Today's News by Jack Nerad for Driving Today

Get Started on That Hot Rod Free

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Since the late 1950s, the “T-Bucket” has become the world’s most enduring and popular hot rod. Based on Henry Ford’s original Model T of the “post-brass” 1915 to 1927 era, T-Buckets are simple lightweight hot rods that offer pulse-raising performance when equipped with a modern passenger-car engine. Because of their simplicity and the fact that they can be built on a shoestring budget, they’re the first hot rods for many. To get started, though, a solid chassis is required, and many aspiring T-Bucket builders don't know where to start. Now, a Minnesota hot rodder who’s been building T-Buckets since the mid-60s is ready to help.

Ron Young, who has been the beneficiary of a lot of knowledge passed on by older hot rod builders, has put together a detailed set of T-Bucket frame plans based on the way he’s been building them for the last 15 years or so. He is so identified with this type of vehicle that the T-Bucket frame style he popularized is called a “Youngster.” Now he is offering those plans for free, because he wants to share his knowledge just as his many hot rod mentors did.

These free T-Bucket hot rod chassis plans include 23 pages with directions for the construction of a “roller” chassis, many illustrations (some full size) for a transverse sprung front-end and a coil-over-shock suspended rear axle, and a budgetary “bill of materials” with part numbers and costs. The plans are available in PDF format. TBucketPlans is also the publisher of the e-book How to Build a T-Bucket Roadster for Under $3000 by Chester Greenhalgh.

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