The improbably free ’34 Ford coupe

For Michael Behrendt, it’s all about style and proper proportion. It just has to “look right.”

So when he spotted the shell of a 1934 Ford five-window coupe, he knew that with the right combination of parts and pieces, it could become a great traditional-style hot rod.

“It was right down the street from here, at the bottom of the hill,” he recalled. “It was kind of butchered up. I think it might have been a drag car.”

He looked up the owner and repeatedly tried to buy the ’34 over the years, without success. Finally, in 1981 the owner, who was preparing to move to Colorado, relented.

“He came up to me and said, ‘If you still want that old car, I’ll just give it to you … if you promise you’ll give me a ride in it when you’re through with it,’” Behrendt recalled.

“I think that is probably the last free ’34 Ford coupe in the world,” he grinned.

Like many of his projects, the old car was stored away, along with various parts he had collected, knowing someday they would all come together.

Other projects, like restoring his beautiful 1880 Queen Anne-style house, which he bought in 1971, took precedence. A gifted artist by trade, Behrendt sketched every detail of the house as he brought it back to life, decorating it with a mix of Wild West art and artifacts and vintage hot-rod imagery.

At first glance, you might mistake Behrendt for a Flint Hills cowboy, with his ever-present bandana around his neck and his denim clothes. And you wouldn’t be far wrong.

But Behrendt is a trained artist who studied under Disney artist Adrian Landis. He has made his living doing everything from high-fashion newspaper illustrations to beautiful pencil and ink drawings of custom cars and hot rods. He even spent several years as the official quality control inspector at Big Dog Motorcycles, where he says he was known as “the Picky Old Man.”

Finally, the time was right to focus his considerable talents on the ’34 Ford coupe.

“I got serious on it about six years ago,” Behrendt said. After the tragic loss of a longtime close friend, working on the car proved to be therapeutic for him.

He had built a model of such a hot rod when he was a teenager and he used it for his inspiration.

“I would sit that model up there, and it would occupy a lot of my time,” he said. “I wanted it to look like it was built in the late ’50s or the earlier ’60s.”

Behrendt used a set of aftermarket boxed ’34 Ford frame rails for the foundation of his hot rod, tying them together with a ’35 Ford X-member out of an old water wagon from the family farm.

The step-down ’34 firewall was cut out and replaced with a ’46 Ford firewall, shaving about 15 inches off the total length of the car and allowing the engine to be set back farther in the frame, giving the coupe the proportions Behrendt wanted.

A ’32 Ford truck grille shell was modified to fit and tucks in between a set of vintage headlights.

For power, Behrendt selected a 1950 Oldsmobile Rocket V-8 displacing 303 cubic inches and breathing through a stock two-barrel back-draft style carburetor. Jerry Livingston rebuilt the motor, with a custom-ground Schneider cam giving it a nice lope.

“I wanted it to look like I went to a salvage yard and found it,” he said. Painting the stock Olds engine green color, with the plug wires running through factory valve cover brackets, the engine looks exactly right for the time period. Andy Tole took Behrendt’s drawing of a set of exhaust headers and turned it into the real thing, wrapping one pipe expertly around the Ford F-1 steering box.

Old bed frame tubes were used to build straight pipes running back to a vintage set of exhaust tips Behrendt had stashed away years before.

Up front, an Ed Stewart dropped axle was installed, with ’46 Ford brakes fitted. In the rear, Behrendt hauled out an old Halibrand quick-change rear end, fitted with 4:11 gears and ’47 Ford axle housings. Tapered wishbones are used front and rear to locate the axles.

In between the engine and rear sits the original Hydramatic 4-speed automatic transmission, shifted by a period-correct Mr. Gasket shifter.

The coupe body was lowered over all this and sits with a nice nose-down attitude – what was referred to as “the Wichita look” back in the 1960s. Behrendt had saved the wheels off one of his early 1940 Ford hot rods and used them, along with rechromed baby moon hubcaps, to set off the bias-ply wide whitewall tires, using Candy Classics 8.20x15s in the rear, Coker 5.60x15s in the front. The front tires are covered by a set of handmade cycle-type fenders given to the builder by a friend, Gary Estes, who ran them on a ’29 roadster at the first NHRA nationals in Great Bend in 1955.

Inside, Behrendt narrowed a 1950 Oldsmobile dashboard to fit, complete with the dash wrap-around pieces that extend into the top of the door panels, which are finished with decorative expanded aluminum grating. A ’59 Olds steering wheel and pedals are also employed.

For seating, Behrendt selected a 1934 Ford back seat from a 4-door sedan because the metal seat back appealed to his styling sensibilities. Morgan-Bulleigh covered the bench seat in taupe and black leather.

With the help of friend Jesse Worthey, the car was finally assembled and finished off with a beautiful deep black single stage paint job applied by Terry Cook.

“It turned out to be a pretty fun car,” says Behrendt. “When I was a kid riding on the school bus, I would imagine myself in a car like this, sliding around the bus and impressing the kids. If I did that now, somebody would call the cops and I would probably end up in jail.”

The man who gave him the free ’34 coupe has been back once to see it as a work in progress. But he hasn’t got his free ride yet.

“I need to pay up on that … I even told him he could take it around the block,” Behrendt said.

This story was originally published September 19, 2014 at 7:54 PM with the headline "The improbably free ’34 Ford coupe."