Words: John Gunnell Car Owner: Jim Skomski
Jim Skomski is a practical hot rodder.
“I like all of my Ford cars and trucks, even though I haven’t spent a fortune on any of them,” he said. “My friends and I were talking about how nobody today gives enough credit to the guy who fixes up his own vehicles.”
Skomski gave two examples of why he’s not into farming out the work on cars such as his ’47 Ford hot rod.
“In the first case, I met one guy who spent $13,000 to get his Buick painted,” Jim pointed out. “I painted my ’47 last fall and it cost me just $2,000, and that was mostly for materials. The Ford’s paint might not quite match the quality of the Buick’s paint, but I take personal pride in the car because I did the paint myself.”
In the second case, Skomski talked about a friend who took a Tri-Five Chevy to a shop and spent $100,000 on its restoration.
“Now he’s been trying to sell the car; he’s down to asking $75,000 and hasn’t had any takers,” Jim explained. “He may just keep it.”
Jim noticed the Ford sitting by a house in West Bend, Wis., owned by the brother of a friend. He was smitten with it because his first car, back in high school, had been an almost-look-alike ’46 Ford V-8 Fordor (four-door) sedan that he bought from another friend’s mother. The car in West Bend was a Ford Tudor (two-door) sedan with a V-8.
“I asked the owner, Bob, what he was going to do with the car and he said that he had already invested some money doing work on the car,” Skomske explained. “He also had a GTO and his wife wanted him to spend his hobby money fixing up the Pontiac instead of the Ford.”
Jim’s friend had moved to Colorado and was sick. He and Bob flew out to see him and put a deal for the Ford together on the airplane flight.
Bob had been asking $7,800 for the car and Jim asked him what the lowest price would be for a friend. He told his wife that $5,000 was his limit. That turned out to be the price Bob asked and Jim got the car. Since he didn’t trust driving it home, he trailered it. Then, after some tinkering, he got it running pretty well and drove it for about a year without touching the flathead V-8 in the car. Since it came with a spare engine, he decided to rebuild the second motor and hop it up with speed equipment,
The second motor was actually the car’s original engine. It had gotten “tight” and Bob had found the replacement engine. Jim knocked the pistons out of the motor and removed the crank. He took the block to a shop to have it boiled out. The engine was bored .040 in. over and fitted with a higher-lift cam, three two-barrel carburetors, a header exhaust system and a Petronix six-volt positive-ground electronic ignition system.
“It is probably putting out 150 hp,” Skomski stated. “But we had problems at first. It would run fine when it had no load on it, but start sputtering when you put your foot into it.” One time he even broke down on the way home from a car show when the battery went dead. A friend brought a trailer out to pick the car up. He also brought along the trophy that the car had been awarded at the end of the show after Skomski had taken off for home. “I should have posed for a picture with the trophy and broken car,” Jim said.
Although several supposedly expert mechanics tried to solve the problem, Jim actually came up with the answer himself.
“The Petronix needed six volts to operate, but it was getting only 5.8 volts,” he determined. “The voltage regulator wasn’t working all the time, so the six-volt generator wasn’t getting enough juice and the battery would eventually get too low or die, causing the engine to sputter and stall.”
After Jim installed a new regulator and got the car running well again, he started painting it. Although the car carries a bunch of speed equipment and a paint job that’s anything but factory, it qualifies for entry in stock classes at car shows in Jim’s area because you could buy all the old school accessories when the do-it-yourself Ford was new. Come to think of it, back then almost all hot rodders did their own work and mods.
