Tabla de contenidos para September 2014 en Rod & Custom

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…

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…

In the square world a person can earn a nickname for any number of reasons, and none of them have to be related to anything as cool as owning a certain kind of car. The weird guy named Clay who rides the bus to work every morning and eats cabbage burritos like clockwork earns the moniker “Gaseous” Clay. The Detroit resident who moves to Northern Michigan’s Upper Peninsula will soon be called a Yooper. Now gearheads on the other hand have to do something a little more momentous than pass gas in public or move to another region of their state to earn recognition. In the gearhead world it takes owning a string of a particular make of automobile to earn a distinguished title. Take Bob Wells of Laguna Beach,…

Back in the Apr. ’12 issue of R&C we demonstrated a time-tested technique while woodgraining the dash rail and garnish moldings of our friend Sam Strube’s ’30 Model A coupe. On a hobbyist level, success was achieved in Strube’s residential garage, using the latexgloved hands of his own mother who’d actually done the job once before—back in the ’70s. Around that same period, I was doing a fair amount of ’graining myself, and in fact I’d even taught it once as part of a seminar at the old hometown paint store. Strube knew that, so I was invited in to bring his mom back up to speed. Before the refresher course was completed, however, she took off like a fish—in familiar water—without looking back. Sometimes we’ve got to go with…

I first came across a photo of this roadster when I bought a print of it from George Barris. I was instantly in love. That color image can’t get much more pure ’60s, featuring the hot rod pictured in the above large photo with a bikini-clad girl laying on a longboard resting atop the dark aqua blue roadster. When one of the Barris books about the ’60s was first published I learned that this roadster was owned by Skip Barrett. I knew of Barrett as an employee of both Barris and Roth in the ’60s, but never knew of him as building or even having a hot rod. A few years later I stumbled upon a bright red roadster at the Throttlers yearly picnic in Burbank. I quickly learned from…

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…

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,…

Call it a reliability run, a rod run, or whatever, getting out and driving hot rods and customs is what we build ’em for, and the Hot Rod Roundabout is one of the best we’ve had the pleasure of attending. Following on the success of last year’s inaugural event, flyers went out for the second Roundabout a couple of months before the date, set for the Saturday of Easter weekend. The route was different, though still around 100 miles, but the ethos was the same—no hard and fast rules on traditional-only participating cars, but just a bunch of like-minded hot rodders who enjoy driving their cars. That said, the majority were traditional, but there was also a smattering of radial tires and alloy wheels, and even one independently suspended roadster,…

In the late ’60s, most of the guys at DeKalb County High School were into Corvettes, Tri-Five Chevys, and something new called muscle cars. Ronnie Goodwin, however, was fascinated by what we now know as traditional hot rods, especially the Deuce roadsters he saw on the pages of Hot Rod and Rod & Custom, but never on the streets of Smithvillle, Tennessee. As years went by, Ronnie collected more magazines and more ideas for the ’32 roadster he would someday drive. All he needed was the right builder to help him make it happen. Michael Young runs Street Rods by Michael in Shelbyville, Tennessee. Ronnie had known Young for a few years and knew the quality of the cars he built. At a car show in Nashville, Ronnie told Young…

kevin.elliott@sorc.com Russell Gay ARABI, GEORGIA 1955 CHEVROLET BEL AIR “I bought this ’55 Chevrolet Bel Air hardtop in 1970 from a man named ‘Booty’ for $200. I was 13 years old. I fooled around with it for about 10 years, then got it painted in 1984 or so. Around 1994, I started to put a small-block Chevrolet in it. I had a 392 Chrysler lying on the shop floor. I measured it and figured it would fit. I thought that if a big-block would fit, this Chrysler would. After about 20 times in and out, it finally fit. “Since then, it has been through two fires, one engine demolition, and one transmission explosion that came through the floorboard and broke my right foot! The car has a ’58 392 Chrysler…

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…

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…

No one knows exactly who, what, when, or where the word “hot rod” came into being, but imagine standing right next to the person when it was first uttered. The guys who hung out at the speed shops before World War II called them gow jobs and hot irons. But we can pinpoint when another idiom was created that would describe the most explosive, mechanical projectile ever conceived, plus it also became the source of Dode Martin’s livelihood. The late Dick Kraft had shown up at Santa Ana Drag Strip shortly after it opened July 3, 1950, with a contraption he called the “Bug,” that consisted of a Model T frame, a cowl, an engine, and a seat. After seeing that, Dode Martin, thinking he could do one better, built…

Hard to believe it’s been over a decade—13 years to be exact—since the very first time I not only set foot in Austin, but attended what was to become my all-time favorite “to do,” the Lonestar Round Up (LSRU). That amount of time doesn’t seem like a whole lot when you first think about it, but during that period I’ve raised a 10-year-old son and been through a few project cars. But through it all, two things have remained the same: I’m still doing what I love to do, and the Round Up is still kickin’ some serious hind end. Period. Austin is simply an amazing place in my mind—from the people (the best) to the food (the best) to the attractions (the best), the never-ending nightlife to the never-ending…