How about a post dedicated to the ups and downs of the 80s car scene. We all loved the zz top eliminator, but today I would call it an atrocity. This weekend I had the privilege of painting an 80s period correct mini truck, soI will start of the thread with pics of it.
I did some ugly paint jobs in the 80’s including pink scallops on a little Datsun pickup a**** other things. I’ll dig up some of the 80’s stuff I did and post here. I’m sure some day that stuff will be popular again?
Built this S-10 in the late 80s...for no particular reason. The first "tubbed" Mini Truck in my area.
I graduated high school in 1985. I Absolutely hated those mini trucks and pro street tubbed cars with tweed interiors and tuned port injected sbc’s. Not saying i had/have good taste but those cars ****ed. Last summer i saw a time capsule mini truck when i was out if town it brought back memories of good times
No it’s like when you hear a song you didn’t like from a time when you had a lot of fun. It brings back the good memories
I loved those mini trucks! Always wanted one, a Toyota. When I was on spring break senior year in Florida I was walking down the main drag at Daytona Beach, and my buddy came cruising up to a stop light with all our ladies in the back of his lowered 80s s10. I went running up and jumped into the truck bed that was that sea of young beautiful women, and when I looked behind me there was an old man in his car, and he just looked at me and smiled ear to ear like 'you lucky sob.... Enjoy it while it lasts'...... Lol
Yikes, I remember those cruising around my apartment back in the 90s. Didn’t really have a strong opinion either way but I do have a soft spot for those era of small import pickups in stock form. That whole time frame for street rods made me not like early cars, the bad taste lasted until the early 90s when I found old magazines. At that time I was into stock 50s/60s cars.
Painted the following questionable colors in the late 80s-early 90s: 81 Toyota pickup with dual tilting bed - neon geometric shapes over a silver pearl 70 Nova with squiggly neon pink and lime green stripes over a green/grey pearl 78 Malibu Wagon with a scallop fade job 82 Toyota Cressida with Ford electric blue / Honda phantom grey fade job Opel GT Raspberry Red with lime green trim and engine bay I appreciate the time and technique involved with the paint jobs...... Glad the style died
I missed out in those days. Rather than a turquoise 30s Ford with pink graphics, I bombed around in old muscle cars. A veritable who's who that would make current collectors drool with envy. 70 383 Cuda anyone? 70 LS5 Chevelle with a later motor and NOS. 69 Boss 302. Some got refreshed and seasoned with what we call "Day 2" these days. Had a couple disco cars too. 78 T/A for while, a rebuilder from a wreck. 79 Z/28, the 1st car that I ever did disciplined oil changes based on mileage, and it still turned its cam into a broomstick. Sometimes I got bashed for my selections, sometimes I bashed back with full brake lights. Yeah, I went late night street racing vs fairgrounds cruising. Went to 1, the 1985 Hot Rod Magazine Supernationals in Indy. Gimme the arm drop at 1am in a westside Motown suburb over the lawn chair at high noon any day. My most flashy? The Cuda got Porsche India Red with a blue pearl. Made the highlights and body lines look like Faygo g**** soda
I did a ton of street racing in the 80's. Lots of multi colored stripes and harwood hood scoops. I was kinda stuck in the 70's though. I had HiJacker air shocks, Aluminum Slot wheels and lotsa motor. I don't know why I never took any pics of my truck back then. This was 1984, they took this for the school paper. A much younger Roothawg and I had a lot of hair back then. Found another one.
If you lived it you would think so....I miss it. Times were way simpler then. Of course, every generation says that...
my 1st car I restored was Porsche raspberry - pink 57 vw bug, miss billet & tweed & even mini trucks & hope it comes back? my daily by choice a 79 2wd blazer, I'm sure I look ridiculous at 57 yrs old but not in my head.... just respect all car guys regardless the style. still a street rodders down deep, NO HATE we have enough in the world ken
I'd say that it's a grave indictment of the state of the modern automobile that things like surviving Datsun 120Ys should elicit in me something very much like warmth! I thought them preposterous when new; now they seem sane and wholesome by comparison. Likewise, I could never understand why Americans called Japanese 1-ton pickups "mini-trucks" — the term suggests something substantially smaller than a Mazda F1000, like a Suzuki Carry. It begins to make sense today, if you park one next to a current Toyota Hilux, for instance. That and all its ilk make a '70 C10 look like something for which "mini-truck" would be a perfectly rational term.
