Tag: 1932

This 1932 Ford Roadster Hot Rod Has Dings Here and There, but They Build Character – Codrin Spiridon @autoevolution

This 1932 Ford Roadster Hot Rod Has Dings Here and There, but They Build Character – Codrin Spiridon @autoevolution

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This 1932 Pete Henderson roadster-inspired hot rod barely has 11 hours to go until it will be sold off at a Bring a Trailer auction. At the time of writing, there are 17 bids, with the last one going for $33,000. It features a steel bodywork finished in matte black, but just as important, it’s running on a 296ci (4.8-liter) Mercury flathead V8. It was originally bought in 2011 and is now up for grabs in Georgia.

It comes equipped with a three-speed manual transmission, 16″ wire wheels painted with typical but mesmerizing white on the sides, it has a rumble seat, a louvered hood to get that pesky Georgia heat out, hydraulic drum brakes, Lincoln-Zephyr carburetors, a Wieand hi-rise intake manifold, a dual-coil distributor, and a swan floor shifter.

Furthermore, it has bucket headlights, a polished windshield frame, and of course, era-appropriate taillights. One important note any potential buyer should know before pulling the trigger on this gem is that the owner replaced the lower body panels in the past. Another and arguably more important detail is that when you look hard enough at the exterior you’ll notice some drilled holes, dings, and dents.

Circling back to its 16″ wheels for a second, supposedly, they have been sourced from a 1935 Ford. Furthermore, the drum brakes also belonged to a 1940s Ford, according to the auction’s description. The tires, however, are Firestone Deluxe Champion whitewalls. The seats come in brown vinyl, and the wheel is a banjo-style DeLuxe.

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A Flathead-Powered 1932 Ford Roadster You Have to See to Believe – Tim Bernsau @HotRod

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Engineered by Troy Trepanier to set land speed records on the Bonneville Salt Flats, this flathead-powered 1932 Ford roadster had SEMA attendees going nuts.


Booking it through the SEMA Show’s central hall, we got caught in a multi-person pileup at the AM Hot Rod Glass booth. The cause of it all? A built-for-Bonneville 1932 Ford roadster that might be the wickedest flathead-powered Deuce we’ve ever seen.


Matt Jewell of Davenport, Iowa, had been a dirt track racer and drag racer before getting into land speed racing at Bonneville. The Jewell Group Motorsports team built the roadster in 2015 to go after the XF Gas Roadster class record of just over 161 mph. The XF/GR class is for roadsters running pre-1953 Flathead engines, which must be normally aspirated and fed by carburetors or mechanical fuel injection.

The roadster body is a steel 1932 Ford reproduction from Brookville. The chassis features suspension parts familiar to anybody into traditional hot rods, including a 3-inch dropped tubular front axle, 1940 Ford spindles, and classic wishbone-style radius rods, along with a Winters quick-change rearend. A Liberty air-actuated five-speed transmission backs up the flathead.

The XF/GR record of just over 161 mph was set in 2012. Jewell was determined to beat it but was having no success, and turned to Troy Trepanier at Rad Rides by Troy for help. “He was hitting a wall,” said Rad Rides fabricator Adam Banks. “Part of it was aerodynamics and part of it was the horsepower he was getting out of his engines.”

At Rad Rides by Troy, the engine was filled with Devcon epoxy and machined. “There were a lot of trials and changes,” Adam said. “We flow-tested different blocks to find out what the best cfm was and kept changing the combustion chambers. We ended up increasing the cfm almost 150 percent without losing a lot of compression. Switching the intake and exhaust ports—which is why the exhaust comes out through the top of the engine—helped with the flow. “

Related: America’s Most Beautiful Roadster 2022 Is a Breathtaking ’34 Chevy Built by Troy Trepanier

The billet aluminum cylinder heads that got so much attention at SEMA were custom machined at Rad Rides. Cooling runs through the heads; an oil-squirter system cools the pistons and cylinders walls from underneath.

