Jake's '34

The following telephone conversation took place nearly three decades ago. A youthful Jim Jacobs was telling his friend, the late Don Thelan, about the '34 Ford three-window that he was building. Jake, whom most people refer to "Jacobs," elaborated on the plans he had for chopping the top. Mind you, this was back in the days when resto-rods ruled the rodder's roost and chopped tops were rare birds. The accepted practice among our ancestral brethren 25 years ago was to adorn their street rods with cowl lamps and chromed luggage racks, and to let the car ride on stock-height front axles that bore hideous chromed wire wheels and obese raised-letter, wide-oval tires.

Jake: "Yeah, Don, and I think I'll chop the top a couple of inches."
Don: "No, Jake, you don't chop the top of a '34 three-window. You just don't."
Jake: "But it's something different. Nobody chops tops anymore."
Don: "There's a reason for that, Jake."
Jake: "Yeah, well, I think I'll chop it anyway, and..."
The silence that Jake next heard was the sound of Thelan hanging up his phone on the other end of the line. Recalls Jake today, "He just hung up on me. He didn't like what I was going to do, and it made him so mad that he just hung up!" Of course, Jake and Don remained good friends and, as we all know, Thelan later went on to build one of the most famous three-windows of all time, the ZZTop Eliminator Coupe. And its top was chopped several inches. As an aside, Jake was careful not to change the angle of the front posts on his coupe, so that even with its chopped top, the '34 retains its original integrity and charm. That kind of detail can be found on any Jake-built street rod.

Another true story about this particular '34 three-window. For this narrative Jake recites one simple, declarative sentence, and it has to do with the coupe's '38 Ford truck grille, a rather unique modification for a '33-34 Ford street rod 25 years ago and today: "Lil' John always threatened to back (his car) into it." In the words of Tex Smith, "'Nuff said," and Lil' John Buttera's threat made it clear that he wanted to remove forever the grille from the face of the earth. Or at least from the streets of America.

Today the snub-nose grille on the yellow '34 continues to garner attention and comment wherever it goes. Usually favorable comment, too, leading one magazine editor to recently remark about this styling anomaly: "Jake's coupe is so cool looking." Again, 'nuff said.

Such are the controversial stories behind the car that has become affectionately known as Jake's '34. For the most part they're whimsical tales, filled with some of the most interesting modern-day hot rod lore that has evolved since the first NSRA Street Rod Nationals in Peoria in 1970.

The story behind Jake's '34 also is interwoven with the creation of perhaps the first successful modern-era street rod company, Pete & Jake's, now owned by Jerry Slover. If you've been a part of street rodding since before 1987 when Slover became the company's new owner, chances are good that you know that it was Pete Chapouris and Jim Jacobs who formed the business in the first place. Moreover, to better appreciate how and why Pete & Jake's was even formed in early 1974, you need to know about the genesis of Jake's '34, because in a roundabout way the car served as the springboard for several products that made the company a success in the first place.

The coupe's saga officially began in 1971 when Jake acquired four incomplete '34 three-windows, one of which happened to already have the trimmed-down truck grille that's on the famous bright yellow coupe today. As you can imagine, Jake's '34 eventually adopted a variety of other salvageable parts, but more about that later.

Jake doesn't take full credit--or blame, depending on which side of the Lil' John equation you're on--for the truck grille. In fact, Jake confesses that he got his inspiration for the coupe while browsing through a 1950 issue of Hot Rod Magazine. While researching information on the Bill NieKamp roadster that he was restoring, Jake spotted a chopped, fenderless three-window on the pages of HRM, and fell in love with its bad-boy stance. Sparked by the image, Jake began laying blueprints for his own '34 project, using the small squadron of coupes he had stashed in and around the garage as fodder. Finally, one day he stopped to pay special attention to the '34 with the odd-looking truck grille among his mini-collection of three-windows.

