Ron San Giovanni's Ardun-Powered Deuce

Parked in the midst of 'Visa card' look-alikes with Chevy V-8s, Ron San Giovanni's Ardun-powered Deuce highboy is a '60s throwback. So's his wife Laura's chopped Deuce five-window, with its SCoT-blown Flathead. Ronnie's rods may not have the exact fit and finish of so-called pro-built cars, but they're well-engineered and practical. Both '32s are fixtures at East Coast meets from Ty-Rods to York. Ron does all the wrenching; and they don't trailer their cars.

He's been called Ronnie Roadster since the '70s. "All the guys in the Connecticut Street Rod Association had nicknames," he recalls. "I had a roadster, so that's what they called me. It sorta stuck."

"Ronnie practices hot rodding the way we envisioned it 40 years ago," says Steve Coonan, who used to live near San Giovanni. "He builds his cars himself in his garage under what could be described, in this era of high-tech cars and fancy workshops, as pretty crude conditions. His small one-car L-shaped garage is narrow and deep, and it houses all his cars as well as lots of parts and pieces."

"There's an ancient-looking drill press, a lathe, a buzz box stick welder, grinders and much more," Coonan says. "The floor is caked with years of grease and grime, just like the garages we remember when we were kids. Everywhere you look, there are Flathead blocks, camshafts, quick-changes, driveline parts, etc. His cars and his garage wreak of earthy authenticity and that's just the way he likes it."

A wiry man with steely eyes and a ready smile, San Giovanni has the no-nonsense look of a self-reliant, tough little guy who's worked hard all his life, and knows he'll probably just keep on working hard 'til it's over, 'cause that's all he's ever done. When you're talking hot rods, he's animated, enthusiastic and understated about his abilities.

Ron San Giovanni is a mechanic, a welder, a machinist, a painter and a fabricator. He's been blessed with good mechanical aptitude and practical, hands-on ability. He sets his own standards, builds cars the way he wants, and doesn't worry about what anybody else thinks. "Everything I know," he says modestly, "I learned by trial and error. I just didn't have the money to go out and pay somebody to do it." And he's a lifelong Flathead enthusiast with a large collection of vintage Flathead speed equipment. "Everybody around me had a Chevy or a Chrysler product that was high-performance orientated (sic). I got into the real workin' world after graduation, but finances were really tight." So Ford's simple, affordable Flatty was his engine of choice.

New England rodding legend Artie Johnson lived 'just around the corner' from Ron's older brother in North Haven. "I always hoped we'd go by Artie Johnson's house to see his latest hot rod," Ron recalls. After he acquired a ratty T roadster and a '51 Merc, Ron decided he could speak with Artie on his own terms. "I told him what I'd really like to do is build a roadster like his '32. Of course, he'd heard that from plenty of other kids, many times." Whatever his mood may have been that fateful day, Artie Johnson made a kind gesture that forever altered Ron San Giovanni's life. "'Well kid,' Johnson said, 'I know where there's a car like that.' And he gave me the name and number."

Ron quickly made the call. That's how he found the '32 roadster he still owns today. "It was sitting in a old ranch house in Easton, Connecticut," he remembers. "To get into the house where the car was, there were two big wooden doors. A red-primered Deuce sat on red steel wheels with whitewall tires. The body had been channeled, but it was propped up on 2x4s on top of the chassis to sit like a highboy. It had a dropped front axle and some sort of Chevy rearend. When I walked in, it was like I'd gone into a time warp. The kids were there with the DA hair-cuts and cigarette packs rolled up under their sleeves.""But here was this cool-lookin' hot rod," Ron remembers, "just like Artie Johnson's. It was $800," he recalls. He had to sell his '51 Merc, but he kept the Flathead engine and the three-two intake from his T-bucket. Then he began to learn all he could to build a Deuce roadster, for the most part in a rented garage in New Haven.