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The 1932 Clobes Special, the First Street Rod? – @Wheels Through Time

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The 1932 Clobes Special is one of the most talked about cars in the collection at Dale’s Wheels Through Time. Regarded as “The First Street Rod,” it was custom built by Cletus Clobes of Mt. Pulaski, IL in 1932. The car started as a 1932 Ford Model C and then the entire body was customized including chopped leather top, new interior, dropped axles, Z’d frame, and custom fenders

This 1932 Ford rolling chassis just begs to become an A/V-8. Here’s how I’d build it -David Conwill @Hemmings

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Back in the late 1930s or 1940s, if you wanted a 1932 Ford roadster and couldn’t find or afford one, the next best route was to build your own by buying some other kind of 1932 Ford and a 1928-’31 Ford Model A roadster, dispose of the ’32 body and the Model A chassis, and put the remains together. A lot of people came to prefer the combination of fenderless ’32 chassis and Model A roadster body because the less-massive Model A body wasn’t as unbalanced by the removal of the fenders as the Deuce was—plus the ’32 frame helped make up for the visual loss of the Model A splash aprons.

There aren’t too many unloved ‘32s waiting around these days to have their chassis pirated; likewise, few unclaimed Model A roadster bodies. You can buy reproduction 1932 frame rails, of course, but most people don’t care to go to all the trouble of replicating the details of a stock ’32 chassis when off-the-shelf hardware from the street rod suppliers does the trick. That’s why this rolling ’32 chassis in the classifieds presents a unique opportunity to build a period-correct Deuce-framed A/V-8 with minimal effort.

By 1932, the rod-actuated mechanical Ford brakes had gotten pretty good. Still, the hydraulic system introduced in 1939 and used here in its 1940-’48 form is better supported in today’s aftermarket and understood by the modern enthusiast. It also permits lowering the chassis at some point without me

Surprisingly, this chassis is built around a mint-condition original frame, says the seller, “from an original roadster.” That likely means that roadster is getting a street-rod update. It must have been a nice car to begin with, however, as the ad says the chassis was rebuilt in 2006. It was also upgraded at that time, incorporating a 1934-spec Columbia two-speed rear axle (Ford’s optional overdrive up through 1948); a 1939 Ford transmission; and 1940 Ford (Lockheed)-style 12×2 hydraulic drum brakes.

By 1939, even years of development had created a really pleasant gearbox for the Ford V-8. Slipping one into a ’32 chassis like this is easy.

At least two of those upgrades were actually current 1932 technology—just not at The Rouge. The Columbia was available in contemporary Auburn cars, and the Lockheed brakes were already found on Chrysler products. Columbia axles for the Ford were a spiritual successor to the Ruckstell two-speed axles used in Ford Model Ts. The Columbia was controlled by vacuum, rather than mechanical linkage, however.

You’ve heard the line in the song about “twin pipes and a Columbia butt?” This is the Columbia. It’s a vacuum-actuated two-speed unit that was optional equipment in Auburns

The ’39 transmission is really a development of the 1932 transmission. The Model A transmission notoriously does not feature synchromesh, making up and down shifting a more complicated process and considered by some folks to be a step backward from the simple pedal-controlled transmission of the Model T. For 1932, Ford integrated synchronizers on second and third gear. The 1939 transmission has a more highly developed shifter and even better synchronizers than earlier units.

All that means that this chassis is already pretty much state of the art for 1940, aside from the Tacoma Cream 18-inch wheels—but those and their big sugar-donut whites are so nice looking, I think I’d leave them and even build the car around them. If they were on a roadster, then The Auto Color Library indicates it was originally painted Medium Lustre Black or Dearborn Blue.

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The Rearview Mirror: One-Upping Chevy; the 1932 Ford V-8 – Larry Printz @TheDetroitBureau

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Chevrolet was eating Ford’s lunch. But Henry had a better idea.

It’s 1932, the height of the Great Depression. Nearly a quarter of all Americans are out of work. What money is being earned buys less, as a 1931 dollar is worth 90 cents in 1932.

The President, Herbert Hoover, is a pariah — so much so that during his re-election campaign, Detroit’s mounted police are called to protect the president from jobless auto workers chanting “Hang Hoover.”

Of course, things aren’t going well for automakers either.

