So a friend of mine has put me on the job of hunting down a traditional hot rod for him. He’s not looking for a cartoon rat rod, some sort of weirdo mish-mash, or anything along those lines. He’s looking for a hot rod that looks like it came right out of the pages of a 1940s or 1950s magazine. I’ve been trolling all the local electronic classifieds, ebay, and making phone calls to guys around here that “know stuff”. One of those guys was my pal Jon Sandahl who answered my call and told me he had just passed a cool “old Ford” down the road from his shop. I threw on some pants (the cops told me if I left the house without them again, it would be a long stay in the cooler) and headed off to grab Jon.
What we found was not an “old Ford” as Jon said, but a 1929 Chevrolet coupe. The seller calls it s “barn find” and says that it has lived in a garage for the last 10 years. Despite its tattered appearance, there’s a lot of car here. The body is not rotted through and the areas in worst shape are the parts of the wooden frame that were eaten or rotted over the years. The frame is solid, the inline six engine runs as well. Both Jon and I were shocked to see the inline six engine under the hood. I immediately thought that someone must have swapped it in sometime in the car’s life, but the fact is that 1929 was the first year for the famed “Stovebolt six” engine and this is one of them. It has compression in the high 4:1 range, displaces 194ci and this one makes 50hp if it is the one that originally came in the car. The oil smelled bad but there were no obvious leaks and it actually did have oil in it.
The interior was badly trashed. Interestingly, the steering wheel is not broken. Pay close attention to that because at first glance you’re going to think the thing is shattered but the fact is that the glue in the beautiful dove tail joints holding the wheel together gave up over the years and the thing just fell apart. Assuming the other hunks are in the cabin of the car, that wheel could be glued back together and pressed back into service.
As it turns out, this one is not what my buddy is looking for, so the hunt continues, but I thought the BS readership would dig a look at this neat old car. It is one of the few we’ve run across up here that have a hearty amount of surface patina and the actual structure, frame, and body steel integrity is in great shape.
SCROLL DOWN TO SEE ALL THE PHOTOS OF THIS NEATO 1929 CHEVY!
