Thread: Whats driving our design of our street rod

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Originally posted by Don Meyer
Are the big rod shops,after market parts & designers like Foose driving how we build are cars or are we designing our own by our adapting junk yard parts to our rods.

Do you follow the trends in design?

No Foose influence here. I don't have cable and don't make it to many BIG shows so, I problee' wouldn't know one if I saw it. Back when I built the panel truck, I just built it the way I wanted. I would drive it through the summer and tear it apart in the fall, ........ back together by spring. Some influences would come from cars I saw at the rod runs during the year, some would just be hair brained ideas I came up with. I think most people thought I wuz' nuts ........ some of the things I did like build my own fiberglass front end, dash, chopped top on the panel truck (first attempt), but it all worked out O.K.

Todays project is too new to be a street rod (in my old way of thinking it's a street machine). It took me a year to decide how I wanted to build it, and only after I started planning the build did I find out the style had a name (Pro Street). I've been out of building for about 25 years or so, so the term "Pro Street" was new to me. I bought chassis tubes pre-bent to save some time & headaches, but find myself tweaking and changing stuff around some anyway. Although building a chassis that has to pass tech at the drag strip has it's obvious influence on the design. I try to limit my ''out of the box'' purchases to things I don't have the equipment to produce myself. You won't find too many junk yard parts on this project ............ but you won't find many over the counter trick parts either ......... To me 90% of the fun is designing and fabricating the puzzle pieces that make up the final product.

And no time line. If there is one thing I won't do is rush the project just to drive it by a certain date. It's strictly a hobby for me ........... a set time schedule would take all the fun out of it.