Bad Idea Brilliantly Executed

Because When You Have a '39 Plymouth Truck, You Install a 757ci, Seven-Cylinder Radial Aircraft Engine. Right?

- Elana Scherr

The joke’s on you if you think this is all for show. Yeah, that’s an airplane radial engine shoved back against the firewall of a ’39 Plymouth truck and rising from a pockmarked, raw-steel body dotted with rivets. When Gary Corns starts it up, there’s a wheeze and then a rat-a-tat-tat in the bare-metal engine bay. Smoke billows around the Plymouth and it disappears before you can comprehend what you’re looking at.

“One day my dad said we needed another project,” Gary’s son Adam says. “He went over to an airplane wrecking yard, and the next thing you know this 1950's seaplane shows up on a trailer, and he says we’re gonna use the 300-hp Jacobs radial engine for the truck.” The truck is a vintage Plymouth that Gary picked up from a customer for a couple hundred bucks, and then it sat around for almost 30 years.