Dented hotrods and nostalgia?

I was trawling through marts real hotrod site and decided to look through the vintage hotrod pictures,now i love satin paint and dents and a lot of people tell me this aint period correct (as if i care)i like what i like and thats it .Mart gets sent pictures from the 50's all the time so it's a great informative site.Now how many satin primered dented hotrods do you think there were in the 40's and 50's ?well judging by the photos more than shiney cars,it would seem that average Joe could build a fast car but not nessasarily get it dent free and painted,some look as though they got used and abused real hard and rightly so thats what they were built for to have fun.Now don't get me wrong there are a few show winning shiny cars in there too but sad to say it looks like they dont get much use now this is going to stir things up again but what the hell.Real hotrods are satin and dented and anything else is a street rod ,i love both but some will take umbrage to that comment anyway the main purpose of this post is too congratulate Mart on a great site the url is www.flatheadv8.freeserve.co.uk/martsframes.htm ...................well done Mart and everyone else enjoy

 

I tell you what, and I know some people will disagree, but friends of mine that were alive in the 1950s, and my dad, said that most of the cars running around today, such as hot rods, and kustoms that are part of the "rat rod" scene, are not too far from how they actually looked in the '50s. The only difference is that nowadays, they are a little more exaggerated in their stance and chops, etc. Terry Cook (built the Scrape zephyr) once said the same thing. I wasn't there in the '50s, so I don't really know. Mart's site is the shiznit by the way.

 

cool web site! looks like i need to send him some pics!

 

another thing you gotta keep in mind...back "in the day," this stuff wasn't 70 years old, and had seen a lot less abuse when they put it together. The crap frames and rusty rotted bodies we use now would have been stuff they would have passed on.

 

I've always felt that Mart's site is a good reference for telling it like it was. Just look at some of the photos, you don't see torn edges, yellowing, out of focus photography in digital pictures. Don't ever quit what your doing, Mart, telling it like it was.

Frank

 

I dunno bout that k&r just look at some of the original photos ,there are big dents aplenty but i suppose it depended on where you were from if you were from a wet state it woulda started to rot out soon after it was manufactured just like over here in the uk,if you had a truck or car from a wet state and a farm it woulda been dented and rusty but one of the ole guys told me they used whatever they could get thier hands on that was cheap then abused the life out of it east coast was certainly different from west coast and california had it's style too i'm more into eastcoast stuff personally but each to thier own but Marts site rocks..........Marq

 

I was there in the 50'S.....then I got to the 60'S, now I can't remember anything.....

 

I agree with k&r, a deuce wasn't even 20 years old in 1950, plus with the war and depression the cars were more likely to have been kept by the same owner, rather than being replaced because it was old, and taken care of because it was the only car. The cars couldn't have been as rusted, dented, and dull as the "rat rods" of today. In many cases, the original paint would probably have cleaned up with simonize.

On a personal note, if I'm building the cars as I remember from my childhood, I'm not building the kid next door's primered sedan jalopy, I want to build the nice shiney roadsters and coupes I saw in the old hot rods and hop ups of the day. Maybe that's me.

 

Today's "rat rods" are about the owner's nonconformity first and being cars second. It was vice-versa back when. This, I believe is the true difference between rat rods and hot rods.

 

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I dunno bout that k&r just look at some of the original photos ,there are big dents aplenty but i suppose it depended on where you were from if you were from a wet state it woulda started to rot out soon after it was manufactured just like over here in the uk,if you had a truck or car from a wet state and a farm it woulda been dented and rusty but one of the ole guys told me they used whatever they could get thier hands on that was cheap then abused the life out of it east coast was certainly different from west coast and california had it's style too i'm more into eastcoast stuff personally but each to thier own but Marts site rocks..........Marq

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No shit. That was one sentence. Right on Marq. Wayno

 

In the 50s you only had one car it was daily driver, race car and custom all were works in progress.If you had custom work going on it was easy to prime the nights work and drive to school or work the next morning. Plus if some of your lead or bondo fell off it was easy to match back up. It was to easy to find parts then to have dents unless they were fresh.even The moonshine autos called "trip cars"always had any damage replaced repaired and painted.

 

BANG! Tony Bones, you just hit the nail on the head.

Ive been pondering the true nature of the current trend in hot rods...and that statement answers to the motivations that have been bothering me about rat rods. I guess the trick is finding an unmolested body thats been in dry storage since the fifties, and building that up. (in AUSTRALIA?? yeh right...... )