ABOVE: Zabala hand cranks his speedster. He keeps an open grip on the handle so that if the engine backfires, it won’t injure his arm.

NASHUA, N.H. — “When you crank,” James Zabala says, “you never wrap your thumb around the handle. Because if it kicks back like that, it’ll tear your arm around.”

Zabala, a 26-year-old shoe designer for Sperry Top-Sider, was crouched like a quarterback at the line of scrimmage. The tall grille of his Ford Model T loomed over him as he demonstrated the backup starting process.

“So whenever you crank, roll it with an open grip like that,” he said with his right hand around the crank. “So, if it backfires, hopefully it will throw your hand off it in time before it smacks you.”

In an age of push-to-start buttons, getting the Model T to turn over seemed an especially elaborate and physical process. Indeed, it is usually unnecessary, given that Zabala’s Ford has a battery and electric starter, features added in 1919, about midway through the Model T’s production run of 1908-27.

Zabala steadied himself and gave the crank a whirl. The engine putted and sputtered, then died. He regrouped and whipped his arm around again. This time, it took.

As the jet-black car chugged to life, Zabala jumped to the side of the open cockpit. He advanced the engine’s timing with the spark-advance lever to the left of the steering wheel. On the opposite side is a lever for the throttle. He notched that up a little, and the engine rumbled itself to a steady ruckus. Zabala hopped in.

Given that many 26-year-olds lust for turbocharged sports cars and German sedans, Zabala seems an unlikely owner for a Model T. It was the first car marketed to the middle class, because Henry Ford’s assembly line made it cheap to build and relatively affordable to buy.

Zabala’s Model T is a speedster, built by his father, Bob Zabala, who started with the engine that came from his first Model T, a car he owned when he was 12 in the 1950s. Bob has restored several Model Ts.

Speedsters were not an official Model T body type. But according to Bob Casey, curator of transportation at the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Mich., people began modifying the car soon after it was introduced.

“There’s a picture of a young-looking Edsel Ford with a speedster in 1911 or 1912,” Casey said, referring to Henry Ford’s son. “He’s got the thing tricked out with a pointed radiator, which not only looks good but works better. The fenders have been cut off, the seats lowered. This car looks like a racecar or what we would call a sports car. And he wasn’t alone.”

Zabala’s speedster, though registered as a 1926 model (based on its engine and chassis), was built seven years ago.

“The body is built from scratch,” he said. “The running gear is from spare parts lying around. We fabricated the cowl ourselves. The wood for the dashboard all came from wood from our own property that we had milled.”

The Zabalas bought the bucket seats and 16-gallon gas tank. They found the toolbox at a swap meet in Hershey, Pa.

“Basically, this car came from a pile of parts we had laying around,” he said.

A peculiar machine

Zabala steered the Model T down a rural two-lane road here in southern New Hampshire. Over the chatter of the 4-cylinder engine, he explained the process of driving the car, which is quite different from driving a modern vehicle.

There are three pedals, but they are for, from left to right, the clutch, reverse gear and the brakes.

The clutch also serves as low gear — there are two gears, aside from reverse — and to the left of the pedal is a long lever that serves as the emergency brake, neutral and high gear.

“So what you do is you push down the clutch,” he explained. “That gets you going in low gear. You put the lever forward, and once I develop some speed, I let off on the clutch and that engages second gear.”

The Model T has 21-inch wheels and thick tires, and Zabala sat high above the road. Maneuvering the levers, pedals and steering wheel, he resembled the man behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz.”

“It’s a tall car,” he said.

Zabala was 4 years old when his father brought home a Model T pickup truck.

“I can remember being in the backyard and sitting on his lap, and him moving the car around,” he said. “He did a full restoration on that one.”

Zabala began driving Model Ts before he received his license.

“A family friend had a big field in the back of their house, and my dad let me take it out in the field and drive it around,” he said.

Zabala was wearing a polo shirt with light jeans. He was going about 25 mph.

“I’ll usually cruise at 40, 42,” he said.

The engine produces only 22 horsepower or so. He has, he said, reached top speed: around 60 mph.

“It’s a little scary,” he said, and he recalled a recent ride with his girlfriend, Mallory MacRae, in which he got the car up to 55 mph.

“The engine is screaming. It’s going all out at that point.”

“You can’t really describe it until you ride in it,” MacRae added.

“The first time I rode in it, it was a sunny day,” she continued. “And I just kept feeling wet, and I said, ‘Is it raining? I think it’s raining.’ And he said, ‘No, those are bugs.’”

They both wear sunglasses now.

“I carry hair things in there,” she said of the toolbox. “I have elastics and bobby pins.”

‘You can smell the strawberries’

A couple of years ago, Zabala and his brother, Micol — the car belongs to both of them, although Micol is in the Navy and stationed in South Carolina — were caught in a Michigan hailstorm.

“It just started getting nasty — nasty thunderstorm,” Zabala remembered, after pulling off the road into an apple orchard. “So we already had our rain gear on, and all of a sudden we start hearing ping, ping, ping, ping, ping.”

Just as Zabala finished his story, a blue van appeared down the orchard’s narrow path and stopped next to the Model T. The driver poked his head out the window.

“You going across the country in that thing?” he asked.

“Going to South Dakota in two weeks,” Zabala replied, referring to a tour by the Model T Club International.

Zabala and MacRae will take the car by trailer to Rapid City and use it for day trips.

“That’ll be a fun ride,” the driver said. “Don’t forget your goggles, though.”

The car has been resilient over the 2,000 miles Zabala has put on it. The only thing to break was one of the gears in the rear axle. Zabala was on a club tour at the time.” We pulled it over to where all our trailers were,” he said. “And I think we were four or five guys, we basically lifted up the back end of the car, pulled the entire rear axle assembly out from it, set the car back down on the springs and within four hours we had it apart.”

Leaving the orchard, Zabala wound the Model T up to speed. He nudged the brakes and kept his hand on the throttle. Although the car was only doing about 40 mph, it felt much faster.

But, he explained, the thrill of driving his Model T, with its open-air experience and panoramic view, had more to do with the senses.

“You see things differently,” he said, “especially in this car when you’re out in the open and there’s nothing around you. You’ll catch things that you wouldn’t catch in a modern vehicle.”

Passing a farm stand, he said, “You can smell the strawberries.”