FULL FLAVOUR —
RETRO ’54 CHEV
Taste is a strange thing. It varies greatly from person to person, but though it’s as unique and individual as the person it is prescribed to, both good and bad extremes are almost universal. We’re under no illusion that all of the many vehicles featured in this mag will push your buttons, but the ones that don’t do it for you, personally, will speak to a bunch of other readers. Building a car is ultimately a matter of taste, and how others receive it is very much the same. Lucky, then, that Brendan Everett is a man we can probably all agree is blessed with a fine sense of taste. You don’t have to know much about cars, or American custom culture, to know that his ’54 Chev Bel Air has been done right — in terms of not only the oily bits that make it a car but also all the other details that elevate its status to something far more special.
“In 2008, I went to Bonneville Speed Week in the US,” Brendan recounts. “One day at the salt flats, we parked our caravan next to a bunch of random Americans from Sisters, Oregon, and we became good friends. There was a cool ’54 Buick doing laps of the pits that I couldn’t get enough of, and, over a few beers, I found out that one of the Americans, Bob Frack, had an original ’54 Chevy coupe that had been parked up in his backyard under a tarpaulin since the ’70s.”
As Brendan was living in Canada at the time and was already planning to do a road trip through the States later in the year, it wasn’t much extra to plan on staying with Bob in Oregon to check out the ’54 while he was there.
To cut a long story short, the ’54 was exactly as Bob had described it, and Brendan bought it for $3500 and shipped it back to New Zealand when he returned home.
He recalls, “When it arrived, my uncle, Stephen Brown, did the panel and paint, straightening it all out with matte black paint and a metalflake roof. Graeme McNeill at Mac’s Speed Shop put a Camaro rear end in it, lowered it as much as possible without cutting anything, and mocked up the engine bay.”
Brendan’s original plan was to get it on the road before slamming it on bags, but life intervened, as it does, and the Chev ended up in storage for 10 years while Brendan finished uni, did the house thing, and messed around with Harleys and Chev trucks.
He did get around to it, though, unlike so many others in the same boat.
“I contacted Chris [Harrison] at Bad Penny, and he agreed to take on the job of finishing it off,” Brendan explains. “After a few months of working on it, shit escalated big time when I told Chris I wanted to french the headlights, which completely changed the direction of the build.”
As Chris describes that stage, “The initial game plan was to shave the trim off the side of the body and french the lights, going for that early ’60s mild custom.”
In the Bad Penny workshop, Josh Nelson started by removing and filling all the side-trim holes. Continuing in this vein, the frenched headlights came about by using original 1954 Chev bezels, to retain a smoother version of the factory detail. In doing this, ease of maintenance became an issue, so custom mounts were fabricated allowing the lights to be adjusted from the rear.
The front-end metalwork also covered the addition of grille teeth, and, while all that cutting, welding, hammering, and filing was happening outside, Chris had his head buried in the engine bay, trying to get the McCulloch VS57 centrifugal supercharger to work. It looks right at home in there now, but a lot of time and head-scratching were needed to get it there. The work included machining the Offenhauser triple-carb intake to lower the carbs; fabricating the alloy charge piping, intake pipe, and air-filter housing; and clearancing the firewall to accept it all.
Underneath, the imposing intake pipework is even more: the obligatory Fenton split exhaust manifold flowing into twin 1¾-inch exhaust pipes and Coby resonators, with the tailpipes artfully manoeuvred to line up with the lowered bumper’s overriders, which were then modified to incorporate the exhaust exits.
By the end of it all, there must have been a couple of hundred kilos of metal needing rechroming — a task outsourced to Advanced Chrome Platers in Hamilton — and a ton more parts and trim were ordered out of the States.
“We also talked Brendan into changing the colour to be more period and less West Auckland,” Chris says with a smile. “The brown was chosen to tie in with the already-painted dash and window reveals, and we had local outfit Phils Panel & Paint lay down the cola brown on the body while retaining the flaked roof.”
It was the right decision.
As they say, wheels make or break a car, and this makeover meant that the steelies with spider caps and radials needed to go — to be superseded by slick Cadillac ‘sombrero’ hubcaps with Firestone wide-whitewall crossply tyres.
Amid a big push to get the ’54 presentable for CRC Speedshow 2019, the vehicle was assembled
and Greg from Midnight Upholstery finished the interior the night before they left for Auckland. That statement in itself barely does justice to Greg’s work — gold tuck-’n’-roll vinyl abounds, covering the front and rear bench seats, door cards, parcel tray, and inner firewall; it even extends to the engine bay, which boasts trim pieces on both sides of the firewall.
Back inside, things have been finished off in understated ’57 Cadillac fabric inserts, with the aftermarket only coming through in a Limeworks steering wheel and Stewart Warner boost gauge hidden where there would normally have been a clock. Hey, Brendan will never be running late with a bit of boost!
Making it to Speedshow was one thing, but a car good enough to put on show isn’t necessarily good enough to hand back to the customer. The return to Hamilton saw Chris and the team straight back into tying up loose ends and fine-tuning various details — but not without a big change in plans. Before getting it finished for the cert man, Brendan decided it needed a rear C-notch — a decision made in the name of futureproofing.
“I wanted Chris to notch it so that when I eventually chop the roof, I will have the clearance to lower the arse end further for a subtle taildragger stance,” Brendan tells us. “With the stock roofline, they don’t have the right attitude to pull this look off.”
The request wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for the guys at Bad Penny. “Nothing like cutting up a freshly painted and upholstered car and cutting up the chassis in situ!” Chris laughs.
Once the chassis had been notched and everything reassembled, the schedule returned to where it had been post-Speedshow. The engine was fired up, with no way of actually knowing whether the guts of it were any good, but things went well even with zero tuning, and the first drive up the street — the twin-pipes rapping that distinctive split manifold sound — was a distinct milestone in the build. Gavin and the boys at High Performance Rotaries were keen to be the ones to tune it, and had it done in a short time and with minimal changes to the tune, taking the old, unknown-condition 235ci six up from a factory-claimed 120hp to nearon 150hp.
With all that power on tap, the Bel Air was raced over to Noel McMillin at Nostalgia Motors for a cert. While that was held up by that lockdown business, she’s all good to go now. Well, just about.
“It’s all certed and registered, and I’m just waiting on some new lifters and a cam coming from the States,” Brendan says. “It was all ready for me to take home, but the valve train was noisy as hell, so we decided to blow it apart and fix it properly.” With that done, there really will be nothing left to do.
Brendan adds, “Chasing the ’60s mild custom look is a bit of an exercise in restraint, so it’s been great working with Chris over the past few years, getting all the small details right.”
Brendan might not have had this in mind when he bought the ’54 all those years ago, but it’s turned out to be exactly what he wanted. We’d have it in the garage — exactly as it sits — in a heartbeat, and if you’ve got any taste at all, you would too.