Corey Conyers keeps vintage front-engine dragsters rolling

Readers of Wichita on Wheels are used to seeing beautifully painted, running driving cars, trucks and motorcycles on this page.

But this week, we got to take a rare, behind-the-scenes look at some amazing work in progress, a homegrown example of metal mastery in action at Crown Custom LLC, the one-man Wichita fabrication shop operated by Corey Conyers.

He’s earned a solid reputation as a builder and painter of vintage 1960s-style front engine dragster bodies, working on such beautiful machines as Tom Hoover’s and Jimmy Nix’s fuel dragsters.

Currently in the works in his shop are two prime examples of his art: the Hippo & Poindexter AA/FD owned by Eddie Buck of Eureka, Mo., and Rex Stevens’ ’23 T-bodied fuel dragster out of Indianapolis.

The day we visited, Conyers was hard at work with a slap hammer, painstakingly smoothing out the hand-built aluminum nose piece on the Hippo dragster, with his new beagle pup, Orville, keeping him company. The shop was immaculately clean.

“I can’t function in a messed up, junked up shop,” Conyers said. He knows where every tool, every piece of flat aluminum stock is. It cuts down on wasted time.

“I always had attention to detail … I’ve always been kind of a neat freak,” he said. “Nothing happens overnight. There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears in what I do.”

There are no computer renderings or printed manuals in what he does, either, as most of the race cars he works on were one-off builds, with nobody keeping track of precisely what went into the tubular steel frames and swoopy aluminum bodies.

“I do everything old school,” he said. He works from old photographs and magazine articles on the vintage dragsters, using known reference points such as the size of a set of Hemi valve covers, to establish the dimensions of all of the other parts he fabricates.

Conyers wasn’t born with those amazing skills, though, he had to work hard to learn them and he had some of the best teachers in the business. He began working for Tom Hanna as a janitor in his shop when he was a junior in high school and would log more than a quarter of a century with him, working on everything from beautiful full-bodied dragsters to Hanna’s super car concept in his Wichita shop.

He also punched louvers in ambulance hoods for the late, great Dave Stuckey as a youngster.

And then there was Pat Foster, famous driver, builder and tuner of some of the most iconic drag cars, who came to Wichita to work on Hanna’s super car and wound up running his own drag car restoration/recreation shop here.

“I wanted to be a welder … and he taught me how to weld. He started me right out with TIG welding. He took me under his wing and taught me all my fabrication skills.

“He showed me all the ropes, all the little tricks,” Conyers said.

When Foster’s son Cole, a talented car/motorcycle builder came to town for a visit, he and Conyers immediately hit it off. He ended up moving to California where he worked for Cole Foster in his Salinas Boys customs shop, helping to turn out the iconic ’56 Ford F-100 pickup that won the Chip Foose and Runner-Up award at the prestigious Grand National Roadster Show.

“I learned a lot with Cole. Nothing scared me … after working with Cole.”

“It was a beautiful, amazing time in California,” recalled Conyers, who also fulfilled his dream of learning to surf while there.

“While I was in California, `cacklefest’ dragsters became an event. These old guys were finding old cars and rebuilding them.” The vintage front-engined dragsters came back out of hiding, not to race, but to be fired up and idle in front of crowds, sending sheets of nitromethane-fired flames into the night skies.

That’s the plan for the Hippo car, which arrived as a bare frame with an engine block, returned to its 1969 configuration by Brian Fox in St. Louis. Conyers got to work on the dragster, carefully measuring and then forming sheet aluminum into the beautiful contours of the original Sorrell bodywork.

No English wheel is used, with the shapes being hand-formed.

“When I do my aluminum work, there’s no filler involved … I don’t do Bondo,” Conyers said. His panels are smooth enough that he merely sprays some high-build primer on them, block-sands them and they’re ready for one of his award-winning paint jobs.

But he’s so proud of his craftsmanship that he’s convinced Buck, the Hippo car’s owner, to campaign it in bare metal for the first year of cacklefest events. Then it will come back to Crown Custom for a period-correct paint job.

Conyers says the cacklefest trend has reached a sort of plateau, and that he hopes the next trend will be “burnout cars,” dragsters that do long, smoky exhibition runs. That’s the mission of the Stevens car, which arrived as nothing more than a modified 1960s fiberglass Model T bucket body equipped with a streamlined canopy.

Conyers constructed a chassis of his own design for that car, which will meet current NHRA safety standards while retaining the ’60s vibe. It should be capable of 200 mph tire-burning passes, he said.

“It’s just kind of sinister-looking … it’s going to be a crowd pleaser.

Conyers gives a tip of his custom-made aluminum derby to all of the talented builders who helped him along the way. Plus there’s a whole list of Wichita area friends who have always been willing to lend a helping hand, from his brother, Terry Conyers, to Gary Cooper, who teamed up with him on the Jimmy Nix car.

He also credits Larry Wolfe, Roger Nelson, Steve Bahm, Pat Sullivan, Adam Brownfield, Jeb McGregor, Gary Dreiling, Mark and Kyle Lane, Mark Bauer, Randy Woods and Larry Mong for their help along the way.

“I do this stuff because I can’t afford these cars myself, but I get a lot of satisfaction and fulfillment working on them,” Conyers said.

For more photos and background, check out Conyers’ Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/corey.l.conyers.

This story was originally published January 17, 2018 at 8:46 PM with the headline "Corey Conyers keeps vintage front-engine dragsters rolling."