Hot Rods Todays messed up takes on how hot rods were in the 1950s n 60s

I can't weld for sour apples, but I can tell a bad weld when I see it. The fact that gas and stick were the most common methods of the day (along with brazing) doesn't mean the welds were inferior to what we see today. The real fact is... a shitty weld is a shitty weld, no matter what method is used. Thanks to Home Depot and the rest of the 'big box' stores convincing some that 'even YOU can weld, right in your own garage', there's a lot of crap welds out there that put us all in jeopardy every time we hit the road. A quality build can be made with many methods (like Harold Sperb proved), but a hack is a hack, and we still see a lot of evidence in many of today's builds. To many MIG welds are just glorified versions of hot-melt glue guns! Thanks for the post Marty!

 

I tried to make a homemade welder as a young lad
A transformer, skint wires for leads. Didn’t know what I was doing, just knew it was supposed to make sparks. Well, I made sparks, knocked myself out and popped a fuse.
woke up looking at the ceiling in the dark.
Had an electrical ozone kinda smell.

That was the last of my attempts at welding fame. I guess I’ll stick to buying welders with someone else’s name on the side.

 

Tig welds can be deceiving to look at, and you are so right about Mig welding, it's all about the prep, and technique. Harold Sperb was a magician, and Chief Mechanic at Indy !

 

They end up in the battle zone...Questions and Suggestions...

 

It is a beauty but I envision a round bump in the Top as I'm cruising around...

...look at that firewall eh!!

Ticks all the correct boxes...I mean right is really not rocket science...

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I'm no great welder, but the last frame I stick welded was like this. Not the prettiest, but stick is good and strong. It gets in.

 

You guys have me up deep in the night thinking about the past. I am close to 63 and had uncles that played with cars and dad had a large garage with a pit and chainfalls so car things happened. Since I have painted a lot, I’ll go over some of my memories. Many guys had rods for their work car. It wasn’t uncommon for them to brush or roll on a new coat of paint on a Saturday afternoon after mowing the lawn. A couple of fellows in town got a reputation for decent paint jobs using an attachment off their wife’s sweeper. My first teacher in painting used a blow through gun and a milking machine compressor. He taught me to add reducer until the drips from Off the stir stick created bubbles that hit the-surface at a certain timing. It was deemed sprayable then. There were lots of rods with patchwork paint being in the rust belt. Usually stock size painted steel front tires and chrome wider rears. Level or slight tail up. Taildraggers were the newer customs.

 

I wasn't there either. I was two years old when the HAMB's focus era ended. And I wasn't in the same place, either: my first introduction to the hot rod phenomenon was some Tom Daniel box art in a toy store window in Italy in 1970 — and I've actually thanked Tom Daniel for that. The closest I'd got to immersion in the hot rod world was spending four years of my adolescence in Canada, when it was long shackles on Dusters and such. When we came back to South Africa in 1977 the concatenation of politics and geography put me back in a place where nobody had an idea about hot rods, or indeed about much that was going on elsewhere in the world.

I'll say this, though, as a sometime student of history: a lot has been coming to light recently in the fields of history, anthropology, and archaeology, and it's all pointing to the same thing. Generally, people have been much more connected for a longer time than we've hitherto supposed. More people have been talking to a greater variety of other people and moving far longer distances far more often to do so, and as a result the edges of things which historians used to see as clear and distinct are looking blurrier and blurrier. It turns out our ancestors weren't small isolated bands of hunter-gatherers, but moved between a variety of social scales and modes and stuff all the time. It turns out that "the East" wasn't all that mysterious to the ancient Greeks, but that they and the ancient Indians were constantly looking over each other's shoulders when it came to things like architecture. It turns out that the "voyages of discovery" didn't actually discover that much; and Africa wasn't anything near as deep and dark as all that. Even at the far end of the continent, where I'm sitting now, the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in 1652 wasn't nearly as remarkable as we'd subsequently been told. The people living here had been dealing with Dutch, English, and Portuguese for years by then, enough to have developed something of a fresh-water supply industry, and with Arabs and Chinese for much longer if less frequently. We could speculate as to why we'd been fed the narrative of pristine isolation for as long as we have, but the HAMB isn't the place for that.

