Matt Sayles was a young stainless-steel fabricator when his hot rod mentor Ed Kihn taught him there is no such thing as can’t. So, Matt taught himself to build hot rods and custom cars from scratch.
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Matt has been car crazy since the age of 11, building model kits into custom cars and hot rods. He drew his future dream builds on paper and never finished the 1950 Mercury pickup truck he chopped and channeled when he was 16. “I had no garage or tools,” he recalls. But he turned that experience into a career as a metal fabricator. He honed his skills with a job flying out of Vancouver to do stainless steel galley repairs on cruise ships all over the world: Alaska, Hawaii, Asia.
Now 41, Matt runs a fabrication shop in Kamloops and has the time to make his dream cars a reality. Pre-COVID, he turned a 1950 Mercury sedan into a sleek custom with a chopped roof and a shaved and lowered body. That car is now cruising in California.
He became captivated by a picture he drew when he was 17 of a radical 1930’s pickup truck hot rods, now displayed on his garage wall with other designs he had drawn as a teenager.
“I had finished the 1950 Merc and wanted to do another project but didn’t know what. Then I came across that picture. I thought: That’s what I have to build,” Matt says.
His original design was based on a 1932 Ford pickup truck. “Twenty years of looking at hot rods allowed me to evolve the design with proportions from 1930’s Dodge cars – the way they had the big, rounded fenders,” he says. “I bought a sheet of metal and went for it. The design elements were what popped into my head at the time I was building the truck.”
Matt built all his own metal shaping equipment, including a bead roller, plenishing hammer, shrinker-stretch and English wheel. He would do all the work himself to make his hot rod pickup truck 100 per cent unique.
Features include a hand-built custom chassis, turned aluminum firewall surrounded by rivets, an aluminum removeable transmission cover and a split windshield with each side opening from the bottom for cab ventilation. Fabrication of the stainless-steel windshield frame required 42 individual pieces. Along the way, Matt had purchased a 1957 Chrysler 354 cubic inch hemi engine. He chose the hemi to provide the power for his pickup project. The engine is topped with six Holley 94 carburetors mounted on a hand-built intake manifold. For that ‘old skool’ look, the custom truck has no hood to showcase the chromed-up engine bay.
It took almost five years to complete the truck with Matt working two hours every night after his two children had gone to bed. “I thank my wife Vicki and my kids Jake and Bianca for the patients and support they’ve had with my hobby,” he says.
Now that the truck is finished, Matt plans to take it to car shows in the British Columbia Interior and on the coast. “It will be the only one there like it,” he says.
Matt is now looking at some of his other drawings from his teenage years. “I’d like to do another one. Maybe a front engine dragster or a tail dragger,” he says referring to custom cars built in the 1940’s that were lowered in the back.
“I look at this as the highest form of art. It involves design, engineering, sculpting, painting and upholstering.” he says
He notes there aren’t many people his age building traditional hot rods and customs, particularly from scratch. He says it’s better than being a couch potato and is good for the mind.
“People are still finding happiness doing this into the nineties. It keeps them going, with their minds occupied. You don’t see too many cool cars outside the psychiatrist’s office,” he says.
Alyn Edwards is a classic car enthusiast and partner in a Vancouver-based public relations company. [email protected]
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