Every so often a build comes along that refuses to fit neatly into any category, and this 1927 Ford Model T roadster is exactly that kind of machine. Instead of the flathead V8 or small-block you'd expect to find poking out of a traditional T-bucket, the engine sits behind the seats, drawn straight from a Pontiac Fiero. The result is a mid-engined hot rod that looks the part from twenty feet away and rewrites the rulebook the moment you walk around back.
The car was the brainchild of builder Jim English, who had wanted to put together a '27 T roadster for the better part of his life after being captivated by a vintage Hot Rod magazine feature. The trouble with a period-correct flathead T, as he saw it, was reliability over real distances. After ruling out a small-block for swallowing too much legroom, conversations with collaborator Dave Vonada steered the project somewhere far more unusual. While hunting for an Oldsmobile Quad 4, English instead found a nearly new Fiero drivetrain going cheap, a 2.8-liter V6 paired with a four-speed manual transaxle and port fuel injection. That bargain decided everything that followed.
A Chassis and Body Built From Scratch
Underneath, the car rides on American Stamping '32 Ford frame rails, fully boxed in eighth-inch steel and pinched hard up front so they tuck neatly inside a chopped grille shell. The fiberglass '27 T body started life as an inexpensive Poli-Form shell before being reworked extensively, with hidden door hinges, a fresh fiberglass floor, a firewall moved forward nine inches to free up room for the driver, and '39 Ford taillight buckets molded into a custom rear pan. The grille shell was chopped six inches and topped with a laser-cut stainless insert wearing a 27T logo, polished until it gleamed.
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The metalwork is where this project really earned its hours. English wanted a steel deck lid that opened like a factory piece, and getting there meant rolling a panel on an English wheel, fighting it into shape with a shrinker and stretcher, and then spending roughly forty more hours smoothing it out by hand. After 165 louvers were punched into it and hand-sanded several times each, the deck lid alone is said to have eaten up around 200 hours of labor. The hood is hand-formed steel shaped over an argon tank, and an aluminum belly pan runs the length of the underside to quiet things down.
Custom Suspension and a Clever Cockpit
Rather than buy an off-the-shelf independent front end, English admired the pushrod-actuated coilover geometry he saw elsewhere but balked at the price and the fit, so he fabricated his own. The A-arms are welded from seamless tubing and chrome-plated, paired with TCI spindles and polished Wilwood brakes, while a narrowed Dodge Omni rack handles the steering through an Ididit column. Out back, the Fiero strut was modified to accept a Carrera coilover, and the half-shafts were shortened and re-drilled to a Ford bolt pattern. Cooling the mid-mounted V6 required a custom radiator feeding copper lines that travel the full length of the car, and remarkably, there's even a working heater tucked under the dash.
With no driveshaft to package, the empty transmission tunnel became home to a sideways-mounted Optima battery, and a hand-built 14-gallon aluminum fuel tank sits behind it beneath the seat. Inside, the cabin centers on a narrowed Wescott Model A Auburn dash with recessed gauges, a banjo wheel on the Ididit column, and gray upholstery stitched up locally. The paint is House of Kolor Pearl Violet, and the slot mag wheels were polished inside and out and fitted with what English calls genuine fake knock-offs.
Tipping the scales at under 2,000 pounds, the finished roadster earned a feature in Street Rodder magazine back in 2000. A quarter-century and roughly 16,000 miles later, it remains a genuine Pacific Northwest one-off, complete with an Oregon title and a thick folder of build invoices documenting the obsessive effort that went into it. The car is now being offered for sale on Bring a Trailer out of Klamath Falls, Oregon, with documentation, spare parts, and accessories included.
Images courtesy of Bring a Trailer.
