History New Builders....Please revive Canted Quad Headlights.....

I've heard that exact same line of reasoning applied to engine mods, and hot rodding in general more times than I can count...

 

GOOD GOD!!!

 

Seriously? Come over and I'll buy you a beer, and take you over to the Benz Advanced Design studio. It's less than five miles from me. I'll introduce you to the fellow with that bitchin' little gold roadster with that nasty hemi in it that's on the cover of Rod and Custom from February of 2008. He's one of the big cheeses there. Lot's of hotrodders working at all the design studios down this way. I'll be happy to show you around the area, and perhaps change your mind about a few things ...

 

Beer ? That's a start. I'd love the roadster I'm sure but as far as customs go I don't think I will ever develop much in the way of love or even like.
The design studios would be fun to see.

 

I would like to put them on my '54 F-100. I just haven't found a set to use or had the money when I do come across a set.

 

I like a well done custom and honestly, I'm still trying to figure out the fascination a lot of people have with this example and a few others that have been mentioned. Canted ANYTHING seems to have been done strictly to show off someone's metal working skills. Does it require a shit load of skill? Yes. Does it work on a car or truck. No. It just looks ugly.

The same goes for vents and air ducts. They always look like the person was just doing it because they could. When I think of a well done custom, I'm looking for a completely shaved body. No hiccups. A MILD chop that flows well. Frenched headlights. A well done grill treatment and skirts. But that's just me.

My taste in hot rods is just as particular and a lot of hot rods are over done, as well. To me, an over chopped coupe with a 6" windshield? Please. An over channeled anything and individual exhaust pipes (the one's that look like spider legs) are just obscene and foolish. When I see an older roadster and the top of the rear tire is ABOVE the trunk line, I just turn away. It's channeled too damn much and looks odd. All that crap looks like it was done to get a reaction. Well, my reaction is disgust.

Is any of this a slight to the persons building skills? Nope. I just suspect his judgment and quest for approval is askew. It's been said so many freaking times and yet it's the unwritten rule a LOT of builders forget. Just "KEEP IT SIMPLE".

 

You think just like I do! I always say the Harley guys are worse than teenage girls in needing to dress like the rest of the herd "to stand out from the civilians"

sorry to veer off topic. As for the canted headlights, when done well, I like them, but that is only on probably 10-15% of the vehicles that have them.

 

Ratio and proportion...Your avatar signifies that..

 

Naw, I don't agree with you fontana...IMHO they need to be high and hard...those are too saggy and the proportion to shoulders and rib cage is all wrong....and the pasties are way too large and don't add anything to the look of "canted" to the right or left...!!! She may be "traditional" but not my cup of tea...!!!

R-

 

When quad headlights showed up on new cars for 1958, I was 17 years old, and I just thought "Oh, that's where new car design is going now," like wraparound windshields and 14" wheels. I didn't think it was necessarily an improvement over what had gone before, and it never occurred to me to customize my car to add them. Interesting that all of those trends blew over within a decade and are long gone now.

When people did start adding quads to cars that weren't born with them, I thought most of them looked like socks on a rooster -- they just didn't fit the design. As for canted quads, I never saw a SINGLE car -- factory or custom -- that appealed to me over other designs.

Over the years, I've owned about six cars that had factory quads, the majority of them Pontiacs from the '60s; none of them canted. I did a series of four threads a couple of years ago about "pretty faces" -- front end designs that I favored -- and one of them concentrated on four-eyed cars. (http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/...contest-pretty-faces-part-4-four-eyes.354179/) None of the cars I chose had canted quads; in fact, they were all lined up horizontally, not even stacked. The thread wasn't very popular, and only a few people chimed in. Squablow and Gotgas carried the torch for canted quads.

Just about the only custom I can recall where the addition if quads (not canted) looked like they belonged there is a '46-48 Plymouth coupe that has been at Paso Maria in the recent past. I don't have pictures, but he did a very nice job of integrating them in the design.

So, sorry for the long winded blather. I just never saw the point in quads at all, and canted quads least of all.

 

Still beats your avatar....

 

I'll agree, most have a face only a mother could love with the addition of canted quads. The Mark Mist and the Grecian are the ones that come to mind most when I think of this "change for sake of change" restyling era. Most of the time this was done to move an already well proportioned trophy grabbing Kustom to the next level in the car show world. This soon became the arena of the (just this side of useless) Show Rod type indoor showcar. It was all done to show a builder's talent and then I believe evolved into something to shock the viewing public into thinking this was cool. Like most mods, canted quads were a short lived Kustom fad of sorts. Love it or hate it, it happened. If you don't "get it", you should. Even if you hate it, at least understand it happened, and why. It is all part of the evolution of this digital custom car history lesson a select few are helping to write. It's called the HAMB.......




I'll be the first to admit most customs with canted quads don't look good, but these below seem to work for me.

The Cushenbery built Marquis


The Gene Winfield built Jade Idol

The Alexander brothers built Adonis.

 

LOL, maybe, but I think you'll agree the "dagmars" in my avatar are pretty much perfect...!!!

R-

 

Hey, the HAMB's about what happened. They happened. Some cars worked some didn't, just like today.
There's a long list of things that didn't happen that a lot of people are putting on their cars canted quads aren't one of them.
That being said there's a vast difference between early customs and customs from the "more is better" show circuit era. It all depends on what era you're building to. I tend to lean towards the less is more approach.

 

show rod not a custom but you cannot find fault with these canted quads

 

Wellll... I wouldn't be so sure of that.

 

The word FUGLY was invented to describe this car... HRP

 

Yup.

 

here's one I saw yesterday at Gambino's sit down in San Jose.

 

With his avatar you could get as many of tfeverfreds avatar as you could handle...

I for one love the caddy and I am one for certain kustoms with canted headlights

 

I like it..........

 

Not one car in this thread looks good with the canted quads. Not the customs, not the factory stockers. There are some that look amazing starting at the point just behind the headlights, but the canted quads look like a bag of smashed assholes, no matter how well executed they are.
Using the 1-10 rating scale--I see no 10's. I see a couple of 7's that could be 10's without the canted quads, then a bunch of 2's. If you like them, more power to you--somebody has to fuck the 2's.

 

I've been trying to figure out if there is a way to make them work on a 58 ford custom 300...


-LUKEY-

 

was this ever a San Francisco Bay Area car? back in the 80's there was an orange one sitting in an apartment complex in Fremont. looked like an old show car, my brain says it was high up with a straight axle. it was crazy looking and just sitting outside.

 

here's a good looking example of canted quads...

 

It seems to me the examples closer to vertical work better than those nearer horizontal. Around 45° is most outlandish and excessive. I think substantially stacked quads canted <5° from the vertical can be quite restrained and tasteful. Hermann Graber's stuff from the early '60s springs to mind:

 

I might do quads on my model t, but straight up, and certainly not squares either

 

This from someone who thinks a '51 Plymouth is the epitome of design enough to own one?

When this car appeared in, I think, the short lived large format American Rodder, the story with it was that this '53 was actually found abandoned with one side badly wrecked, on a riverbank. I believe in Washington State. I could be wrong but I doubt there are two '53 Corvette customs with canted quads out there.

Quad lights that are vertical aren't canted.

I really like this one.

 

I sold that pile of shit years ago, your reason being one of many to dispose of it. I kept the name because it's just easier that way--I'm nowhere near motivated enough to have a different name for every forum.