This old style "Tub" started out being built from a beat up Model A grill shell , a rusted out 28 Model A sedan cowl and the rear section of some unknown brand 1920's 4 door touring car. Thats all. No body just cast off swap meet type stuff. Every thing else is hand built . It didn't take my friend Epp long to come up with a plan. An early '60s style hot rod. Epp has done favers and helped so many car people through the years that when they found out he was looking for parts to build The Eppster a lot of the parts and assistance seemd to show up for the build. As you can see the quality of this build is A1. All hand built Doors and body parts. He believes the total investment when finished will be less than $6k. What have you got laying around? As you can see it sometimes doesn't take much to start a Hot Rod. Make a few phone calls, hit some swap meets and start building.
A budget A vision Parts scrounged, on the cheap or donated by friends. Thinking "outside the box" Fabricate it rather than caving to a catalog order Garage get together with your Buds to make it happen = Fun and Tradition in my book! Neat.
Now that is taking basic left overs and making a real hot rod out of them Basic and simple but with a high level of craftsmanship and ingenuity. This thread should be a primer for the guys just starting out who want to build a car on a tight budget. Think, design and then build simply but without cutting any corners or forgetting attention to details. Epp and crew does some nice work.
Well my good friend from my Late-model dirt tracking dayes ,Curt, posted pictures of my current project with out me knowing it! Then my good buddy Gary [ who helped me put together the full boogie slant-6 in my Charger] tries to buy it , should we say, CHEAP !!! After all, what in the heck are friends for, ha ? I'ld like to thank everybody for thier nice comments. I've never done anything like this before and really don;t know what I'm doing but I get a lot of advice from my friends. I think every one thought that I was crazy when I started this project[ probably still think I am] but I;ve had this car in the back of my mind since the early '60's. Thank you.
some new photos of the work being done on the " Eppster Hot Tub ". Steering , brake pedal, master cylinder and rear hatch storage cover. very nice designing here.
I see Curt posted some more pictures of my car. Chubbie, I don't think I'll make it this summer as I still have a ton of work to finish the body and that's before final bodywork and paint. I stiil have the one side of the body to build and I have to finish the driveline tunnel. Most of the car is tacked together so I also have a lot of final welding to do.
Very cool! I love the touring car body. I'd love to build something similar to this. The low budget thing is so true to the roots of hot rodding.
Adam F, I was inspired by how the colunn shaft sits on a sprint car steering box, it;s real short. I also wanted my u-joint angles as slight as they could be and still miss my brake pedal assm.. I used a '67 Chevelle steering shaft that I had laying around, this allowed me to use a Grant steering wheel adapter so I could build a faring down from the steering wheel to look like a real steering wheel top. The rest was just exhast tubing that I flared at the top with a exhaust bending machine to give a more realitic look.
Some locals who viewed my car on this site asked about my storage cover. I have access to a upholstery machine and I plan to sew up a snap down tonneau cover to look more period correct. I used gas struts off a 9o's Buick to activate the cover ,barn hinges for the hinges, and the trunk latch from a early 70's duster for the latch . For paint I plan to use white with a blue pearl , the running gear and engine all black, and red wheels with red trim on the valve covers, Interior will be black which I'll attempt to do myself. Hopefully I can get my old friend "Hack" to pinstripe the car in red, "Hack" lettetred all my race cars and has pinstriped a lot of my projects and it was always outstanding!
That car and your build is outstanding. Very inspiring!! Great engineering and craftsman ship. You gotta bring it up to back to the 50's sometime.
seesko, Itook my 55 Chev mild custom up to Back To The 50's sometime in the late 80's , I know that it was just short of a thousand cars there. It was a real intimate affair where you got to meet people , get to really look over thier cars and get ideas for how you would do future projects. I guess we continued to go for the next 5 or 6 years and watched it grow to the monster that it is now. It was just in the north part of the fairgrounds. The last time I went up a few years ago ,it was just to visit venders and buy some parts. It's a great deal but it lost the intimate part of it. I'm not saying that I won't attend again but it's just not the same---just my opinion, like belly buttons, everyone's got one !
seesko, I reread my last post and maybe it comes across as being too negative. I guess I'm old and don't like fighting big crowds and physically can't walk that much . I lean towards small events because of those issues. Sorry that I didn't explain myself well enough.
Some new progress on the 'Eppster'. The dash is almost finished with a really cool insert, glove box and signal switch. the signal switch is the low cost one from Speedway with the outer housing removed and then mounted on flat a plate behind the dash panel. The indicator light shines through the knob so no other indicator lights are needed. I think a lot of us have toyed with this idea of putting the switch in the dash but wonted to see what it would look like first. Check it out. Keeping it simple always looks good to me.
I see Curt posted some more pictures that he took a few weeks ago. I haven't got as much done as I was hoping due to some miserable back issues. I finally decided on orange for the car color instead of white which explains the dash being orange. The dash is a '34 chevy that was given to me. I loved the Art-deco look of it and cut it down to fit the A cowl and tried to make the dash insert reflect the Art-deco look. The big think was I also got a glove compartment using it.
The Jalopy Journal
