Truly creative people are out there, and in more ways than one.
They’re not limited by time or money, or any of the other excuses a lot of us fall back on. They work with what they’ve got and blow the rest of us away with their results.
This Ford Anglia creation is one I’ve wanted to see for a long time. If you look at the featured image above, you can see what it started out as sat on the right. It first appeared in maybe 2014 or 2015 looking a lot like this, but with an upright early Anglia/Prefect grille.
The new look is killer, though.
It makes me think of 1950s Ford trucks, but is just as likely to have been handcrafted from plain steel tube when you check out the quality of fabrication elsewhere around the build.
Hiding up front is a BMW four cylinder, and looking back at this image now I realise I should have delved deeper as it possibly features forced induction too.
Inside it just gets wilder. It’s part steampunk, part bomber – all the labels you want are here. But that’s the other thing about builds like this; it takes a list of labels for people to understand them, when in reality there was probably no consideration given any sort of conformity when putting it all together.
Some people might say ‘it just works,’ but I’d disagree. It doesn’t ‘just’ work, it takes a whole load of talent to end up here.
The rear quarter treatment is one of my favourite angles, and that’s saying something. The sculpted panel has echoes of the body shape you’d find on an early Ford fender-less hot rod.
Another thing I think is very clever – and I’d like to think is not just by chance – is the colour choice, which serves a couple of purposes. First, with this much detail a wild paint job might be too much, and second, it means you can spray local areas as you chop and change them through the life of the car.
Do you like the throttle pedal? A quick internet search reveals T-H Marine Supply Inc. have been going since 1975 and still make this alloy pedal. But you can’t use it now, because you saw it here. It seems like an obvious choice, but would you have thought of it?
The switch box is the top half of an old ammo box, the sort of thing you can find for a few pounds or dollars, chop it in half and rivet into place. But again, it takes vision rather than eyes sometimes.
Now I’m sat here writing this, two things occur to me: One is that I should have found the owner, as I’m fairly sure he was sat behind the ‘Misfit’ while I took these pictures. But I was in my own world and on a tight schedule, and I would have bored him to death with compliments.
The second is that this is the perfect example of what I meant in my recent Classic Motor Show story about going to different types of car events.
Because you find stuff like this when you least expect it. So get out there.
Bryn Musselwhite
Instagram: Brynmusselwhite