Building a Frazer Nash kit car from the ground up is not a project for the faint
of heart! When you open the big cardboard boxes that the parts come in,
you realize that a fiberglass body and fenders hardly make up the completed
car. Next you must locate a good VW Beatle chassis, remove its body, and
narrow gauge the belly pan and also extend the front end 16 inches with an
extension kit. Here you learn the mechanics of welding, cursing, and
applying bandages to cut and bruised fingers.
This
is what the completed rolling chassis looks like with the belly pan now
narrowed, new angle iron side rails installed, and all the undercoating
completed. Only the tranny is now mounted, Now the fun begins
finding all the missing parts. Have you ever thought what a shopping list
looks like for building a car? well, you need wires, a fuse box, complete
interior upholstery, antique dash gauges and horns, exhaust system, gas tank,
hoses, all the lights, bumpers, steering assembly, windshield, convertible
top, plus several hundred miscellaneous parts that you realize you need in the
middle of bolting the thing together.
The
basic body is now bolted onto the running gear and lined up. Now the fun
part begins where every part you add starts to make the project look more like a
completed car. At this stage, your expenses for beer start to equal the
car investment as all your friends come over to sit back on lawn chairs to drink
your been and watch you build your car. These arm chair mechanics also
seem to be able to offer advice to the extent that you are lead to believe that
they have built several dozen of these cars themselves even though it took them
an entire week end to assemble the last barbeque they bought.
Success at last! After three years of searching for and making parts and
bolting it all together, the car is now ready to drive. At this point, my
wife was not on board with the idea that after all this work, the car would look
nice in the living room for winter storage since I had determined that it would
just fit through the patio door. After this workout of building a car from
scratch and sourcing all the parts, I reckoned that restoring a Dart Swinger
should be a piece of cake.
For
the first major road trip with the Frazer Nash, my wife Deb and I loaded up two
month old #1 son Justin and we motored out to visit grandpa, auntie (far left),
and grandma (middle), and the misses holding Justin.
Additional 1934 Frazer Nash pictures can be seen at this web site: http://www.braatenclassics.com/1934frazernash/gallerypgp.htm