The Barn Find Hot Rod

Been awhile since something was posted here but with a busy summer of car shows and races it's hard to stop to post what's been going on around the shop. This job that came up was a more interesting one than normal. One of my good customers is a 32 Ford Junkie. This car he came across is what every hardcore hot rodder wishes to stumble across. This car is a 32 Ford 3 window coupe and according to my customer was hot rodded in the 50's on the east coast. It features a "full house" Mercury flathead engine equipped with Offenhauser heads and a 2 Carb Manifold, An Isky Solid lifter cam and Johnson adjustable lifters. It has 1940 Ford brakes and rear axle( a popular modification back then) A drilled, and dropped axle hangs on the front and has 1940 Ford Deluxe wheels and hubcaps. This car is really clean and has 99% of it's original hardware that Ford put on it as it traveled down the assembly line. That is VERY rare today. The car was in storage on the east coast for about 25 years then was sold to a guy in Chicago who put it in storage for another 25 years. It was unearthed this past summer and is going to see the streets again soon. Our job was to go through the motor and build a set of hood latches. The customer wanted a center pull hood latch instead of the more common 2 finger pulls. So we removed the stock pulls by carefully extracting the rivit removing the stock pull and replacing it with the center pull casting that we bored to fit the latch assembly. We now have to make new rivits from scratch as no one reproduces these rivits. lastly the castings will be sent to the plater to make them shiny again. The devil is in the details and this car is full of them. The 36 Ford coupe in the pictures belongs to Hop Up Magazine publisher Mark Morton. My Customer has been the caretaker of the car this past summer so Mark can fly in from CA. and enjoy car shows on this side of the country. This Car has been driven from coast to coast several times. This is a hot rod!