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Cars

Bucket T holds 5 years of sweat

The popular 1950s street rod, modeled after the Model T, inspires a Valrico man to build one from scratch.

By MARTY CLEAR
Published March 25, 2005

VALRICO - If you're a fan of the classic car songs from the '60s, you'll no doubt recall that Jan and Dean paid five bucks for a Bucket T they found in a barn in Tennessee. Then they claimed to have spent three years of sweat and blood to clean off all that Tennessee mud.

It may have made for a good lyric, but even given more than 40 years of inflation, it's doubtful that anyone picked up a Bucket T for $5, or single-handedly got it into street condition in only three years.

John Sullivan figures he has invested about $15,000 to $18,000 in his 1923-style Bucket T, and even with help from a lot of friends who were very generous with their time, it took him five full years before he could drive it.

He has still not finished and probably never will.

"There's always something more you can do with it," Sullivan said. "You're always working on it. At the moment, I have a one-piece windshield on it. I just got a two-piece that I'm going to put on, just because I think it looks better. Right now, the car is Bahama yellow with just a single brown stripe. I'm going to have some more pin-striping done."

Of course, Jan and Dean (and the countless other bands that later covered Bucket T) had the advantage of starting with a pre-existing car. Sullivan built his from the ground up.

"You can do it either as a kit car or you can build it yourself," Sullivan said. "I built this myself, with a friend from West Virginia. It was about a five-year project."

For noncar people, for those who don't know that "Bucket T" refers to anything but a song, Sullivan offers a bit of education.

A Bucket T is a street rod, not a modified classic, and it's modeled after the Model T. The most noticeable difference is that the Model T was a four-seater. The Bucket T had a smaller body - more or less bucket-shaped - with just two seats.

The Bucket T didn't exist back in the 1920s; it's an invention of the golden age of street rods, in the 1950s.

Sullivan's a devoted car buff and has restored a slew of cars over the years.

"But I've never had a street rod and I've always wanted one," he said.

Sullivan makes the process of building the car sound simple. You build a frame, weld all the pieces together, put on a front end and a rear end, have a drive shaft fabricated and put the body on the frame.

"Once you have it all together, you take it apart and paint it, and then put it all back together again," he said. "Then you do the wiring."

The project mainly involved Sullivan and his West Virginia buddy, but lots of other friends and experts stopped by to help in both places. It ended up taking five years, but mostly because it was a weekend project for everyone concerned.

"You could probably do it in six months if you worked on it full time," Sullivan said. "And it'd be hard for one person to do it all. You end up with a lot of people having their fingers in it."

One thing that makes Sullivan's Bucket T unusual is its engine. Because almost all Bucket T owners choose V-8 engines, Sullivan opted for a 1967 Chevrolet six-cylinder.

"I just did it to be different from everyone else," he said. "Probably 90 percent of the ones you see have a V-8, so people are just amazed at this little six-cylinder. It brings a lot of spectators over to your car, which helps you at the shows."

Besides, he said, the car is so light - only about 1,500 pounds - that the six-cylinder had plenty of power.

"It's real fast, but when you get going around 70 miles per hour, it gets kind of squirrelly," Sullivan said. "It's basically a frame and a radiator."

Sullivan takes his Bucket T to car shows several times a week. He drives it to local shows, but hauls it on a trailer when he's going a long distance.

"Usually anything over about 25 miles, you don't want to drive it because it's not a real comfortable ride," he said.

"And you definitely do not want to get caught in the rain when you're driving this 'cause it's all over the place. You step on the gas and all of a sudden you're going sideways."

But for shows in the Brandon and Valrico area, when the skies are clear, Sullivan will drive his Bucket T. His wife will follow in their restored 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.

"Usually when we go to shows, we'll take both and we'll park them right next to each other," he said. "Both of them will take home trophies, because they're in different categories. The Olds is a full-body and the T is a street rod."

[Last modified March 24, 2005, 08:15:13]