Ron later learned his car had run as a channeled B/Altered roadster, owned by Al Volpe. And he recently acquired some old photos to prove it. "The engine was set back, and they'd welded the driver's side door shut, because the center steering arm ran right through where the door was. After Al, it was owned by five or six people, but they never ran it." Ron did the requisite bodywork, and installed a new Brookville door, so you'd never know today how mangled that side once was."That first time around, I paid a major rebuilder to do the motor for me." Ron and Laura drove that car a lot. "We'd get off work on Friday, or not go to work Friday at all, and spend weekends goin' to hot rod events. As I got more involved, and did more of my own work," he says, "I learned about superchargers." Ron located a big 6-71 GMC blower and he ran it successfully for many years, both on the street and at the drags. His blown Flathead-powered Deuce turned consistent 101s in 13.20 seconds.

But he's best known for the gleaming Ardun overhead valve conversion in his roadster. Ronnie is living proof you can run Arduns long and hard. Ardun conversions were the short-lived brainchild of Zora ARkus-DUNtov and his brother Yura. The bolt-on hemi heads were copied from a pre-war French Talbot design. Intended principally for late '40s Ford trucks, the Arduns claimed a dramatic power increase from 100 to 175 bhp, with no other modifications. The aluminum heads were well built, but at about $500 a set, they were expensive at the time. Unfortunately for the Duntovs, they soon became obsolete. Ford stuffed a big, 337-cid Lincoln Flathead in commercial vehicles, then brought out more powerful overheads to serve the needs of truckers.

It's believed that about 250-275 sets of Ardun heads were made before Arkus-Duntov discontinued them. Britain's Sydney Allard offered Ardun conversions on his Allard sports cars. Few people ran the heads on the street. Horsepower claims for the basic Ardun setup on an otherwise stock motor were high, and it wasn't a simple bolt-on conversion. But a few enterprising hot rodders, like Don Clark and Clem Tebow of C-T Automotive, learned how to correct the original design's valvetrain geometry and oiling problems and make serious horsepower. Their roadster topped 165 mph at Bonneville in 1952 and sent the Flathead guys packing. After years of study, the late Tom Senter unlocked more Ardun secrets in his famous "Ardun White Paper" series in R&C in 1971, Senter successfully experimented with this engine's remarkable power potential, as did Cotton Werksman, another noted Ardun devotee.

And then there's Ron San Giovanni--self-taught, curious, and possessed with a real need for speed. He wasn't really looking for an Ardun setup. He'd learned about the rare conversions in an issue of HRM, but he'd never actually seen one, saying, "...they were so elusive it wouldn't be worth my while to even look."After a false start, a guy Ron calls "Pete the Engineer" tempted him again. "I know where there's a set in Norwich, Connecticut," he confessed. "Let's go," Ron said. Next weekend, the searchers were looking at an actual Ardun motor "...that sat in a back room, in a place called Freddy's TV Repair Service. And this individual Freddy," says Ron, in his characteristic East Coast way, "was involved in sponsoring stock car racing at Stafford and Waterford, Connecticut, Speedways." Racing rules precluded Freddy's running the Ardun in a modified stocker; if he had, his driver would've run away and hid from the field.

"As small as this world is," says Ron, still intrigued with the coincidence, "Freddy had taken and installed this motor in his company's '50 Ford panel truck. It was identical to the one I cut my teeth on driving. And at this time, I still had it. Crazy as it is," he admits, "I get attached to stuff and it's hard for me to let something go." You have no trouble believing that when you see his garage.

Unfortunately, old Freddy knew exactly what he had, and he planned to advertise the heads for sale in California. San Giovanni quickly realized, "I couldn't get this engine, along with a remarkable cache of duplicate spares that came with it--like double everything: rockers, valves, springs, guides, retainers, pushrods, it was endless--without spending a lot of money. The parts were in plastic bags that read, ARDUN ENGINE COMPANY, NEW YORK," Freddy said the engine had come from a speed shop in New York and whoever purchased it before him had bought enough spare pieces so there were at least two spares of everything that was in the motor.

