Thread: Whats driving our design of our street rod

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Geez Don !!!! I sure do like your questions!! For me it is probably a combination of the two, and many other influences as well. I guess mine are sorta like the the old adage about a well dressed bride, "something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue".

I like the old style. Chopped tops, sectioned bodies, channeling, frenching, stretched doors, adding and or eliminating body lines are all things I saw done on cars when I was a kid, a lot of these old school hot rodding ideas have stuck with me. But sometimes new is cool too. I love the reliability of electronic fuel injection, I would hate to go back to cleaning, gapping, replacing, adjusting dual point distributors again. And in my humble opinion the best looking wheels made are painted steel wheels with baby moon hub caps and trim rings. Chrome reverse wheels with a fake knock off center cap run a close second. I also like to "borrow" the looks of bullet tailights on a 59 Caddy and apply them to other cars, on a recent project I "borrowed" the outside door handles from the rear door post of a wrecked chebbie and put them on an old Ford pickup.

I would like to think that some of my build ideas are toatally my own. Most of them are a combination of slightly altered ideas I have seen on other cars and applied to my own project. Awhile back a friend was looking over my Ranchero project with all of it's modifications and asked where I came up with all the ideas. I just shrugged and mumbled my usual response of it being just something I wanted to try. My pal Bart chuckled and told the guy eyeballing the Ranchero that most people who have known me for awhile attribute most of my ideas to bad drugs in the '60's!!!!

I guess I've kicked around on this hot rod stuff long enough to believe another old saying, "Everything old is new again". I went to a car show late last fall and saw a '40 Ford droptop that is a clone of a car my Dad built in the late '50's, right down to the Merc flathead and multiple Stromberg 97's on top of it.

I could never be so vain as to say all my ideas are my own, and I will never forget the things the originators of this whole hot rodding deal did years ago. Most of these original rods were built with small checkbooks, lots of imagination, and countless hours of hard work. So really, I am nothing but a copycat.


The "something blue" is of course the Blue Oval power under the hood. Yeah, I know chebbies are more plentiful and cheaper to build, some of the chebbie crate motors cost less than the machine shop bill on a current FE that I am putting together for the Ranchero. And we won't even get in to the log intake with 5 Webbers that I will eventually get built for this kewl looking V-10 Triton Blue Oval motor I salvaged from a totalled Ford pickup a couple years ago.


The last thing I will mention is something my buddy Randy said one day at coffee when a youngun was asking him how he could make a big paycheck building hot rods. Randy told him that hot rodding is not just a way to make a living, it is a way of life!!!! Ain't it the truth???