Hot Rod terms that are no longer in common usage

"Gorilla"-Really good, BIG. Opposite of "Mickey Mouse"- weak, unimpressive, small

As in "Rance just set low ET, that pass was Gorilla!!"

"That thing sounds like its got a Gorilla cam in it!"

 

Whats the difference between a speed shift and power shift ?

 

All these terms, when put together, sound like the lyrics to a Jan and Dean song!

 

With a power shift, the gas pedal stays on the floor....So a power shift is always a speed shift, but not necessarily the other way around.

 

A digger was a dragster, the Shoe drove it, and the wrench was the crew chief. The engine was a motor, the blower was a buffer. The barrel valve was the brain, and the slicks were either shoes or meats. Going to a drag race was going to the diggs. Hell, do I miss those days.

 

I saw in an old USAF dictionary, the slang term for a jet aircraft was "blow job."

 

(This is rather long, maybe too far off what you want to read about. I'll come back later, and if I see that opinion was against it, I'll delete it, no big deal).

Early Sixties: Nobody talked about their new lakes pipes without specifying whether they were "full-lakers," side-pipes that terminated just ahead of the rear wheels, or "little lakers," that came out just behind the front wheels. Very few guys I knew had cable-operated "cut-outs" leading to open pipes. The wheels might have Moon wheel-covers (but still called hubcaps) or even slotted Moons. But they weren't then called "full-Moons" because there were not as yet any "baby Moons" to compare them with. When the baby Moons did come along, they looked great on chrome-reverse wheels (are these even sold now?). What you wished you could afford was a set of "mag wheels," although any that really were made of actual magnesium were on expensive racing cars. J.C. Whitney would sell you a set of magnesium rocker arms, however, not that you needed them even if your "mill" did sport "trip-dueces" (three Stromberg 2bbls).

You could still buy, though I never knew anyone to do so, add-on rubber whitewalls to put over your blackwall tires, and these were known as "Mickey Mouses". A few guys did get goofy horns such as wolf-whistles and old oogah horns, and in my case, a cattle-caller. Steering wheel spinners and bluedots in taillights were on the way out, but such absurdities as chrome-plated differential covers, oil pans, and even ignition coil covers sold well.

Any car with four doors and a "slush" was a "family-car" (pronounced very nasally and with deep scorn) or "mommy-car". The modern analogue would be a "soccer-mom's car". Having a three-in-the-tree manual trans was less bad, but even if you didn't have enough "coin" to equip your car with four-on-the-floor, you still felt compelled to convert your three-speed to floor-shift. Aftermarket shifters were available from a lot of companies, primarily Hurst but also outfits like Mystery Shift and many others I can't recall.

Only a "sosh" (from social), i.e. one of the popular crowd in school, with no mechanical talent, could drive a mommy-car without losing caste or even having anyone in his circle notice. The real car-guys were often the "rinks," the disreputable guys in leather jackets and ducktails who smoked, acquired beer somehow, and didn't study. Another marginal individual was the "grope," a clueless loner who read a lot and was never seen at the dances or anywhere else than in class; few gropes knew anything about cars as students, but I know a couple who are first-rate rodders now.

Anyway, for a while, any cool car was "tough". In fact, anything cool was "tough," which led to odd uses, such as a group of young guys talking about a small, slender, fine-featured, pretty, delicately-built girl and saying of her, "She's really tough-looking!" A few years later there were "camp" (and "fort"), then "boss", then "rad", . . . .

You'd hear a lot of "-city". Businesses called themselves Muffler City, Hubcap City, Burger City, and so on. If a couple of guys at the burger joint were about to get in a fight, somebody would say, "Come on, Ritter and Jonesy are gonna go fist-city!"

