Customs Does your car have a theme?

I am doing a time era theme on my 63 falcon. I am after a 60's look young kids first car a hand me down car if you will. A car that a kid working in a grocery store or a gas station would own. I have added steel chrome rims with baby moons. The body will be done in flat black. I may even add an 8-track tape player if I can find one from that era. I am also going to lift the rear end a little as was popular in that era.

 

My 63 in 1966. Looks kinda like you describe except for flat paint.



Drew

 

I went with a 50's hot rod theme for my car. I like to see a theme (whatever it happens to be) when it's pulled off correctly. It's sometimes hard to stay true to one thing and carry it throughout the whole car. When it's done right - it's REALLY cool. Good luck with your build!!

 

Lifting the rear came later, at least in northern mid-west. Most kids cars had multi colored primer areas and the colors were gray or red primer. I don't remember any all black primer. Different parts of the country had different tastes and opportunities. We tended to rake the front-end, usually by heating the coils. Dual exhausts were a must 6 or 8 cylinders. A floor shift(Foxcraft) if the trans was standard. No tinted windows, something dangling from the rear view mirror(grad.tassle) many times), seat covers and just an OE am radio and a tach. Again , this was in northern Iowa and in the first 1/2 of the sixties and back.

 

Both my 54F100 and 62 Falcon will have a built in the winter of 63-64 Look. The 54 as a custom and the 62 as a hot rod.

 

We didn't paint our 60's cars flatblack in those days. Believe me everyone wanted a perfectly shiny paint. Be careful not to mix themes. The stance you have in mind is correct. Black walls and chrome reverse was the thing to spend your grocery store paycheck on. You seen a few baby moons but only on customs in Ohio during those years. The new stance that began getting attention was the front end higher than the rear although not too many seen that way yet.

 

It is 1958, my junior year in high school and I bought a 1950 Ford tudor off the back of the used car lot in our little upstate NY town. Working in my old man's grocery store after school and weekends I got the money and using the Honest Charley catalog, perused in study hall concealed in my history book, I got the flipper hub caps, the steel bubble skirts and the tube grille. Having made friends with other gearheads in town older than me, weekend nights we chopped the car six inches and put it in primer, frenched the headlights and the tailights, dechromed the car (you reach in through vent windows to open the doors, put dual steel packs on it, and some pinstripes. Not a finished custom but pretty radical for a upstate NY farming community of 2000 people.

Never could do that as a kid, no matter how many little magazines I read and absorbed. But I have it now as I rapidly approach my 70th birthday. Puts a big smile on my face everytime I back out of the garage, even on a short trip to the local grocery store. My wife and I are both cancer survivors in the last two years and now I am pretty much a caregiver for her. This "theme" if you will is better for me than a bucket of anti-depressants. Kind of like finally winning the lottery I guess, lot of years of wishing finally transformed into real steel.

 

Pete,
The stance was opposite in my part of the country down in the snout. Funny the difference a couple of miles makes.

One thing to remember was that Earl Scheib would paint one shiney for 19.99, or was it 17.99. It was less than 20 bucks anyway. If you did your own sanding and masking you could get a sweet ( sweet being a nominal term here) enamal job cheap for sure.

The baby moons was also a regional thing as well. I always peeled the hubcaps off of everything that I owned but you saw some street brawlers with moons as well in N cal. It was a mixed bag where I lived.

Pink,
Your plans sound good. Most of us can live with flat if that makes you happy. It won't be perfect but it will be yours.

 

Not any 60s cars or trucks flat black,not even satin black. Alot in grey primer while waiting to afford paint. Here if you could afford the chrome wheels you kept them clean and didn't cover the centers with moon caps. Lot of guys would paint the hubs and rear axle centers to match the car and order the chrome front bearing dust caps. And in the early 60s guys were still using the push on lug nut chrome covers that never stayed on.

 

One of the funniest things I can remember from that era was my aunts boyfriend driving an early 50's Chevrolet. He had a surfboard bolted to the top of the car. This was about 1968 or 69. We lived near the beach so he wanted to look cool. I will never forget those bolts sticking through the headliner.

 

That's pretty rich. A kid I went to high school with had an old beatup F-1 that he hauled a dirt bike around in the back of all the time. He was terrified of bikes, but he thought it made him look cool.

I think we have all done some lame assed shit at one time or another.

 

Shackles,hood pins,dice hanging from rearview,dice door lock knobs, racing stripes, bobbleheads on rear deck,fake dual exhaust on a six banger just a few as beaner calls them Lame ass shit everybody tried.

 

Primer or at least primer in spots was popular for older street cars in NJ early 1960's.Low buck race cars were more often primered than not from what I saw at the track.
My theme? Old trucks with obvious wear made up from secondhand parts. Not to make a style statement but because I a cheap ass and been driving shitboxes for nearly 50 years

 

Primer spots were common on in progress cars in N cal up through the NW when I was a kid.

Full primer jobs were also common on low buck race cars and even streeters. Most of us thought it was pretty goofy when someone took a car with a good paint job and primered it to look like a low buck race car., but that happened also.

There was a '56 Chevy post car when I was in high school that had been red lead so long that the fella that owned it finally just cleared over it. He said that there was no color that matched the car so well.

