So I had a run in with one of those elitist resto as#holes. I was at the Ford place in Orange getting parts for my 48 and there was this guy ordering parts for his 31 Phaeton. So I ask him if he had any parts for sale as I also have a 31 2-door sedan with roof cut off and winshield chopped down. All this jerk off says to me is oh I wouldn't sell you anything anyways I don't wan't you ruining any other cars. Even the guys at the counter looked surprised. So here's what I did. First off I stayed calm and polite, then I said oh man I wish I'd met you earlier as the car I was working on was restored and all the parts I took off like the perfect fenders and the perfectly restored running gear I would have given to you. This peaked his interested wondering what happened to them. I told him the fenders I ran over with my truck to flaten them and I torched everthing else up to take to the scrap yard. As I didn't think they were worth anything. HA HA HA You should have seen the look on his face, he looked like he just shit his pants, I just laughed as none of it was true of course
If guys like that could see what aircraft restorers do with crap that has been under water for 60 years. These dudes make them FLY! People like that need to put their man pants on and relax.
That turd is rare these days...about 30 years ago and more, restorers really hated "rodders" of any kind - but in the past 3 decades either they've mellowed, died off, or come to appreciate what a truly well-built hot rod represents - somebody interested in cars...just like them. dj
speakin as someone with restored cars AND rods, i can say that guy is just ignorant. hell most of the stuff getting the treatment nowdays guys like that wouldnt consider as restorable...
and then you wonder why some restorers have a bad opinion of hot rodders? you are just as bad as he is.
You realy have to be able to walk on both sides of the fence on the Pre 1949 stuff without pissing off anyone, that's how you wind up with cars & parts.
Next time. ask him what he has,what he did in restoring it,get him started on talking about what he's interested in. Then,at the very least,he might change his mind that all rodders are jerks, maybe you'd learn something new about car history or how it used to be done when you couldn't buy stuff off the shelf and maybe even score some parts or a car. Everybody has a story.
Yeah, you showed him. He'll learn to treat rodders with respect now, after you showed him the way. Trying to remember...something in Bible..turn cheek or something...what was that...? Tucker
Believe it or not, I started out as a restorer. (I can hear it now, "my name's Mark and I'm a Hot Rodder".) So I'm restoring this very much thrashed Model A coupe that ended up having to have half of the panels replaced, I got a coat of Kewanee Green on it over the patch panels I got from Ray Gollahon that fit , kinda, and installed this half worn out 31 A engine that had 4 new pistons and a .040" overbore. Two $5 seats from a junked Opel Kadett and I was styling. Cost? $700 in 1977 and 4 years of work, most of the time it wasn't very productive. I was learning. Bigtime. Read every issue of R & C until they folded. Bought a new torch set at Layman's Welding in Grand Rapids. Tied the tanks to the birch tree in the back yard and learned how to hammerweld. Took it apart and then wleded it back together. Learned how to paint. Faast forward to 1977. So I'm driving the wheels off this coupe and all of the restorers in the "Grand A" club...(I figured out what the "A" stood fore-- (_Y_) hole....) are literally whining that "I'm ruining this car"...the one that they said was "too rough"...But they wouldn't drive their cars down those roads out on the rural route..."it will get dirty". I'm smiling and having a grand time. Drove that coupe for 2 years..the only vechile I had at the time. Including a one way trip to Newport , RI...1000..to do active duty in the Naval reserves... Today a car like that, in the condition I hauled it off Beaver Island for (paid $25 for it) would be on the HAMB or EBay for $5k....the $35 parts car I bought for the necessaryt pieces would be worth probably $3500...torch channelled and as straight as it came out of the Briggs Body Shop in Detroit City in 31... All I knew is that I couldn't afford a nice car..and got one that I could afford to work on. I gave it to son Dan who's now 13 for Christmas last year, along with a new set of patch panels. We'll get it straighter than it's ever been in it's past history. He asked me if he could paint it flat black....and then asked about painting flames. Last month he starting reading Old Skool Rodz...and dragged me to Finishmaster so I could get him a Mack 00 brush...he striped his cell phone cover.... We gotta keep an eye on this kid so he doesn't get recruited by the restorers....
I've run into that kind of snobbery before... I usually just tell them "if you like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - that's good for you.... " A li'l humor can disarm most snobs. You can also remind them that if it wasnt for us, most of this crap would end up rusted or crushed into oblivion.
Well you are actually supposed to pray for people like that to go to heaven. HOWEVER...I kind of bend the rule & I tend to pray that they get taken that very day!The sooner the better. Gary 4T950 Chevy Guy
Ran into a guy like that at a Caddy show, some months back. What started out as a civil conversation, turned to crap when he told me of a '54 CDV that had been sent to the crusher, because the frame was rusted and the panels were bad; I said I'd have rebuilt it in my fashion and made a cruiser out of it, and he told me in no uncertain terms that he would rather see the old junk mashed up, than to see it made into a "hot rod". Some people!!
Perhaps if more cars were done well in the traditional hot rod style and not hacked together self proclaimed "rat rods," there wouldn't be such a rift between teh rodder and restorer groups.
I dunno, the snobby restorer has been around a lot longer than the "rat rod" fad has been. I'd rather see a car rodded than sitting rotting or crushed, myself.
