mustang; '71 VW bus; '67 Cadillac Calais; '79 Jeep CJ-7; '86 Bronco; '96 Thomas school bus being turned into a camper... Okay, you get the picture, I'm no stranger to a wrench. But this shoebox Ford could test my limits. My uncle told me over the phone that it would need new floor pans. Well shee-it that was an understatement, but I can't really blame him - he's got about four hundred cars, so he can't know all of them too well. So here I go. It's a coupe, so it's worth saving. It will never be a beautiful restoration, at least not on my budget, but I will make it cool through hell or high water. I want to drive it sometime before I die.
I thought you wrote the floor pans were shot. Hell, I'm seeing more metal on that floor than 3-4 other similar shoebox restorations combined!
welcome to the H.A.M.B., nice car with a nice grill treatment. and a good car to learn some metalwork.. have fun, Cheers, Carsten
The Jalopy Journal
