mod@tech

Convenience, durability, usability and most of all, reliability. These were the main goals of our Project Rampart track support build. Starting with a showroom new Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat ensured that our performance and reliability concerns would be covered. Then, add in a top-notch designer, and a crew of skilled fabricators, and from concept to reality, our vision was coming to fruition.

In episode 4 of Project RAMPART we take a deeper dive into what the team went through to get the Durango to this point. We then talk about adding more power thanks to the folks at Direct Connection, and then address how all our aftermarket parts were hard mounted to our roof rack and cargo glide system, so that when we decide to unleash the Durango Hellcat’s full 710-horsepower and 650 pound-feet of torque, that they would remain securely in place.

Date: 1984

Location: Boulder City, Nevada

Source: Richard Guy Wilson, via University of Virginia

What do you see here?

As late as the first part of this month, most people who knew what a McQuay-Norris was believed that just one of the six such cars built still existed. That’s understandable, given that for many years most people believed none of the cars had survived. Yet at the three-day dispersal of much of the late Mark Smith’s collection last week, a second McQuay-Norris streamliner resurfaced and subsequently sold for $57,500 despite its dilapidated state.

In the early Thirties, the McQuay-Norris company of St. Louis saw opportunity in the hardships that people across the country suffered. More car owners were stretching their dollars by running their cars longer and rebuilding their cars’ engines, and McQuay-Norris offered just the wear items needed—pistons, rings, bearings—to make that happen. To publicize the company’s products across the country, McQuay-Norris’s executives approved a small fleet of teardrop-shaped cars to capitalize on the streamlining trend.

The McQuay-Norris looked suspiciously like Lyman Voelpel’s 1932 Arrow Plane with their bodies more like blimp gondolas, their wheels in pods separate from the body envelope, and their doors mounted amidships. That’s no coincidence, given that Hill Auto Body Metal Co. of Cincinnati built both and that Hill Auto Body owner John A. Hill worked with McQuay-Norris’s chief engineer, Arden Mummert, on the McQuay-Norris car’s design.

While the Arrow Plane used a rather unconventional drivetrain with a Miller overhead-valve-equipped Ford four-cylinder engine mounted in the rear and driving the front wheels (similar to the Dymaxion, another streamlined car that appeared at roughly the same time), the McQuay-Norris cars—at least one of which was built in 1933, with the rest coming along in 1934—used essentially stock 1932 and 1933 Ford V-8 chassis with front-mounted engines and rear-wheel drive. The driver sat in essentially the same place as in a stock Ford sedan, though it seemed so much farther back due to the plexiglas curved windshield that extended far forward of the cowl. Hill fabricated the bodies out of aluminum over steel framework and installed a set of 15 gauges (among them a blowby meter, exhaust gas analyzer, viscometer, exhaust temperature gauge, compression gauge, vacuum gauge, oil level gauge, oil pressure gauge, oil temperature gauge, water temperature gauge, ammeter, odometer, and speedometer) in a mahogany dash panel. Other than engine rebuilds using McQuay-Norris products and General Jumbo tires, everything underneath remained stock Ford. While McQuay-Norris commissioned just six of the cars, the company had them lettered with numbers 9 through 15, presumably to give the appearance of more such cars on the road.

Hemmings file photo

And put them on the road McQuay-Norris did, though not for any real testing or performance purposes. (According to Robert Gottlieb’s article on the cars in the December 1972 issue of Special Interest Autos, McQuay-Norris had another fleet of test vehicles and instructed its drivers not to discuss improvements in top speed or mileage as a result of the streamlined bodywork.) Instead, the company hired young, college-age men to drive the six cars across the United States and Canada and function as door-to-door salesmen, stopping at every garage, repair shop, and parts store to hype up McQuay-Norris products. As one of those salesmen told Gottlieb, he made a lot of calls—typically 18 to 20, but as many as 36 per day—and would often just set up in town squares and wait for the general public to flock to the unusual car. The cars even made appearances at the Indianapolis 500 and, presumably, other major motorsports events.

“There was no rear window, [so] we used rear-view mirrors on the outside,” driver George Leutwiler told Gottlieb. “These cars were easy to drive, but they had some peculiarities. For instance, you needed good shocks or the car would dance around a lot because of the donut tires. There was no backseat, but there was room for the blowby meter and one suitcase behind the driver. All of us driving these cars were college graduates, and we kept records on operations.”

