Bruce Reimer has always had a love affair with cars.
That fascination led the semi-retired Forest Grove mechanic to build his first car, a Datsun 510, when he was 15. Over the past 40 years, Reimer has done custom work on hundreds of cars and built dozens more for clients across B.C.
While other car enthusiasts with the 100 Mile Cruzers Car Club love collecting cars, Reimer’s obsession is in building unique vehicles you can’t find anywhere else.
“I’m a car builder, that’s what I do. I love building cars, I love all the aspects of it and I do everything myself,” Reimer, 60, said. “I do all the welding, all the fabrication, the engine work, the mechanical work, the bodywork, painting everything 100 percent is done by me.”
One of his prized possessions is a replica 1931 Ford Model A Woody Sedan that he built from scratch. He came up with the design when he was a teenager, partly inspired by the Beach Boys and California surf culture, but it wasn’t until the last 20 years that he was able to complete the project.
During that time, he has created four different versions of the car.
He got started in the early 2000s after he noticed some friends in Chilliwack building rat rod racers - custom cars made with cheap or cast-off parts - on pick-up truck frames. This made him realize he could build a replica Woody for cheap using a 1985 Toyota pickup frame. Although he based his design on the old 1931 Woody, there isn’t a single part of the car from that era.
He got most of the parts through bartering, trading or fabricating them himself. The oldest part of the car is its headlight buckets, which come from a 1938 Dodge Pickup. Its engine is a 351 Ford with a C-4 transmission, while the wood that makes up the body is made up of “good old SPF” - spruce, pine and fir - that he hand-selected from the lumber yard.
“The basic concept was to build something really cool without spending a whole lot of money,” Reimer said. “When I first got this car up and running, I had no more than a $1,000 into it and most of that was on the wood body.”
He finished the first build in 2010 and drove it for four years before he started to notice little flaws. Finally, he decided to redo the entire car, disassembling and rebuilding everything over four years.
“When I’m driving it, it’s pretty incredible. I get lots of attention from it. I remember one day I pulled into a 7-Eleven to buy gas and this young Asian couple comes running over to my car and starts doing a photoshoot in front of it while I’m pumping gas. I just kind of laughed and I thought ‘that’s cool.’”
The only thing Reimer now feels is still missing, to this day, is a custom-built surfboard. “I want to put it on the roof because I think that car should have a surfboard on it, not that I can surf,” Reimer chuckled.
His time with the car, though, is coming to a close. Reimer has put the car up for sale, partly to fund a winter home in Belize.
In the meantime, he has two other personal projects that he’s working on. One is the refurbishment of his son’s 1970 Ford Maverick while the other is a “really bizarre project” similar to the Woody.
Dubbed “the Stranger” by Reimer, the project is based on a 1990 Ranger that Reim er chopped apart to create a custom roadster. He’s re-welded the frame to give the car a more narrow profile and cleaved off the roof to give it a classic racer look.
“It will be like the Woody, a one-of-a-kind vehicle. That’s what I do, I like to do something different,” Reimer said. “Driving and the attention is cool but for me most of it is about the build because that’s really what I enjoy doing most, it’s my creative outlet. Some people paint, some people write but me, I build cars.”
patrick.davies@100milefreepress.net
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