1928 Ford roadster pickup - Once Bitten

Art Linkletter, Nancy Reagan, and Sergeant Joe Friday would like you to think otherwise, but it was really model-car companies who made paint-huffing glue sniffers out of our nation's youth. Rick Hanson knows; he was 12 when Monogram released the Black Widow, a model kit based on a cut-down 1927 Ford roadster pickup. That was 1960, and there was Rick, Testors model cement in hand, staring point blank into the steely gaze of 1:24-scale King Bee headlights.

As the self-help gurus will tell you, there's no cure for addiction, and the recidivism rate for those who shake the habit is high. Sure, he fell off the proverbial wagon a few times and built a car or two; however, one time he fell hard-not for the little gateway jobs that initiated this slippery slope, either, but for the bigger, harder stuff. He built a hot rod, but not any hot rod; he built a fullscale version of the Black Widow.

OK, so we took some dramatic liberty with Rick's story, but he really did build the Black Widow. He calls his the Black Widow 2, as his isn't a nuts-and-bolts copy (Model A body, radial whitewalls, full fenders), but the connection is more than suggested. It's black, it wears polished Moon discs, and it sports a red-and-white gut and white top and tonneau. Even if it's not the Widow in body, it's the Widow in soul.

The project started as a very incomplete roadster pickup and stayed that way for some years in Rick's garage before he fully committed himself to building it. Instead of setting a realistic pace and never finishing, as most of us do, however, Rick took a different approach: He thought it'd be neat to debut the car at the 2006 Grand National Roadster Show-the same show in which his brother's car placed third in class in the mid-'60s. Now here's the catch: He made that decision in about April 2005.

Instead of leading you along for the duration of the story, we'll tell you right now: He made it. He met the same cast of characters that push us forward and set us back as we build our cars, but, due to this compressed time, they seem so much more ... interesting.

Consider his friend Cliff Heitman who, while he stored the car, chopped and leaned the windshield, patched some of the body's cobby areas, and found a way to wedge a '40 Ford dash between the A-pillars. Then take Bulgarian ex-pat Kiril Popov, the old-world master who straightened the bed and chopped it 8 inches, bobbed the fenders, and massaged the truck back to shape using nothing more than simple handtools and heat.

Factor in only two days of driving the car in bare metal as a shakedown run; then consider the discipline it took to actually disassemble the car for finish work. If Rick couldn't have done it without Kiril, he surely could've done without the unnamed painter who worked under a tarp-clad lean-to in a dusty marina-the guy who set Widow 2 back by a full month a mere month before its GNRS debut and still didn't finish the job.

If building a car under an impending deadline isn't stressful enough for you, do what Rick did and cancel those pesky obligations to your customers and do without income for the month leading up to an event. Rick's gamble did actually pay off, though, since people came out of the woodwork to help-people like Martinez Auto Body's Gary Hernandez, who finished the paintwork.

Trimmer Armand Annereau Jr. not only understood Rick's instruction to stitch wide pleats to match the model's seat, he coined the phrase "fullscale model car," a name that stuck. Leave it to 'striper Herb Martinez to not only work around Rick's crazy schedule, but to render the model kit's chunky pinstripes in 1:1 scale. Finally, good personal friends and artists Robert Lee and Susan Fair sandblasted the windshield with the model's web motif.

To understand the crush under which Rick worked, Kelley Hunter detailed the Black Widow 2 practically as it rolled into the Pomona Fairplex building four. Rick's ride was just another shiny car in a convention hall until sign painter of note Al Meadows delivered the hand-lettered acrylic show-car plaque. Suddenly a 12-year-old's 1:24 fantasy sat practically cheek-and-jowl at 1:1 proportions with America's Most Beautiful Roadster contenders.

Many a grown-up kid can recant our elders' pleas to change our ways. They told us those aromatic solvents would wreck our brains. They warned us we'd waste our lives by throwing good money after bad cars. And you know what? They're probably right. After all, here's proof on four wheels.

If that's the case, there's only one thing I can say: Pass that tube of glue, would you?

Facts & Figures
Richard Hanson
Pleasant Hill, California
1928 Ford roadster pickup