 

In 1967 I graduated fron high school. The car I wanted to have and never did was chopped and chanelled A coupe. I owned two SS Chevells up to about 1974. Then life, marriage,kids took hold untill I retired in January 2007. I was lucky enough to pick up an unfinished chop/ chanell project of a !932 Esex Terraplane coupe for short money. Thus began the build of a hot rod that I would have liked to have in 1967. I have been working on it four years now and enjoying every bit of it. So trying to build it in a late 60's early 70's style with a traditional flavor at my age now of 62 years , my first and probably only build.

 

I don't recall any cars running around in primer in the 60's- except here on the HAMB.
Popular around here was the stink bug stance.
Then you painted the rear end white. Yea, white.

 

Steve I remember stink bugging with a white rear in Nor Cal as well.

its funny, the Ol' Man called that a SoCal rake, I spent a lot of summers in oregon where they called it a california rake. I guess you guys didn't have anyone to blame it on but yourselves???

 

funny how just a few yrs changes things. in the mid 60s i was around 10 and i remember all the cool cars in the suburbs of chicago had the frontend up in the air and by the late 60s the ass was up in the air.all the cars ive got are built to a certain time frame. most are built as they may have been run in the late 60s but i got a couple leaning towards the late 50s.but i dont ever remember seeing that many cars in primer. most were shiny paint,but the ones in primer were grey and a few in red oxide.

 

Oh theme I forgot. I gues if any of my projects had a theme it would be got off your dead ass and pay attention to me.

Most of my builds lean towards '60s performance. Street brawler is what I saw a magazine guy call my type of car once, I have always called them beaters, the old man called my '46 a jalopy. Generation gap is what I call it, two men saying the same thing with different words.

 

I'm inspired by cars that Mercs that were customized in the early 50's. From what I've seen on old pics by 1956 the cars were getting scallops, thin white walls so I'm very much before that.

 

It would have to be a 4 track player. 8's didn't come out until late 60's. I bought my first Muntz 4 track in 1966 at K Mart in Reno and made payments until I could pay it off. It was in my 40 coupe. I remember a friend bought the new 8 track in 68 and we had to put this little wheel adapter in the 4 track tapes to play in it.

 

No one ran a car with "flat" paint in the 50's or 60's. The first flat paint I saw on anything was on the hoods of Road Runners in the late 60's or early 70's.

As it has been said many times on here, guys ran primer while they were working on their car as they only had one car and it had to be driven to work or school the next day after you did some body work on it that evening or weekend. There are lots of old photos of cars running one custom tail light and one stock one while being driven while the work was being done.

From personal experience with my 51 Merc with a Metallic Emerald Green lacquer paint job, if you didn't stay after it and polish it weekly the paint would start to look dull because the pant job was probably ten years old in 1963. That was probably the case in a lot of photos guys have seen in black and white which doesn't help the situation when a lot of photos back then were taken with box Brownies and the black and white printing at the time seemed to give the whole photo a flat look.

In this photo of my dad's 41 Ford taken in 1946 the 41 shines but the fender of another car closer to the camera seems to be flat in the photo.

 

I think that my cars theme would have to be POVERTY.

 

You know the wagons you see at the drag strip and at the flats in all the old pictures. (I have a feeling that they may be a little hopped up too) that's what I'm going for with my wagon. It'll pull my gasser project, that's in my head, to the track.

 

Mr 48,
We went through a mild recession in the '50s. I think some parts of the country got hit harder than others. A lot of cars besides being daily transportation spent a little longer getting finished than they would have like say in the very late '50s or early '60s.

I don't recall seeing flat black cars untill the very late '80s or '90s.

I think that sometimes we paint things or do things that are not necessarily "traditional" because we like them that way. We want to be accepted so we say that is the way that it was done. Sometimes a fella just has to step up and say this is the way I like it and let it stand at that. If someone doesn't like you for it I don't see that being a big deal someone else is out there that will.

 

My 63 1/2 Sprint in 1966,

Nobody painted their cars flat black,,this car was blue with black 5 spokes.HRP

 

Hmmm, in Santa Clara, CA 1954 there were quite a few primered cars, but they didn't stay that way for long.

1. Chopped & channeled '30 'A' coupe driven daily to Santa Clara University, flat black.
Car stayed this way for 4 years.

2. Cliff Ambrose's '32 5 window, peach primer for 5 months 'til paint.

3. Bill Souza's '36 3 window, white primer, driven daily, running rod, fast...repainted weekly, for greasey hand print removal. (I bought this car in '55, still white primer)

4. '56, Jim Rose's '48 Merc Coupe, mild custom, 'charcoal' black primer. (low buck)

5. '57, My bud Ramsay's channeled '30 'A' Coupe, flathead powered, black primer for a year, finally painted shiny black...

6. '57, my channeled '30 Cabriolet, red oxide primer. (repainted black primer in '59!)

The Sherwin-Williams store had 'flat black' in pint, quart, and gallon cans.
On the label it said, "Hot Rod Black". This was in 1956. Go figure...

But anything later than '40 looked strange to me in primer...in our parts, that was a 'hot rod color'. (it even said so on the paint can!) True story.

 

My 32 Roadster body is powder coated among many other parts on the car and with the V12 Zephyr engine it was appropriate to call it HOT ROD LINCOLN.

Thanks
Frenchy

 

Im doing my F100 up as a (shop) truck/ pusher
(should i put a camper top on it like Milner?)
Im letting my kid drive it as a daily driver he goes to a school where alot of the kids parents buy/ lease them brand new cars he has been told he has the coolest ride
in school not bad for running around in a 40+ year old pick up truck

 

Grey primer,yes......black,no!