Random Picture Of The Day
Getting an extreme close up of a car is a fun way to mix things up. We may do a few extreme close ups this week to add a bit of post-Halloween panache to the blog. Today is a 1981 Trans Am that appears to have huge nostrils because of the angle & camera. FWIW: This car is amazing in person.
In the early days of hot rodding, there were guys putting big engines from big cars into vehicles that they had no business powering. Flathead V8′s, Zephyr transmissions, multiple carb’s (sometimes even hooked up!), and quick change rear ends were all the rage. Each hot rod builder wanted to be faster, lower, smoother, and more custom than the next guy. Car customizing was pushing the limits of what could In high school, my friends and I were minitruckers (don’t hate!), so we were all about laying our trucks as low to the ground as possible and tucking lug nuts in the fenders. If some part of the truck prevented us from being low, it would simply be removed. One cool fall day I was building a boxed steel frame, triangulated 4-link suspension, and air ride setup for a friends Toyota truck, and my dad walked outside and watched me work for a few minutes. He then said “This is just like what we used to do when I was a kid. This is hot rodding.” For whatever reason those words stuck with me, and in my mind it holds true. I feel like if you are modifying your car in a way that other people aren’t doing, don’t like, or don’t understand, you are probably hot rodding. What’s your definition of Hotrodding? Who is doing it?
Picture borrowed from:
Once in a while I get a call from a friend that says to me “I have XXX wrong with my car, should I fix it or cut my losses and just get something else?” This can be a really easy question or a really tough question depending on the car and the problem that is ailing it. When doing all of your own work, it is much easier to justify fixing a car because you don’t have to pay the labor. The downfall to this is that it also means you can justify fixing cars that normally should be junked. Well folks, now I have found myself in this position, and I’m asking the Nutts & Bolts Auto Blog readers for opinions. I got a 1960 Pontiac Ventura in trade for some work on a 1964 GTO a couple years ago. It was a complete car when I got it, and I even got it running again, but it is in rough shape. It hasn’t been registered since the mid 1980′s, and it has been outside the entire time since, so finding solid portions of the body is not easy. That being said, I am more ambitious than most, so I pulled the body from the frame, rebuilt the frame and suspension, and set the body back on it temporarily. Recently, I had a friend (homesteadblast.com) soda blast the entire body of the car for me. Ugh. What we found was disheartening. At the bare minimum, it needs all new floors and floor supports from front to rear, quarter panels, inner and outer rocker panels, a tailpan, lower fenders & doors. Yeap, basically a new body minus the roof. All of the glass is broken as well, which is a real financial drag. To restore this back to original, the replacement sheetmetal alone would be in the multiple thousands of dollars. Never mind the wiring, plumbing, trim, interior, and little odds and ends. By the time the car is nice, I bet I would have well over $7500 in materials and several hundred (thousand?) hours of my own labor. It’s value when done? Probably slightly less than what I have invested. The 2nd option is throw originality to the wind, and basically “hot rod” the heck out of the car to suite my own bizarre tastes. This option would be cheaper and faster because I could make my own floor braces out of boxed steel, do some simple bead-rolled floor pans, a basic DIY-style wiring kit, and use junkyard parts for the rest… The 3rd and final option is to find a more suitable home for the car and just buy something fully drivable instead. Ugh. I don’t know what to do. Help! There are a lot of cars out there that belong in your garage, and this is the one that you need the most. That’s right folks, a real Monkees mobile. Replica or not, you would be the coolest dude in the neighborhood rolling in this thing. It makes a great conversation piece as well. The only unfortunate thing is that you have to open up your wallet and remove over $100K to own it. I guess that’s the price of monkeeing around.
You know how sometimes your eyes are bigger than your stomach when you’re at a restaurant? Well I have that problem with old rusty junk cars. I see a car that looks like it was likely deemed unrestorable in the early 1980′s, and I decide I need to save it. UGH. I then drag it out of a ditch, trailer it’s dead body home and unload it into its final resting place in my yard. Around this moment is when my brain is released from ambition prison, and I say “oh crap, what have I just done?!“ Before long I am knee deep in sandblasting sand, MIG welding wire and receipts for sheetmetal. Rather than spending a grand on a solid car from Arizona, I spend 10,000 hours restoring a rot box from the north east. What the heck is wrong with me? Do other people make bad decisions like this or am I alone here?
When building or restoring a car, you absolutely HAVE to take pictures. Here are my top 7 reasons why: 1) Without pictures, nobody will ever believe that you did any of the work (unless it’s terrible, then they will believe you 100%). 2) You will never remember how things originally went together. That extra bag of bolts needs a home! 3) You can hold the photo up against your car and say “look guys, before and after”. 4) It can remind you where you came from, and how you got to where you are. 5) You can look back and laugh at the horrific work you did toward the beginning of the project. Remember when you couldn’t weld? 6) You can post them on the internet and show off all of your work to the world. 7) You don’t realize it at the time of the photograph, but there is always weird stuff going on in the background. It is fun to look for! If you are saying to yourself “This guy is right, I don’t have any pictures of my cars…”, grab a handful of camera right now and go take some pictures. I promise you that you will appreciate it down the road. Just imagine how cool it would be to see all the cars that your parents had throughout the years. Got before and after pictures? I want to see them! Post them up or Send them to me: jnutt@1aauto.com You may not think anything could be more thrilling than the “Pants on the Ground” singing sensation General Larry Platt from American Idol last night, but there is in fact something far greater. A simple internet link from a friend yesterday took me to some fresh pictures of an absolutely unreal Pontiac Solstice built by Stenod Performance. One quick peek, and I was desperately clawing at my mouse craving more. I mean who doesn’t need one of these? It could be the most perfect daily driver for any gearhead out there. An LS7 with 625 horsepower and a dry sump setup, 6-piston Brembos, and coilover’s for that absolutely perfect stance. Wrap all that up with a new tiny convertible Pontiac Solstice body, and you have an ultimate win. It doesn’t even scream “arrest me”, so staying under the radar is even doable. Stenod definitely built this car just right in my opinion. I have to guess that when this car is in motion, the driver is laughing hysterically at how absolutely absurd it is. Well done. I will shut up now, enjoy the eye candy, I know I did. |
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