When nothing dramatic was happening at the burger joint, we had rock and roll in our cars. REAL rock and roll, dammit, meaning early Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, et al.. REAL rock and roll died with the arrival of the Beatles and Stones, whose music was "rock," which is not merely an abbreviation of the earlier term but a different thing entirely. Rock and roll or rock n' roll was AM radio only, reproduced in fairly low fidelity on the Sears Allstate tube radio you'd installed in your car, or maybe the transistor (radio) you could carry around. At almost the same time as the "hosepower wars" between Detroit's automakers, the early makers of portable radios had what could be called transister wars, bragging about how many transisters their radio had ("Six Transisters!" "Eight!" "Twelve!"); of course function only required a certain number, and the rest were for advertising advantage. I forget who now, but some company tried to sell a turntable for your car. The problem was that to be able to use it while driving there was excessive pressure on the needle, wearing out your 45's. Somewhat younger guys here will recall "8-tracks," which came from the inventive mind of William Lear, who had built some of the early portable radios in the Forties, one of which I am pleased to own. I've never tried to see if it will pull in stations from inside the car; it was more a radio to carry in the trunk and get out once you'd got to the beach.

Who remembers when the number of plys in your (bias-ply) tires was considered a big deal? Six was standard; my dad got a set of 8-ply tires when he picked up his new '51 Ford Country Squire in Michigan and drove it back to Anchorage via the Al-Can Highway, all-gravel for thousands of miles. You didn't feel you ought to "lay rubber" too often, since those tires didn't last very long anyway. One thing you got a lot of with the old un-belted bias-ply tires and inner tubes was "blowouts", always a thrill. I can't remember having an actual loud, instant blowout since I went to tubeless belted radial tires, and they seem to last almost forever. OTOH, that means I haven't had the chance to try to light off a "hot-patch" to fix a holed inner tube. Nor do I ever seem to use the old rusty tripod "bumper-jack" since cars no longer have anything you can call a bumper in the old sense of the term.

For a couple of years after Hudson and Nash merged to form American Motors, any car from the new company was called a "Hash". American Motors went on to make some good cars, but nothing as ugly yet undeniably useful to a young guy with an "easy" girlfriend as the early Fifties "bathtub Nash," with the seats that folded down into a bed. If you are going to do something that was, in those days, as socially-disasterous (no exageration, this was terribly hard on the girl) as impregnating your 16-year-old date, you might as well be comfortable!

 

Stovebolt

 

Chevy 6 was also a Crager

 

In the ZZ Top song Manic Mechanic there's a line "I done put the coon tune on this bet" Being it's a song about two guys racing I'm assuming "coon tune" is some sort of hot rod slang?

 

Do a google search on COON TUNE and on COON MUSIC ... in my opinion it was the origin of rock and roll....

 

Hot water six.
Grind another gear, they're gonna make'm outta rubber next year!
Grind'em 'til ya find'em.
Turd burglar--POS car.

 

Twice pipes. Powerslide trans.

 

Well yeah, except when you was meet'n my Uncle Ray in his tail dragger 58 Impala.

 

This is a great thread. Here's mine.

eat my dust

high test (premium gasoline)

glasspacks (mufflers)

red line tires

ponchos (pontiacs)

goat (pontiac GTO)

bulldog (first gear manual trans, "put er down in bulldog")

gimme two bucks worth and don't forget my free glass

 

I used to have a Muntz 4-track tape player which was mono sound, before the 8-track stereo tape players.

 

Glove compartment was called the "Jockey Box".

Mr. Rogers: "I kind of like sayin' that...it sounds like 'window sill'..."

 

dumps are what we called the pipes welded to the exhaust that we could open below the header pipes.

 

ha ha ha! I remember the bus driver pullin over one day and threatening to "beat us boys so hard we'd wish we'd never been born" and just because none of us would rat out which one yelled out..."if ya can't find 'em grind 'em" at him for always rubbin reverse try'n to find third. He was a sensitive old fart!

 

Slip & Slide = powerglide
Blew his doors off
Boiling the hides
Stomp on the binders

 

My father used to call the vent window a " cozy wing "

A "shoehorn" was a small car (vega,pinto,..) with a small block

"Hookin it" - getting power to the pavement

A car cornering fast was "railin "

ass, grass, or gas, no one rides for free.