The McQuay-Norris streamliners remained on the road through 1940, presumably racking up enough miles over that time to warrant scrapping all of them for the war effort. Leutwiler told Gottlieb that the company sold them off one by one, with some going on to second lives as delivery trucks, and one even becoming a sign above a mechanic’s shop. By the time Gottlieb wrote his article, he couldn’t turn up any survivors.

As longtime Hemmings Motor News subscribers know, however, one did turn up in the late Seventies in the collection of Michael Shoen, who had Elwood Pulled restore it. That car, lettered as car number 9, became part of the Hemmings Motor News collection before eventually making its way to Jeff Lane of the Lane Automotive Museum, who drove it in the 2005 Great Race from Washington, D.C., to Tacoma, Washington. It remains in the Lane collection, and when Barcroft Cars profiled it for the Ridiculous Rides video series in early October, it reported that Lane’s was the only McQuay-Norris in existence. Our own Mark McCourt reported the same in his 2018 profile of the McQuay-Norris streamliners.

It’s unknown how long Mark Smith had owned this other McQuay-Norris streamliner or from whom he obtained it or even why Smith—a popular figure in the collector-car world who died in November 2021—didn’t widely publicize the fact that he owned the car. Polk Auction Company, which ran the Mark Smith auction, has promised to follow up with information on this McQuay-Norris from Smith’s archives. It’s missing a number of unique trim pieces along with the grille, the wraparound windshield, and its suite of instruments, but the body remains complete and it still sits on a flathead-powered Ford chassis. While it wasn’t the top seller of the auction at $57,500 (a 1937 Airstream Clipper sold for $155,000), it handily beat out the more complete and unusual four-wheeled vehicles at the sale, including a Dick Guldstrand-built 1968 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28 that sold for $30,000, a mid-Thirties Chevrolet Coca-Cola delivery truck complete with cases and bottles that also sold for $30,000, and an all-original 1942 Buick Super Sedanette that sold for $16,000.

For full results from the Mark Smith sale, visit proxibid.com.

Its story begins as so many others do in our hobby, with fond childhood memories of a favored family vehicle, and ends with the restored car before you on these pages. Filling in the middle are tenacity, luck, and some clever workarounds. This first-year Kaiser-Frazer Henry J Deluxe is a rare survivor that was brought back to as close-to-stock condition as its dedicated owner could reasonably make it, and it represents a decades-held dream come true.

John Kunkel recalls the Henry J sedans that passed through the hands of his father and older brother, especially the new 1953 Corsair Deluxe that was, in its day, the Kunkel family motor. This gearhead from youth has owned and appreciated many other types of vehicles, but that economy car from the postwar independent automaker has a special place in his heart. “I’ve been going to car shows for years, and you see so many Chevelles, so many Mustangs, so many Camaros, so many Corvettes. After a while, they become so common,” John muses. “I personally like cars that are different, unusual, that you don’t see often.”

In a conversation with his son circa 2012, John mentioned he’d buy a Henry J if he found one, but he had a particular specification in mind: It would need to be an early 1951 Deluxe model, the one without an external trunk opening, but with the straight-six engine and an overdrive transmission. “That narrowed it down pretty hard,” he recalls with a smile. “My boy found this car on the Internet, for sale out in Colorado.”

The Henry J, purchased sight-unseen, spent some 25 years in storage in New Mexico before it lived in Colorado, explaining its sunbaked appearance. It rolled on 14-inch wheels, but the car’s new owner had correct 15-inch versions in his family’s parts stash.

The Restoration

One of the more unusual aspects of this car was the custom interior its previous owner had installed. He’d replaced the headliner, door and rear side panels, and the dashboard’s knobs with wooden facsimiles. John disassembled everything for the restoration.

The Restoration

John opted to leave the Henry J’s body attached to its frame to avoid misalignment as he removed rusted passenger-floor sections using a metal cutting wheel, and MIG-welded replacement sheetmetal he’d harvested from a Comet and bent on his homemade metal brake.

The Restoration

With the frame and suspensions exposed, the components were cleaned and treated with chassis-black paint. John ran new brake lines and replaced the master and wheel cylinders. Tubular rear shocks were easier to source than the fronts, which came from Monroe.

The Restoration

Every panel that could be removed from the body shell was, and each was treated individually. This ensured complete paint coverage from every angle, minimizing the possibility of future corrosion, and also eliminated the need to redo large areas if a flaw occurred.

