Words: John Gunnell

Bob Beltz did not want his hot rod to be a brand of car that every other hot rodder owned (like a Ford or a Chevy). He came up with the idea of doing a Willys, until another hot rodder called him and said, “I know where there’s a Nash coupe sitting in a Minnesota junkyard.”

Beltz went to see the car and fell in love with it. That was in 1991. He bought the car, but it didn’t get finished until 2013.

A ’40 Nash Ambassador is a pretty big car. That makes it hard to restore. Parts are hard to find, too. Nash parts don’t grow on trees — or even in catalogs. You either have to treasure hunt for what you need or make it. Bob learned this while he was building the frame himself. When Wayne Johnson came along, the body was sitting on the frame with the floor out and Bob didn’t quite know how to attach everything together.

Wayne Johnson knew. He had been working as a welder and got laid off. He started doing car stuff in his garage at home. Today his IKAD Kustoms in Wausau, Wis., has a three-year waiting list to get in the shop. Wayne says that due to its difficulty, the Nash should have taken two years to build, but he did it in a year and three months. Stated another way, it was a 3,500- to 4,000-hour job.

For power, the Nash uses a blown Chevy 350, a Ford-based performance transmission from FNB in New York and a Chrysler rear end.

“Bob took the best of everything good,” said Johnson. “He pulled out all stops to get it to the 2013 La Crosse Car Show.”

The restorer pointed out that the car has a tilt front end and that most of the body panels are all made of original metal. “It’s a blend of lots of hand-made stuff,” Johnson noted. The electronic gadgetry seen in the car all runs off a touch screen computer. In fact, the car won the award for “Best Interior” at the recent NEW Motorama (www.newmotorama.com) Show in Green Bay earlier this year and the electronics display had a lot to do with it.