Reading this thread got me to wondering if the history of hot rods isn't the same way. In fact something which has been bothering me for a long time is the sort of idea that hot rods developed in their own little world, separate from a wider automotive context; a sort of caricature American Mid-West where there was Detroit and the guy down the street's channelled A, and nothing else existed. That is, the hot-rod world is seen as being sharp-edged and moreover hard-edged, in the sense that things can't get through from the outside. I don't think it was that way at all. A lot of things fed into the hot rod, from the "cut-downs" @anthony myrick mentions in post 99, to the cold practicalities and economics of lakes racing and early drags, to all the other forms of motorsport in the world at the time, to Popular Mechanics 'Man Builds Car' items, to what the OEMs were doing — especially outside the reach of direct experience, but only glimpsed in the media of the day. In the same way a lot of things fed into what we today call the traditional custom: from popular futurism to the international coachbuilding tradition. The creation of an idealized "'50s" from c.1970 on was about denying all that blurriness. It's remarkable how it took only the twelve years from 1959 to 1971 to establish a solid cultural conception of "goodol'fashioned." A lot did change over that span, but think about it: it's 2010 to now. Nothing was old-fashioned in 2010. It smells fishy to me, but again it's a fishy the HAMB isn't the place to unpack.

What we're looking at isn't a sharp-edged realm but rather the way a cultural phenomenon like hot rods will likely be both mimetic and disruptive, but much more mimetic than disruptive. (Sorry about the supposedly big words. It's days like today that I miss 3wLarry ragging me about it.) It's mimetic, because the majority of hot rods are built in imitation, with small differences, of existing other hot rods. The differences mean that the new build happens in answer to other builds, so there is something like a conversation going on. Or, you could say that even the least imaginative build has a bit which is disruptive in it, a bit of argument. And it can happen over any time or distance, especially because of the magazines, though I'd expect that more builds responded to recent, nearby builds than we might expect.

I'm of the view that culture doesn't perpetuate in any way other than personal responses to other personal responses to other personal responses etc. But sometimes these chains and networks of responses go in directions where people soon don't understand what's going on. In renaissance Italy you had Mannerism in architecture, with one architect doing something original with a pediment or something and another responding with something else, and before long it's a weird-fest and everyone's forgotten what it was all about in the first place. The hot rod world has something of that, which is probably why it was necessary for Dana to start this thread.

The builds in which the disruptive element predominates are those which try to answer not their builders' buddies' cars but the OEMs, or even the very idea of what a car is or ought to be. The thinking here was a bit different: the idea wasn't to build a better hot rod, but a better car, producing a hot rod in the process almost by accident. I'd submit that these are the builds which could send the whole course of hot rods in a different direction, and suspect that these aren't the cars which made the magazines as a rule. They might have been short-lived and obscure, apart from one idea which a lot of people copied or took further, such that they would get copied etc. That is possibly why it is so hard to trace the origins of a lot of hot rod practice.

Personally, I'm not much interested in recreating "back in the day." I'm interested in what I call the Contested Age of automotive technology from c.1933 to c.1989, when the enclosure of the automobile industry through the establishment of what Austrian priest and theorist Ivan Illich called radical monopolies in embodied automotive technology was not yet a done deal, and other technological trajectories, and consequently other organizational and economic structures, were still possible. I'm interested in the technology we lost out on, indeed in the society we lost out on. That is why I like to consider what might have happened if purportedly long-obsolete technologies were developed in completely different directions to what actually happened. That's what I was after when I asked about the history of triangulated 4-links two weeks ago.

That's also why I don't like sealed-beam headlights. Yes, they outperformed OEM bulb-and-reflector headlights at the time, at least those made down to a price. Yes, they were widely available and affordable, being completely standardized. And yes, they were consequently the headlight of choice in our era. Still, they represented the first blow which did real damage in the aforementioned Contested Age, the first manifestation of the post-'89 engineering culture. For me, they don't fit the ethos. They were the first sealed, disposable, unfixable, technologically unengageable component in what would turn out to be a long series. You take them or leave them, and what is inside is none of your business — just like pretty much entire cars these days.

I won't have sealed-beams on my planet, especially as they happened in a world in which Lucas P100s and Marchal 310s already existed, and a lot of innovation was happening besides. Halogen bulbs came near the end of our era, in 1962. All the ingredients were there. It could have happened so much differently.

