Buick straight-eight pistons and sandblasting our 1937 Ford Coupe | Redline Update - Hagerty Media

The 1937 Ford race car has been on the back burner for a minute, but now it is blasting to the top of Davin’s to-do list. That’s because the body and chassis are headed to the sandblaster to be cleaned up. The process could potentially reveal some structural problems, but Davin is hoping the car’s bones are solid. He’s also crossing his fingers that rebuilding the restarting assembly on the Buick straight-eight will be trouble-free—and, sometimes, Davin gets what he wants.

The axle-less coupe is levered onto Davin’s flat-deck trailer and dropped off for sand blasting. The car looks pretty solid through the thin, mismatched paint. There are a few rust holes, but is that really any surprise when you’re dealing with an 80-year-old race car? It shouldn’t be.

Expecting that the Ford could be picked up later in the day, the team heads back to the shop’s engine assembly room and makes some progress on the Buick straight-eight. New pistons have arrived and are ready for their rings. This requires properly filing the rings and assembling the pistons onto the connecting rods. However, right when Davin is about to put the pistons into the block and torque down the rotating assembly, he gets a phone call that the Ford is ready to be picked up—and he had better hurry, because rain is on the way.

So off to the blaster goes the team, loading the trailer quickly and bringing the Ford back to the climate-controlled safety of the Redline Rebuild garage. There the vintage racer is safe from flash-rusting, and Davin can inspect it to see just how much welding wire he’ll be burning in the coming months. Judging from the first look, he’ll need more than a little … If you want to see the whole process, you’ll have to subscribe to the Hagerty YouTube channel and wait for next week’s Redline Update.