One reason is "Show Points" more mods more points, another reason is "Cultures" low riders are low riders.
I need to dig out a 60s issue of, I think, Car Craft, that has a feature on a static dropped shoebox Ford that was the lowest I'd ever seen 'til then. As a 10 year old, I stared at that car for hours. I don't know which mag box that's in, someone who remembers it should post it. If it wasn't on the frame, it was damn close. In 1963.
As seen, the cigarette smokers back in the day seemed to verify the low stance with a pack of cancer sticks, now days should we say, more like a match book, to each his/her own !
Paint it pink and call it your "drag queen"............. It was 1/tenth of a percent. (99.9%) The trailer does not drag at all now that I added the caster wheels to it. I knew that scraping on any concrete or asphalt surface would eventually result in some damage and decided to take steps to prevent its occurence. We all know that road surfaces can have wide variations in slope and intersecting grades as well as pot holes and speed bumps. I believe that both my vehicles and my trailers will handle any reasonable variation or discrepancy without scraping any component. When I was 17, in the 50s, I destroyed the suspension /frame in one of my first cars going over a railroad track at normal speed in a lowered 52 Ford. I learned an expensive lesson....... The road to scraping is paved with good indentations
I learned lessons too. Ubolts get cut, lowered leafs eliminate hanging the spring mount plate. So will flipping spring hangers. Trans crossmembers get raised. Over my 40 mile commute I drag about 2 feet. Extremely low percentage Pun intended
There were standards for static low back in the late 60s or early 70s around here. A 12 oz can of pop or beer is 5" high. A pack of unfiltered Camels or other unfiltered name brand smokes was 3 1/2" high, standing on end. Filtered smokes were about an inch taller (the popular 100's back then were even taller). A 69 Pontiac Trans Am was advertised with 3.2" of ground clearance for "That ground hugging driving experience." Our city posted a notice that was sent out to repair shops around 1970 (my boss had it posted on the wall at the gas station for a while), it read: "A raised manhole cover could be up to two inches above the roadway." That raised manhole cover was usually around the midpoint between the track width of the vehicles tires. Raised manhole cover housings did not move, they bent things that came into contact with them. Apparently, there must have been some problems involved. The city made a huge effort to lower those raised manhole covers back to even with the street surface over 3-4 years following the notice. The repair shop/gas station I worked in from about 1972 on sure replaced a lot of smashed low hanging "performance deep oil pans" and we patched up a lot of header tubes and header collector flanges. We don't even want to go into how many times we had to put cars on one of our lifts to "check for damage from hitting something under the car." There were lost of dented and scrapped up crossmembers. Driving a static low vehicle requires paying a lot of attention to the streets you are driving on, and having an understanding on how to enter or leave driveways or transverse other quick road level changes. I do not believe the conditions of most of the roads in the USA are anywhere nearly as nice as they were even 10 years ago. Most main streets through our town are really rough. driving something low (less the the unfiltered smokes clearance) would be a huge challenge around here these days. If your ride is low, and your coming this way, be prepared.
As a youngster, I thought it was cool I could lay a can on its side, ease up to it, pop the clutch and smash the can with the front crossmember. Crossmember was darn near ground off. Since then I learned to raise up the important stuff.
Speaking of manhole covers, in the mid to late 80's my late brother was working on his 55 Chevy wagon in the driveway when he heard a strange noise & looked up as a full size heavy man hole cover rolled into his front yard, I don't recall the situation for sure but can only assume it fell from a city truck or a recycler headed to the salvage yard, at any rate if I'm not mistaken he had just put disc brakes & dropped spindles on the front of the 55 & was contemplating how much to lower the rear so he tucked it in the spare tire well to get some insight, going in was easier than getting it out & so there it remained. Should I say he liked the newfound stance he was seeking? & in his words the ride was even improved. The 55 & the cover traveled together from Nebraska to California & back seven years or so later, & upon his passing in 2018 the nephew purchased the car from his estate complete with the uncommon well-traveled & so called space saver spare still intact.
I've been trying to articulate a theory of aesthetics based on a definition of beauty as the characteristic appearance of that which is admirable, for whatever reason. This is in response to architectural debates in which there has been a resurgence of theories of "objective beauty" manifest in stuff like proportioning systems or "sacred geometry" — a position I find unsatisfactory. Thus in cars we find beautiful that which reminds us of cars we have cause to find desirable. High-performance cars have been built low since the '20s for purposes of handling and roadholding, resulting in a characteristic look which becomes an established understanding of what the thing looks like when it looks right. As a result we seek that look in a car that has performance aspirations, and call it beautiful when it nails the look. The look itself comes out of purely practical considerations. The first to embody it would have been distinctly funny-looking. It is only after the thing has been shown to work, and thus to be desirable, that we figure out the poetry by which to make sense of it. That is when race cars begin to look like pouncing cats or whatever. I believe that the custom phenomenon developed in the mental presence of the old craft of coachbuilding. All the classic custom techniques work to emulate the proportioning of coachbuilt upmarket cars, not least lowering. In customs I believe more or less moderate lowering was initially about getting the car proportioned like a somewhat bigger, more expensive car. Again, the look becomes established and recognizable. Of course secondary effects happen, emulations of emulations, even emulations of emulations of emulations and so on. That's what happened in Mannerism, at the tail end of the Italian Renaissance, and it gets horribly contrived and precious very quickly. That is when a hot rod not only gets away from that first raw inspiration of a functional purposeful race car, but even gets away from an answer to other people's emulations of race cars, and instead becomes an emulation of a "hot rod" iconized. And it's downhill from there. That's when rat rods and "lifestylez" cosplay fakery happen. As an obliquely relevant aside, a little-recognized problem with extremely low-profile tyres is that in any given application they will tend to cause the bottom parts of the wheel to protrude further below the scrub line than would be the case with taller-profile tyres. Because we experience the way a car sits by mentally referencing the tyre sidewalls to some kind of inference of the scrub line, a car on huge-diameter wheels can be impractically low to the ground and still look like it's sitting too high. Getting a car on that kind of wheel/tyre combo to look low can be a challenge, and I wonder if that hasn't fed into the recent obsession with "laying frame" etc.
Yes, the roads are flatter in Ca. Jezz...... My old man was building tail draggers in the fifties, long before low riders were popular.
Larger diameter wheels cure possible scrub line issues. A 27 inch tall 15 compared to a 27 inch tall 20. setting up one now. Rim diameter only needs to clear the brakes. Tire overall diameter will work with 14s to 24s axle centerlines are in the same place. The OP asked why people spent time and effort to build an out of proportion car. that is like asking “why are you dating an ugly woman” Hot Rods are out of proportion, cartoonish creations. Big an littles are out of proportion. Same with gassers. Both are cartoonish creations many find pleasing. Same with lowered cars. My friends stock 57 with OE 14s looks horrible to me. Way out of proportion. But it’s stock. This place is dedicated to messing up out of proportion stock cars. Traditionaly speaking anyway. And making them out of proportion in a way the builder wants.
The Jalopy Journal
