What You See is not What You Get - '39 Ford Wagon
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Sometimes you can tell if a car is a bone-stock classic car or a hot rod. On the other hand, sometimes a car will fool you completely. That happened to be the case with a ’39 Ford “woodie” wagon sitting outside the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center during the 2016 SEMA Show.
Bone-stock classic cars are not the focus at SEMA, of course, but there’s always a few of them to shoot pictures of for the purist magazines. This tan Ford woodie seemed to fill the bill. Everything on the outside of the car, from the wood paneled body to the “bottle cap” hub caps, looked like it came from a factory photo of a 1939 Ford station wagon.
According to the Standard Catalog of Ford 1903-2003, Ford offered Standard and Deluxe station wagons in 1939, at $840 and $920 respectively. The Standard wagon had the styling of a 1938 Ford. The wagon at SEMA was a Deluxe model with updated 1939 styling that includes teardrop headlights and a lower grille with vertical bars. Only 6,155 Deluxe station wagons were built.
The stock engine in these station wagons was Ford’s iconic 221-cid 85-hp flathead V-8, which was considered a hot “mill” in its day. The engine bay in the SEMA car was where things started varying from stock, since a 400-cid Chevrolet V-8 had been installed. The car blended an all-original body with a modern drive train that gave it 70-mph performance and 5-mpg fuel economy.
This car is also a celebrity car. It was featured on the Hagerty Insurance Company’s “The Barn Find Hunter” Web series and belongs to Tom Cotter, the well-known author of several “car-in-the-barn” type books.
“I bought this woodie because I was an East Coast guy and jealous of all the West Coast guys,” Cotter wrote about the station wagon. “The West Coast guys had hot rods. surfing, the best-looking girls and Coors Beer.”