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!
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I stumbled on this quite by accident when I was trying to learn the computer last year, and it totally blew me away. I didn’t think that there was anyone out there who even remembered my book. I was up from my retreat in Mexico visiting my step daughter, and she logged me into the internet. Just for the hell of it I punched in the name of my book and got this blog. I responded personally and started a friendship with John that evolved into this new enterprise. I had thought about reintroducing my book, but never did anything about it. Since I was well into the creation of another rod I started writing again.
Thanks again John ………………………Chester