Chester Greenhalgh: T-Bucket Genius!?!
The following is a personal blog post from New Year’s Day, 2009. It was a great start to my New Year because it brought me into contact with the long incommunicado Chester Greenhalgh and through our friendship has brought us to where we are today with TBucketPlans.com.
A lot of disparaging remarks have been made about Chester Greenhalgh’s out-of-print T-bucket bible, but they don’t hold water. It takes a true mechanical and scrounging genius to convert raw materials like old truck front axles, steel bed rails, iron water pipe, cast-off house trailer springs, furnace louvers and glass doorknobs into a safe, fun creation of beauty like a T-bucket — and on a budget anybody can afford! Just take a look at one of his creations on the book cover above. Chester can take a $500 rolling wreck Chevy passenger car and, like the food processing industry does with a pig, use everything but the squeal.
Most people had nowhere to turn for this vital T-bucket build information. Fortunately, the unassuming, ingenious, budget conscious owner of Chet’s Car Craft in Naples, FL decided to employ some of those same skills he’d used to successfully build T-buckets for his family and customers and self-published the legendary “How to Build a T-Bucket Roadster for Under $3000″ in 1986. The first ad I saw for this spiral-bound book was in the February, 1987 issue of “Rod Action” magazine, with the bargain introductory price of $11.95. By September, 1987 the price in the ad had risen to $14.95 and in 1988 it was up to $19.95.
produce a perfect bound softcover version of his work that was introduced in 1990 with a price of $14.95. Somebody in Motorbooks’ marketing department decided that the appropriate cover photo for this “how to” book about building a T-bucket on the cheap would be a high dollar, Total Performance T-bucket laden with chrome and a blown Chrysler hemi — budget, indeed!
TBucketPlans.com's FREE gift to help start your T-Bucket Hot Rod adventure ...
Ron Young shows how to build a T-Bucket chassis: -- do it yourself & $ave!
- -- 23 illustrated pages
- -- Transverse sprung front-end and coil-over-shock rear
- -- Yes, they’re FREE: no strings attached
- -- >Enter your name, email and click Download Now
Check Out These Related Posts, Too:
Category: T-Bucket History, T-Buckets of the 1980's, TBucketPlans Products
