1948 Ford Anglia - Odd Job: 10 million Hot rod

A separate advantage of hunting for auto-moto magazines when searching for information about a particular car is that, in addition to the article you are looking for, you actually get the rest of the magazine. Sometimes, however, this leads to the need to buy even more literature… but sometimes you just stumble upon some interesting project about which there is no information anywhere else. Something that never made it onto the Internet… or it used to be in it, but it didn’t last our days. Yes, it happens. The Internet is not as reliable as many people think. So always keep what you like.

In general, this is, so far, the first such case in our section, but the moment has come to tell about the car, which, unfortunately, cannot be found anywhere else. Odd Job is a 1948 Ford Anglia built by someone named O. Jay Schultes, and which the November 1975 issue of Popular Hot Rodding magazine told us about. It was from this magazine that I scanned an article about Gremlin Express for a large article about the custom culture of the 70s almost four years ago.

Scan of an article about Odd Job - 1948 Ford Anglia - from Popular Hot Rodding magazine, November, 1975, pages 1 and 2. — Yes, I would have written about Odd Job before, but all this time our site continues to be almost completely enthusiastic, so instead of writing articles, I decided to rob mail coaches and fight raccoons for I’m on my way. By the way, I was bitten by a radioactive raccoon, and now I wash the dumplings after I fried them. All this could have been avoided if at least someone had transferred money to us more often.

Comrade Schultes claims that it took him $ 20,000 (twenty thousand dollars, tchk) to build the car, which, translated into our time since 1975, turns into one hundred thousand, and if this is also translated into rubles, it will turn out to be all 10 million. The entire amount was spent over the course of two and a half years. Of course, for such money and time, Odd Job was rebuilt to the last screw and to the highest class. The frame was made anew, from molybdenum tubes and using tungsten welding. O.J. also made the axles, steering, and suspension from scratch, designing and assembling them together with a certain Paul Fredrickson. Their invention includes eighty-centimeter ladder beams, expensive aluminum coilovers from Koni and racing rear axles with a gearbox from Strange Engineering. The front axle, by the way, is extremely simple: it was made independently, and it does not even include brakes – the braking system is located exclusively on the rear wheels, plus parachutes specifically for quarter-mile races.

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A 66-liter gas tank and a battery were placed in the trunk, which is placed directly into the tank body. There are also two electric fuel pumps from Holley, which supply gasoline to a small block from Chevrolet. The engine with an initial volume of 5.7 liters was slightly depleted to 5.9, after which it was additionally equipped with forged 8:1 pistons, molybdenum-coated rings, two Holley carburettors with a capacity of 18.7 cubic meters per minute and a camshaft from General Kinetics with a lift of 15 millimeters and a duration of 324 degrees (for comparison, the camshaft on VAZ models 2101 – 2107 has a duration of 232 degrees).

A scan of an article about Odd Job - 1948 Ford Anglia - from Popular Hot Rodding magazine, November, 1975, page 3. — camshaft duration is perhaps its most interesting value. It shows how many degrees the crankshaft will turn while the valve is open. Since the camshaft is the main part of the gas distribution mechanism, its tasks include both the intake of a fresh fuel mixture and the exhaust of exhaust gases, and even into different cylinders, and therefore the valves still have to be periodically closed – in a certain sequence in accordance with the order of operation of the engine. But, in general, the duration tends to the maximum value of 360 degrees as much as possible, since it is this parameter, coupled with the rise, that increases the power of the motor. At the same time, the longer the duration, the more the power curve is shifted higher into the RPM range – to the point that the engine may even simply lose its ability to operate at low RPM in principle. Racing camshafts, similar to the one installed in the Odd Job, have an idling limit of at least two thousand, and sometimes even higher. For dragsters, this is the order of the day, since maximum power in straight-line races is actually the only goal, and low-rev torque does not matter for such cars. But increasing the valve lift height, by the way, can add power without significantly affecting engine performance at low RPM.

However, most of the power gain was achieved, of course, by installing a GMC 6-71 supercharger on the intake manifold from Weiand. The exhaust manifolds were manufactured at home and connected to modified Hooker pipes. And – like the cherry on the cake – crowns all this beauty with a fully working custom bug trap with five valves, which is the first to attract attention. The engine power turned out to be around 800 horsepower.

From the outside, the body of the 1948 Ford England is almost standard, except for the modification of the rear wheel niches. They have been enlarged to accommodate huge slicks with a diameter of 83 centimeters and a width of 381 millimeters (for comparison, our standard tires have a diameter of about 65 centimeters, and they are only 205-215 millimeters wide). At the same time, the rear fenders were almost completely cut off so that the rubber of the driving wheels could get out from under the body of the car according to all the canons of automotive fashion of the seventies. The interior has been completely redesigned, including a reassembled instrument panel, leatherette door and seat trim from the Naugahyde brand, which is well-known on the custom scene, and a lot, a lot of sheet metal, which Schultes personally worked with, and whose work, of course, is completely impossible to evaluate from black-and-white photos, but the editors of Popular Hot Rodding magazine claim that she is beyond praise.

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A scan of an article about Odd Job - 1948 Ford Anglia - from Popular Hot Rodding magazine, November 1975, page 4. — only color photo of the car in its original form.

No one knows where or when the 10 million hot rod disappeared. If you seriously dig through some archives of photos from automobile gatherings and exhibitions of those years, as well as buy bundles of magazines, you will probably be able to find a few more photos, and maybe even a few articles. I won’t say that I personally dug too deeply, but my search didn’t bring any results. Targeted searches in search engines like “1948 anglia hot rod”, “odd job ford”, “schultes hot rod” and so on also did not bring results. So, as amazing as it may be, this article is really all we have.