Who wouldn't like to rewrite history, especially those personal moments that changed the course of your life? You know, the missed catch at the high school championship football game, the girl you wanted to ask out but never did, and that cool car you wished you had bought and fixed up. You can't go back in time, of course, but you can find the car you longed for and make it your own.

 Just ask Mike Jonas. Back in the late Nineties he spotted a '46 Ford convertible at a street rod event that he longed to own. "I fell in love with it," Mike admits, "but I thought it was too expensive at the time. I later realized I was wrong."
 Ironically, that car and its string of owners would later cross paths with Mike, after he forged ahead with his own plans for customizing a '47 Ford. More about that later, but first we need to review the radical surgery he performed on a forlorn and forgotten car.

 Originally his '47 was first sold in Phoenix, Arizona, and later purchased by a broker in Toronto, who would it to someone in Buffalo, Mike's hometown. He heard about the car, and tracked down the owner, who was cash-strapped with another resto project. The '47 was a basket case, with parts spread all over town, and rust eating away at the A-pillars, doors and rockers. Even so, original tin doesn't come cheap, but Mike was able to talk him down from $10,000 to $7500.
 That was just the beginning, though, because he had to purchase a second '47 Ford, a Club Coupe that has the same door size as the convertible. He parted out most of the second car to offset the purchase price, and used the rest of the components to repair the deteriorated areas of the convertible. Whatever he couldn't scavenge off the second car, he had to find through countless Internet searches and hours of phone calls. "It was cheaper to buy fenders than the expense of repairing the original ones," he explains.

 Some of the nitpicky items that needed sorting out included shaving the door handles, custom hidden door hinges, and new V-butt glass for the chopped windshield frame. Of course, Mike added his company's Tri Power stoppers with three-piston calipers and integral parking brake. He chose Classic Tube's brake lines to route the hydraulic fluid from the SSBC remote reservoir and billet master cylinder.

 For all his efforts, Mike has earned a slew of trophies from such illustrious events as the Detroit Autorama, where he won a "Best in Class" trophy for radical custom convertibles. He also took home six "Best of Show" awards from other events.

 

Source:

Brake Lines (stainless steel)
Classic Tube

800-882-3711

classictube.com