The previous year, 1931, Ford sold 395,000 Model As, down significantly from the million-plus vehicles sold in 1929. But the whole industry is down, having sold 1.1 million units, down from 4.5 million in 1929. 

But the slump in sales hadn’t deterred Henry Ford’s plan to beat Chevrolet: build a Ford with a V-8 engine. Unheard of in a mainstream car, it was introduced 90 years ago this week, at the height of the Great Depression.

Henry Ford, above, developed an affordable 8-cylinder engine that could be mass-produced cheaply in a single casting.

A wild idea to top Chevy

Whereas Ford once commanded 50% of the car market with his Model T, his refusal to change it gave competitors a chance to catch up, offering more power, more comfort, more amenities and colors other than black. And it wasn’t just Chevrolet. Mid-priced brands like Oldsmobile, Nash, Dodge, Hudson and others nibbled away at his dominance. While Ford still had the industry’s largest market share, it was sliding. By 1926, it stood at 36 percent.

By 1932, Chevrolet topped Ford with more style and more cylinders, as seen on this the 1932 Chevrolet BA Confederate Deluxe Phaeton . Photo Credit: RM Auctions.

The Model T was losing its luster.

So Ford shut down his factories as he developed his next car, the Model A. It would be a sea change from the Model T, with markedly better performance, thanks to its 200.5 cubic-inch 4 cylinder that produced 40 horsepower, double that of the Model T. It boasted a far more modern design and employed a 3-speed manual transmission, rather than the T’s planetary gearbox. 

But while Ford’s factory shutdown cost him the lead in sales, it would reverse itself in 1928, with the arrival of the Model A. By mid-1929, Ford sold 2 million of them.

While Ford thought the car was good enough to last a decade, Chevrolet one-upped him, introducing its 60-horsepower “Stovebolt Six” and overtaking Ford. 

Something had to be done. 

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Hemi Powered 1932 Fords!!! – Garage Full Of New York Drag Racing History – @IronTrapGarage

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One of our viewers Ed emailed us many months ago about the 1932 Fords that were owned by his father, both with New York drag racing history. Ray Stillwall purchased the 1932 Ford Roadster in 1948 and built the car in stages over the next 10 years. The roadster was raced at many local tracks, and even at the Allentown Fairgrounds back in 1955! Ed’s father was able to purchase the car back in 1970 and after a few other owners it ended back in the hands of Ed. The blue 1932 Ford Tudor was owned by Ed’s father and was also raced all over. This one stayed in the family and Ed continues to drive and race the car today. We enjoyed spending time with Ed and hearing all of the stories of the two 1932 Ford’s in his shop. Thanks for watching

Sisters, ages 20 and 18, youngest winners of The Great Race – Larry Edsall @ClassicCars.com

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Sisters Olivia Gentry, 20, and Genna Gentry, 18, of Newnan, Georgia, became the youngest winners of The Great Race, winning the 9-day, 2,300-mile cross-country competition for vintage vehicles. The 2021 time-distance rally, which began in San Antonio, Texas, ended June 27 in Greenville, South Carolina. 

The sisters, competing for the fourth time, earned $50,000 for their performance in a 1932 Ford 5-window coupe. Olivia drove and Genna navigated. They had finished seventh overall in 2019. 

The competition drew 120 entries in the time-distance rally that precludes the use of modern navigation or electronic devices while competing in various stages at precise time and speed averages. Teams can use only a map, stopwatches and “old-fashioned reckoning,” event organizers note.

“We are thrilled that the Gentry sisters won the race after several impressive showings over the past few years,” Wade Kawasaki, president and chief executive of event owner Legendary Companies, was quoted in the post-event news release.

“These young ladies and their beautiful ‘32 Ford have shown that the spirit of competition, a drive to compete and excellent math and navigational skills live on in the youngest generation.

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Uniquely American: THE ONGOING STORY OF THE 1932 FORD “LITTLE DEUCE COUPE” – Jack R. Nerad @JDPower

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Not only were songs written about the car, most famously by the Beach Boys, but the ’32 Ford became the basis of a cultural phenomenon (hot-rodding) that spawned a movement (the Youth Culture of the 1960s). And that demonstrates the remarkable “staying power” of this car because even in the early Sixties, it was an antique car enjoying a new life as the emblematic hot rod. Who would guess that the popularity of the ’32 Ford Coupe would still be going strong more than five decades later? 

