In Our Garage: James Young 1935 Chevy Roadster

Q. Tell us about your Chevy Roadster and why you decided to build it from scratch?

A. This is a 1935 Chevy Roadster turned into a cabriolet with a hard, removable top.

I actually built it off another person's car, took all the dimensions off of that, and drew them on CAD program.

They're not easy to get hold of, and at the time it seemed like a good idea.

It was okay while I was building it, but I got a bit older and a bit wiser now.

I had a 1956 Chev car and was in the Hot Rod club and decided I'd try and build one, as I thought it would be cheaper to build one myself, but it may not have turned out that way.

It's got JAG front and rear end but used most of the gear out of the 2002 SS Commodore with the LS1 engine and a lot of the parts and the computer and all that to get everything to work.

When you build an old car like that up and put a lot of new gear in it, it drives and rides nice like a new car, but still has the history of the old cars where they all originated from.

Q. How many hours do you think you have spent on the car?

A. Well, it's impossible to calculate exactly how many hours would have been put into the car, but many full weekends, night times, holidays, a lot of stuff like that, it’s just a lot of hours.

It's just a matter of keeping on going until you get it finished.

Q. How did you decide on the colour?

A. The colours were put together by trying a lot of different colours, just little sample pots and spraying them out onto little separate spare panels just to see what they would look like.

That was not the first colour that I had in mind that it ended up at. I just ended up with that colour because we thought that looked the nicest.

I was a bit nervous, as I had seen other yellow and purple cars that I didn't particularly like those particular colours together, but they were different purples and different yellows, but these two, I thought went together okay.

Q. What do you like about older cars?

A. I've always liked the shape of those earlier, that era car of the 34 sort of models and always liked that shape, whether it's the Ford or the Chevy.

I've always been a bit of a Chevy man, so I sort of went with the Chevy but a Ford would have been easier to probably get a body to start with, but yeah, I sort of wanted to build a Chevy.

You get looks when you're driving it, it's nice to drive around and have people wave to you and call out to you, and the car drives very nice. It's very comfortable just to sit in and drive.

This car has a dinky seat in the back that opens up where the boot would normally be which was common in the older cars and the person just sat outside in the open, in those seats.

They're probably not practical, and I've probably only had people in them from for a maximum of 15 to 20 minutes at a time.

I like going to the car shows and a lot of shows are connected with a camping weekend where you have a lot of friends that you meet up with from other towns that have similar interests and got similar style cars..