Economy DRIVE

DELUXE ROD SHOP BUILDS AN IMMACULATE ’32 ROADSTER WITHOUT BREAKING THE BANK THANKS TO SOME LEFT-OVER PARTS AND PLENTY OF ELBOW GREASE

- BORIS VISKOVIC

IT MIGHT appear that we’re giving Steven Alldrick and the Deluxe Rod Shop a lot of ink lately, but that’s simply because they keep turning out killer hot rods and street machines. Most recently we featured Steven’s XR ute in SM, Apr ’20, and it was a huge hit. In a way, this ’32 roadster is a hot rod version of that car: understated, with a tendency towards factory styling features, but highly detailed top to bottom. I know many of you won’t believe it – and it sure as shit doesn’t look like it – but both cars were built with very tight budgets.

Of course, it helps when you have your own hot rod shop and spend a lot of time attending swap meets to source the cool early Ford parts that would make or break the look of the car. Even so, there are still plenty of areas where Steven invested time rather than money, and that’s something all of us can do. As with all of his builds, he simply had a plan and stuck with it: “We wanted to build a turn-key car in 60 days to showcase at the Victorian Hot Rod Show; something simple and a nice driver with the right look,” he says. “So after the XR was unveiled at Summernats 33, we didn’t stop – [wife] Kathleen and I did a lot of the assembly after work so we could keep the shop running and weren’t taking time away from customers’ cars.”

After doing a bit of a stocktake in the workshop, it turned out they had most of the bits on hand to finish off the roadster. “I had a diff housing and a centre, all the radius rods, a set of Rod-Tech four-bars and coil-overs,” Steven says. “I only had to buy the axle and spring for the front end; I had everything else. We bought everything we needed during the build so there were no extra costs at the end.”