hotroddaddy- as soon as you become involved with ANY official club you will encounter what you described. If you join a marque specific club where everybody owns Mustangs or Corvairs you will find people trying to project their values on you and your car.

This is part of why younger guys don't care to join clubs because all the old farts mill around and say stuff like, "you oughtta do this or that to your car if you wanna have a class winner." Because old Joe retired from paint and body and put a zillion coats with wet sanding and all the rest over a few months he thinks YOUR car should have $8,000 dropped on paint too cause that's HIS thing. Some quack in a roadster club says the only whay to make a hot rod is to take the entire hood assembly off while another says Hi-Boy style is the way you should rebuild your car.

That's the reality of it. Everyone you meet with another car has a bunch of usually uninvited comment on what you should do with your car. And just like on forums when people ask questions there's lots of people ready to spend your money with their ideas. Most critiqing your car simply list a bunch of ways money can be spent whether it will look or run better is unimportant to them.

Rodders built cars differently in the 40-60s than they do now. Some people choose to copy that style, some don't. We didn't call them rat rods back then but most folks didn't have the money to complete a car all at once over a few months of either sustained labor or check writing.

There were hardly any hobby cars as such. The "hobby" back then was not building a car dedicated to that role only. People worked on their daily driver cause that's all they could afford. Guys bought a car and began smoothing out the body which resulted in primer spots. A 20+ year old interior was usually rags by the time some young guy got it. Often only the front seat had a blanket over it and the rest was stripped out in anticipation of upholstry.

There were no aftermarket wheels and we made do with hubcaps from other vehicles. Cars were completed over a few years as guys drove them. Primer and a stripped interior was not a rat rod it was a car in transition. That's all.

Back then you could find the same bitching and moaning between traditional rodders and customizers. It was simply a question of style and creativity all subjective to the viewer- just like today!

It is very easy to build a roadster apropriate to the guidleines used in 1962 for example. Same for a 30s fendered car or a post war car too.

If you want the tru answer get ahold of era car magazines. Look at cars in Hot Rod and you'll rarely see a full blown radical custom. Most are mild near-stockers. Different hubcaps, naugahyde= (cheapass vinyl) upholstry, some pretty paint and maybe an aftermarket intake manifold with dual carbs. Some cars took to improved looks by lowering and chrome removal. That's it for the most part. There wasn't much aftermarket anything except for the engines and a few chrome goodys like spotlites.

If you wanted something it was either impossible due to lack of technology at the time or you had to do it yourself of explain it to someome who could.

I encourage you go back and study the roots of modifying automobiles and look at the examples. It has nothing to do with prestegious auctions and $100,000 '56 Mercs. It has nothing to do with being able to build a "new" 1937 Ford replica out of a kit, but those cars do have their places. It has nothing to do with 700 HP for a street cruiser, nitrous, blowers, turbos or any of that. People swapped stock engines. It was a time when Chevy V-8s were new so how could there be an aftermarket in selling them? If you've heard of Fordillacs or Studillacs you know that Cad V-8 engines were used in applications of all types. Used Olds V-8s were good for power. Buicks were used and Pontiacs not so much till the late 60s. There was a lot of bolt on stuff for Ford & Merc flatheads and every shop knew how to work on them. The Chevy crate of today represents all the V-8s of all brands used in the old days, period. Not using disc brakes and a dual master cylinder on a rod with a 60s nostalgia look is dumb. By the mid 60s Chevy V-8s were finding their way into rods so......?

In the 50-60s cars from the 20s-40s were just old cars1 No one called them vintage. The true classic car was not found in a barn. They were Duesenbergs, Pierce Arrows or V-16 Cadillacs. Classics were expensive, with custom coachwork built in limited numbers so only the very rich could own them. A '33 Ford was not a classic in 1958 or in 2008. It was just another old car. And who the hell wanted to be seen in an old car? No one except kids who thought 40 Fords and 29 Chevies were cool. Regular people in the 50s were concerned with keeping up with the neighbors trading cars in every 2-3 years. A very tiny minority of wack jobs thought that pure stock old Nashes, Hupmobiles, Oaklands or Essexs were neat. Abandoned cars from the 20s and 30s littered the nation. When they quit running most of the owners walked away from them being they were already 15-25 years old. And in 1950 that was real old.

Owning a dedicated hobby car was not the average thing it is today. I can walk my 8 sq. block neighborhood and see upwards of 40 vehicles over 25 years old that are obviously kept for nostalgia and not transport. In 1958 no one had 20's-30 cars they were building, rebuilding or even leaving sitting around decaying in cities of any size. There were no local clubs or shows and the term cruise-in was not yet born. If you did have a really prefect 1926 Marmon so what? It was just an old car that no one else was interested in. You were an oddball.

Only the kids and the very few men who had the creativity to produce custom cars like Barris, Starbird or Roth and the rest championed the cause along with the guys who like Marmons and Oaklands.

The fact that anyone under 30 is interested in any aspect of the hobby or collector market is amazing really cause all the old farts do is usually negatize them and make them feel unwelcome. Just cause I was fooling with cars in 1962 has nothing to do with anything. Yeah someday rat rods will die out and people will "finish" them. Just do you cars for you and forget what anybody else thinks.