Rectangles? Wrecked Angles? Open yer EYES, people!!

I was just thinking the same thing about the Mercedes lights being used on 50's customs. After the Sniper came out, all of a sudden everyone was sawing their fenders off at a 45º and mounting those ugly things in there, no matter if they matched the styling and lines of their car or not.

 

So, wait a minute here...
You guys are telling me that a "mock up" can be more than arranging a bunch of rusty s**** into a pile on the floor and placing dry rotted bias plys around it?
Next you are going to tell me that my wheels don't have to be painted red.

 

no Mr nuckles your wheels definately need to be red. it it aint rad if they aint red.

There was no such a thing as a moch up before disco boyd started his TV show. Before then we all just grabbed a yard rake and headed for the neareast junk yard or cow pasture. Of course nothin' we ever built or owned was groovy just a pile of mismatched unrelated parts.

But now we all know ya got to go to a lot of car shows and look really close for hours at cars built by pro builders to get it right. If it aint square it gots no flair.

But getting back to it you really need red wheels.

 

i thought it was a good post. i always like reading hacks words. Hes a good egg.

 

If done like they were in the pic that Muttley posted, yes.

But some cars can pull it off.

Some Customs looked really good with the rectangular Cibie ( Citroen Ami ) lights.

And the ****era 3W...
For me personally, they dont detract from that car at all.
If there was anything to nit pick about the front end, it would be the IFS Brackets outside of the bodywork...

And when talking about mixing round & square shapes, who would have thought the two square lights on each side of the grille of most ferrari GTO's would look good ( they are pretty much the only sqare shapes on the whole car...)
But they do.

 

Wow this hot rod building thing sure is DEEEP! also...rectangular headlights ****!!

 

Well, people choose engines for less rational reasons than that!

When it comes to powering up a hot rod or any other type of custom-built vehicle, the engine choice may very well have as much to do with asthetics as anything else! Why do you suppose people elect to run flathead V8s in their rods? Surely it's not for their Earth-shattering horsepower! It's because they look "right" for the type of car that they are building.

Personally, I have always thought that the small block Ford V8 was the nicest looking V8 that anyone had ever designed and built...followed closely by the FE big block Ford and then the big block Chevy and 348/409 Chevy engines! The Windsor-based Ford small blocks are pleasing to my eye from every angle...from their uniquely shaped rocker covers, to their evenly spaced exhaust ports, and their overall proportions. Dressed in appropriate hot rod trim, it is the best looking engine available, to my personal way of thinking!

If ultimate power were the goal, then we'd all be running Ed Pink funny car Hemi engines or something! But the fact is that the motor plays a part of the whole plan when it comes to a car where it will be readily visible, and I just think you oughtta give a little forethought to it is all I was trying to say. A good mecahnic can make one engine run about as good as any other, so it stands to reason that he or she should open up their options to include the one that they personally think looks best.

?

 

Ha Ha...okay, Keith Black then?!

 

If I was drinking a gl*** of milk, some would have come out of my nose

 

Every car builder makes mistakes in judgement.....
That is, if he actually builds something.

 

rectangles, triangles, pentagons, trapazoid its all relative. greg i disagree sbf are ugly and the dizzy is in the wrong spot. quare headlights are for 70's ****gin vans and not enought people look at what there doing half the time. i my self have done this many of times. But i sure do like to stare at some ****ies i tell ya what.

 

Ha Ha...you sounded SO "Hank Hill" right there!!! I love it!!!

Glad you made it back home through the endless ice storm okay!!

 

If you take the fenders off a Model A Sedan, what you are left with is a three dimentional quilt of rectangles.
Looking at it in that way, (and obviously not in our current, new, "traditional" way,) rectangle lights can and did look harmonious to people in the still ambitious '70's.
That is obviously not the case with that Red & White '38 Ford pictured. It has no angular details for the square lights to find visual comp***ion from...

Getting back to the Wrecked Angles, my peeve with a lot of "new" cars is the wedge cut sectioning of cars makign them look like they have huge ****s and skinny Anteater snout looking hoods and grills.
I like the "engineered" look of a Miller Race car, where the shape of the entire is dictated by the reqiuirements of the dimensions of the mechanical parts plus the room required by the driver to operate those parts. Everything else just falls into logical place.
The hood should be just long enough to span from the firewall to the radiator which are located at the immediate ends of just the space the engine requires, no more, no less.
It should also be just tall enough for the engine as should the cowl which also should be tall enough to shield the driver's body from the wind and stand just as tall as the top of the steering wheel since the driver needs to look over but just over the top of both. The rear end only needs to be back as far as necessary for the ch***is engineer's vision of proper wheelbase, weight distribution, Center of Gravity and Moment of Inertia.
These are things mostly dealt with Geometricaally, with Rectangles.

Gotta do dinner now...

 

,...

 

Funniest thing I've read in awhile....THANKS Hack!!!!!

 

Damn straight! I have always loved this car - I have the Hot Rod cover (somewhere) and will post once I can find and scan it. This and maybe 2 others stand out in my mind as early cars that just plain "work" with rectangular lights. I think Tom McMullen's mid-eighties '32 Vicky highboy with the digital Vette dash works as well with the rect lights (even the egg-crate grille insert kinda does it for me!). Keep in mind, the housings used on these cars have slightly rounded corner contours and mimic, in my opinion, the linear sides and rounded corners of the deuce shell. Hack's right on the money with the transition year of '32 as one of the few that can pull this off, too - anything with more curves (talkin' cars now people - focus...lol) tends to look awkward when combined with straight lines. On that note, I've been saving a pair of motorcycle headlights to use on a project - not sure what they are off of but they have flat bottoms and curved tops - they would look dynamite with a '28/'29 shell as, again, they would pick up the design of the shell and add some continuity to the front of the car.

Just my (almost) worthless 2 Canadian cents! lol

Steve

 

Thanks for posting those pics, McKee!!

I like it much better in it's original configuration, with the darker red paint and those "controversial" lights! The only thing I was never too crazy about was the sunroof on the car. The Chrysler mill with the Westlake heads and funky induction looked cool, but the story goes that it was pretty tempermental and eventually got replaced.

Still a cool car, though. It'll always be the first one that pops into my head when I think "Deuce 3 window"...because it was the first one that really turned me onto 32 Fords. Call me a sentimental sap for hangin' onto something I always liked...but guys re-creating the 50s are doing the exact same thing. That car was contemporary and fresh in it's day, and it stood out from the crowd.

 

Angular, rounded, boxy or wedge..

Doesn't really matter. I can state the case that nearly every car with the right set of wheels and a good stance can look good.

I've seen ugly Ferraris and pretty nice looking Fairmont wagons, but a rounded organic rod looks silly with square headlights. Glad to see Lil John jump in with his two cents, that was greatness.

 

I think we oughtta bring back asymetrical bodywork.....boy is it tough to get both sides the same! ha ha ha

 

That's a great at***ude....

You first....

 

Actually, I have been toying with a few ideas and I have some cool stuff gathered.

I think that maybe my next car won't be a circus freak like I have been doing though. ha ha ha....but then again, it is too much fun.....