expensive mistakes! internet hotrods

Lostforawhile wrote: "if the laws continue to prevent every scratch in an accident soon the entire car hobby will be outlawed. then will it be safe enough for you? the attitude of lawmakers is we must protect the idiots amoung us at the expense of everyone else."

Now let's not get carried away. The thread started with people who sell cars that are junkers disguised for the purposes of sale.

It then went to "there oughta be a law against that".

From there it went to "there shouldn't be laws for anything".

I'm just saying that laws have their place in civilized society. My attitude is not to protect the idiots, but to protect me from the idiots. <!-- / message --><!-- sig -->

 

FUELROD had what I thought was a good idea, and it resulted in some interesting ON TOPIC stories. But in this as in almost every thread, a few blow-hards who take themselves WAAAAYYY too seriously turned the whole thing into a political or philosophical pissin' match. Geeese...you guys need to go work on your cars or something.

 

Bought my current project (50' Chevy Coupe) off of ebay. Thought I could make it a driver w/ little work.
My fault, I should have been more careful. Long story short, 3years later, I have had to sub it (somebody already cut the crap out of the front of the frame...and left it that way!)..235 was smokin', powerglide slipped to the point of being undriveable...and thats just drivetrain...bottom 3 in. of body is shot....BUT....

It is also what got me into hot rodding. If I would have took more time to think about it, I would have always came up with a reason not to do it. I have learned a ton and I am within 6 mos. of having the coolest daily driver within' 100 miles!!!

Sometimes you just gotta make chicken salad out of chicken sh*t!

 

After my first scare with the '58 (previous post) and a guy who told me his LeSabre was "completely rust free".."even around the vinyl top" NOT (ebay: mesamotorsports). I FINALLY learned my lesson(?) I've dropped a few hundred here and there having somebody go look at a car for me...worth every dime. And ya know I've come to the conclusion that alot of times it's not intentional deceit. I drove all the way to Indy to look at/buy a Continental that was "like new, rust free, completely original". NOT. But still I nice car. I think his description was how HE SAW the car. Fortunately he was decent enough, when shown the disparities between his description and reality, he lowered the price. BUT had I bought it...site unseen.. ya think he woulda refunded a dime?

 

This is a good statement

Here's my whole take on it and I have stuck by this with success for a very long time. Anything that you buy used needs to be rebuilt. it doesn't matter if you buy it from me or a stranger. If you go into any transaction with that attitude you'll never get burned because you will prepared to add some sweat to it. If you have to sort it out you won't be disappointed and if its good then you be happy as a duck in mud. by porkbeaner

I guy from Santa Maria purchased a '47 Lincoln out of Missouri and it look real good. It took it to a hot rod shop for some touch ups and inspection. Well, There was a lot of patch work on the car with inch to two inch bondo backup with beer cans. Everything was was done and turn out to be a cool ride. Just the bucks were big on the redo.

CRUISER

 

To Coolhand;

You may well be right that by not being American I may never get it. You guys seem to take the "freedom" thing MUCH farther than us. But freedom works both ways. Here in Oz, I have the freedom to drive down the road without risk of being taken out by some loser in a badly designed and built car. The law is not there to stop me from killing myself in my dodgy car, its there to stop me from killing someone else with my dodgy car. Nor is the law ever perfect, and even at best is only a harm minimisation measure. The question about how many have died because of ratrods? It is widely known ( among Oz hotrodders ) that our current state of regulation is, in part, due to a fatal accident involving a very badly built T bucket many years ago. Badly built doesn't just cover birdshit welds and particle board floors. It covers cars that are, by comparison to the majority, very difficult to drive. A car can be built to a compromise that the builder is aware of and able to drive around, but when the car is then onsold 2 or 3 times, the driver will likely be unaware of the problem until something goes wrong. ( as was the case with said T bucket ).

Some points you missed in relation to our low road toll include mandatory use of seatbelts ( where fitted ), and an absolute ban on using a mobile phone while driving. As for the rest of the statistical data you reference, does any of it break details down into hotrod/ratrod/production car? If so, I would be keen to see it, cause as they say, knowledge is power. As for Aussies not driving fast.... I can assure you that we do I've got the scars to prove it. The point about kinematics is entirely true though. Escelade Vs A Model? Not hard to pick the winner...

