Having a car whose paint job is as bright as the sun will certainly get you noticed. Edward Johnson knows a little something about star exposure. His 1930 Chevy three-window coupe has graced the pages of more than a handful of national magazines, though not simply for the eye-popping paintwork.
There’s something about the 1930s that captured the heart of this child of the ’60s. As a sophomore in high school, Johnson worked with his father, a career fender and body man, on a number of side projects. As his skill set grew, Johnson went to work for his father in his body shop for two years until he eventually left to join the police department. He recalls his first major father-and-son tear-down and build was a 1932 Plymouth with an asthmatic four-cylinder engine.
“It was a nice car, but obviously you were limited with where you could take it,” said Johnson, who eventually sold the car, hoping to replace it with a hot rod.
In October 2001, father and son set out to find the perfect hot rod that didn’t look as if it had been deteriorating in a junkyard for the past 70 years. For one reason or another, a problem emerged to prevent a final sale. Many of the early Chevys used wood to stabilize their internal structure. With decades of neglect, the result was usually significant dry rot. The effort involved with replacing these beams with steel tubing was time-consuming, and for guys interested in keeping it as close to original, such a swap was tantamount to blasphemy.
“We looked at a bunch of cars, most of which were rust buckets,” Johnson said. “And then I found this particular car through an ad in the paper. I wound up buying it from a gentleman in Glen Burnie, Maryland.”
The 1930 Chevy was in good shape with its original set of spoke wheels. It had some rust spotting, but the previous owner had “re-wooded” the chassis. The Johnson men would strip the car of its flaking paint job to get to primer, hoping to reveal minimal damage. Ninety percent of the overhaul work was done by the two men, and only a few projects required outside intervention.
Bill Lang at Hot Rod Fabrication in Denton, Md., designed and built the unique front bumper bar on the boxed chassis. Johnson then smoothed out the mocked-up piece, did some welding to fix it to the joints and join it to the body, and even bent the reflector lights along the contour of the rounded bar, creating an original, one-off design.
To right the wrong previously inflicted on his male ego by the four-cylinder Plymouth, Johnson looked to Jon Barrett of Oklahoma City to provide a top-of-the-line V-8 engine, a 350 crate capable of 375 horsepower at 5,500 rpm with a compression ratio of 9.5-to-1.
With the car finished and a dazzling orange paint scheme, three generations of Johnson men are able to enjoy a show-quality vehicle that outshines the trophies it often grabs at local shows.
What do you drive? 1930 Chevy three-window coupe.
Why do you drive it? It’s a joy and the time spent with my dad. Going to the car shows is kind of the payoff for all our hard work. There’s nothing like being behind the wheel of something like that.
What makes this car so special? There’s a lot, but the one question I get invariably at any car show is “what color orange is that?” It’s a custom blend.
What is your most memorable driving experience? This goes back to 2006, and technically it’s a driving experience. We took it out to Columbus, Ohio, to the Street Rod Nationals. You wind up with anything from 4,000 to 6,000 cars out there. This car was one of 10 voted by national magazines to receive a Street Rodder Top Ten Award. So they have a big building out there, and on the last day of the show they filled it with spectators, and the cars that won the awards had to drive through that building. That was pretty cool.
What was the first car you owned? A 1975 Nova. It wasn’t long before I was hacking into that, trying to do some custom stuff and put it together.
What music are you currently listening to in your car? Primarily country.
And your first ticket? What was it for? That was in the Nova, and that was for not coming to a complete stop. First and only.