 

Ther's a road that crosses over I-81 in southwest Virginia Naamed "Scratch Gravel Road",
Was a time, when we only had enough power to "spin" the casin's (rubber......meat......) on gravel, "Lets see you "Scratch Out !"
Then 1955 came along, 265 c.i. SB chevies, '55 Olds, Buick Century Engines in Specials, Etc. THEN, you could "Burn Rubber" for half-a-block !
Must be his Daddys car ?.......Or he would'nt be burnin' out like that !


Have Fun, gotta' go go put a new bumpstick in me Mill.
Oh yeah, gotta' replace the rear U-Joint in "the Couplin' Pole. (driveshaft, fer you Youngsters) Love ya.
Smokey
P.S. my 1st Car used 5 qts of Oil on the Longest trip I ever made, Junior-Senior Outing...........125 miles.
Wonder where the nickname "Smokey" came frum ?
Damn sure NOT the Mountains !
Too Kool
Where did the term "Kemp" come from ??

 

Boxed Rods
Hydro Stick
Scavengers (long exhaust pipes sometimes an 8 pack with flare tips)
Short Stacks (stubby exhaust going up behind truck cab)
Bruce Slicks
Henry's Axles
Hooligans
Slingshot
Diggers
Dual Coil Ignition
Muntz 4 track

 

How about "Ran like a raped ape"

 

Mexican overdrive, to coast downhill
shoehorn, to fit a large engine in a small car

 

After #415 Posts it is hard to add anything new, at best an angle on something already shared.

Hot Chrome plated unit, Combat = cool ride

Slicker than a cats ass at kitten time = very clean ride with a lot of shine

Straighter than a Preachers D--- at a double wedding = very correct sheet metal

Grind me a pound = grinding a gear while shifting the transmission

Church key = beer can opener

Shoot her the juice Bruce = lets leave now

Throw some glass in that hole = roll up the window

Shovel = Chevelle

Gitex = GTX

Frog = Ford

Crippled Chicken = Plymouth Road Runner

Hammeroid = Hemi powered ride

Super Snort = SS Chevy

Gravel hauler = 348 Chevy powered car

Nine = 409 Chevy powered car

Patty Mashers = large extra wide rear tires

Bubble Gum Machine = Red light on top of a Cop car

Whip Stick = Long antenna on the rear of a Highway Patrol car

Dipstick = uncool guy / flake / nerd

Hood = guy with the Black jacket, cigs rolled up in the sleeve of his Tee shirt,
cuffed blue jeans, comb sticking up out of his back pocket & a chain on his
wallet and a DA cut

DA = ducktail style haircut

Necking = parking & making out with your girlfriend

Riding the Ribbon = cruising endlessly around town

Oklahoma Credit Card = 4' section of garden hose to siphon gas from another car

Port-a-Walls = fake white wall rings to dress up a black wall tire

Bluey Pipe = my mothers term for a loud exhaust noise

There is no end to these when you get a 1/2 dozen guys gathered up, bending an elbow and shooting the bull. This has been a fun Post to read through.

 

Your tires are so worn out I can see the air through 'em

Buried the Needle - In a car with no Peg to stop the needle, in the speedo.

"Pegged" That's what happens when the Speedo needle goes all the way to the Stop Peg.

 

Hang a 'Louie' = Left turn

Hang a 'Rudi' = Right Turn

Maypops = Bald Tires: As in "The car has nice rear tires, but a couple of maypops in the front.

 

what ever happened to the BANJO rear end?

 

That's because you weren't around folks from England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and probably India as well. I never saw the term until I began to read some Aussie and Kiwi car mags in the 70s. And to this day have never heard the term in person even from the few Englanders and Canadians I've met.
I thought if you said dizzy in Texas meaning a distributor you'd get your ass kicked.