And while fatalaties are tragic, in NSW Australia in 2007 they represented only 0.9% of crashes. Hotrods make up only a tiny portion of the total road mile traveled, and as such I would sumise that the use of absolute road toll data in a discussion of this type is rather meaningless. Injuries and damage to property are a far more significant stream of loss with this class of car. Insurance claims and Small Claims Court records would be far more relevant ( but I wouldn't know how to access them )

Living in Oz, and building cars under the tough laws that we have, it is my honest belief that they are more good than harm. I know plenty of idiots who think that have welder = car builder, and would build atrocious wrecks if not for the law. And I know plenty of rodders who think that the laws are inconvinient but nesecary, and without too much trouble get their cars registered. The cost involved is not what many assume. On my car I expect the cost of required components and inspection to be less than $2k AU. Less than what many spend on rims....


To 29Nash.

You'll die in a well built rod just as fast as you'll die in a badly built rod in a crash?
Stop thinking worst case scenario. If you are in a roadster and you get hit by a truck at 60 mph, then yeah sure - you're toast either way. But most crashes don't happen like that. If you hit a parked car at 30 mph in an Aussie rod ( which will most likely have a colapsable steering column and seat belts ) you might walk away. If you did it in some of the ratrods I have seen driving in videos from America, I tend to think you would slide off the seat and bash your head into the steering wheel. You might not die, but it would hurt.

 

Your definition of freedom does not jive with ours.

We have freedom of action, and freedom from government interference (or we're supposed to have that).

Our two ways of life are more divergent that you'd imagine just looking in from the outside. The way Americans think and live is not like people anywhere else in the world. Australia is likely the next closest, but there is still an ocean between us (both literally and figuratively).

We're just gonna have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.

The discussion could go on for years and we'd never touch on every facet of the issue. It boils down to our fundamental way of looking a the world, and I'm fairly sure that's something like religious belief. You either see it the same way I do, or you don't, and there's a good chance that's never going to change.

Best to just acknowledge that and go away on friendly terms.

 

The interesting thing I see is that in your profile you claim to be civil engineer and on track to get your PE. This tells me you see some value in code compliance and laws to prevent injury and property damage in engineered systems.

 

Apparently you don't infer from context as well as you think you do.

Actually, it's quite the opposite, my time working in construction has actually reinforced my disdain for codes and strict centralized rules.

They are poorly and/or vaguely written, left to be interpreted by petty bureaucrats who don't care a whit about whether the job gets done right (or even at all). They call for earthquake resistance in places where the ground hasn't moved in more than a millienia, and hurricane resistance in the middle of the country.

They change every single year, often in contradictory manners. What was "safe" one year may very well be "dangerous" the next, or vice versa. Some design constraints are rigid and arbitrary, while others are so vague as to be completely unenforcible (if anyone could decode it well enough to attempt compliance in the first place).

The entire affair is a text book example of what happens when a bureaucracy attempts to dictate every single facet of a project in the name of safety.

Some things are straightforward, but ~85% of the code as it is written is useless. It costs man hours and great gobs of money to comply with, and in the end turns out a building no "safer" than one built 25 years ago.

The problem with things like building codes or hot rod codes, is that while a few guidelines do help folks not make dangerous mistakes, the code inevitably devolves into a tangle of rigid minutia that must be applied across the board, as though every instance in every project in every part of the country will require (and be best served by) a single answer.

This de-evolution is how you end up being required to build 4 hour fire separation walls inside a pre-engineered steel building which will fail and collapse after being on fire in any one place for no more than 45 mins. What good does a 4 hour fire wall do, when the building it is inside of has already collapsed? The answer is none at all, but the code is so rigid that it cannot take into account building systems that do not behave in the same manner that a masonry block building would.

Or how you have to have a roofing system which will withstand 90 mph winds, but the door and window codes say nothing about debris resistance. Guess what? That roof won't stay on in a 90 mph wind after the glass storefront in the building has been demolished by flying debris and the wind can get inside and under the roof deck, but the code makes no mention of it.

It does however specifically require that stairs shaped in a round curve have a minimum radius of 30' (meaning a circular staircase descending four feet and covering 180 degrees of arc must be 60' wide at the inside of the circle, making the entire staircase a minimum of 68' across, to go down 8 steps), while a staircase shaped like a rectangle can get by with a landing less than 10' long (the minimum width of a rectangular staircase would be 8').

Or how the minimum required bumper height for your rebuilt Corvette ends up putting the bumper on a level midway up the windshield.

Or how a road ditch in the middle of a land locked state can be considered a "navigable waterway" and put under the control of the Army Corps of Engineers because the water flowing in that ditch when it rains eventually ends up in a river or the ocean.

