‘Road Rat’ is not his mom and dad’s street rod

It’s not like Mark Franklin can’t do beautiful auto body and paint work. Anyone who has seen his parents, Mick and Doty Franklin’s, rose-colored 1935 Terraplane or their gold-over-red 1947 Hudson sedan can attest to son Mark’s skills.

It’s just that he decided to go a different route for his own street rod.

“People used to ask me, ‘When are you going to build your own car?’ I was always doing something for my dad or my mom,” he says. “I couldn’t afford to build a really nice car. So I asked my wife (Kim) what kind of car she would want. And she said, `A rat rod.’ ”

“A lot of imagination goes into building one of them,” said Franklin, who thought that sounded like a great idea.

He had been collecting odds and ends from other people’s projects for at least 10 years.

“Anytime you tear a car apart, there are parts left over,” Franklin said.

Friends would donate their leftovers and he would store them away, waiting for the day when he could start a project of his own.

“I found this body in 2010 and that’s when the project really got started,” he said. “I had seen this old ’28 Dodge body sitting in a hedgerow at a buddy’s place south of town.”

The friend shot him a price that seemed out of reach, but later, when he found himself in a financial pinch, he agreed to part with the rusty old hulk for a mere $300.

“There was no frame, just the body, but the doors were still on it. I had no definite idea on what to do with it when I started. I was just going to wing it,” Franklin recalls. “The first thing I did was I chopped four inches out of the roof.”

He decided to craft a round-tube racing style front chassis, something like he had built for a dirt track modified race car he had campaigned. In fact, he still had the 350 Chevy V-8 race engine, so he rolled it into place and built the frame rails around it. Up front, he used a chrome straight axle and coil-over springs and shocks from the donation bin.

The front section was welded to a hand-built square tube frame that was permanently attached to the Dodge body. At the rear, a junked 1993 Thunderbird independent rear suspension system rescued from a trip to the salvage yard was welded into place. The whole chassis setup allows the car to ride low to the pavement, with air bags at the rear cushioning the ride.

“It’s kind of a low-budget deal,” Franklin said. “I would sit out in the garage looking for something to do. I didn’t want it to look like everybody else’s car.”

Probably the most expensive components on the Dodge were the Speedway disc brakes and spindles fitted to the front axle at a cost of about $500. He figures he has only about $1,500 in the project, thanks to the generosity of others.

The Chevy race engine was detuned, with a milder camshaft installed, along with a 600 com Holley 4-barrel carburetor. It’s matched up with a two-speed manual shift Powerglide automatic transmission that came out of Mick Franklin’s mid-engined Corvair, another off-the-wall project.

Mark Franklin built his own exhaust headers, which terminate in Speedway megaphones outfitted with propane-powered flame-throwers “just for fun.”

During the course of the two-year build, a theme of spiders and cobwebs developed, with Cairns Plasma Works cutting out various pieces of flat steel to decorate the car. First, it was a spider web grille insert for the Model A radiator shell, then a pair of cobweb braces from the cowl to the radiator. Eventually, the black Summit racing wheels would have spider center caps and the entire open roof of the car would house a massive metal spider and cobweb cutout.

Inside, surplus van seats from the El Dorado National small bus company in Salina were installed for the driver and front seat passenger. Franklin formed an aluminum rear bench seat, covered it with an Indian blanket and hinged it so it can be swung forward so he can access the battery and rear suspension. A 10-gallon gas tank is filled by swinging the rear window inward.

The inner door panels are upholstered in old-school metal flake orange vinyl accented by metal spider web trim. A tall floor shift sprouts up through a wooden center console fashioned from an old ammunition crate, with a Frankenstein head for a shift knob. A Hudson steering wheel and a Terraplane speedometer round out the interior features. There’s even a “Franklin Automobile Company” emblem affixed to the radiator shell as an inside joke.

“It’s a little bit of everything, kind of like that car that Johnny Cash sang about,” Franklin says.

The weld seam for the top chop is still visible and there are no plans for applying paint over the 88 years’ worth of hard-earned rust red patina.

“It looks like hell, but it handles nice and it drives nice,” said Mark Franklin.

The car is perfect for parade duty, with grandkids perched in the back tossing candy out to other youngsters. The car, sometimes referred to as the “Road Rat,” has made successful long haul road trips into Nebraska and Missouri. Next week, Mark and Kim Franklin plan to fire it up and head for the big “Back to the ’50s” car show in St. Paul, Minnesota.

“It’s dependable. You can drive it anywhere. It gets about 15 miles to the gallon, so with a 10-gallon tank, after 150 miles, we stop and get out and walk around for a while,” Franklin chuckled.

This story was originally published June 11, 2016 at 8:36 AM with the headline "‘Road Rat’ is not his mom and dad’s street rod."