X-Sonic: 1956 Chevrolet Corvette, the world’s first lowrider

Today, comrades, a story from the world of lowriders is on the agenda. From the very beginning of their world.

The X-Sonic is the most famous car of the Krankers auto club of San Bernardino, which has not existed for 40 years. It was a 1956 Chevrolet Corvette that belonged to club president Ron Aguire. This car is famous for being considered the first car to use hydraulics, as well as the first show car with a plastic bubble top as a roof.

In 1957, the so-called California Transportation Code 24008 was issued, which made it illegal to lower any part of the car below the bottom edge of the car’s disk. Someone named Lester Groves made it his number 1 priority to issue fines to Ron, as Comrade Aguiare owned the lowest car in the city. Ron came up with the brilliant idea after he saw the work on straightening dents in the body using a hydraulic pump in his friend’s body shop. The idea in Ron’s head was simple: install a pump between the spring and the body. Special bowls were designed to hold the pump, as well as hoses that went from the pump to the hand pump between the seats. That’s how the first lowrider worked relatively simply.

Ron Aguire himself describes his early experience using this system as follows: “But until 1959, I couldn’t make the kind of fuss I wanted, and I wanted to drive Sandy Cop crazy. We waited for him to pull up to his spot on the other side of the street, next to the local burger joint in Berdo ‘Ruby’s Drive-in’. I was standing in the parking lot with the car understated to the last degree. About a hundred of my college friends were there, waiting to see what would happen. Without lifting the car, I began to drive out and the side pipes scratched the asphalt (it was really cool to drag my car on the asphalt). My girl went out, and my friend sat down instead, ready to pump the pump on my command. Everyone knew that Sandy was in front of me and was waiting for me to leave the place to give me a ticket in front of all my friends and show them that this idiot can’t just leave, breaking the law, again. I pulled out onto the street and watched Sandy start his bike, telling his friend to start pumping. I hadn’t gone twenty feet when Sandy flashed a red light at me. I got out of the car. All our spectators were already standing on the sidewalk. I greeted Sandy by name, since no one called him Sandy to his face – ‘Hi, Lester, what’s the problem?”– “Your car is too low.’ he declared. ‘But Lester,’ I said, “she’s not too short anymore. I followed your advice and raised it to a legal height.’ He smiled at me and took his ticket book. Back then, the cops checked the cars like this: if their ticket book didn’t pass freely under the car, you got a ticket. And he ran it under my car without hitting anything. Damn, his face was so red, and all the witnesses were screaming and screaming… Lester didn’t say a word, just looked at me in surprise, got on his bike and drove off. Oh… revenge was so sweet…”

The manual pumping system was huge, and it lifted the car unevenly. Ron’s father, who helped him with the pendant, was aware of this problem. It was he who suggested that his son use aviation parts, among which 12 and 24 volt pumps and various pressure distributors were purchased. Over time, the X-Sonic began to rise smoothly and smoothly at the touch of a button.

In the future, Ron often redid his car. Very often. They say that once the fresh paint on the car lasted only one day, because Ron did not like the result. But the turning point came when Aguire wanted futurism and decided to replace the standard roof with a plastic bubble. At first, there were attempts to reuse aircraft parts, but there was not a single suitable and sufficiently transparent one. And then Ron remembered that he had previously made a set for taillights by clamping heated plastic between two pieces of plywood. The desired shape was cut out in the upper piece, and by blowing air through a hole in the lower piece, the desired result was obtained. The biggest challenge was finding a furnace large enough to blow out the roof.

A large plywood platform was prepared, in the middle of which was a pipe with a plug and a valve regulating the air supply. Ron’s father made a metal ring, which was the rim for the future roof. With the help of eight assistants, a piece of plastic was heated in an oven, placed on plywood, and then a metal ring was placed on top, which cut off unnecessary edges. After that, Ron began to pump the air a little bit until he got the right height. After that, the air supply was closed and the plastic was left to cool.

Thanks to a good plan and preparation, the roof was blown out the first time. After Ron explained the technology to his friend, a certain Ed Roth, he decided to install the same roof on his next creation, known to the world as the Beatnik Bandit.

After the epic with the roof, X-Sonic acquired all its other features, most of which it will retain forever. One of them is the apparent absence of headlights. However, there were headlights, and they were cleverly hidden behind a home-made fiberglass radiator grille with thirty-eight vertical fins. From the outside, the roof rose and fell according to the commands of the buttons, which were hidden behind the hatch of the gas tank. And inside, between the front seats, there was a console, the buttons of which controlled not only the roof, but also the ignition, headlights and hydraulic suspension. Subsequently, the steering wheel was removed and the car was also controlled from this console.

Ron admitted that the controls were uncomfortable, especially on the highway, at high speeds. Because of this, and also because it was often unbearably hot under the completely transparent roof, Ron no longer drove out for walks as often as before.

In Pat Ganal’s book American Custom Car, Larry Watson notes that he repainted the X-Sonic six times. The most memorable was working with paint, which includes metal shavings. According to Larry, the X-Sonic was the first metallic-painted car in California.

For a while, the X-Sonic was perhaps the most radical custom car in the whole world, and therefore it is not surprising that its appearance at any auto show caused a stir. This lowrider was a star from the world of cars: they talked about him, wanted to see him, and wrote articles about him.

However, sometime in the late sixties, Ron decided to part with the now legendary car. Now it is in a disappointing condition, and the only good news is that the current owner expresses a desire to restore the car, although according to the latest information, work has not yet begun.

Source: https://kustomrama.com/index.php?title=X-Sonic