Built, Not Bought: The Making of a Custom Car

Standing still, the vehicle looks as if it’s moving, the air quietly slipping over its sweeping curves, shapes reminiscent of the 1930s. But this car is new, the only one of its kind. Garry and Dug Smith, father and son, wrought each curve by hand in their tidy, well-organized Mono garage.

The two have been car guys for a very long time.

When Garry was in high school, his friends built and raced stock cars. “I wasn’t a driver,” he says, “but I helped build the cars.”

His own car was a 1954 Mercury Meteor convertible. “I customized that car, put in all-electric doors and trunk,” he says. “I put three carburetors on it, fin heads, Frenched the tail lights … It got second prize at the Toronto Hot Rod and Custom Show. I still have the trophy.”

A few years later, Garry built a hot rod from a Ford Model A coupe, and when he married his wife, Joan, that was the car the couple drove. But it would be Garry’s last build for many years. He founded a highly successful trucking business, and the long days kept him out of the garage.

Dug, too, worked long hours in what became a family business, and though he didn’t modify or build cars at the time, he was passionate about them. His drives ran the gamut: Oldsmobile Toronado, Olds Delta 88, Toyota Supra, BMW, Jaguar, Cadillac, Fiat Spider, Corvette, Porsche, another BMW …

But as the business grew and changed, the two decided to move on. “We sold on April Fools’ Day and I retired,” says Garry. “That was 20 years ago.”

After that, inspiration came unexpectedly. In an Atlantic City hobby shop, Garry picked up a model car he didn’t recognize: a Chrysler Atlantic. Turns out it was a one-off concept car built by Chrysler in 1995.

When he got home and called Chrysler, the company told him the car was in its Michigan museum. “I drove down and took a bunch of photographs. It was drop-dead gorgeous,” says Garry. “They gave me the wheelbase and engine specs, and all that stuff.”

That was the start. In the well-equipped family garage, Garry began to experiment with designing and building a car from scratch. Dug, who had also retired, joined the project later, and the two decided that they needed some practice.

“Dug bought a ’66 Chrysler Windsor from down the road,” says Garry. Together, they redesigned the whole car, put in a Hemi 6.1 crate engine, and in 2023, entered it in the Motorama Custom Car & Motorsports Expo in Mississauga. The car was named best in class.

“Then we decided, well, let’s go for it,” says Garry.

They took a 3D scan of Garry’s Chrysler Atlantic model to a local cabinetmaking company to create a body buck, a full-size skeleton of the car’s shape made from slices of fibreboard roughly six inches apart.

This buck became a form for the body that they fashioned out of some 65 pieces of aluminum, shaping every curve by hand on their English wheel. This metalworking tool was first used to make armour in the Middle Ages, and although the Smiths’ wheel is more sophisticated, creating compound curves is still a painstaking process. So they had to be precise.

“We made two or three pieces for every one we used,” Dug laughs. They also modified the shape of the car to make it unique. And it is. With a Corvette power train and extended frame, and extraordinary detail throughout, it was 10 years in the making. Along the way, the pair also formed a company: Nasty Automobiles Inc.

Dubbing their creation “Panache,” Garry and Dug took the car to the Yorkville Exotic Car Show in Toronto this past June. They weren’t sure what the organizers would think of their one-off next to Bugattis, Lamborghinis, and Aston Martins, but their worries were unfounded. Flanked by two hot new Ferraris, Panache was used to promote the show.

“When I was driving the car from the trailer around the corner to our spot on Bloor, people kept stopping me for questions and pictures,” says Dug. For the entire show, Panache attracted crowds three and four deep.

Panache will appear next at Cobble Beach on Georgian Bay on the third weekend of September at the Concours d’Elegance & Motoring Festival. And in early November, Garry and Dug plan to take it to Las Vegas for the SEMA Show, an automotive aftermarket trade event organized by the Special Equipment Market Association.

In the meantime, they’re looking toward their next build. Says Dug with a smile: “This time, maybe do it faster.”