Rick Mack has owned woodie station wagons since the 1960s. Now he restores them. (Jeff Layton)
Rick Mack shows the complicated cuts needed to replicate an original woodie exterior. He completes 10-12 sets a year. (Jeff Layton)
Growing up in Southern California during the 1960s, Rick Mack was an avid surfer. And every surfer in those days, it seemed, had a woodie wagon.
Woodies -- cars that use wood components on their exterior -- were high-priced vehicles during their heyday, 1949-51. They quickly fell out of fashion because owners grew tired of sanding and varnishing the wood every year. Their low resale value made them a steal for surfers living on a shoestring budget.
"People wanted a cheap car to get to the beach," says Mack, who now lives in Lakewood and runs Rick Mack Enterprises. "Guys took doors and windows off to fit surfboards inside. They drove them to death."
Mack owned 13 woodies by the time he was 20. He decided to begin restoring them professionally in the 1980s when he noticed a resurgence in their popularity.
Few of the remaining vehicles -- Mack estimates less than 1 percent -- still have good, original wood. The rest need the help of a master woodworker like Mack to replace it or bring it back to life.
The process is meticulous and time consuming. There can be upwards of 64 wood pieces on a vehicle. Very few are straight or square; most bend in two directions, and some have a twist.
Woodie history
- The first woodies were produced in the late 1920s.
- Early wooden vehicles were light delivery trucks assembled by teams of carpenters.
- Almost every carmaker built a small numbers of woodies; Ford and Mercury mass-produced them from 1949-51.
- Of the estimated 94,000 built during those years, only 5,000¬-8,000 remain. Production ceased in the 1950s due to high cost and low resale value.
Mack online
Mack uses a hand-crank press to laminate and shape replacement wood. He then uses jigs, patterns and templates to dictate where to drill holes, round corners or router interlocking pieces.
"I realized getting the jigs right was the key, and I've worked really hard to make them accurate," Mack says. Pieces are accurate to the originals to within 1/64 of an inch, he says.
Once varnished and installed, even judges at car shows cannot tell if the wood is original, and many of Mack's customers have won "best wood" awards.
Mack completes an average of 10-12 full wood sets a year and ships them all over North America -- usually without even seeing the cars. A set costs around $14,600, and his customers are typically former California surfers like him or wealthy collectors in the Northeast.
The rarity and beauty of a restored woodie can cause people to behave in strange ways, Mack says.
"Four out of five drivers will ignore me, but the fifth loses it and will let go of the wheel with both hands and wave at me," he says. "I've been run off the road, literally, by people waving at me."
Mack drives a 1950 Ford woodie wagon, even though it's not well suited for the Pacific Northwest. For one thing, "Driving in the rain can make the wood swell," he says.
He drives it, though, because he loves woodie wagons. The same passion fuels his business.
"You don't do this because you will get rich," Mack says. "With a certain number of years, and some effort, you can make a living at it. But you have to have some kind of attachment to them."
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