Early Barris Custom Dick Fowler 1938 Ford Coupe restored
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The Dick Fowler 1938 Ford Coupe, the oldest known Custom Car created by the Barris Custom Shop around 1947 has been restored and is shown to the public for the first time at the 2023 Custom Car Revival show.
Really wonderful to finally see it all put back together. Here are a few photos of the car shortly after it arrived at the Custom Car Revival event. I hope to be adding many more photos of this historic Custom over the weekend.
Enjoy the beauty of Customizing
David Wolk shared some more photos of the car taken with some better light…
Enjoy the beauty of Customizing
A few interesting observations. Modified 1940 stainless body trim. Nothing under the bottom of the grille. And, I have a pair of those accessory headlight trim things. (They were kinda fake 40 model and allowed for use of ‘modern’ sealed beam lights.)
Tony, the accessory headlights were part of the original car, I have seen quite a few early Customs using those. But the ’40 Ford side trim, and the rear splash pan are new.
I had not noticed abrupt end of the grille. But you are way more on top of that than I 🙂 That is as far as I can tell the way the Barris Shop created it.Enjoy the beauty of Customizing
Tony, the accessory headlights were part of the original car,
I’m not disputing that Rik, just saying I have some.
They were a period ‘modernisation.’
The car turned out awesome! The amount of research and thought Kurt did to try to pin down colors, interior, etc. was impressive. I was blessed to get to see it in bare metal during one of our trips to St Louis a few years ago. So cool to see such old Barris work. Of course, I appreciated the skill level they had at the time and the tools available, but it did encourage me that maybe my amateur efforts aren’t so bad after all. 😉 There were parts of the car, the front end around the grille in particular, that were very, very rough, and required forming new metal. I’m not saying that the very rough stuff was actual Barris work, and by the looks of it could very well have been accident repair at some point or something else. A whole lot of effort went into getting the car to this point and it shows. Splendid and I’m so glad we have such a great piece of early Barris work still with us to enjoy. Kudos to Kurt for making it happen!
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