A Pair of Artists Immerse Themselves in the Classics : Anaheim auto restorers Alex de Ulloa and Tim Krehbiel take their time bringing cars back to production-line--or better--condition.
By the time Henry Ford was producing his Model A cars in 1927 in his new state-of-the-art River Rouge, Mich., plant, he had the concept of the assembly line so perfected that raw iron ore entering the plant exited it a mere 28 hours later as a completed automobile. A new car left the line every 24 seconds.
But, despite the haste in which they were made, the cars have certainly hung aroundand gone through some odd permutations in the process.
Ford’s autos ran like a happy dog and were cheap and plentiful, made to be the conveyance for everyman. Like most things mass-produced, they weren’t designed with eternity in mind. But a curious thing happened on the way to the junk heap. By the time everyman’s son was hitting his teens in the ‘50s, adolescence had become a powerful social entity, with youths asserting their newfound status with their own dress, heroes, culture and cars.
So 30 years on, Model A’s were picked up for a song and transformed into hot-rods, with souped-up engines and wild paint jobs. Lumbering lumber-made woody station wagons became the surfers’ choice for tooling along Pacific Coast Highway.
And now, another three decades along, many of the cars are still around, the pampered property of those with the wherewithal to indulge a nostalgia for the simpler times of their youth. That pampering doesn’t come cheap: The cost of restoring a classic car can approach the sort of dollar figures one associates with a long hospital stay.
Seeing the completed work of Alex de Ulloa and Tim Krehbiel, one can understand why classic-car owners are willing to shell out anywhere from $10,000 to $70,000 to have their vehicles restored. The Fords, Mercurys and other models housed at the pair’s Arrowsmith Automotive couldn’t have looked better on the showroom floor back when Calvin Coolidge was in the White House.
And there is surely nothing today to match them. Sit in a ’38 Merc woody and you feel you’re not so much in a car as in a stateroom on an ocean liner, surrounded by the smooth warmth of varnished maple and mahogany curving around you. And it’s hard to not feel like a spunky youth just looking at the bright yellow Model A roadster they’re restoring, with candy-apple red wheels and deluxe pin-striping.
Krehbiel and de Ulloa say they’ll often spend hours researching the just-so particulars of the thousands of parts that are out of view.
“It’s hard for me to consider myself a mechanic,” said Krehbiel, 34. “I’d consider myself an artist first.”
“I think we bring an art to the cars,” agreed de Ulloa, 54. “Even though we bring them back to the way there were done on the production line, we do it in a beautiful way. And sometimes we bring it back better than the production line ever did.”
Spend any time with the pair and these don’t seem like boasts, rather just a simple pride in their painstaking work. While it may have taken Ford 28 hours to build a car, it can sometimes take the two a year or more to restore one. Even with the prices they charge, they say their business--opened by charging their credit cards to the max--has yet to turn the corner on profitability.
*
Their claims to being artists have some background. Before opening Arrowsmith Automotive 18 months ago, de Ulloa was a graphic artist and Krehbiel a sculptor and architect (last year the Orange County chapter of the American Institute of Architects gave him an award for his design of the Laguna Beach studio/living space in which he resides).
De Ulloa knew Krehbiel through the latter’s father, another lifelong car fanatic, and when their artistic pursuits hit the skids in the recent economy, they decided to pool their abilities and try something else they loved.
Both had previously restored vintage cars as a hobby and sideline. Krehbiel likes to display a 1963 black and white photo of him at age 3 helping his dad repair a ’39 Ford. Suspended on chains from the ceiling in one corner of the shop is the husk of an ’32 Model A roadster De Ulloa has had for decades. If there’s ever a break in their schedule he dreams of getting it running again. In its present sorry disassemblage it looks like a tin bathtub on a sled.
He’s owned other vintage autos, but had to sell them. Krehbiel contents himself with borrowing his father’s cars, recently taking friends up the coast to San Simeon in a Ford woody.
Though their everyday vehicles are a more recent Ford van and pickup, the two claim they’re not solely stuck on that one make.
“We’ve restored Fords that have been in car shows, so people bring us more of them,” De Ulloa said. “And in the whole field of collecting cars, Fords must make up about 80% of it. When I was a kid, a Ford was the only thing to have because they were durable and you could flog them and they’d still work.
“The hot-rodders used Fords all the time because they were the fastest things around. And the wrecking yard people would crush the other makes for the iron, but they wouldn’t crush Fords because they knew they had this pipeline of kids who wanted the parts. So there’s more Fords still around today because of that.”
Along with dealing with the engines and suspensions, they think the car is a good make from which to learn about owners.
Krehbiel said: “Ford is a good place for us to start in this business, because their drivers run the full gamut. You have the daily-driver guys who just want it to start up and go, then the car show fanatics where every nut and bolt has to be perfect, and the street rod guys who just want to go fast. We figure if you can do a good job working for all that, you can satisfy any client.”
One client is also the owner of their business’s building. Half the building is used to store his cars, a remarkable collection of old Fords and Mercurys, most of which the two have restored. Cars currently under restoration in the shop range from the flashy hod-rodded yellow roadster--the property of a retired gentleman who likes to tool around Leisure World in it--to a stately, shapely ’39 K Model Lincoln, an extravagant monster with a V-12 engine. Even in the Depression it sold for $11,000.