The Restoration

John re-hung the fenders as he worked his way around the Henry J. Before he painted the interior, he had to weld up the screw holes in the roof supports, side panels, and rear floor that resulted from the last owner having used wood instead of correct materials.

Finding the right Henry J

The Deluxe that would soon relocate to south-central Pennsylvania ticked all the right boxes. It was one of 43,442 1951 models in this trim powered by the Willys-built “Kaiser Supersonic” 161- cu.in. flathead inline-six that sported a 3.12 x 3.50-inch bore and stroke, 7:1 compression ratio, and 1-bbl Carter YF carburetor. When the 2,341-pound car was new, the engine’s conservative output—80 horsepower at 3,800 rpm and 133 pound-feet at 1,600 rpm—provided adequately peppy performance with help from the column-shifted three-speed manual transmission with Borg-Warner overdrive. That desirable option allowed the six-cylinder Henry J to comfortably cruise at 55 mph, a speed with which its unassisted nine-inch drum brakes could readily cope.

John did something he says he wouldn’t do again, though it worked out in this instance: He bought the 1951 Henry J sight-unseen. “The guy I spoke with seemed like an honest man. He said the car ran, but not good. It stopped, sorta. It needed some work but was originally a Southwestern car and there wasn’t a lot of rust. I figured, if they’re that hard to come by and I’m going to get one, now’s the time to do it,” he tells us.

This car’s 161-cu.in. straight-six was a set of points and a new muffler away from running well. Its Carter carburetor and ancillaries would be rebuilt.

Evaluating and rebuilding the Supersonic six-cylinder

Once the car was delivered, its new caretaker wasted no time in evaluating his purchase and diving into its restoration. He’d bought a reasonably complete J with recently recovered seats, and, oddly, timber trimmings throughout the interior including a wood-slat headliner, wood side panels, and matching dash knobs.

“It would start and run, but not very well. When you revved it, it started breaking up,” John remembers. “The first thing I did was an engine compression check; surprisingly, the compression was great on all six cylinders. So I checked the timing and vacuum, and found the points in the distributor were cheap replacements. I put in the proper points that had more spring tension, which stopped them floating due to low spring pressure. That made a big difference, but it still wasn’t right. I kept working on it and took off the exhaust system. I found the muffler was really heavy. I cut the top off and found it was jam-packed full of nuts! Replacing the exhaust system made all the difference— it ran like a top!”

As he worked on the engine, John came to believe it had previously been rebuilt since there was very little sludge in the oil pan and each component had been repainted. The transmission was likely given the same treatment since it showed no signs of typical Henry J first gear and synchronizer wear. The overdrive wasn’t working, but studying a shop manual’s wiring schematic clarified why: Improperly connected wires had shorted out its governor. John didn’t trust the rest of the car’s 60-year-old wiring, so he made a replacement harness. He would also rebuild components like the carburetor, generator, starter, and the distributor, and source new brake hydraulic lines and cylinders, plus new Monroe front tubular shocks.

Bodywork using homebuilt tools

The Kunkel family’s history with this model benefitted our feature car, since both John’s father and brother had stashes of spare parts that were crucial in this restoration, including that shop manual. He’d also been collecting Henry J parts when he came across them in hopes of someday having his own to restore. A derelict 1963 Mercury Comet belonging to John’s son would prove useful when it came to sourcing sheetmetal to replace corroded sections of the passenger-side floor and rocker panel.

Early 1950s Kaiser-Frazer cars don’t enjoy the replacement parts support of collectibles like the Ford Model A and MGB, so John had to get creative at many points in the restoration process. He found that the roof and trunklid sheetmetal of that Comet were reasonable approximations of the Henry J’s own, so he used a metal cutting wheel to harvest sections that he then re-formed in the homemade sheetmetal brake he made using three pieces of four-foot-long angle iron, a hinge, and C-clamps. “It was a bit crude, but they bent up nicely,” he says modestly; “The metal was a good-enough gauge that you could hammer it and weld without it burning through.” John left the Henry J’s two-door body on the frame to ensure it would remain square as he cut out and MIG-welded back those sections of passenger floor and sill.

