2004 PPG Street Rodder Road Tour: Part 2

If striking flint on steel makes sparks, what happens when you put steel on steel? In the case of the Road Tour roadster, we've got a Deuce Steel chassis from Hot Rods & Custom Stuff (HR&CS) and now we're adding the "Body of Steel" from Brookville Roadsters! These two companies are justifiably proud of their products, which go together very nicely for our '32 Ford highboy roadster project. The polished engine, Wheel Vintiques wheels, and searing yellow PPG paint may sparkle, but the only "sparks" from this car will be in the enthusiasm it generates as it tours the country.

As delivered from Brookville Roadsters, the "Body of Steel" is as close as most of us will ever get to having an original steel Deuce, but the Brookville body is actually better in many ways, having been spared the ignominy of seven decades of rust, damage, and hot rodders. It's no easy task to build something like this from 68 different pieces of stamped steel, and rodders are lucky that Brookville has made the investment in tooling to make these available.

Just bolting one of these new bodies in untouched form on your Deuce frame provides the base for what can be a beautiful car, with changes in the hood, paint, wheels, and other features making your car a truly personal statement. On our Road Tour roadster, the STREET RODDER staffers liked all of the creative changes Randy Clark suggested that took the overall scheme even further. We'll have a unique Deuce roadster body and chassis as a result.

The interior of a roadster is right out there for everyone to see, and we'll be getting more than casual glances with the dual-dash setup created by HR&CS. Space is always a problem in a Deuce roadster, especially in the cowl area and under and/or behind the relatively small dash. Hiding things that are behind the dash is a concern when you have electronics, an electrical center, and Vintage Air heat and A/C components all sharing the space back there. The dash we're using in the original location will carry just the Dakota Digital instrument panel, while the deeper secondary dash will hold the climate controls and also hide the components behind it.

Exterior mods to the Brookville body included a very novel approach to frenching-in the '50 Pontiac taillights. Metalman Lars Blomberg made wooden hammer-forms to shape sheetmetal "buckets" for the taillights that sink these traditional lights in somewhat and at the same time provide a small, smooth lip around them. Holes were cut in the back of the lower deck panel and the new buckets were welded in. Also at the rear, roll pan-like corners were made to fill up the body area on either side of the gas tank for a smoother, more custom look.

Up front, we have a three-piece steel hood with some interesting louvers along the bottom of each hood side, the HR&CS stainless headlight/shock mounts at the framerails, and a Brookville steel grille shell that's seen some tweaks. The headlight shells are reproduction '34 Ford commercial type, painted body color.

Unless its coffee in the morning or pizza at lunch, they don't send out for much at Hot Rods & Custom Stuff. Their four buildings include separate areas for sales, fabrication, and assembly, as well as a media-blasting center and body shop. There's also a large paint shop and final assembly building down the street. Randy has found that keeping things in-house means there's more control, and the painted cars that come out of their shop are vivid testament to that.

After all the customizing and welding was done on the Road Tour highboy, the body was sanded down to the nude and sprayed with PPG's well-known DP-90 epoxy primer, which is so durable it's the final finish of choice among the suede set. All bodywork and blocking can be done over this. At HR&CS, they used a variety of PPG products to achieve the final, show-car finish our '32 now sports.

After using thin applications of filler around areas that they had reworked, the car was cleaned and painted with NCP-271 high-build primer and block-sanded, then this was repeated. When this was dusted off, the body and exterior parts were moved into the huge down-draft paint booth and sprayed with NCP 1990 "wet on wet" sealer to promote good adhesion of the final paint, the PPG Giallo Yellow (DBC 84902-SC) basecoats. The frame, rear end, and other body-color parts were also treated to a session in the booth.

After all this prep, what really gives the shine and protection to today's paints is the three coats of DCU-2010 two-part clear, which HR&CS bakes for 40 minutes at 140 degrees F. These two-parters are actually thermoset plastic, so without that "cooking" capability, the material will never become evenly "cross-linked" or fully cured inside. Once cured, the sun can't do any harm, even on the hottest days! After the parts were given two days of rest, the boys put the finish to the finish with more than a few man-hours of wet-sanding, proceeding to finer and finer grit papers. Lastly, they did the complete compound/buffing drill and two stages of glaze.

There's much more to the story, so next month we'll bring you details of all the post-paint activities. We gotta tell you, when you see this car's color in print or in person, you'll grin!