1932Chrysler
ONE DOOR FOR THE
ONE OWNER OF THIS
ROD SINCE 1956
Series CI
WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANIEL STROHL
The oddest part about Ray Demaris’s 1932 Chrysler street rod—the welded-shut passen- ger door—can be directly attributed to
too much alcohol.
No, really. In the late ’60s, Ray took his
three-window coupe racing with a 291-
cu.in. 1955 De Soto Hemi V- 8, injected with
alcohol, and ran in the C/Altered class,
recording quarter-mile times in the low-
9-second range.
“The minute I broke into the 10s, I had to
take a test and a physical, and my car had
to go through a more rigorous inspection,”
Ray recalled. To stiffen the car to pass the
inspection, Ray decided to not only box the
entire frame, but also weld the passenger
door closed and install a hatch in the roof
as a backup egress route.
This after an 11-year buildup of the
Chrysler, starting with a car that was
already a step or two removed from the
typical hot rods of its day.
“I chose it because everybody else was
running a ’ 32 Ford, and I wanted something
different,” Ray said. “Plus, I’ve always
been a Mopar man, and I’ve always noted
that Mopars were built a lot more ruggedly
than other cars.”
In a junkyard in 1956, he found this
Chrysler Series CI four-passenger coupe,
with its distinctive split windshield, and
paid $100 for it, plus another $15 to have it
towed to his house in Rochester, Massachu-
setts. Other than a missing head from the
224-cu.in. six-cylinder, it was complete.
Out came the six and in went the De Soto
Hemi—not in the stock Chrysler chassis,
but in a 1932 Ford chassis that he slipped
under the Chrysler. With a 1933 Ford truck
grille shell bolted to it, he initially drove
the end result on the street, but soon took
it off the road to go drag racing, traveling to New England Dragway in Epping,
New Hampshire, and to strips in Sanford,
Maine, and Childstown, Rhode Island.
The racing came to a halt in the early 1980s, “only because I couldn’t afford it anymore,” Ray said. But after let- ting it sit in the corner of his barn for a few years, he determined that the stiffness he added to the chassis and the body would
make it an ideal street rod, so he began the
transformation of the Chrysler back into
a street-legal car, keeping the passenger
door welded shut.
“And I’m not unhappy about not putting
that door back in,” he said. “It would’ve
been a big deal to do so, plus there are no
drafts, no squeaks, no rattles from that
side of the car.”
In place of the Hemi, Ray dropped in a
Mopar 360 V- 8, bored .060 inches over to a
total displacement of 370-cu.in. and topped
with Edelbrock Performer RPM heads
and an Edelbrock Performer RPM intake.
A Chrysler A-727 TorqueFlite three-speed
automatic transmission backs the engine.
The suspension now consists of setups
of Ray’s own design and manufacture: Up
front, a chrome-moly straight tube axle
hangs from a transverse leaf spring with
TCI disc brakes on the ends; out back, a triangulated four-link coil-over suspension
now springs the 9-inch and drum brakes.
While converting the Chrysler for the
street, Ray also decided to get the car low,
so he Z’d the frame by 6 inches, then channeled the body 19 inches, slicing off the
bottom 6 inches of the body altogether.
Meanwhile, he left the top completely
unchopped and painted the car in a 1977
Chrysler copper metallic.
Inside, the pair of buckets come from a
1994 Ford Escort. Yes, really, a pair—Ray
and his wife Paulette have driven the coupe
60,000 miles since he finished converting
it for the street in 1993, and Ray said Paulette has absolutely no problem climbing
through the car to get to her seat.
“Oh, she’s a little gal,” Ray said. “And
she loves it; it makes her feel safe.”
