1960 Chevy Kingswood 9 Passenger Wagon named “Helen”

Next up the firewall was shaved, the heater box opening was removed, along with a bunch of unnecessary holes and divots. After he smoothed the firewall, Ryno jumped to the dash and shaved the factory radio, center speaker opening, heater controls, ash tray, light switch hole and wiper control to get it as smooth as possible. To change up the look of the exterior of the car, some Impala side trim and birds were sourced to replace the stock wagon trim.
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The 700R4’s bigger size meant a new transmission tunnel needed to be fabricated, and the new low altitude meant that the drive shaft tunnel needed to be moved up a bit. After those were addressed, it was finally time to fabricate new floor foot wells to patch up the holes.

Under the hood, Ryno spent two days smoothing the 283 block and heads, to get that custom clean look. A new Edlebrock intake and 1406 carb were added along with a Pertronix kit in the distributor, some Speedway headers and Smithy’s mufflers to get a little better performance. Some Corvette valve covers were swapped on to the engine to dress it up even more. By now the body color had been decided on and the newly smoothed engine and the transmission were painted body color. One unique feature under the hood are the inner fenders, which were made out of the original set of outer fenders to give the engine bay a clean look.
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About 10 months into owning the car, with all of this work done, customer cars took over and the car went up on the lift for awhile for storage.

Over the course of the time from 2010 to mid-2019 Ryno built a bunch of customer cars, and worked on about 10 cars of Ryno’s own. Finally it was time to get Helen done, or sell her. The decision was made to sell her and almost immediately Ryno’s friend Gary Anderson and his wife Brandi called about the car. They loved Helen and the direction that the car was going so they bought the car and hired Ryno to finish it out. It only took another year or so to get through with previously promised builds so that it could get back on the schedule.

When asked if they fully bought in to the car as it was in the renderings, Gary had a couple of reservations, “I didn’t like the wheels and I wasn’t 100% on the paint, so we changed the wheels and I eventually came around on the color.”

Ryno was quick to respond, “Because that green is AWESOME!”

Brandi replied with a laugh, “We changed the wheels from the spokes to the Tru Spoke Supreme wheels because… If you know the Hot Rods of Omaha people, we don’t clean… we park, grab beers, and scatter. We’re not cleaning spoke wheels kinda people!”




Ryno took the car to Hartsville, TN to Mike Howell at Volunteer Auto Body Shop for the final body & paint. The main green color is a custom mixed PPG color based off of a modern Ford color. The roof and an accent panel on each side of the car were painted silver with a ton of small metal flake. In the sun, this car pops!