At the 2022 Detroit Autorama, we met Logan and Tanner Kucharek, brothers from nearby Howell, Michigan. Logan is now 23 years old and Tanner is 20, and their flathead-powered 1932 Ford coupe is one of the coolest hot rods we saw all weekend.
In the '50s, it was pretty typical for hot rods to be owned and built by young guns like Logan and Tanner. In 1956, their uncle Jon Grinager was a sophomore at Farmington High School near Detroit. He bought a beat-up 1932 Ford three-window coupe body and took it to his school shop class, where, for the next few years, he and his friends polished their mechanical and fabricating skills and turned Jon's Deuce coupe into an impressive lowboy hot rod.
Jon went to Vietnam in 1966. "We have the letters that he sent home," Logan told us. "He wrote, 'I know that after this I'm not going to have much, but I have my boat and I have my hot rod.' He had a hard time when he came home, and his car was the thing that helped him as he struggled with PTSD."
The Kucharek brothers describe their uncle Jon as a Renaissance man. "Until we tore the car down to the frame, we really didn't understand how much work had gone into it. He did his own bodywork and fabrication and built his own wiring harness. He did his own upholstery. He boxed the frame and Z'd the 'rails to lower the car, and moved the front crossmember forward two inches and upward two inches to make everything fit right. He used whatever he had at his disposal. We figured out that the inner part of the firewall is made out of an aluminum baking sheet, still with a handle. The tunnel over the driveshaft is a piece of chimney tubing—but it worked."
The coupe's strikingly low profile is accomplished by its 7-inch channel over the Z'd framerails, and a 4 1/2-inch top-chop. Logan and Tanner have heard repeated reports that the chop may have been performed by another pair of Detroit brothers, Mike and Larry Alexander of the legendary Alexander Bros. Custom Shop. The work on the coupe has the style of Alexander Bros. metalwork, and Logan and Tanner are still trying to authenticate the story.
Through the '70s and '80s, Jon continued to work on the car, modifying it from its traditional '50s style as trends changed. The 239 Flathead was retained, but the front suspension was updated with a four-link, and the appearance was modernized with smooth lines, fresh orange paint, and lots of chrome.
Unfortunately, it didn't take long for the new paint to start dropping off of the sheetmetal. Discouragement over the failed paintjob, along with his struggle with PTSD, caused Jon to abandon work on the hot rod he'd enjoyed so much. "He took a snag grinder and ripped off all the paint he could," Logan said. "He stuffed the car in the back of the garage and it sat there for 30 years until he passed away in 2015."
Logan and Tanner were teenagers when they inherited their uncle's discarded and disassembled hot rod. "We've been working on bringing it back to life ever since," Logan said. "We putzed around for the first few years with it and got it running OK. Originally, we were just going to get it running again- heads and some brake work. We weren't planning on taking the engine apart. Obviously it snowballed a lot from that."
They went to online forums and read books to learn how to rebuild the flathead engine, but needed some professional help to "kick it over the edge," as they put it. During an online search for "flathead repair Detroit" they discovered Brothers Custom Automotive in Troy, Michigan. Brothers, owned by Bill Jagenow, is nationally known for outstanding vintage-built hot rods.
"We brought our car to them and instantly hit it off," Logan and Tanner told us. "They were totally interested in our story and what the car meant to us. Bill really connected with the fact that the car's been around since the '50s and that it was going to be young people working on it, keeping the story alive. We felt confident that Bill had a very traditional vision for the car and that it's what our uncle would have wanted. And Bill is a flathead wizard, to say the least."
The 239, originally installed by Jon Grinager, has been machined to 286ci, running a Mercury crankshaft, L100 cam, stainless valvetrain components, and Offenhauser cylinder heads. The Edmunds aluminum intake manifold is topped with a pair of brand new Stromberg carburetors. Exhaust is drawn by a pair of Red's headers, with straight exhaust out the sides. "It's ridiculously loud," Tanner said. "When we moved the car into the lower level at the Autorama, we had people coming down from upstairs. The floor was rumbling. The flathead has a sound all its own."