How popular is it? Evidence of that is as clear and direct as the value NADA Guides lists for a ’32 Ford Coupe today. The car that sold new for $485 in 1932 now commands a retail price as high as $54,000, which turns the term “retained value” on its head. 

From Model T to ’32 Ford Coupe

The story of the 1932 Ford Coupe started in the mid-1920s when uber-industrialist Henry Ford decided that his company would have to replace the Model T, the car that put America on wheels. It was a bold decision because, in 1924, Ford would not only sell its 10 millionth car (in June), but by the time October rolled around, it would sell its 11 millionth, representing an unheard-of sales rate. 

Commanding a solid 50% of the American car market, Ford Motor Company was riding high as its Model T “Tin Lizzy” outsold everything else that moved. Yet Henry Ford could see that the competition was gaining ground rapidly as the company’s signature and only car model became more and more antiquated. The contemporary Chevrolet offered a more powerful 4-cylinder engine with a more modern drivetrain and better chassis than Ford’s rapidly aging Model T, and more expensive mid-priced brands like Nash, Dodge, and Buick were selling cars that were even more refined yet within the price range of middle-class Americans. 

These facts weren’t lost on the public either. In 1926 Ford’s market share plummeted to just 36%. So, even though it had successfully sold nearly 15 million Model Ts, Ford began to develop a new model. 

Since they were starting all over again, Ford decided to call the new car the Model A. As development continued, Henry Ford’s son, Edsel, became the driving force behind the car. He insisted that it have a conventional three-speed, sliding-gear transmission instead of the Model T’s planetary gearset. He pushed for substantially improved engine performance. And he closely directed the chassis and body design to make sure the new car wasn’t just better than the old one but more attractive, too. 

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McKeel Hagerty on driving, daughters, and becoming one with the Deuce @Hagerty

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There is always one person or fictional character that kids identify with. Mine was James Bond. I liked him because he could, quite literally, do everything. Ski off a cliff, then pop open a Union Jack parachute and glide to safety? Check. Tilt a car up on two wheels to escape down a narrow alleyway? Check. Leap crocodiles? Jump a speedboat? Get the girl? Check, check, and check.

I didn’t know the term at the time, but Bond was a Renaissance Man, and that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up—someone who could do just about anything. I haven’t reached that point yet, but I’ve tried, and along the way, I’ve come to believe that life is about adding tools (read: skills) to your toolbox, both mental and physical.

Which brings me to the subject of daughters, driving, and what we car lovers pass on to the next generation

I’m blessed with three daughters, all of whom share (or possibly just tolerate) their dad’s life-is-learning philosophy and are thus good-natured about me teaching them things. This summer’s project was driving a manual. My middle daughter, Sophia, learned to drive an automatic last year, but as a member of a car family, she understands that driving a modern automatic car isn’t a full driving experience. Real driving is about feeling like you and the car are one. It’s about mastery of a mechanical object. And freedom. And being in control. And tight corners. And long straightaways. And a whole bunch of other things, as well.

Or so I see it.

So, we decided her classrooms would be a 1930 Deluxe Model A roadster and a 1932 Ford hi-boy roadster hot rod. (Access to cool, old cars is a perk around here.)

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The Famous Horse Beating 1932 Ford “Pete Henderson” Roadster Sold for $192,500 at RM Sotheby’s Hershey Auction

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As the story goes, back in 1944, a guy with a quick quarter horse won countless bets challenging hot cars to a race. This roadster, however, had a reputation as the quickest car in the San Fernando Valley. With Pete Henderson behind the wheel, in a specially staged race held in La Habra, and witnessed by a large crowd, including speed equipment gurus Vic Edelbrock Sr., Ed Winfield, and Phil Weiand, this deuce was the only car that ever won. Ernie McAfee took a famous grainy photo showing the roadster edging out the horse. Noted hot rod racer Ak Miller and writer Gray Baskerville always said they could trace the origins of ¼-mile drag racing to that famous contest.

The full listing can be found here