'40 Ford '60's Style Raked Street Rod

[Bernard Kron]

’40 Ford Sedan Delivery Hemi Powered Street Rod
(more pictures below)

This was my final project for 2021, begun on the afternoon of December 28th with a self-imposed deadline to get it done by year’s end. I did complete it on the afternoon of December 31st, so basically a 96 hour build. My motivation was that 2021 had been a kind of stale year for me with only 4 projects completed so I wanted to challenge myself to get No. 5 on the board.

Like all most of my projects this year this is a spare-parts kit bash. The basic kit was the AMT '40 Ford Sedan Delivery, one of my favorite parts kits for doing late ‘40’s and 50’s customs because of its flipper hubcaps, baby Moons, ribbed bumpers and tubular nerf bars, and also for the tri-carb Buick Nailhead. As a result I’ve got plenty of spare bodies and chassis to work from.

I wanted to do a 60’s style raked California style street rod. I had a blown 3962 Hemi from the Revell Miss Deal that I had recently gotten in a box of Miss Deal parts I won on eBay and I felt this would make the perfect exaggerated street rod statement to go with a heavy dive-bomb rake. I used the front and rear axles from the Revell ’32 Ford hot rod kits, shaving the front axle spring to get the front end in the weeds as much as possible. I radiused the rear wheel openings to clear a set of Revell Goodyear drag slicks. The slicks and the AMT Firestone blackwalls were modified to fit a set of Torq-Thrust mags from the Revell Deuce kits. The nerf bars are from the AMT ’36 Ford coupe kits and the bucket seats for the interior are from an AMT ’37 Chevy kit. Paint is Duplicolor Flame Red for the fenders and Brite Touch Black Primer for the body and hood.

Thanx for lookin’
B.

 

Edited January 2, 2022 by Bernard Kron

[Zippi]

Great looking 40 Sedan.  I like that big ol Hemi shoehorned in the business end.  Stance looks really nice.  Great job.

[slusher]

great looking sedan delivery!

[Bernard Kron]

Thanks to you both. Doing this end of year "speed build" was a fun way to wind things up. It involved surprisingly few compromises, which I didn't expect...

[Koellefornia Kid]

Cool ´40 with a nice stance!

[TooOld]

It's a cool looking Sedan Delivery , especially in those colors !  I still don't know how you built it so fast !

[Bernard Kron]

Thanks again guys!

44 minutes ago, TooOld said:

... I still don't know how you built it so fast !

The secret is that it's an early AMT kit with a solid straightforward chassis plate that's pretty well detailed to begin with, and the fat fender cars ('36 and '39/'40 Fords) all have the single piece fender assemblies. Also the bucket type interior helps. All that keeps things well aligned and minimizes the parts count. A Revell '40 would have taken at least half again as much time with plenty of fiddly detail parts to paint and assemble. Also those vintage AMT pre-war Fords just have that "right " hot rod DNA, so if you don't fight 'em they'll probably get you there.  As should be obvious most everything is hidden inside the body work and the build was all about the overall look, not the details.

But the funny thing about this project is that it was identical in build style to virtually anything else I've been doing lately. Most of the build routines were ones I had done many times before. It involved almost zero compromises and the only shortcut I used is that the motor was already built, had the right style, and happened to fit the chassis with virtually no modifications. It just needed to be wired. I must admit that the fast dry time of lacquer and modern acrylics goes a long way towards keeping the flow going. And having my eye on the calendar I did increase my bench time. As I mentioned in my write up, it probably took me as many days to decide on a candidate as I did to execute the project!

Edited January 3, 2022 by Bernard Kron