Art & Inspiration You’re Covered: Hot Rodding Magazines from 1945-1975

Very cool. I have a library of 1948 through mid 70s myself. Couldn't do without it. The 75 cutoff makes more sense to me than the 64 on the HAMB but that's just me.

 

Incredible!!! Just visited the website and it's really a treasure. Thank you, Richard.

 

You can look at all the Popular Mechanics magazine online. The issues during and after the war years are the most interesting. Mainly you had to make everything your self, not like today just buy everything. You can read the internals of the PM also.

 

Wow thats pretty incredible. So much time invested. Great archive to visit time to time for inspiration.

 

A major undertaking!! I have been collecting mags for the past 18 years, and just the photos on E-bay alone I comitted to memory!!! I have a few of the missing issues, should be snowed/iced in this weekend, so maybe I can clear off the bed to dig through the closet. It is a hot mess!

 

Wow, what a great resource. Thanks!

 

Have almost all of those.

 

All --

I'm glad you all are enjoying the site. Joey, thanks for putting the news out there.

Your comments have generated lots of positive emails, but more importantly you all are sending along images that I'm missing. It's a great way to document our history as represented by the magazines we all grew up with.

As Kan Kustom noted, it was a challenge to figure out a reasonable time period to cut this off. 1964 as a cutoff would miss all the great magazines from the 60s. 1972 would have been logical, as I think many of us felt that the automotive world took at bad turn going into 1973. But street rodding publications were just getting started in the early 70s, and I wanted to make sure that trend was well represented. So I picked 1975. It's arbitrary, but I don't think it detracts from the usefulness of the site.

I also recognize I've skimmed around the edge of drag racing publications. I'll be adding a few more in that category as we go. I'd love to get my hands on images of Throttle!! Help me out, guys!!

Richard

 

A lot of work. Very well done. Best I've seen. Haven't seen a lot of those covers in many, many years. Thanks Richard.

 

Nice..........and yet there is no mention of my favorite....Rodder's Digest. I'm amazed.

 

Rodder's Digest doesn't make the cut, it started in 1981.

 

Thanks for sharing! What a major project!

 

I have many of the magazines you show in the beginning of this post.
They are all in boxes and every once in a blue moon I look at them.
I never sell or trade any of the old magazines because the memories to me are more important then the dollar value for each one.
Jimbo

 

Poking through the images posted here I came to a yellow cover featuring a nice woody for an August issue of Rodding and Re-styling magazine and noticed it had a teaser on the cover that read "Increase Efficiency 300%, LIQUID-COOLED BRAKES".

Um ... wait, what? There was such a thing as liquid-cooled brakes? How the heck did THAT work?

 

I dont know...I get my old drummies wet and it a game of "is god listening today?". You know how thats played. Step on the brakes and pray real hard.

 

Wow, I didn't realize this was the same guy who did the R&C index. I sent him a scan of an issue he was missing a few weeks ago.

Sent from my GT-P3113 using The H.A.M.B. mobile app

 

Wow...Best source of info a guy can have, I have two rooms in my house devoted to my library, was more but I lost some due to water damage, had a gal that I was going to let move in a few years back and she informed me that I was going to get rid of some of my magazines to make room for her cloths .......Still have my magazines and I have no problem being single....,[/IMG]

Sent from my QTAQZ3 using The H.A.M.B. mobile app

 

I've been pondering this a bit. I'm assuming it would have been drum brakes back in the late 1950s, and I'm wondering if they built brake shoes that had coolant passages so you could pump a fluid through them and then on out to a radiator of some sort to dissipate the heat from them. The plumbing would be a nightmare with at least a few flexible hoses at each wheel and coolant lines connecting them all to a central reservoir, pump and radiator set up.

And that cools the shoes rather than the drums which I suppose would help a bit, but I'm not sure how you would cool the drums other than to spray the outside of them with water for an evaporative cooling effect. Spraying the drums would be quite a bit less complicated, but it would require you to top off a reservoir pretty frequently.

I'd love to hear from somebody who had a copy of that August 1957 issue of Rodding and Re-styling magazine to see what they were actually doing. The fact that the idea sounds so weird suggests that it was never a commercial success and might not have been practical for anything other than some sort of highly specialized purpose.

 

Just dug out the 8/'57 R&R. It was a Raybestos experiment with liquid cooled shoes circulating thru piping & into the engine cooling system. Honest ....

 

Just what we'd need, nice slippery anti-freeze on our brakes if they sprung a leak!

 

So I was on the right track when I speculated about liquid-cooling the brake shoes, but I was speculating that it would be a separate cooling system from that used for the engine.

In any case it isn't difficult to see why this idea might not have caught on all that well. With all those flexible lines bending and flexing as the car turned and went over bumps and such there would certainly be a lot of possible points of failure for the vehicle's cooling system. And somehow I think the cost would have been higher than just using larger diameter, wider, finned brake drums to get improved braking.

Thank you for posting the answer. It was interesting.

 

Some really neat covers.....some really neat hot rods!
p.s. Lots of traditional info.....back in 1973!

 

Richard, I was just looking at the 'site and noticed something about the Feb. '73 issue of Street Rod. It is in fact numbered Vol.3 No. 1&2.

 

Fordors, great catch!! I guess they didn't publish a January '73 issue, but combined it into the February issue. Very helpful, thank you!!

 

Cool resource, love the bar graph. Thanks Richard & Joey!

 

I was just at my parents house last night and got out my Dad's magazines for the first time in at least 30 years. He started buying Hot Rod when he was 9 years old in 1950 and kept it up until around 1964. There is a Motor West from 1962 with an address label for Gearhart Pontiac in Redlands CA. My Dad was like, Oh yeah, I forgot I worked there for a while as a mechanic. If you want Motor Trend covers, I can get you off to a good start. Nice Work!

 

Excellent site! Back when I had the ClassicDragsters.com website I thought about doing something with my old magazines. I was going to scan the complete magazines for the ones that are no longer covered under copyright. I have a spreadsheet of the magazines I own, most of which were my Dad's from that late '50s-early '60s. He liked customs mostly, judging from his magazine collection.

 

Fellow hot rod & custom car magazine lovers --
I continue to receive additional images and information; thank you very much!!
I just added Best Hot Rods (a series of one-shot or annual publications from Fawcett) and what little information I have on Sports Cars and Hot Rods (only two issues published).
Next in the queue - Modern Rod ('64 -'66), Drag Strip ('66 - '69), How to Hop-Up Your Engine ('59 - '63) and Rodder & Super Stock (''65 to '74).

 

Is one supposed to be able to click on a title and then search the content of a particular issue?
If so please let that info be known.