Mike Lithgow has owned his 1931 Model A street rod for 40 years and is still counting them.
Mike is a skilled performance mechanic who bought the A when it was in pieces and required assembly in a big way.
Jim Sutherland
We at MyStarCollectorCar label Mike’s initial purchase as a “Humpty Dumpty” car because somebody tore it apart and failed to put it back together again. Fortunately, Mike’s skill set gave him a rare ability to reassemble the Model A and bring it back on the road.
Mike told MyStarCollectorCar his ’31 Model A had a sprint car engine in it, but he had bigger plans for the hot rod. As a result, the sprint car engine was not in the plans because Mike wanted to upgrade the horsepower to beastly levels and chose Chrysler’s famous 392 Hemi for the process.
He turned the 392 into a 406 stroker engine with major internal performance upgrades and two 4-barrel carbs sitting on the top. Additionally, Mike put a supercharger on the car to boost its horsepower to insane levels.
He connected the Hemi to a GM Turbo 400 automatic transmission to push all those extra horses to the rear end of the car. Mike mentioned his “rear tires will blow off-even at 70 mph if I throttle it”. The net result is he built a monster engine and is still learning how to handle it.
This level of brute force performance also required a major upgrade to the ’31 Model A’s factory chassis because cars built in the early 1930s had a fraction of the horsepower as Mike’s hot rod. Mike chose to use a perimeter frame because it offered a huge upgrade in strength in the right places to handle the new power upgrade.
The Model A’s brake, steering and suspension systems have also undergone major upgrades because of the huge power boost in the car.
Mike’s car is reminiscent of the famous ‘32 Ford Milner hot rod in ‘American Graffiti’, mainly because of its stylish yellow paint scheme, but the truth is Mike’s hot rod would clobber Milner’s movie hot rod in a street or track showdown.
He chose to build a car with plenty of retro roots so Mike could enjoy the Model A in its purest hot rod form: loud and proud. Mike pointed to the car’s windshield that still opens up and labeled it as his “air conditioning system” and, while it does has a radio, Mike does not use it very much because the car makes a lot of noise when fired up and he clearly prefers that kind of high performance engine music over radio music.
The net result is a throwback hot rod built by a master mechanic who clearly knows how to build a pre-war in the finest tradition of an old school hotrodder. Mike’s Model A is a tribute to the glorious past of hot rodding at its finest.
Congratulations on a job well done, Mike.
Jim Sutherland
BY: Jim Sutherland
Jim Sutherland is a veteran automotive writer whose work has been published by many major print and online publications. The list includes Calgary Herald, The Truth About Cars, Red Deer Advocate, RPM Magazine, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Windsor Star, Vancouver Province, and Post Media Wheels Section.
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