*
One project De Ulloa has been working on since even before the shop opened is a frame-off restoration of a 1940 Ford Deluxe woody. Its owner, Norris Pratt, was in the shop that day, as he has often been, watching and photographing its slow rebirth. He’d originally brought the car in to have a balky water pump fixed and ended up deciding to have it entirely rebuilt.
Pratt, a 54-year-old executive, has owned and sold a number of vintage cars but says this one is the keeper. He’s always had a soft spot for the wagons, he said, since he was a lifeguard decades ago in Newport Beach.
A lot of De Ulloa and Krehbiel’s work has been with woody station wagons. The reason the wagons had passenger compartments made of wood is tied in with the reason they were called station wagons, De Ulloa said.
“They were originally made for railroad stations, to carry people and luggage around. Ford was the first company to make a wagon for them in the 1920s. Since the production numbers were so low, they decided to make them out of wood” rather than tool up to make them out of metal.
By the time station wagons were being made for public consumption, the wood bodies had become a tradition. Since Henry Ford owned his own forests, timber mills and wood shops, there was no problem obliging. Other car makers followed suit.
The last woodies in the early ‘50s were made with a wood veneer on a steel body, not unlike some modern vans that feature cosmetic panels of artificial wood, which De Ulloa disparagingly refers to as “shelf paper.” Earlier woodies lived up to their name, though, with heavy passenger compartments formed solely of wood.
While uniquely beautiful, that construction wasn’t without its drawbacks. “I’ve read some accounts of accidents with these,” De Ulloa said, “and they had a big problem with splinters.” It wasn’t unknown for the cars to get termites, and there were more common enemies such as dry rot.
De Ulloa said it is the condition of the wood that determines the value of a woody now, with prices for prime wagons reaching up to $80,000. From 1946 to 1948 Ford also made a woody convertible called the Sportsman that goes for upward of $100,000 today. The two recently restored a woody that had belonged to the actress Gloria Swanson.
Along with all the mechanical work, restoring such cars involves a multistaged process of stripping, bleaching and staining the wood--replacing irreparable parts with closely matched woods--and going through a 10-stage varnish and sanding finish.
*
When they aren’t varnishing, the two are often waxing philosophical. Some days they discuss the future of the car restoration business and doubt it will continue much past their lifetimes, if that.
Krehbiel said: “Sociologically, we’re on the twilight of the combustion engine for private transportation. And as soon as they’re not used anymore, the romance about them will change. If no one is dealing with combustion engines in 40 years, are they going to be interested in 1992 Nissans? I kind of doubt it.”
De Ulloa said: “And I don’t think people in the future will get as excited about today’s cars. And restoring them? There’s so much plastic and on-board computers that change every year, I doubt if anybody’s going to be able or willing to deal with it all.”
While both claim to like the handling and comfort of modern cars, they also see parallels between those vehicles and the isolation of modern communities.
“I happen to think new cars are great,” Krehbiel said. “As an architect, I wish we could make buildings as good as we make new cars. But the neat thing about these old cars is they still give you a sense of being in the world when you’re driving them. You have to shift the gears, pull the choke. You roll the window down and open the vent, with your arm out the window, and it’s comfortable . It gives you more a sense of where you are. We’re weird. Even in new cars we roll the windows down instead of using the air conditioner to get a bit of that feeling.”
De Ulloa said: “You’re more of a participant in these. I’m amazed by the way new cars ride, but I really like to be a participant, with the noises, the bumps and the smells and everything.
“They cared more about the individual when they made these. They throw the term ‘ergonomic’ around so much now, taking about the placement of the gear shift and everything. But you know what? The damn car, you can’t fit in it, it’s such a cubicle.”
*
They listen to Robert Johnson’s blues, big band music and KROQ while they work, and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” shares shelf space with their shop manuals.
They didn’t name their business after the rock band, but, rather, after Sinclair Lewis’ 1925 novel “Arrowsmith” about an idealistic doctor dedicated to the scientific process. Krehbiel said he feels a kinship with the protagonist.
“He’s a guy who is really impassioned by the empirical method. . . . With these cars I’m very interested in their construction aesthetic, but I don’t have nostalgic connotations about the cars. I’m more interested in how they were made than in what they are.”
He might be willing to make exceptions to empiricism, if the right E Type Jaguar came his way, while De Ulloa makes no bones about his affection for his denuded roadster hanging from the ceiling. He also says that, no matter how objective they try to be, they usually wind up falling in love with the cars they’re working on.
Krehbiel said, “These come from such a simpler, easier time, and people all want to be reminded of that.”
“The nostalgia for me is really big,” De Ulloa said. “People my age recall this simpler lifestyle. We were worried about the nuclear bomb the Russians had, but daily life was a piece of cake by comparison. The bomb was just a distant worry. You didn’t worry about it taking you out when you were just standing at a burger stand.
“So many of us are searching for our lost youth, and Southern California is such a car culture that our identification with them is probably stronger than with our houses. Even doing this as a business, we usually fall in love with the cars we’re working on and wish we could somehow own one of those and one of these and one of these. It’s under control, but we do like the cars a lot.”
