Rod & Custom September 2014

Most of us have heard the saying “A street rodder carries polish and a cell phone, while a hot rodder carries tools.” I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate, as not only do I carry two cell phones at all times (don’t ask …) but I’ve even been known to carry a bottle of Mother’s Instant Detailer in my one painted car. However, I never go anywhere, and especially on a road trip, without my trusty tool bag. I’ve swapped out steering linkages in a parking lot in the middle of New Mexico, taken a hacksaw to bracketry on the Flathead in my A roadster to ft a different alternator after mine took a dump in France, helped with major wheel bearing surgery on a friend’s ’32 somewhere in Belgium, and…

brian.brennan@sorc.com MAINTAINING YOUR COOL Performance Automatic now offers a line of transmission coolers and accessories. Your street rod may be light in weight but it can still generate a lot of heat within the transmission. Normal driving builds plenty of heat but aggressive driving, or performance driving, can cause the strain to be even worse. Installing a transmission cooler on your hot rod or custom reduces the stress and strain on your transmission and helps it run more efficiently. Installing a transmission cooler is the best way to prevent overheating and stop the transmission fluid from breaking down. Once the transmission cooler is in place the engine and the transmission will not have to work as hard. Performance Automatic trans cooler kits include a polished aluminum stack plate cooler, high-pressure…

kevin.elliott@sorc.com TOOL SEARCH I enjoyed your recent helpful article “Plumbed Out: Brake Line Bending, Flaring & Finagling.” I am trying to find the tube straightener pliers, black with purple hand grips, but cannot find them as directed by the article. The article lists Summit as the supplier, I have looked online and called Summit and Eastwood (in case I misread the article), but neither company can locate this item. From your article research, do you have a manufacturer’s name for the tube straightener pliers? Stan Suddarth Via the Internet The purple handles led us to think it may be a Speedway Motors tool, but a search of their site brought no luck. Classic Tube (www.classictube.com) and Eastwood (www.eastwood.com) both offer tube-straightening tools, but they’re not handheld as shown in the…

Customs are one-off exercises in design sculpture with each one creating something unique and fresh. Once all the welding and fabrication is complete and the dust finally settles that’s when everything melds together and art is formed. John St. Germain of Goodwood, Ontario, Canada, is no stranger to the world of customs, already having many accomplishments under his belt, including a noteworthy ’50 Ford coupe and a seductive ’36 Ford roadster known as “Time Bomb.” If you can gauge the devotion of a person to a particular segment of a hobby they’re involved in it’s easy to see here that where most bleed red, John bleeds lead. This brings us to his latest build, taking on the lines of a ’35 Ford coupe with plenty of influence from the likes…

While installing an engine and trans into a chassis or car where it didn’t originally belong isn’t rocket science by any means, there are certainly right and wrong ways to do things. You’ll nearly always want the engine to be located centrally in the car, unless you’re building a cramped race car and need to offset the transmission for driver clearance, for instance. Any carbureted engine should be mounted with the carburetor base level. But level with what? Level with the ground at ride height, which means you have to set the vehicle up at its intended ride height and level it side to side before even starting to mount the engine. Ride height may also be on a front-to-rear rake so take this into account when preparing the frame,…

As a rule we in this industry are a self-sufficient group. We build our own engines. We do bodywork for ourselves. We build frames. We paint our own cars. A few of us have even taken to trimming our own interiors. But there’s one frontier we can’t seem to conquer: chrome. For good reason, really. Chrome plating solutions contain strong concentrations of sulfuric acid. The process relies on hexavalent chromium and produces lead chromate and barium sulfate, three toxic chemicals that’ll kill you in time. One solution will kill you immediately: it contains cyanide. No wonder it costs so much to have parts chromed. So for that reason I sort of knew what to expect when I asked Don Meth at Show Quality Metal Finishing what it would cost to…