1932
Roadster
WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL STROHL
UNOBTANIUM CENTRAL:
REALSTEEL DEUCE CARRIES
ULTRARARE PARTS
Probe any corner of the collector- car hobby, and you’ll find that cer- tain specialized holy grails exist.
They’re those parts or cars that exist in
extremely limited quantities, that every
enthusiast seeks, that carry some sort of
totemic sway over men.
Ron San Giovanni’s Deuce is loaded
with them.
To start with, it’s a steel-bodied 1932
Ford roadster, one of about 12,000 that
Ford built. Not rare, but extremely in
demand due to hot rod tradition.
Ron always wanted a hot rod, but didn’t
get the opportunity to build one of his own
until 1973, when he found Al Volpe’s old
B/Altered Deuce roadster. Volpe had run
12s in it at Connecticut Dragway with a
small-block Chevrolet V- 8 under the hood,
but intermediate owners had unsuccessfully attempted to turn it into a street car.
“When I first saw it, it had no floor and
was sitting on the frame over a couple of
two-by-fours,” Ron said. “The frame had
a lot of old-school stuff: It was Z’d in the
back, all gas-welded together.”
Still, Ron bought it for $800 and put the
body back on the frame. He kept it primer
black with red 16-inch Ford wire wheels
and wide whitewall tires. With a flathead
Ford V- 8 topped with Edelbrock aluminum heads and an Edelbrock three-two
intake, Ron had it running a year later.
Next, a peek under the hood reveals a
hot rod holy grail even more in demand
than a steel Deuce roadster: a pair of
Ardun heads atop the flathead block. Zora
Arkus-Duntov and his brother Yura developed the crossflow, overhead-valve, hemispherical heads in 1947, and hot rodders
soon took notice of their potential. Again,
reproductions exist, but originals (about
220 to 225 pairs were made) cause grown
hot rodders to swoon.
“I actually found those heads here in
Connecticut,” Ron said. “It was the early
1980s, and I had been collecting flathead
speed equipment for years, but had never
been able to get my hands on a pair of
Arduns.”
That changed in 1980 when he found
the pair in the back room of a TV repair
shop in Norwich. They sat on a hot 59A
flathead built for racing, but never actually raced. The seller knew what he had,
so Ron had to take out a personal loan just
to buy the heads.
“My wife actually convinced me,” he
said. “We had a three-year-old son, a new
house and mortgage, but she asked me,
‘When are you going to have another
opportunity like this?’”
So he took the opportunity, then with
his mentor and friend Mike Hart took a
solid month to get the Ardun-headed race
engine to run right.
Even rarer than the Ardun heads is
the large S.Co.T. supercharger that Ron
found about a decade later. To buy that, he
took some cash dividends out of his life
insurance policy. Ron said he hasn’t seen
another such supercharger since.
Less rare are the reproduction Radir
wheels—Ron said he was never able
to find a set of the originals—yet they
formed a key component in the mid-1990s
update of the rod to fit a 1960s theme, an
update that also brought the Ford Grabber Blue paint.
“It’s basically my version of Mono-
gram’s Big Deuce model,” Ron said.
The Deuce continues to evolve. In anticipation of a recent cross-country trip to
take the Deuce to L.A., Ron had a custom
roller camshaft, roller lifters and roller
rockers built for the Ardun.
“The Ardun is prone to wearing out the
flat tappets, and I had gone through a lot
of lifters and cams,” Ron said. “That’s
usually all right for guys who just drive
their Ardun-powered cars around town.”
A modern Tremec five-speed (to back
the Ardun’s estimated 400 horses) also
helped him realize his goal of completing
the 6,000-mile round trip.
So with Ron’s magnetism for unobtanium parts, and with the continual
evolution he subjects the Deuce to, don’t
be surprised if you soon see it with Kin-mont brakes, spindle-mount magnesium
wheels, a certified police speedometer, or
any one of the dozens of rare parts hot
rodders continually seek.
