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Cars

The complete custom car craftsman

Gary Wolcott started young as a custom car maker, building dozens of cruisers, roadsters and coupes from the ground up.

By MARTY CLEAR
Published August 26, 2005

SEFFNER - Even in the summer, back in the 1950s in Olean, N.Y., there probably wasn't a whole lot for a young man to do.

But in the winter, when the frigid arctic air blew across Lake Erie and brought with it tons of snow, so much that drifts up to the roofline of the houses weren't unusual, that small town south of Buffalo was hard to handle.

Gary Wolcott sought warmth and shelter in his garage, and started tinkering with cars.

"I had a garage up there with a big oil stove in it," Wolcott said. "It was in the '50s and customizing was the big thing, so that's what I started doing. Back in those days, it was just cars and women."

It went a little past mere customizing though. Now 65 years old, Wolcott has built, from the ground up, so many cars that he couldn't begin to count them. Dozens of them, certainly. He's done all the work himself, everything from the engines and transmissions to the painting and upholstery. When he started, he really didn't know what he was doing.

"I had an auto mechanics class in high school, so I knew just the basics," he said. "No one taught me how to paint or weld or fabricate. I just learned that myself by doing it over the years."

But his first project was an ambitious one. He took a Volkswagen Beetle body, mounted it on the shortened frame of a Ford truck and put an Oldsmobile engine in the front, where the VW's trunk had been.

He didn't have a whole lot of know-how, he didn't have the best tools for the job or enough money for the job or for the right parts. So he improvised a lot, and if he made a mistake he just tore everything up and started over again.

"It turned out pretty good," he said. "I drove it for a few years and then I sold it for more than I had put into it. I thought, this is a pretty good way to go."

In the 45 years or so since he sold that car, Wolcott has usually had one finished handmade car that he actually drives, and another that he's working on in his garage. He has made a profit on every car he's built, and a lot of the money goes back into his hobby. He's continuously upgrading his tools and equipment, and, of course, his level of expertise grows with each project.

He generally starts with a body of a car he likes. His tastes, he admits, are a little different from those of mainstream car buffs, so even the raw materials he starts with are pretty distinctive.

He has a visual concept in his head of what the finished project will look like. But that concept gets modified throughout the process. Sometimes his ideas don't work out, and other times the changing shape of the car suggests something that didn't occur to him at first.

"Sometime I'll just sit there and stare at it until an idea comes to me," he said. "And sometimes I find I just have to stay away from it for a few days and clear my head."

His all-time favorite, he said, was a car he sold just a few months ago. He started with a 1949 Cadillac torpedo-back that he found in St. Petersburg, complete but not running.

"I chopped the top, which is something I had never done before and I had to figure out how to do it," he said. "I did extensive body modifications. When I was done, there was not a single panel of that car that I didn't do something to."

He took the car to shows all across the country and ended up being featured on ESPN and in a Swedish magazine.

He always uses modern engines in his cars. That's something a lot of his colleagues shy away from. Older engines are easier to work on, they say.

Wolcott thought that same way for a long time, but he decided to switch to more modern, computer-controlled engines a few cars ago. The main advantage is the peace of mind that comes in long-distance drives to car shows. If your car has a newer engine, all you have to do is pull into a dealership when you need repairs.

He's currently driving a '32 Ford Roadster he built from a fiberglass body he bought from a company in Clearwater.

Meanwhile, he's working on a 1939 Lincoln Zephyr coupe, another car that started from a fiberglass body. Among other things, he has installed the original interior that came in that '49 Cadillac.

"I think this will be my last one," he said. "I'm 65 and it's getting harder to be on my knees and get under the car. And I've done all the cars that I have a passion for at this point.

"Of course," he said, "I tell my wife that this is going to be my last one and she says, "Oh, yeah, right. I'm sure.' "

[Last modified August 25, 2005, 09:35:05]