Or how ordinances can be written to require that the parking area be planted with a minimum of 10 but perhaps up to 40 shade trees, while simultaneously demanding that no plant debris be allowed to wash into stormwater conduits, and that each tree be given a minimum area of 150 square feet of green space to live in, inside the parking area, regardless of the size of said parking area.

I could literally go on for weeks with crap like this. The abject stupidity of the one-size-fits-all approach is literally never ending.

No, I feel the same way about building codes as I do everything else I've discussed in this thread.

A few guidelines would be fine, but it never stops there. I would rather err on the side of freedom and personal responsibility. Many of you seem to favor the nanny state side of the scale.

When you remove judgement in favor of specific and inflexible rules, you inevitably end up with a shit storm of stupidity, contradiction, favoritism, and intimidation.

BTW, nice side step of my entire last post made in reply to you.

I guess even in Germany they know the old "don't have any defense, so I'd better'd change the subject" trick.

The law should be reactive, not proactive.

If you do something to hurt someone else, there are penalties. That's how it was 60 years ago. Actions had consequences. If you built a shitty house and it fell on someone and killed them, you were held responsible for their death because it was your fault.

Now, we preemptively shackle people to keep them from have the ability to hurt someone else. If you build a house to code but use very cheap materials and shoddy practices, and it falls on someone and kills them, you can plead to being a victim of bad circumstances and evil profit seeking suppliers, and fall back on the fact that the inspector OK'd it, and the engineer oversaw what was happening, and and and and. When it's all said and done, a person is still dead, only now, no one is held to account for it, because none of those preemptive laws were broken, and absolute guilt can't be established because an investigation might cast a poor light on the state or city's inspectors, and it takes too much time to go through the courts, and and and.

Suffice to say that the day european style nanny statism arrives here, will be the day I make alternate arrangements.

 

Coolhand Wrote: The law should be reactive, not proactive.
If you do something to hurt someone else, there are penalties. That's how it was 60 years ago. Actions had consequences. If you built a shitty house and it fell on someone and killed them, you were held responsible for their death because it was your fault.



While I agree that many codes are not coherent and sometimes nonsensical in real world applications, I also realize that creation of laws, codes, and regulations in the USA is a very messy process. This is the result/symptom of our system of government. The Founders set it up so that lawmaking is the result of multiple inputs, even if the inputters have no holistic technical savvy like you apparently do.

There are no "reactive" laws and the US Constitution prohibits Ex Post Facto laws. Codes set standards. Without standards you cannot hold someone responsible for "shittyness" if shittyness is not defined.

You, CoolHand, are about as cool as the nuke in your avatar and just as obnoxious. Your insults to our Australian and German brothers in hotrods is embarassing to me as an American.

 

Ours?

In the rest of that rant, you quoted me, so I guess I'm on the outside ,,looking in,, of wherever you are........?????

Ours?

 

Ryan,
I'm not sure the building code analogy really applies to the situation with customized cars, at least from a safety standpoint... I bought my home because it's a beautiful place and everything we were looking for. I knew going in that there were some problems with it and I'm dealing with them as best I can. BUT, my house sits here and very few people other than the 3 of us ever go inside. My house doesn't pass by hundreds or thousands of other houses full of people every day.

The law of averages tells us that a poorly built car will be more likely to fail; and when it does fail on a public road, it is likely to injure or kill someone other than the person driving (who should know better). Don't get me wrong...I am NOT for more legislation that will "save us from ourselves", but I hate the thought of innocents getting killed because of someone's stupidity. I'm sure as a racer you've been involved in accidents that resulted from someone else not preparing a car properly...?

There is another (IMO) big factor in all this. It is so important for some people to be noticed nowadays, that they will do anything for attention. Just look at cable TV... How many programs are there showing people being injured doing asinine stunts? I firmly believe that there are some "builders" out there putting cars together so poorly just so they will be remembered for it. Sort of like "Jackass" on wheels... I'm more than happy to let that type of person throw themselves in front of a moving truck, and I'll admit to laughing when I see it... BUT, when that same person jumps in a rod with no floor and no brakes and does a sideways smoky burnout down a crowded residential street with children playing on the sidewalk, I can't see the humor in it anymore. Unfortunately, this kind of crap seems to be more and more in fashion these days.

Sorry for the O/T rant, but yeah, maybe some of "us" do need to be saved from ourselves, at least for the sake of others...

Back on topic; I think Squirrel and Porknbeaner hit the nail on the head... If you're going to buy a vehicle sight unseen (or don't bother to inspect it thoroughly), it becomes your responsibility to at least make it safe before driving it. The only reason for more legislation is when individuals do not accept that responsibility...