"I looked at the grille and said, `That looks funky,'" he said. And anybody who knows Jake also knows that "funky" is the operative word for "street rod cool." Another factor played a key role in transferring the bastardized grille to the project car: it was already trimmed to fit the '34 frame. "I didn't have a decent '34 grille and grille shell," confessed Jake twenty-something years later, "so I used what I had." Necessity became the mother of intervention in this case, and Jake would come to rely on her for additional help as the project progressed. As it turned out, some of necessity became the mother of invention, too. Case in point, the four-bar suspension that's clipped to the front axle.

Having modified the frame for a rather unique--and cool--stance for a mid-'70s street rod, Jake happened to equip the coupe with one of the late-Jim Ewing's original Bell dropped-tube axles. Jake knew that the Heim-end joints that most rodders were using were prone to break because there was little to cushion the steel ends from the constant pounding that suspension systems must endure, so he looked for an alternative mounting system. It was during one of his endless walks through a junkyard that Jake saw the solution--a rubber-bushed Panhard bar from a '58 Chevy. Ever the innovator, Jake eyeballed the old part, then reasoned that with a little modification it would make one-fourth of a four-bar system. So he hustled three more, then restructured their ends. The final step was to have the ends heli-arc welded, "which was foreign to me at the time," Jake adds modestly today.

More important to the street rod fraternity, this is the unit that served as the prototype for the early Pete & Jake's four-bar kits. Indeed, Jake's interpretation for the four-bar system worked so well with the Bell dropped-tube axle that the combination became a mainstay. In Jake's words, "We pioneered the four-bar system on this car, and that was the beginning of the tube axle era."

Jake put a few additional features into the chassis, too, mostly in the interest of combining a safe ride with a low stance. Because the frame's X-member had been removed during the car's past life, Jake fabricated his own centersection, using 1-inch square tubing. He boxed the framerails from the firewall forward, he replaced the front crossmember with a piece of formed channel iron, and boxed in a set of Model A front frame horns. Next he notched the front over the spring for additional lowering. The rear framerails were boxed at the kick-up and notched 2 inches for the rearend that mounts to a Model A rear crossmember. Again, these were considered unconventional styling tricks for the 1970s, although many had been employed during the 1950s and early '60s.

The original brake system called on '40 Ford juicers at all corners, but after one too many panic stops, Jake decided too much nostalgia could be a bad thing. That revelation occurred about the same time that Super Bell introduced its popular Mustang disc brake conversion. Since that time the scarcity of replacement calipers has led to the demise of the kit, but if you're looking to see one of the originals, just cast your gaze down at the front discs on Jake's '34.

Those disc brakes are easy to spot, too--this is a fenderless '34. Again Jake incorporated a styling trick seldom used back in the '70s. Most '70s-era rodders stuck with fenders for a reason: because they didn't want to get busted by the police for breaking mud flap and fender laws. Jake was no exception, and he constantly reminded himself, "This is not going to last very long." Truly, he planned to put fenders on the car, and he even got busted several times with fix-it tickets. Did he fix it? Look at the photos. Remember, we're talking about Jim "Jake" Jacobs, one of the most innovative rodding personalities ever to shift a gear. But for an exact explanation about how he resolved his fix-it tickets without ruining the lines of the car with fenders, you'll have to ask him yourself.

As an addendum to the fender fiasco, Jake says that today when he drives the coupe there's never a problem with the law. "I think most of them (policemen) are too young to know about fender laws," he says. "That, or they're so fascinated with the car that they don't care."

Speaking of not caring, let's skip back to 1973 when Jake was about to throw caution to the wind and chop that top. During that same time he was doing freelance work for the third-coming of Rod & Custom Magazine, and he struck up a friendship with Gray Baskerville. Baskerville had heard about Jake's '34 project and told him he knew of a guy working at Blair's Speed Shop who was building a similar hot rod. A meeting was set and Jake was introduced to a fellow named Pete Chapouris. Nobody knew it at the time, but the cornerstone to Pete & Jake's had been laid down, as the two young men began sharing ideas about how each would build his particular three-window. Pete's car went on to gain instant fame, sharing star status in the television movie, The California Kid, while Jake's car was destined to remain in the wings, assuming the supporting role whenever the name Pete & Jake's was mentioned.

