1934 ford hot rod truck.

didn't you do this thread a while ago? or has it just had a drastic tidy? anyway, bring on the awesomeness


ahh yes the unicorns thread

So this is it. The inspiration.


The very picture from the cover of the very magazine that started it all. You can see why it made the impression it did.
I’ll use the same phrase again. Hardcore without being flashy or cheesy. Think about that with all the ‘look at me look at me’ rat rod abortions that have been spawned to try to make people Instagram famous.

Almost all the parts on it are original Henry Ford parts, albeit modified to various degrees. There’s a smattering of period aftermarket stuff (navarro heads, S.C.o.T blower, etc) and some modern so-cal speedway stuff like the front hairpins and some other suspension bits (shine worked for so-cal at the time).

The chop is nicely proportioned, as is the channel. The chassis is ‘32 ford length not ‘34. This improves the proportions massively. The bed is shortened and raised. The front end is ‘suicide’, which means the spring is no longer mounted over the axle, it’s mounted behind to the hairpins. The motor and trans are raised up in the chassis to effectively make the car lower. There’s just so many good things going on and it’s obvious the builder has thought about all of them.






One thing on it i absolutely love is that S-shaped cutaway to the bottom of the cowl for chassis clearance. As stock it’s just straight, there is no cutaway as the cab sits on top of the chassis. On this it’s so well done most people don’t even notice it.
These days I’m less of a fan of ending hairpins or wishbones out in the open, to me it makes them look too short. Now id run them back to the firewall.
The way the firewall sits to the back of the motor is really nice, but these days I think it’s slightly long nosed between the front of the motor and the rad. I believe this was to allow room for a vintage magneto and a mechanical fan though, so I can see why it was done rather than running an electric fan.

I also much, much preferred it on the 16” ‘35 ford wires it originally had (pic above this one) rather than the custom made artillery wheels it now wears. I love artilleries, I even have them on my other car, I just don’t like these ones. Back that the chassis, dash and some other interior stuff which are now painted black were unpainted, and I preferred that too.


The way the pickup bed sits on this is really nice. It is raised up a LOT to set the bed rails up to the height of the smaller swage on the cab. This is a trick I learned years ago as the continuation of the line ties things together on trucks, which an look pretty disjointed otherwise as the cab and bed do not reference each other in any way. There are then small fill panels below the bedsides roof hide the chassis that would be visible. The louvers add detail to a panel that would look odd if left plain.

The wheelbase is about 8” shorter than a 34 chassis should be, removed between the cab back and the rear axle. Essentially shortening the front half of the end down to a similar length to what the back half has been ‘bobbed’ down to. Trust me what I say it looks awful if this is not done. Fenderless 33/34 pickups with full length chassis look terrible.

Interior wise, I don’t like ‘40 ford dashes. Never have. They’re really popular with traditional rodders, I just find em a bit meh. I won’t be using one. I love the white wheel against the bare metal though. You can see it very well here but I also like how bold but simple the floors and tunnel are. I’ll have to find a better pic of that.

The interior-


I feel the trim is deliberately restrained, which says a lot more to me than flashy tooled leather or whatever.

Out back, the tailgate is fairly stock. It many be sectioned a little maybe, but other than that it just has some louvers.


The bed posts are full custom but nobody ever really notices them. I think they’re sectioned studebaker ones? One of those little touches that only other builders notice.

The bed ‘cover’ is trick but I can’t find a good pic of it. It has a b52 hydraulic tank sunk in as a fuel tank, and a f100 battery box lid used as a, er, battery box lid. The rest is swaged and riveted.
This pic shows the tank but not the rest.


Little military touches like belts, seats, tanks etc are cool, and a nod to the history of dry lakes racing in the postwar era.
Looking like you’ve ram raided you local army surplus is not, and ‘theme’ cars can just get to f-k.

I’m not a total fan of the bed proportions anymore tbh, but the swages on the sides that follow the tyre go a long way to making it look right.

Bring it on. build threads feed the soul

As for my actual truck, I’m unsure as to how to chronicle it. I think I’m going to go for ‘this is bits what I got and when’ even though when I bought some of this stuff I never knew it would be for this truck.

Take for example the chassis. Well some of the chassis anyway, the main rails at least. It was back in 2014 (according to the pics) I bought this ropey as F-K modified ‘ford pilot’ chassis. I think it was 150 quid and I picked it up somewhere in suburban London one night. I ratchet strapped it to the roof bars on our Lupo and drove back to Essex with it 😂

Hoarding is a big thing in hot rod circles. You tend to buy anything that might be remotely useful that is within a set radius of your location and isn’t too expensive. Even if you don’t use it yourself it brings those parts ‘within the fold’ and you can use them to trade or make a few extra quid selling them on. That’s what was happening here. I had no specific use for it but wasn’t going to pass it up, just in case.

Here you can see even the dog is thinking ‘what the F-K has he bought now’ 😂


The modifications on it were truly awful. All the stock crossmembers were gone, it was narrowed, and had been back halved (the rails stepped in) to make resemble a ‘32 chassis. It had been wearing a plastic 32 roadster body. Parallel leaf rear and tons of big lumps of plate and box section welded everywhere, plus loads of grinder gouges where changes had been made and about a million extra holes drilled in it.
On the plus side though, no rot in the kickups which always rot on these. In fact I rust terms it was very clean with only a little pitting.




