Are you guys that harsh on owners of '32s that were hot rodded in the '50s? Hope not! We have a five window coupe and a pickup both were "butchered" in the fifties. The pickup was chopped the bed shortned in '56. A hopped up flathead was put back in it because it seemed right. On the coupe we un-filled the roof, un-channled it, un-filled the cowl vent & filled three different pairs of tail light holes. If I looked at it for three years I never could have invisioned it on wires, one flathead was all I needed to feel like a real hot rodder.
Don't get me wrong with all the fiberglass parts out there now I hate to see big money owners have big money builders, buy big money restorations as a starting point for a radicaly customized street rod.
GRAYBEARD
I can't speak for others when I say, no, I'm not hard or antagonistic to older rods done 'back in the day'. The ethos then was; take an old inexpensive car and modify it to the style of the time. In short you used what was a plentiful and cheap resource to express yourself, impress your friends, and get girls.
With the passage of time the original resource has dwindled. The restorer, absent when hot rods were first being built, has entered the market-place. The restorer now competes with the rodder. Some kind of equillibrium is/has occured when even most rodders will now look at a mint or even not-so-mint car and declare ; 'this car should not be rodded'.
Add to this mix the advances in modern materials (fiberglass), the mass production of affordable hot rod bodies, and a considerable amount of pressure is taken off the market for cars for the use of rodders. If we also factor in that many 'Rodders' today are not real Hot Rodders at all, but poseurs who enjoy the trappings of the Hotrod but without the commitment of lifestyle, we find that for such 'rodders' the car can be fiberglass, the poseur is largely content to 'pose' and is not so concerned he be 'real-in steel'.
The way I see the situation at the present time is; the biggest threat to 'mint cars' is the hot rod client who wants to be able to pose his 'new beaut all steel from an original body' hot rod in front of his peers (who are driving fiberglass replicas), to say in essence; I am the original deal, I am the authentic hot rod, I have something you don't.
This is a far cry from the days when most rods were built, from a cheap and plentiful resource in their owners garage, . The original hot rodders had something to be proud of, (even if sometimes it was poorly done). They could proudly claim that their creation was made by their own hand.
Now, money talks, and the so called 'Gold Chainers' and there like simply instruct a builder to 'get this type of car, and do what you do'. Naturally, the builder gets the best car he can (often restored) to hot rod or customise, he does this of course to keep the cost as low as possible to his customer (we all know the cost of bodywork).
Again this is a far cry from the guys who would look for old iron (even cheaper and more plentiful), these guys would buy the also rans and spend more hours on the body than was probably wise. If they couldn't afford the good cars they had little choice but to spend their sweat instead. These guys used up old iron that even the restorers wouldn't want.
And now we are in the situation of mint cars under threat from rodders.
What kind of hotrod will the rodder build? Yup! The same kind of 'traditional rod' everyone else has. He will not even think about trashing seventy-odd years of a surviver cars history in his quest to be the same as his fellows. He won't break new ground in design or performance or paint. For him the epithet 'same-old-same-old' would apply. My question is why?
Why destroy or transform a wonderful piece of automotive history to build something so ordinary as an 'old fashioned hotrod'. Thats what fiberglass is for!
To top this argument off I find it curious that Mr Drake is producing a '40' coupe for the market place. Indeed, something for everyone.