Tanner told us that they used an old hot-rodding procedure called the wheat penny trick to change the exhaust tone of the flathead. Old 1909-1958 pennies (with stalks of wheat depicted on the tail side) are the right diameter for blocking the exhaust passage heat riser holes to the intake manifold. The result is more "pop" and "snap" to the exhaust—in addition to keeping the carburetors cooler. Logan and Tanner used 1948 pennies, from the year Jon was born.
In rebuilding the coupe, the goal was not to replicate everything Jon had done, but to honor it. When it came time to paint the car, Logan and Tanner decided on a variation of the bold red/orange that it had worn in the '50s. The new color is Volvo Saffron Metallic. Bill Jagenow shot the fresh paint in the Brothers Custom booth, spraying just a basecoat, without clear or polishing, in order to get the look of a driveway paintjob from the '50s. The effect can be seen by comparing the body with the dashboard, which got some clear for contrast.
Tanner said, "It's going to be a driver. If we get a pebble chip in the paint, it's not the end of the world. We can touch it up as we go. Chips are proof that we've been driving it—and that's what we want to do- drive it all over."
In restoring the coupe to its early hot-rod style, Logan and Tanner took off some of the '80s elements added by Jon, such as the four-link suspension, which was switched back to split wishbones. The rolling stock is early hot-rod-style stuff. Skinny bias-ply Firestone tires roll on painted 16-inch steel wheels with 1947-48 Merc caps. The bench seat is treated to old-time "blanket upholstery," facing a 1940 Ford steering wheel and Stewart-Warner Wings gauges.
Other parts were updated subtly. The 6-volt electrical system was converted to 12-volt. The new Stromberg E-Fire ignition is electronic but has the looks of an old "crab style" distributor. A dual-core radiator and electric fan will keep the coupe cool on the street this summer, and Logan and Tanner said they plan on spending a lot of time on Detroit's famous Woodward Avenue at Normandy. Look for them.
Brothers Custom Automotive always has a prominent display at the Detroit Autorama, in the lower level Autorama Extreme section of the show dedicated to nostalgic hot rods and customs. When Bill Jagenow invited the Kucharek brothers to exhibit the Shop Class Coupe in the Brothers display, they still had a lot to do to get the car together. "We've worked on it really hard. On January 8th, we had a bare frame on the floor. It's been a lot of late nights. I'd put in a full day at work, clock out, and go down to the shop until they kicked me out," Logan explained. "And we were practically bolting stuff onto it as it was rolling onto the trailer to go to Autorama."
When the Shop Class Coupe rolled off that trailer at the show, Logan and Tanner got an education in how significant their car was—and is. "Autorama is probably its first public outing since the late '70s. We weren't ready for the response it's been getting. We didn't realize how much this car meant to so many people."
"We talked a lot about what he would like and what he wouldn't have liked, and thought about that with the style choices that we made with Bill," Tanner told us. "This car is a hot rod through and through. Bare bones. Utilitarian. Not a lot of creature comforts."
"For us to have the car in this finished state is really something. Our uncle would have been laughing at us as we worked on it," Logan said. "I don't think he would have ever imagined his hot rod being at Autorama—and to have it be the first thing you see getting off the escalator to Autorama Extreme. It's pretty cool."
On season 3, episode 2 of HOT ROD Unlimited , Thom Taylor drives a channeled, topless Deuce roadster in the dead of winter from Nashville to Los Angeles, encountering what you would expect in the middle of winter: ice, rain, cold, frost—did we mention cold?? Watch the roadster slip, slide and spin 2,000 miles as Thom takes Interstate 40 through eight states and 70 degrees of temperature change, taking breaks for burnouts, breakdowns, bad weather and junkyards. Sign up for a free trial to MotorTrend+ and start streaming every episode of HOT ROD Unlimited today!