Interestingly it still had the original inner boxing plates still in situ but largely boxed over. The real find was it had a chassis number. This showed it was a 1935/36 Canadian built car and not a pilot chassis at all. Some measuring and maths regarding the axle locations versus the chassis overlaps confirmed this (a pilot chassis is shorter than the comparable American model, 4” iirc?)

The pièce de résitance when it came to the chassis was the front spreader bar.
It was just that.
1.5” solid bar 🤣

I’ve still got that bar albeit about half the length now as I’ve turned up various things on the lathe out of it since then!

As for the chassis, I cut out all the junk and threw it all away, leaving only standard ford metal. Luckily most of the welding was fairly terrible so it wasn’t too hard to remove it all the then clean the good stuff up. I also unpicked the overlaps and then the 4 sections were stashed away for future use.

Nearly missed that tucked away between my posts.
Yes, the vision is pretty clear. It’s going to be slighlty constrained by legalities over here, but I’m not going to go to this effort building something that isn’t legit these days. I’m also pretty strict about what are and aren’t the right parts on this, compared to other builds.

Really should not be underestimated.

Scratch building a car is hard enough.

Scratch building a Traditional Hot Rod without dipping into too much, easier to get, 1-800 bubble wrap parts,

And outside of the USA, is much harder.

I really enjoy your threads, I tend to hit ‘like’ and don’t comment because I have nothing to say and I don’t know what I’m talking about.

But I enjoy your explanations, as above, so that even I have some understanding of what makes a proper hot rod.

And, also your explanation of the aesthetics, as further above, on the details and the lines.... I can look at two different hot rods and like one and not the other, but wouldn’t really have an idea why, your descriptions help to quantify that, so again thanks. (For the record, I’ll never tell you which I like in case I’m wrong though )

One of the parts for this that’s been in my ownership longest is this. It’s easily falls into ‘find of a lifetime’ sort of territory.


According to friendface, I bought it in 2012.


As the listing title my allude to, it was pretty terribly listed. Managing to spell liberator and bomber wrong in the title probably massively increased my chances of winning it.
But yeah I won it, and for not a lot of cash.
It’s a B-24J liberator pilot or copilots seat.

I can remember it involved another late night trip to the curse word of nowhere to collect. Also known as Fakenham.
The chap I bought it off was nice enough but a little educationally challenged. He lived in a caravan in the middle of nowhere, and was one of the contractors working on north creake airfield. Or RAF north creake as it was called during the war. It was dug up from the edge of a small copse during redevelopment works, with other stuff including a string of landing lights.
I’d actually passed through this place many times when younger, we had family holidays in Norfolk and the old airbase actually straddles the main road between fakenham and burnham market. I can remember the nissen huts as we drove through.

The interesting thing about north creake is that is never officially had B-24s stationed there. It flew mostly stirlings and halifaxes of 199 bomb group.

There are 3 theories as to how a fairly important part of a plane that wasn’t stationed there ended up buried in the woods.

1. Any port in a storm. A damaged b24 emergency landed there on its way back from Europe. Wartime records make no mention of this at all, and although they can be sketchy (or often deliberately misleading), you’d think they’d be *something* given all other crashes on site are mentioned.

2. Flight training school. North creake incorporated a special flight training school with a simulation building to get pilots accustomed to night flying under flak fire. A special blackout building had a simulated cockpit, a huge cinema screen, and various lighting and pyrotechnics to simulate flying under difficult situations. It was actually fairly secret at the time, and wasn’t well known about until well after the war when a lot of it had been dismantled. Given the seat was modified when i got it with the top edge trimmed and reworked, plus a steel desk-chair style base added, I kinda favour this option- it was recycled seating used in the simulator. The copse where it was found is directly next to the flight simulator building too.

3. Post war activity. Postwar the site was used by 274 maintenance squadron to decommission and dismantle aircraft. But this was listed as mainly mosquitoes. B24s were still modern aircraft at the time (compared to mosquitoes anyway) and bombers were much less likely to be decommissioned as they were easily adapted to other roles unlike fighters.

Ultimately I guess I’ll never know, unless I meet someone who was there, but as the years pass that’s gets less and less likely.

What I do know is it’s out of a later B24, the B24J, and as such was an upgrade of earlier seats. It’s made entirely out of spot welded stainless steel for shrapnel protection. It’s made by budd, the pioneer of spot welding, or ‘shotweld’ as they called it.
In some ways it should be in a museum, but I find i you donate things like this to places like that, they never get seen again. This will be on show and talked about and lot of people will find it interesting, so i think thats a better use of it myself.




The pink paint is original. It well faded red oxide I think. Overall it’s not bad to say it’s been buried for anything up to 65 years then was hoiked out with a digger bucket. It’s had some mild straightening work, and could maybe do with a touch more. The top edge should be curved but it has been trimmed down square and rewired, not particularly well. I’m torn between redo it, or let it tell it’s story.


The belt I have added, it’s a US pattern that was fitted to loads of things like thunderbolts, kittihawks, and saw its last use in Bell HU1 ‘hueys’, which is Probably were this is from. I like the latches on them and they’re not too hard to find.



For all the unknowns about this seat, I can definitely say two things.
1. Somewhere around 77 years ago someone was sat in this very seat a few thousand feet over some part of Europe, dropping bombs on Nazis.
2. For that reason, It’s unbelievably cool as F-K.