When you think of a rat rod, the last thing that comes to mind is drivability. Bubble-gum welds, trinkets welded onto everything strictly for visual confusion, and suspension and brakes that make you shudder just looking at them put the thought of running 60 mph down the highway into the “are you friggin’ crazy?!” category.

But what if we told you Rich Cummings drove his ’31 Model A-based rat rod from his home in Coldwater, Michigan all the way to the Hunnert Car Pileup in central Illinois and back, 700 miles total, and maintained 70 mph the whole way?

Yeah, he’s got big brass ones that clang. Asking him about the trip, he was nonchalant, and said it’ll do 90 without a problem, and he’s even planning to drive it from Michigan down to Key West this winter, just for fun.

What is it? It started off as a 4-door sedan that Rich found in a burned down Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg storage building. All of the inner wood was roasted so Rich welded the doors together, lopped the off roof, and sat it on a combination of two Model A frames, the original sedan frame and part of another one to add length for the odd engine he decided to use.

That engine is a 1946 Waukesha gas-powered, straight-6 that came out of a Federal-brand fire truck. Rich found it at a swap meet, where it was being sold because the guy who owned it (who also had the truck it came in) needed more power and replaced it with a diesel. The engine only had 11,000 miles on it (though it probably had a ton of hours idling while the truck was being used to put out fires) and Rich figured, “What the hell?” and picked it up, along with the Fuller 5-speed from the same truck.

If you look closely, you can see that this engine has two plugs per cylinder. Fire trucks are left to idle during a fire to power the pumps, so the engine has one hot and one cold plug per cylinder.

The cold plug is used for driving and the hot one for idling, to prevent fouling. Oh yeah, it idles at 200 rpm! A conventional distributor fires the hot plugs while a magneto fires the cold ones. It makes plenty of torque but only about 80 to 100 horsepower. There is no muffler, but it’s still whisper quiet.

The rest of the car is true to the homebuilt, rat rod genre. The front semi-elliptic springs and steering box are from a ’56 Plymouth, while the axle is from a John Deere corn-picker tractor. The wheels are late-model 16-inchers, but the bolt pattern was wrong, so Rich cut the centers out of a Model A rim and welded them to the rims for the right pattern, then added some spokes for looks. The rear is a conventional 9-inch Ford.

The grille is from a ’31 Pontiac (he bought a complete car for the parts), the headlights are ’25 Buick, the horns are from a Chevy truck and an aftermarket triple setup, the steering wheel is ’55 Ford pickup, the marker lights are Harley-Davidson, and he has no idea what the radiator cap is from, he just found it somewhere.

A shotgun was modified to work as a shifter—Rich says “It’s a shifter and security system all in one”— the seats are glass molds for boat seats, covered in foam and burlap, and the taillights are from a railroad crossing arm.

He built the car entirely himself in his small shop, in the span of six months, and is enjoying the hell out it. It won a Top 25 prize at the huge Frankenmuth (Michigan) show and has an enormous crowd around it wherever it goes.

Rich says, “You have to be careful going into town with it because if you don’t have time, you get stuck. People always stop and talk.”

The low-rpm nature of the engine makes it a highway darling; 70 mph is a mere 1,600rpm, and Rich said regardless of how the car looks, it has a lot of suspension travel.

He put over 5,000 miles on the car over the summer of ’11, and as soon as we wrapped up our photo session, he strapped on his goggles, fired it up, and drove it out of the fairgrounds for the 350-mile trip back home.

Rich explained, ‘When everything falls in your lap, maybe there’s a reason and you should go with it. I never thought I would build something like that.’

By: Rob Kinnan

Thanks to: www.rodauthority.com