Volume IX, Issue 12, Page 26

Most of the time spent in building the car was wrapped up in creating the scaled-down carbon-fiber and fiberglass body. Wood started by cleaning up the bodywork on the original ’59 Caddy he’d purchased, then pulling full-size molds off all the various panels. Next came the more difficult task of scaling the car to fit the full tube chassis he’d already constructed according to preliminary plans.

“I made drawings, scale drawings, but I went a lot by just visuals to get the outside to what I thought looked correct. Then I started taking the completed parts and started cutting them up and scaling them down to get the car to a feasible size. We’ve narrowed the car 18 inches from the original and the overall length has been shortened by about three-and-a-half or four feet,” Wood says.

“I didn’t really know until we started mocking it up exactly how much to cut it down to make it look right,” he continues. “Some of the components we didn’t even have to alter because they fit just by cutting them down. The doors on the car are actually from a four-door, so they’re automatically shorter than what a two-door would have, so that worked out well. The quarter panel, I had to cut a considerable bit off to make it work, but I didn’t have to re-engineer anything, it worked just by cutting it. Now, the front cap, we cut and shrunk it down and then we made more molds off of the completed parts; that way I’ve got another set of molds for the scaled parts. So now I’ve got all the molds to produce another body if I had to.”

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The attention to detail and innovation extends to the chassis, which features a unique swing-arm suspension that incorporates the rear shocks inside the cockpit. “I guess I’ve always been one for different, but at the same time I like to do R&D at the expense of myself, I don’t want to put anything out there on a customer’s car that’s not already tried and true,” Wood explains. “It’s actually got a very long and narrow swing-arm that fits within the driveline area and by doing that we had to give it some form of stability, so what we came up with is a push-rod cantilever system. The shocks are mounted inside the car and the push rods give it the stability and at the same time they work as an anti-roll device.”