Words & Photos: John Gunnell
Eric Aurand is the longtime cover artist for the Minnesota Street Rod Assoc.’s award-winning Linechaser magazine. He has been drawing pictures of cars since he was a kid. When he was 18, he sketched the car seen here.
Eric would ride his bike to a certain shop and draw pictures of cars. The above photo shows his illustration of a ’29 Ford that he did over 35 years ago. This illustration dates to 1985 or early 1986. It was published in Midwest Rod & Machine in April 1988. The car looks very similar to one that Boyd Coddington did 10-15 years later and called the "Alumatub.” Eric’s drawings were seen by some Street Rodder employees back then and won praise from them.
Greg Fleury of Prior Lake, Minn., built the actual car following Eric’s sketches. Greg initially wanted the top to slant forward like a "Carson" top on a roadster. After seeing Eric’s illustration, he switched to the more traditional rear slant seen on the car today. The original illustration also shows the headers and Halibrand wheels which were planned for at first, but never materialized.
The car was featured in Street Rodder magazine in August 1986, at the time it was being built. The illustration in this article is the one that made it to the pages of Midwest Rod & Machine magazine in 1988. Later, in October 1990, the ’29 Ford appeared in Street Rodder for a second time.
Car collector Bill Hebal of Door County, Wis., bought the car in 2003. According to Hebal, it has a tube frame, a hand-formed steel body (including a couple of square feet of original 1929 sheet metal) and a lift-off aluminum top.
Hebal said that the roadster weighs less than 2,000 lb. He has kept it mostly original, but he did install new leather seats and “Kidney Bean” knock-off wheels last year. He hopes to get the car painted during 2017.
“I thought it was time to make a few changes," Hebal told Hot Rod Hotline. “In fact, they are not really what I consider changes—they are things I think should have been done in the first place.” Hebal decided to get Eric Aurand to make the design updates. “It was nice to have Eric involved,” he said.
In several pictures you can see the 1929 Ford with new hood side panels. Fabricator Austin Paruch (www.paruchautomotivecraftsmanship.com) did the sheet metal work and punched the louvers with a newly acquired louver press.
“It’s not easy to punch nice, straight louvers,” Hebal said. “But I think Austin did a great job of crafting the changes Eric worked out to improve his original design.”