The 1949 Ford was very innovative in terms of design: the car included, for example, elements of aviation style and protruding taillights – in the 50s, all this would become a real peak of automotive fashion. But in the late forties, it all looked unusual, new and outlandish – and most of all, people liked the fully integrated pontoon wings, without any side protrusions. It was for the absence of any lines and bends on the sides that the Ford was nicknamed the shoe box.
The story is silent about why it is a shoe store. Although it can be assumed that other boxes were less common in everyday life and did not have proportions similar to a car in length and width. And it was from the nickname “shoebox” that the name of the hot rod – Shoe This – came, as the shoe box became the basis for Jacob Griffin’s project. Or rather, half of the shoe box – in the front of the car, an earlier model is easily recognizable. And yes, these are really two cars welded into one – there is no plastic in This Shoe, only steel, which is a rather rare property of modern projects. The reason for this may lie in the fact that Jacob Griffin is a third-generation hot rodder: his father Brian and his grandfather Jerry built cars and raced them all their lives. It is safe to assume that the love of working with steel is passed down in the Griffin family from generation to generation.
So when Jacob decided to build his own hot rod, he chose two steel cars as the basis. Their condition was extremely deplorable, and there was no point in repairing the machines, but they became an excellent basis for an extremely unusual and very complex project. The latter, by the way, was an extremely important factor for Comrade Griffin Jr.: having worked in the garage with his father since childhood, he conceived Shoe This as a test for himself – Jacob was determined to bring to life the most difficult project he could imagine without anyone’s help.
“He wanted to build it himself,” his father explains. “So I stayed on the sidelines, apart from a couple of tips and comments.”
I usually write the name of the paint just for show, but this time the color of the car really deserves a special mention. This gorgeous cream white is called PPG White Platinum Pearl - it looks great in the sun and repeats the shade of the white sidewall on Firestone rubber one by one.
In general, the front half of This Shoe was the Ford Model T of the 27th year, which Jacob seriously shortened by throwing out the rear doors and everything behind them. Instead, a narrowed, shortened, and understated back of a Blue Oval from ’51 was welded to the Tin Lizzie. And if you open the trunk, you can see a lot of scars left after a difficult surgical operation. “Sometimes people say I should leave things the way they are,” Griffin says. “So people can see how it all came together.”
The frame of the new body was reinforced with pipes. The windshield was designed from scratch to emphasize the style of the hot rods of the 50s heading to the dried-up lakes of California. Jacob attached a bullet from the 51st box to the radiator grille of the 27th Ford. The headlights were made manually: the body of the right headlight does not touch the body of the car, because all the wiring is routed through the body of the left headlight. And one of the most impressive moments is the shortened instrument panel of the 51st year, neatly installed in the cockpit of the 27th – this detail looks so good, as if everything was assembled in the factory.
The interior as a whole looks similar to an ordinary factory car, apart from a very wild gearbox handle.
But all this splendor is just a frame for the real picture. A mix of two cars from different eras is very unusual, but long before all the details about the exterior and interior of the car, the attention of a true lover of hot rods is focused on the engine. At first glance, we see supercharging, a belt, a bug trap – and all this attracts us, we want to hear the roar of the engine, we need to hear the howl of supercharging… And this is where the main surprise awaits us: in This Shoe there is not a V8 at all, but a V6, and no more or less familiar V6 from Chevrolet – this engine was assembled at the Buick factory! It’s really a very, very original choice of powertrain.
The V6 from Buick looks simply amazing. And despite its small size, this particular engine can give a head start to many V8s.
But the fact that no one uses it implies the absence of a sane spare parts market, which Jacob was warned about by more experienced builders. Nevertheless, Griffin Jr. decided to use this particular motor, despite the possible problems. Which were overcome as a result: in the worst case, spare parts were made to order. For example, the flywheel was made by some nameless hero, who was obviously not found immediately. “We had to buy two flywheels because this guy made them by hand,” says Jacob. “The first one pays for his expenses, but he gets income from the second one. That’s how we agreed with him.”
Griffins are included in the design of the car mainly because the surname Griffin translates to nothing but a griffin. But the presence of this fantastic beast, coupled with a very... The royal coloring gives the hot rod a very medieval, fantasy look. It's extremely easy to imagine this car in some unusual setting, like Shadowrun, where cars are side by side with orcs and elves.
Griffin also decided to use the sportier Buick second-stage, non-mass-produced block, in which he supplied a forged 4340 steel crankshaft and Carrillo connecting rods with JE pistons. The COMP camshaft controls the titanium valves in the ported cylinder head – with this combination, the air pressure in the intake manifold is 124 kPa. With Hilborn’s direct fuel injection system installed and Don Hampton’s supercharging, a properly tuned, small 3.4-liter V6 produces almost 1,200 horsepower. All that power goes to the Turbo-Hydramatic 400 transmission, custom driveshaft, and Ford’s nine-inch rear axle on coilovers and four levers. The front suspension is much more traditional – a classic wishbone. At the time of writing, the brakes of the hot rod were drum brakes, but Jacob planned to change them to disc brakes.
There are small details everywhere on the car that are nice to catch your eye on. And the presence of scratches, although depressing, on the other hand, suggests that the car sometimes drives on its own - which, it seems to me, is a very positive fact.
It’s probably not even worth mentioning that such a creative and original hot rod immediately started receiving awards at various auto shows. Jacob Griffin is deservedly proud of the fact that in less than a year he went from the first sketches to a fully working car. And apart from some work on the engine like the aforementioned flywheel and specialized moments like interior trim and pinstripe painting, Jacob really did everything himself, as he wanted.
“I needed to know if I could. And there was only one way to find out.”
https://hotrodresource.com/listing/wow-jacob-griffins-shoebox-roadster-is-amazing-his-dad-said-he-built-this-car-in-9-months/ https://www.streetmusclemag.com/features/car-features/shoe-this-a-blending-of-two-ford-decades-into-a-traditional-hot-rod/ https://blog.championcooling.com/2017/09/29/shoe-this-never-let-your-dream-catch-you-sleeping/