Ron's friend, the late Mike Hart, who also had an Ardun, came along. Freddy went out to get a droplight so they could see the engine better. Using a small adjustable wrench he always kept handy, Mike whipped a valve cover off the dirty, dusty engine. "One thing I'll never forget," says Ron, "Mike kept saying, 'it's mint!, it's mint!' And it was, it was like brand new inside." Frantically trying to get his friend to put the cover back before Freddy returned, an equally excited Ron San Giovanni simultaneously made a serious "buy" decision.Freddy set the price at $5,000, which in Ron's words "...was mind-boggling in the early '80s," about ten times the cost of an original set. Ronnie and Mike rode home together and all they could talk about was that Ardun. Mike offered to help Ron lower the purchase price by buying some of the parts. When Ron got home, his driveway was filled with cars. He and his wife were supposed to go out to a movie with friends; and he'd completely forgotten.

When he walked into the house, he expected to find himself in a world of trouble with an angry wife. Instead Laura had a different line of questioning. "Did you see it?" she asked. After he answered in the affirmative, she asked, "Are you gonna buy it?" San Giovanni replied, "It's an awful lot of money." Her reply was classic. "When would you get another opportunity?" Now that's a woman to keep.The following Monday, Ron went to the bank for a personal loan. He says he waited for two weeks "before I finally got up the nerve to go back and talk to the guy." They agreed on a price; and the engine sat in his garage for "quite a few years" until he paid off the loan. He began by detailing and plating individual pieces, then he modified the intake system for three carburetors. Mike Hart ran his Ardun in a Hillegas Championship racecar, so Ron helped out and learned more about Arduns in the process.

Ronnie was already building Flatheads for himself and for other people. "I didn't see any reason why I couldn't just rebuild an Ardun, he says off-handedly; it wasn't that much more complicated--so I did it." He took his roadster off the road in October, and "...in the Spring, out it rolled with the Ardun sittin' in it." The gearbox then was a '67 Ford four-speed toploader with an open driveline conversion and a Halibrand quick-change.

What does he think of Ardun power and reliability. "The most important thing that I noticed," he says, "was that inside the engine, there was a lack of oiling in the rocker shaft and valve tips to the pushrods." He asked Mark Conforth, a longtime New Jersey rodder who was running an Ardun, for advice. Conforth said he sprayed oil in that area. So Ron built one. "I came up with an oil spraybar assembly that'd just drip oil where I wanted to reduce the friction points."

"Once I had that accomplished," he says modestly, making the re-engineering of an Ardun's oiling system sound easy, "I was ready to start it. Before I could drive the car out of the garage for the first time, it took me almost a month to figure out the fuel system requirements, because my motor needed more carburetion than Mike's was using. Once it was running, the only problem that ever developed was that the guide to valve clearances were a little too tight (a common Ardun problem using the original lifters) and it would hang up occasionally. That's the only problem I ever experienced, and it was only for the first year."

For the Ardun's ignition, Ron uses a modified ACCEL dual-point distributor that he machined from a GM-intended unit, paired with an MSD 6A spark multiplier. He feels one of the Ardun's drawbacks is "...that the design of the spark plug location is so far from where the actual combustion chamber is located. So you need a hot plug, a really hot spark and a lot of advance, 50-to-55 degrees, just to get it to run." Inside the modified aluminum Hildebrandt oil filter case on the firewall, there's a modern spin-on oil filter. Ron has replumbed the block so "...I run oil from the oil pump cavity to the filter, then back to the main oil galley; it's not just a bypass system. My friend Mike Hart and I always had a term we used. It was, 'go two steps forward and one back.' That was my learning experience early on with machine work. I could make something up and it'd be wrong, so I'd just scrap it and start again." The important thing here, for all you perfectionists, is that Ron wasn't (and still isn't) afraid to try anything. "Working on cars and doing machine work is not my living," he insists, "So I enjoy doing it. I can take my time."A lot of people don't have his confidence. Even if they did, they lack the fundamental skills. He's part of an increasingly rare breed in hot rodding.

