Being around automobiles all his life (his father owned a car dealership), one could definitely say that Don Carlile was exposed to the "car bug" early on. But he didn't choose car sales as a career, instead choosing to be a route driver for Dreyers Ice Cream in and around his hometown of Salinas, California (near Monterey, just south of San Francisco).
The proximity to the Bay Area was both good and bad for Don, especially after he inherited some money from a gracious uncle. The one thing he always wanted, but didn't have, was a really nice street rod. And though he is close to many San Francisco Bay Area hot rod shops, Don never got the right feeling from the ones he talked to.
Undeterred, Don attended the Goodguys Pleasanton show in 2001 and wandered out to the Pro's Pick area. It was there he found Richard Berg's yellow Impact roadster (which had won the America's Most Beautiful Roadster award earlier in the year and was about to walk away with the Goodguys' top honor, too, the Goodguys Street Rod of the Year).
Don checked out the award-winning roadster and thought, "If they can do this kind of work, then they could probably do my project, too." Impact's builder, Barry White, of Barry White's Street Rod Repair Company (SRRC) in Placentia, California, was also at the show so Don approached Barry about building a car for him. Barry told him about the 2000 STREET RODDER Road Tour car (which featured a Coast to Coast body) that was at his shop, and that Don should come down and see it, so he did.
Barry White has been on a good roll as of late, much of it windfall from being a recent AMBR builder. He's advertising a new line of wheels of his design, the DynaRide (his own polished stainless steel independent rear suspension system), as well as some other smaller hot rod pieces. But it wasn't the 5,000-square-foot shop or the other cars being worked on that impressed Don when he got there-it was the "yeah, we can do that" attitude Barry and his employees exhibited.
Unbeknownst to Don, Barry had been working with a talented Art Center graduate, Chris Brown, who works for Barry designing everything from cars to wheels. Chris had recently worked up some designs on a silver '38 Ford cabriolet, and the design was in the "Need to Build This" stack of artwork at Barry's shop. Chris showed Don the illustrations and everything sounded right to Don, so he gave the green light to the project, and a new type of car was about to be born.
Don, Barry, and Chris then started spending a lot of time together, talking about how to take the '38's styling cues and work them into the '39 Coast to Coast (CtC) body. To get to where they wanted to go, some major reworking of the body would have to take place.
For the next eight months, Chris donned a mask, grabbed his Sawzall, and mixed up many cups of fiberglass resin to reshape the CtC body to his liking. The biggest mods were in the front fenders and headlight region, where Chris changed the arc of the fenders as well as shortened them up a bit in front.
The hood was also reshaped and, because the fenders and hood are integral to the design of the grille, a new grille was made. And anybody who has tried to make a multi-curved grille (one that expands in width from the bottom up, as well as leaning back the farther up you go) can tell you, it's one of the hardest things to get right. In order to get this rod's grille right, SRRC made a basic metal perimeter buck, then sent it to Grille Art (Jerome, ID) so they could create a one-off piece out of polished stainless steel.