On a different track, the idea that the change from, say, a Flathead norm to an Olds/Cad norm to a SBC norm is the same as the change from a carb norm to an EFI norm is a false analogy. The former involves different applications of the same basic engineering ethos; the latter involves a change from one fundamental engineering ethos to another. It isn't enough that both changes happened over comparable periods of time. I'm still struggling to put my finger on it, but there are real reasons why "working with what you've got is traditional" doesn't always hold true. Besides, I've already been long-winded.

 

This car nails it.

 

Especially when it's done by someone with excellent eye-hand coordination in any position. Because I'm an extremely modest individual, I would never claim to be that someone of course. Ahem, coff coff !

 

Reverse the polarity, crank it up on " spew and blow " and you can burn through anything.

 

I would absolutely love to see your library.

 

Nothing wrong with that at all! Good job.

 

This photo came up on facebook yesterday, I thought it was a good fit for this thread. We can talk about how it was done back in the day all we want, but a picture is worth 1000 words.

 

This looks like the FUN we have been talking about to me... Not saying that I wouldn't want it a little nicer, but that has also killed the cool and fun piece at times at least for me.

 

Nothing Can Be Fully Enjoyed Until It Is Dissected Then Voted On......Again..And Again..

 

Really nice gusset and pretty beads. Only suggestions I could make would be to bring the puddle back into the bead at the right end of the top bead. The reason for that is when you end your weld like that and leave that crater, it's the weakest part of the weld. The other option would be to run that bead from right to left ending in the corner.

 

Lots of bile towards flatheads in this thread and a lot of use of the word "never." I think some posters forget hot rodding didn't start when they got their license.

 

As for the rest of it... you are on a traditional hot rodding board. Hot rodding in the 40s, 50s, 60s etc was always about going as fast as you could with the best shit you could get your hands on at the time. But that's not traditional hot rodding, that's just hot rodding. Today that means LS engines and twin turbos, tomorrow it will mean electric motors or Star Wars hovercrafts, who knows.

But this board is about recreating the old shit, and today you can buy a Kia that will give the fastest hot rod of the 50s a run for its money. So if you're in the traditional hot rodding scene just to go fast you're in the wrong scene. This is about keeping old iron alive. That hot 327 that was all the rage in 1963 is closer to the 1930s than the 2020s. You gotta relax your standards for historical correctness just a bit. Old iron tastefully resurrected is always gonna be cool. I'd rather see those big old Model A buckets on a car, out in the sunshine where someone's enjoying them, than rotting into the ground or making up the next generation of Honda... even if you, in 1963, wouldn't have considered them cool.

Any car built today is never gonna be an original old school survivor hot rod, no matter how careful you are to only use 70 year old wires and wingnuts. They're all posers. Why split hairs? Just be happy people are enjoying a facsimile of the "good old days".

 

I agree but I’ll never ask him for directions if I’m in a hurry. ……just joshing, enjoy the posts.

 

At a car show or cruise-in I look at all of the cars. Some rate more than a glance, but I
respect the work that was done that allowed me to look at the cars. I never owned what
in my youth was called a hotrod. My wife likes new cars, I like old cars. My daily driver
is a '57 T-Bird. I also like a heavy foot, hence the O.T. 460 Ford under the hood. At 82
I don't think a change is in my future. You young guys have to keep building cars. Older
guys take too long just to get under a car.
Ernie

 

Ain't stock. 'Layin' is today. Like the internet. B/C. Zinc additives. Eyeballs always waiting to pounce.

 

sorry but the math just doesn't add up. to be building cars in the fifties and sixties you would be in your eighty's and ninety's [assuming you were twenty] very few 16 to 20 year old kids unless you were a child prodigy were setting any trends more than likely copying what they were seeing older guys doing that had the money jobs. building cars in the seventy's was copying not groundbreaking like the fifty's

 

Getting shocked is Traditional...I remember reaching back adjusting the distributor on my running smallblock equipped Lemans and getting zapped and wacking my head on the hood in recoil...what a goose egg...sucks to be a spark plug...or and electrode eh...

...a lonely man...but he's beaming one helluva smile...rightfully so...

Not Traditional per say but part of the Culture nonetheless...I never consider these Oddballs fake and neither does Dana I suspect...they are one offs...many times pretty innovative, easy on the eyes, even dare I say influential...

What the hecks powering this...



It's a Hambers ride or a relative of I believe...I will share when I locate that info...

Credit to Photographer, Owner
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