Having completely disassembled the sedan before repairing its relatively minor rust, John began painting each piece individually. Rather than return it to the factory shade of pale green he didn’t like, he chose to spray the body in Ford’s classic Wimbledon White acrylic enamel, of which he purchased two gallons. “I like the clean look of that color, and considering I was painting it myself, outside, white hides a lot of flaws that would be very obvious in dark colors,” he admits. “I’d take a fender out on a nice day and prime it, sand it, and then paint it. The next day I’d paint another fender, a door, or the hood. It’s not the best way to work, but I found if you have a bad day and things don’t go right, you don’t screw up the whole job, just one panel. Doing it individually, you also have paint behind door hinges, inside and outside every panel, and from every different angle. You can’t do that when the car is all together.”

This Henry J’s previous owner had reupholstered the seats, but John would have to replace interior side panels and headlining using proper automotive materials. He opted to fit carpet instead of rubber mats.

A DIY interior with professional results

That the front and folding rear bench seats were already restored with white vinyl upholstery took one large task off John’s plate, but he had a lot to contend with in returning the rest of the interior to its correct state. He opted to fit custom-sewn aftermarket carpet to the floor rather than the original-type rubber mats to improve sound deadening and reduce the chance of condensation corrosion. New door and rear side panels were made from 1⁄8-inch Masonite that John glued automotive-grade material to using adhesive spray; that material was also used to cover the spare wheel that resides in the 15-cu.ft. cargo area behind the rear seat.

Another custom installation was the five-bow fabric headliner, made by a talented seamstress in North Carolina. “I’d never installed a headliner in my life, but she did a nice job and it fit right up,” he says with a smile. Unfortunately, factory Henry J dashboard choke, heater, headlamp, and other knobs have eluded John to this point, but he’s made do with generic items that, to the untrained eye, look stock.

The attractive styling of this demure compact—squint at the greenhouse and finned fenders, and it could be a scaled-down 1948 Cadillac coupe—was set off with minimal but impactful brightwork. John faced yet another challenge when it came to the dented and bent front bumper. “The chrome shop redid the back bumper, grille, and other parts, but said they wouldn’t touch the front bumper,” he recalls. “I searched for a replacement but couldn’t find one in better shape, so I spent several weeks working on that thing—straightening, pulling, twisting, and grinding. The front bumper isn’t as thick as it used to be, but when I took it back, they re-chromed it.”

Wrapping up the restoration

It’s the details that meant the most to John as he wrapped up the three-year restoration process. His beloved Henry J once again rides on factory 15 x 5-inch wheels, which came from the Kunkel parts stashes, replacing the incorrect 14-inch wheels that were on the car when he received it. The previous owner thankfully still had the correct full wheel covers, and kindly sent them to John at no additional cost.

In the years since the work was finished, the smallest Kaiser-Frazer has turned heads and inspired discussions. “Older people who remember the Henry J from back in the day offer a lot of nice comments,” he tells us. “I’ve heard, ‘I haven’t seen one of those in 25 years!’ It seems most that you see today will have a big V-8 under the hood, the firewall and dash are cut, it’s got big tires on the back. Drag strips cleaned out the Henry J’s back in the 1960s, and it’s unusual to spot a stock one. Mine’s not 100-percent, but it’s a lot closer to being there than most.

“When you see the car up close, it’s far from perfect, but I’m happy with it,” John continues. “I mean, I built the thing in my garage, painted the car outside piece by piece, and put it back together. It’s not professional, but it’s mine.”

[Editor’s Note: Our regular I Was There feature in Hemmings Classic Car invites those who worked for the carmakers or adjacent industries to tell their stories. Scott Huntington, who hauled new cars and trucks for Maris Transport, shared his story along with far more photos than we had room to publish in the pages of the magazine, all of which we’re posting here. If you would like to share your experiences—good or bad—for I Was There, email us at editorial@hemmings.com.]

I retired during 2021 after working 33 years in the trucking industry. My first trucking job was driving car carriers for Maris Transport; a long-since defunct company that was based in Oakville, Ontario. It was only a stone’s throw from Ford of Canada’s Oakville Assembly Plant and Ontario Truck Plant.

It began when I earned my Class-A license at the age of 25 on April 20, 1988, after which I started working for Maris on June 20. At the time, there were 177 drivers working for the company, and even though two others began work on the same day, I was number 177 on the seniority list during my first month or so. The job required six weeks of training that paid $8.00 an hour. After successfully completing the training, we would be admitted into the union: Teamsters Local 938.