"Yeah, we know that," is his reply. "That's one of the annoying problems about the way hot rodding is (today)." It's interesting, he tells me, "You don't say street rodding and neither do I. My cars are hot rods. They're not belly button cars; they're what I am, and they're what I like and no doubt, as we all know, a traditional car will draw as big a crowd if not bigger at times than the latest and greatest high-tech stuff."

As Steve Coonan puts it, "Ron's still an internally-motivated guy in a sport that's becoming more and more externally motivated." Why does he do his cars this way?

"My goal was I didn't want an 'agent orange' car (that's his name for anything with a small-block Chevy); I wanted something that was different, and I love Flatheads. Obviously, I do use pieces that are more modern for the reliability aspect. But I have abused my cars at the dragstrip alongside agent-orange cars and I've beaten them."

Ron eschews big-bore and stroke Flatheads. "My motors are small cubic inches." His present-day Ardun has a stock bore and a 4-inch Merc crank for 255 cid. "I go with smaller cubic inches, because I want the longevity of the motor. I've owned the motor in Laura's coupe since 1971; it's been in every car I've ever owned and I'm still using it. So if I chose to punch it out to 3 3/8, it would have been worn out, 'cause I do use these motors a lot. Back when Flatheads were the hot item, everybody hadda have a big stroker. Maybe you need to relive your youth, because you didn't have one. There's no knocking that. I know I've been successful with small motors; I just never went big."

The secret to Ronnie's Ardun is a custom-ground roller tappet cam. "Nobody has anything like it," Ron confides. "It took a lot of hours to put that valvetrain together." His twin carbs resemble Stromberg 94s, but they're much bigger 2110 Holleys, and they flow 365 cfm, the equivalent of a decent-sized, four-barrel carb.

Ronnie's roadster sits atop a fully boxed '32 Ford frame. A Model A front crossmember lowers the front end an inch and there are owner-built center crossmembers for additional rigidity. The dropped front axle is a stretched Model A I-beam. Ron runs '40 Ford spindles, '48 Ford drum brakes, and a Ford Granada dual-chamber master cylinder. He fabricated the hairpin radius rods. The tubular adjustable shocks are '50 Chrysler, and nearly everything that could be dipped was subsequently plated.

To handle the Ardun's estimated 300 bhp and 350 lb-ft of torque, Ron starts with a Tremec five-speed manual that progresses through an open driveline into a Halibrand quick-change. Ron modified late-Ford axles for additional strength and tied the assembly together with '50 Chrysler adjustable shocks and modified '36 Ford radius rods that do double duty as traction bars. The rear brakes are late Ford 8-inch drums.

This highboy is very much a '60s-style car, so its chromed 15x6 Radir wheels look right at home. Ron runs 5.60:15 fronts and L78/15 rear tires with whitewalls. I hate the cliche period-perfect, but this car is all that and more. Ron chopped the windshield 2 inches, and filled the original grille shell. The grille is a well-made home brew item with its vertical bars made of welding rod. It's accented by a Moon tank in polished aluminum. The bodywork was done by Joey "The Torch" Alexander from Milford, Connecticut, and the roadster's Boss Mustang Grabber Blue enamel was applied by Rich Chaeco, from Wallingford, with Ron's help.

Guide headlights and '47 Chevy taillights round out the changes. Inside, there's a Stewart-Warner speedboat panel and a Bell-type four-spoke steering wheel. Ron custom-made the seat and upholstered the interior in white Naugahyde with a black tweed carpet. The tan canvas top is part of this car's signature. Ronnie drives this Deuce, whatever the weather, and in Connecticut, a top comes in very handy.

Rain or shine, Ron drives his car everywhere. He believes he has over 200,000 miles on it, with a few rebuilds along the way, of course. His dream is to drive it to California for the L.A. Roadster Show. "It's just an old hot rod," he says modestly, "that's been with us a long time. It helps keep the memory alive of the way things used to be, before 1-800 parts and cars became available."Keep on rolling, Ronnie. We'll see you in Pomona.