The build was a slow process. The basic metalwork on the body was complete in early 1998, so I started working on the frame. We pulled the body again, and Paul Giffin helped me fabricate the brackets and crossmembers for the frame. We replaced the ancient coilover springs with a new buggy spring, strengthened the boxing plates, and replaced the rear framehorns. My welding skills are fair at best, so I did the cutting, fitting, and tacking while Paul handled the final welds. We assembled most of the car to fit everything up, then I tore everything down for paint, and work kind of slowed to a crawl for a while.
Between the full-time position I accepted at Vintage Air in 1999 and raising my growing son, I didn't have a huge amount of time to devote to the coupe. I kept collecting parts and fine-tuning my idea for the way I wanted the car to look. My old faithful flamed '39 kept me going down the road in a finished hot rod, but with more than 125,000 miles, it was getting more tired by the year. Then George Packard came back to work for us at Vintage Air, and moved close to me. He started doing the metalwork on the frame, and got things going again. After my buddy, Danny Zoeller, painted the frame and we re-assembled it, I took it back home to my own garage in the spring of 2004. At that point, I could go out and work on it every night, even if it was just for an hour or so.
The car came with an original dropped '32 axle, which we drilled and chromed. I really wanted Buick drum brakes, but I had them before, and I wanted self-energizing brakes. I looked for '41 Lincoln brakes without success, then found out Wilson Welding was reproducing them. I got a set and they look and work great! I bought a rough '57 Ford station wagon to get the smooth back rearend, and threw the rest of the car away. The '32 also had a set of really cool old ladder bars from its early hot rod days, which I cleaned up and modified to accept new style bushings, then had them chromed. Gary Mussman at Cornhusker Street Rods was invaluable in helping me set up the rear buggy spring.
I set a goal of driving it to the Goodguys Lonestar Nationals in October 2005, so we set up a weekly work schedule to meet that deadline. It was a group effort, with George and Danny providing a lot of hours of help. I had paid a couple of shops to do the basic finish work on the body through the years as I could afford it, and I thought the body was pretty close to being ready for paint. As we were wet sanding it for the last time prior to paint, we noticed a whole bunch of hairline cracks in the primer. It turned out that the primer had not been mixed properly somewhere along the way. We ended up completely stripping the body down to bare metal for a second time and starting over. It was more than a little depressing to take a grinder and DA to $4,000 worth of work. The good news is the work that Danny, George, and I did is much better than the first time. There is very little filler in the car, and the bodylines are all very sharp and crisp.
We got paint on it just in time for the 2005 San Antonio Autorama in February, and put the car in the Vintage Air booth as a painted body on a finished chassis. After the car show, the thrash really began. We stuck to a weekly schedule, and I took some time off from work a few times to work on the car for a week at a time.