The first two weeks of training occurred in the Oakville storage yard, where we learned how to load and unload various types of car-hauling equipment, beginning with combos, on which the entire load, except for one car above the cab, was on the trailer. Another was stingers, on which there were three or four cars on the tractor section, depending on the design of the equipment, and the rest of the load was on the trailer, which was attached to the tractor at a point behind the drive axles only inches above the ground. During weeks three and four, we worked at the releasing yard at Ford, helping other drivers load their trucks, and for weeks five and six, we went out on the road with other drivers to learn the rest of the job.

Once training was finished, we were on the road solo. Maris dispatchers would start calling the senior drivers at about midnight to offer loads, and they would get to the bottom of the list between five and six in the morning. Sometimes we were offered non-driving work, such as manning the fuel pumps at the terminal, or working as a yard man at one of the nearby assembly plants. This was hourly work that paid $15.61 an hour that was raised to $16.61 after a brief strike in the late winter of 1989.

When driving, we were paid $2.50 per car for dock loading, which was done at a releasing yard where there were yard personnel to bring the cars to our trucks, in the order we wanted, backed or driven in as specified. The pay was $5.00 per car for ground loading at a storage yard where the driver had to wander the yard and get the cars that were being loaded; $0.36 per mile loaded (even one car left on the truck was considered loaded miles); $0.31 per mile empty and $5.00 per delivery stop. If one of the vehicles on the load was a full-size supercab pickup, or another larger vehicle that took the space of two cars, a premium of $5.00 was paid for loading.

When we were loading at Oakville, we were loading non-clearcoat Ford Tempos and Mercury Topazes built at the Oakville Assembly Plant (clearcoat cars were built in Kansas City, Missouri, and brought in by rail). F-Series trucks were built next door at the Ontario Truck Plant, as well as U.S.-built vehicles, such as Aerostars and Rangers brought in from the States by rail.

We also hauled Jeep YJs out of Brampton, which I was told at the time was the only plant in the world building that body style, for all world markets. That plant was closed and torn down in the early ’90s. We hauled Eagle Premiers out of the brand-new plant in nearby Bramalea, which had been recently acquired with Chrysler’s purchase of AMC; the plant now builds Dodge Challengers and Chargers, as well as Chrysler 300s. And we hauled imports, mainly Hyundai Excels and Nissan 240SXs at a receiving yard in Mississauga.

Since all these plants also built vehicles for the U.S. market, we took loads of those vehicles to terminals in Buffalo, Fort Erie, Ontario, and a couple of terminals in the greater Detroit area. We would deliver our loads to those terminals and load up with vehicles built in the U.S. and Mexico for the Canadian market.

The longer runs required staying out overnight, in which case a dispatcher would book a hotel room at the driver’s request. Maris had accounts at hotels in Ottawa, Windsor, etc., and they were nice hotels. Most of today’s car haulers have sleeper cabs, eliminating the expense of hotels.

Our truck fleet at Oakville consisted of about 200 trucks, with an almost an even split between Ford L9000s (also known as Louisvilles, for the plant in which they were built) and GMC Brigadiers, with a couple of Chevy Bruins in the mix, and there were nine Mack Econodynes.

Transit damage was considered a part of the job, and no driver could say they never created any damage. They ranged from minor scratches to complete destruction of a vehicle – usually from hitting an overpass – and everything in between. There was one driver at the company who had built a dubious reputation for damaging cars, including the aforementioned overpass-type incident, all of which earned him the nickname “Cap’n Crunch.” Needless to say, it was not an easy job to get fired from that job.

The money I made when I was busy was such that I only needed to work one week each month to cover my living expenses; my car was paid for, and the rent on my apartment at the time was $444 a month, including utilities and underground parking. There were lean times, too, during which I had to work at a driver’s overload service to make up the difference. Also, most of the assembly plants would shut down for a couple of weeks in August to tool up for the new model year.

Getting fired was not easy but getting laid off was a risk in a trucking job that was largely dependent on the auto industry; then as now, it was feast or famine. With the onset of a recession in 1989, I received my layoff notice, and my last day as a Maris car hauler was September 30, 1989. It was a Saturday, and I picked up a load of Jeep YJs at Brampton, delivered the whole load in Windsor, and drove back to Oakville empty. My gross pay that week, in which I only worked three days, was about $500. To this day, I miss that job!