The mini truck term mostly applied mostly to the 1/2 ton Japanese trucks, which a 1/2 ton is a gross exaggeration. More like 1,000 lb capacity in reality.
The 1980s... That was a very mixed bag for me. I started the decade out working at a JC Penny Auto Center. Then I went into a factory as general labor, then moved into maintenance, then into heavy machine repair, all at the same factory! We were dirt track racing, and I was parting out Mopar Performance cars to pay for my car addiction. Then, I built a Plymouth Road Runner, did some street racing and suddenly I ended up being a tech at a Chrysler Plymouth dealership. I finished the decade at a different factory doing heavy machine repair, quit street racing, and a few years later quit dirt track racing. We bought a house out in the country, played with low key, high performance Mopars (low key rides didn't attract the local Police as much as the fancy cars with custom paint and strange graphics did). The mini trucks didn't interest me at all. I had a real, full sized, 3/4 ton, work truck, that was always working. The wild paint with strange graphics seemed very "out there" to me, but they sure were attractive to the local police. I was not into attracting the police attention too much, but whatever tripped someone's trigger was on them, not me. My early 80s street racer. I didn't need any additional unwanted attention. I sold the car to pay the lawyer fee (and other expenses) when we bought our house in the country. Our daughter was going to start 1st grade the next year and we didn't want her in the school she would have been in. That move proved to be a good one. At one point in the 80s, I worked 60 hours a week at the 2nd highest labor pay grade in our city, at a different point in the 80s, I was unemployed, with a wife, 2 kids, a huge home mortgage, and no visible chance of future of employment. We survived it all!
Most folks that live "out" or "on the farm" for a better term, all pretty much used full sized trucks. My 1/2 ton 2002 Ford 4 door weighs about 6,000 lbs, so the little trucks like that were used for commuters and picking up groceries mainly. That was my point. They were not taken very seriously. Now, the foreign makers are building full size trucks, so they must have figured out what Americans wanted. I was never into mini trucks, mainly because I have had a trailer hooked to mine since I bought it. I can't even imagine how folks live without a trailer or a truck. I have never been without either. Just for giggles I walked out and took a pic of our parking lot at the family compound.
Foreign truck makers have begun to make trucks according to American legislation, which favours heavier weights overall (an example of the cobra effect), in order to sell in the American market. There seemed to be a real contradiction, so I had a look. According to Wikipedia, American pickup truck payload capacity designations are nominal, conservative, and more about categorisation than actual payload capacity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_cl***ification#Notes_on_weight_cl***es. Payload ratings elsewhere in the world tend to be more literal. That said, American full-size pickups do tend to have worse payload-to-gross-weight ratios than Japanese etc. trucks. For instance, for a 1980 Toyota Hilux, the payload capacity is about 45% of the maximum gross weight. For a full-size Chevy truck of the same year it's about 36% — notwithstanding that the "¾ ton" version was typically actually good for about a ton and a quarter. If you take the payload capacity designation literally it drops to 24%. Hence our reaction of How can that huge body-on-frame barge only be a half-ton truck?! Say "half-ton pickup" to us and we see something of unitary construction and based on a front-drive hatchback. The one-ton pickups like the Hilux, Mazda B-series, Isuzu K-series, etc. are by contrast proper working trucks with frames, used by builders and farmers and such. You actually regularly saw them carrying 1-ton payloads. In particular, the '80s Hilux with the 2.4 diesel had a reputation for indestructability. (Of course there exists a perception a**** some in North America that all vehicles smaller than a '70s Chevy Nova — from a Pinto to a Peel P50 — are about the same size. Park a Peel next to a Mercedes-Benz W123, and they're, "Yeah, they're the same size.") Apologies for the tangent.
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