The company also offers Model A roadster and pickup bodies, and builds complete cars to order.Ĭontact Brookville Roadsters at 718 Albert Road, Brookville OH 45309, (937) 833-4605 or via the Internet at.
The waiting list is now one year the price, $10,500 out the door. Each body requires two and a half days of assembly and hand finishing.īrookville has already built 190 '32 roadster bodies, with another 90 on order. Our customers demand 1932 authenticity, but they want 2001 fit-and-finish," Gollahon says. The main difference is our build quality. "There are a few places we add welds, but otherwise we build them just like Henry did. "Here I can take an entire project through from start to finish, and be involved in the whole process. "Then I thought about being stuck in a corner somewhere," he says. When Gollahon emerged from Ohio University with his mechanical engineering degree a few years ago, he briefly considered a job with the automakers. Ken Gollahon says, "We've had engineers from the manufacturers come through here, and they can't believe what we do on this small scale." But where hundreds of workers and operations were required to assemble the original bodies, Brookville operates with a crew of 25, employing robotic metal trimmers and CNC equipment. They're banged out on the Gollahons' enormous 750-ton Hamilton press, itself an antique. The 68 individual stampings that make up a Brookville body are identical and interchange with all the same parts on an original '32. AutoWeek visited Brookville, and we say to every soul who ever dragged home a crumbling pile of rusty junk with dreams of building a hot rod: The sight of a new 1932 Ford roadster body, bare metal a gleaming, is enough to make you weep. Brookville manufactures new '32 Ford roadster bodies, stamped from 16-gauge cold-rolled steel, just as Henry Ford intended. The senior Gollahon founded Antique Auto Sheet Metal 30 years ago to reproduce Model A body panels, and its hot rod division, Brookville Roadsters, is Ken's baby. There Ken Gollahon and his father Ray saw opportunity. A more severe test of a rodder's skills, patience and vocabulary there may not be. Builders can spend hundreds of hours correcting the inevitable rust, cracks, wear and previous repairs. And after 70 years, originals are usually eggshell fragile as well. But original roadster bodies have become scarcer than Faberge eggs and nearly as pricey: 10 grand or more, if you can find one. Fiberglass is fine, but for old-school hot rodders, nothing feels or sounds like real steel. Of course, today many deuce roadsters are fiberglass replicas. Hard to believe that so few actual specimens made such a broad impact on the automotive world. Then consider how few could have survived being crushed, busted or simply rusting away over the years. for 1932, apparently only 12,080 were roadsters. Of the 258,927 vehicles built by the Ford Motor Co. If you're into hot rods-especially everyone's favorite, the '32 Ford roadster-here's a statistic. Gleaming steel: Henry Ford would be proud.
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