But if there was one place that Jake's '34 assumed the lead role, it was in the development of new products for Pete & Jake's thriving business, which was formed in early 1974. One product was the Vega cross steer that gained a foothold on the market because Pete & Jake's was able to supply a decent Panhard bar in the deal. Pete & Jake's didn't invent the Panhard bar, but when Jake's '34 developed a curious habit of leaping into the next lane due to excessive bumpsteer induced by a set of new radial tires, Jake traced the problem to the steering system not being anchored securely to the chassis. The Panhard bar, serving as a locator link to help govern lateral movement for the axle and steering system, proved to be the solution, and street rodding took another step closer to safe motoring. Jake tells an anecdote about the Panhard bar on the '34, too: "I painted it spray-can black, and if you look underneath it, you'll see for yourself!"

Actually, if you look at the coupe's underpinnings you'll see all sorts of road scars. See, this car's been driven--hard and a lot. Jake made sure of that from the beginning when, after the five-month project reached fruition, he tossed spare t-shirts and boxers and a toothbrush in the trunk, then headed east for the 1973 NSRA Nationals in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That was the first of many road trips with this car. Among the journeys east were the '76 Nationals (again at Tulsa; the coupe missed the '74 and '75 gatherings because by now Pete & Jake's was in full swing and the California-based store needed tending); '77 Nationals South at Winston-Salem, North Carolina; the Nationals East of that same year; plus a final trip to the Nats in '85. "I can't remember the other ones," confesses Jake, but rest assured, there were many.

It was on the road one day that Jake decided his body had had enough of the coupe's traditional-style bench seat. A couple hours in the saddle proved torturous to his back, so when he returned to headquarters he rustled up a pair of Boyd's buckets that was on the showroom floor, had David Gady trim them with matching upholstery, then shoehorned them into the cab.

Somewhere during the life of the car Jake swapped engines, too. The spunky street rod originally rolled out of the garage powered by the '57 Buick nailhead V-8 that Jake plucked out of the NieKamp roadster. The old Buford proved reliable--and fast, posting 101 mph in the quarter-mile during one foray to the local grudge night drags--but a knocking noise within its cast-iron block prompted Jake to buy a Chevy 350 from his friend and business partner, Pete Chapouris. The small-block motor--originally destined for the Lime Fire coupe--was practically brand new, but Jake can only tell you that it has a Weiand intake with Holley four-barrel carb, a "backyard porting job in the heads, and a rumpity-idle cam," but the tech talk ends about there. Simply, Jake knows that the engine is as reliable as a blacksmith's anvil, and that's all that matters to him.

Despite the Chevy engine's stone-cold reliability, Jake hasn't driven the car much during the past 10 or so years. Most of his time behind the wheel has been spent in either his Model A pickup or the legendary Jakeopage touring tub. Not to be forgotten, though, Jake's '34 was part of the Bruce Meyer Hot Rod Heritage Hall exhibit at the Petersen's Automotive Museum for several years, and most recently Jake sold the coupe to Jerry Slover, who also owns The California Kid.

Some rodders might cringe at parting with a street rod that they've owned for more than 25 years, but Jake says it's time for him and the '34 to go their separate ways. "No regrets," he says stoically. Besides, there are many in the rodding community, Slover among them, who feel that The California Kid and Jake's '34 belong together, a matched pair just like Batman and Robin, Laurel and Hardy, Cisco Kid and Pancho, and other famous duos.

As for Jake, you'll find him in his shop out back, building chassis for customers and tackling his own projects. Those projects would be a pair of Deuces--a roadster and a cool fenderless Tudor--a '33 Tudor he's owned since '68 and has yet to finish, a Model A, and...well, you get the picture. There's plenty of old tin to preoccupy Jake, and you just know that anything he'll turn out in the next few years will be cool. No, make that funky, because in Jake's world, funky is cool.