I know where they went, ever been to Hershey Pa? I've seen signs that read "won't sell to rodders" and even cars for sale with signs threatening to turn it into a hotrod if not sold this weekend! On the other hand, some of these TV shows don't help either, I mean I'm a die hard rodder, but even I was a little pissed when Boyd took a perfect old model T and stripped everything away but the body, with his facility's why not find a body and leave the restored T for the "squeekers"? To us it was creation, but to any resto guys watching it was destruction, it would have been a much more positive rodder image to show how most of us actually do it, with something that no restorer in his right mind would ever touch. There's plenty of room for both, and I think we need to respect each other a little more.
Before rat rods, it was awful pastel colored pro streets, and before that it was the gaudy Fad T's. No wonder they don't like us, we can't even stand us.
When I was a Kid, we had a guy that would drive thru the neighborhood, with a 1915? T, and would take pictures of us in it. So anyway when we got the 32 Tudor we needed some parts. "Hey you Fuckin Hotrodders get out of here!!!" When he died, his whole shit sold for $1700, was like hotrod heaven. Today worth like 2K..We got our parts!!!..... This was in 1957.....OLDBEET
Can't be mad for people with different opinions,at least they are keeping the old steel alive ....Better than the people that have no idea what they have and send it to the crusher...
Guess this is a good time to tell the story about the local guy with the restored 1926 Rolls-Royce. Nice car, you don't see many Springfield Rolls coupes, and he really enjoyed working on this thing, would bore you to tears with the same old stories about parts of the engine rebuild. One day he stopped by the shop, he had been cleaning out some old stuff and knew I liked old race cars. I got a run of Hot Rod magazines he has bought new October 1948 - 1952, and CT News, the SCTA newsletter from 1948-1950. It pays to be nice to old car guys.
Like the clown down the road from where I have my stuff stashed who scrapped a nearly complete '55 Imperial last week? Taillights, 331 hemi with the good heads, and all. Probably $3000 in parts up in smoke for maybe $200 scrap price. Gone before I could even ask about it.
You know alot of these guys have their clicks with MTFCA and whatever. They get the nearly complete, not to be seen by the hot rodder type, stored for 30 years by so in so in his barn/garage, "just needs the dust wiped off" cars. They pay BIG dollars too!!! When the wife unloads on him and it sits for another 5 years, who are they getting the parts to complete it from...US. Why, because they're cheap. We don't want them. I have a shitload of T parts that I have collected through various transactions just to complete one fuckin body. I actually am wasting my time with the $5-$20 shit that I have to take pictures from every damn angle to make them happy, reply to some of the craziest e-mails and phone calls, find a box, and the rest of the drill. It doesn't really pay off...and all I'm trying to do is to pay for this 26-27 Coupe body that is in pieces from all over, and is just plain fucked up. I saved something...a body AND the guy buying the parts from me's ass from his wife "It was only $5 sweetie"!!! I'm going to stop going through my e-mails now Mike
Isn't this the place where the people are "hoodlums"? I don't give a shit what some guy might think about what I do to MY CAR. When I got my Dodge some bloke here who's into DeSotos in a big way said to me "hope your not gonna ruin it by putting different hubcaps on and changing the grille". None of your fuckin business man! Yeah I changed my grille, but mines got disc brakes on the front end, and the steerings all fixed. His is a 50 year old peice death trap.
resto guys .......fuck em! dont be nice to em ,rub it in that whilst they are drivin a restored classic they usually dont go any good ,stop or turn corners at all ,or ignore em they will be dead soon enough drivin those death traps
I don't know what it is, but over here the restorers still hate us hot rodders. I really don't mind restored cars, hell I want a restored 1927 T they just look cool putting down the road. Meet them at swap meets all the time, they want everything for 10 bucks, but will sell the same thing to his mate for top dollar. There still seems to be a race between us for the 'good' parts. Though they seem to be leaning toward more pristine parts and leave the stuff I (we) can fix up. I worked in a restoration shop for a while, a guy bought in a pile of rust particles. Said he paid over $1 mill for it all, fix it. The guys there are awesome, it turned out to be an early Bugatti that drove out the door almost two years later after another large chunk near $900g on top. Awesome car, awesome dollars and no way Id do it even if I had the money. To each their own. (Except when it comes to calling my car a RAT!)
One thing that might be worth considering, is that the tree-hugging enviro-whackos would like nothing better than to see all old cars off the streets, and everyone driving around in hybrids. It would make sense to me for rodders, customizers, and restorers to find some common ground for the sake of the old car universe. They are crushing old cars in our county, because our Quorum Court passed an ordinance last November against "junk" cars, old buildings, brush piles, and any place "mosquitos, rats, mice, spiders, snakes, and other vermin" can be found. The ordinance does not apply to towns and cities, but to people minding their own business in the country.
The more people I meet who are full of themselves, full of shit, mad at the world, or bitter, the more I appreciate my dog. Dave http://www.roadsters.com/
Ahhh! This is too true. We need to join together to survive, otherwise the Greenies will kill us. You need to fight that ordinance any way you can. Private property is under attack in this country and it most certainly DOES affect those into old cars. What is total junk to some I'd gladly pay thousands to own.... To the resto guys, we hot rodders often save the stuff that is beyond restoration. Wayyyy beyond! Also pointing out all the new bodies being made are not to satisfy the resto crowd, there aren't enough of them. regards, DJ
Be patient someone on the HAMB someday will end up with his vehicles and fix them. I can go on all day about some of the jerkoffs that throw shit at me. One guy came over and looked at my channeled 33 Plymouth and asked what engine is in it because the hood is on and I said Buick nailhead and he told me I fucked it up because it should have a Mopar in it. I did not dare tell him that the frame is 33 Ford.
The Jalopy Journal
