The definitive hotrod is the 1932 Ford roadster affectionately called a ‘deuce.’
This car was the basis for hot-rodding which started with a group of enthusiasts in Southern California lowering and lightening their roadsters, hopping up the engines and racing them on the dry lake beds east of Los Angeles in the 1940s.
Joe Mahovlic was a teenager in 1950 and Hot Rod magazine had hit the newsstands showing the hotrods that were cruising the streets down south. He was hooked.
His sister purchased a 1932 Ford roadster from a mechanic who worked at a downtown Ford dealership called Black Motors.
“She bought it because she knew I really wanted it,” Mahovlic recalls.
Within a matter of few months, he had acquired the roadster from his sister and drove it to his last year at South Burnaby Secondary School. He had it looking more like a jalopy with the running boards off and chrome visors over the headlights. But he soon began to turn it into the kind of hotrod he had seen in the magazines.
“There were no hotrods in Vancouver back then,” he says. “I had to get all my ideas from what I saw and read in magazines.
He lived in Burnaby and Walt Penny’s service station at Douglas Road and Canada Way was the hangout. Walt was into building stock cars and had Dayton McKenzie as his driver.
“Dayton would wreck the stock car on the weekend and we’d spend all week putting it back together,” Mahovlic says.
He learned mechanics with Penny showing him how to weld. He soon turned his full attention to building his hotrod with help from friend Hugh Chappell. First, he removed all the fenders from his deuce roadster to make it look more like a hotrod.
Power came from a mildly hopped up flathead engine. But he wanted to do more to the car. Soon it was occupying part of Penny’s service garage and Mahovlic would work on the car every night after the mechanics went home and on the weekends.
Within a matter of weeks, he had completely disassembled the car and began to highly modify it. He boxed the frame for rigidity and Z’d the back of the frame — effectively kicking up the frame rails at the rear allowing the rear axle to be mounted higher to lower the entire stance of the car. He bought a dropped solid axle in Bellingham, Wash. to lower the front. He built most of his steering and suspension components, hand filed them to make them smooth and had it chromed at Dominion Bridge.
He moved the front cross member forward to allow for more engine bay room. He then channelled the body over the frame so, instead of the body being mounted on top of the frame, the body was dropped down over the frame — again for a lower stance.
To give his emerging hotrod the right proportions, he sectioned the grill to make it lower. Then he had to build a new longer hood to compensate for the lengthened frame hand forming the side panels out of aluminum and making his own fibreglass mould to make the top part. Blackie Green punched the louvres in the side panels.
At the rear of the car, he shortened the trunk lid considerably and then fabricated a lower rear pan so the much lower car was cosmetically correct. Mahovlic hand formed the same type of round steel ‘nerf bars’ for a rear bumper that he had seen in magazines. His car was coming together.
“Not bad when you consider it was all trial and error,” Mahovlic says. “There were no air tools and everything was hand filed. I made up jigs for the nerf bars and moulds for the fibreglass parts to make the hood. I eventually painted the car with a one-horsepower Webster compressor.”
This low-slung roadster must have stopped traffic when it hit the streets of Vancouver in 1951 with a modified flathead engine and exhaust exiting through dual Smithy mufflers.
But it just wasn’t enough for Mahovlic who, by this time, was working for Eaton’s mail order house in automotive accessories and sporting goods.
Studebaker had introduced an overhead valve V8 engine in its 1951 models and a hapless American visiting Vancouver had totalled his new car. Mahovlic bought the wreck for $275 to install the high-horsepower, V8 engine in his hotrod.
“I got an adapter from Graham Fraser at Cal-Van HotRod Parts to connect the engine to a 1948 Lincoln transmission,” he recalls. “I used the Stewart-Warner gauges from the Studebaker and the wiring harness.”
Joe ended up with the coolest ride on Canada’s West Coast and was on the road in his hotrod as other teenagers were just catching the bug and beginning the search for their own deuce roadsters and coupes to modify.
Joe’s very early hotrod is documented in his photo album showing the 1932 Ford as he originally drove it in 1950 to what it had become in 1952.
In 1957, he sold his hotrod. Legendary car painter Chuck Robinson, who completely revamped it with a modern Buick V8 engine and the West Coast’s first candy apple paint job, made it one of the best known in its time. Robinson’s version of the deuce hotrod won multiple trophies in shows on both sides of the border and was featured in several magazines.
The car ended up in pieces which were being sold off when Victoria enthusiast Jim Jennings acquired the old hotrod, identified it as being the famous Candy Apple and restored it.
His roadster was voted the most historic hotrod at the Northwest Deuce Days show in Victoria last summer which attracted nearly 500 1932 Fords.
Today, Mahovlic is a spry 81-year-old who still has the car bug. When he retired after nearly 50 years in auto body repairs and painting, he restored a 1967 Camaro for his daughter. When she moved on to a modern car, Mahovlic took the Camaro back and now uses it to cruise to car shows.
He spends a lot of his time looking at contemporary deuce roadsters that are now commonplace. They are built from parts supplied by numerous manufacturers. He remembers back more than 60 years when he was one of the first on Canada’s West Coast to build and drive a hotrod that was completely hand built.
Alyn Edwards is a classic car enthusiast and partner in Peak Communicators, a Vancouver-based public relations company. aedwards@peakco.com
