While we were shooting these photos, a neighborhood kid on a BMX bike coasted right into the shot to take a closer look.
"Cool car," he announced.
"Thanks."
"Does it have hydraulics?"
"No. Airbags."
"Hmm. Bet it's got a monster sound system."
"Radio and CD player."
"Oh. How about NOS? It's gotta have NOS."
"Nope."
Thoroughly unimpressed, the kid shook his head as he pedaled away.
Derick Samson's topless '62 Chevy wasn't built with the kind of noise and spectacle that would appeal to your average 11-year-old kid. It was built with the kind of imaginative modifications that would attract the attention of anybody with an eye for cool custom stuff. But you have to look closely. As a designer, Derick worked very hard to make mods that blend subtly and seamlessly with the stock components of the car.
Derick was only 19 in 2004 when his caramel-colored '62 Chevy wagon was a Goodguys Custom Rod of the Year finalist. The following summer, this Galapagos Green convertible former hardtop, nicknamed Emerald SS, made its national debut at the 2005 Heartland Nats in Des Moines, where it was a Goodguys Young Guys Pick and an R&C Top Ten winner. At the 2006 Sacramento Autorama, it won awards for Outstanding Engine, Outstanding Interior, and Outstanding Detail in the Custom category.
We wondered what made Derick decide to build back-to-back '62s. "When I finished the wagon, I still had a lot of ideas in my head about what I could do with a '62 that would be even better," he says. "The wagon was all new to me, almost like the pre-design. I tried to add things to make that car more noticeable. Here I tried to take away things to refine what was already there. Now that I knew how everything fit together, I could really build a great car-something that I'd never seen before, but that looked like it could have been a factory design. I wanted to make it really hard for people to find where the car has been cut and where it's been modified."
In that regard, he has succeeded. All the work that went into slicing off the hardtop, or widening the body an inch to improve the proportions, or creating a show-quality airbagged chassis isn't the kind of thing you can see at a glance. A lot of people miss it. The kid on the bike missed it, but the judges at the Sacramento Autorama saw it right away. Derick is going to continue hitting the show car circuit this year, so you can see it too.