Street Rods
Rich Oakley is not your average hot rod builder. There is no room for cookie cutter cars in the Retro Rides by Rich shop in Archdale, North Carolina. In fact, he prefers to be one step ahead of the norm when it comes to building his personal rides. Loosely inspired by the Tony Nancy 22 Jr., his Model A highboy comes equipped with an attitude. “The car has a loud, rude nature. That’s what I like about it, the way it shakes, smells, and of course, the noise,” Oakley says. It has an aggressive stance, and those six Holley 94 carburetors are an indication that the roadster might have a chip on its shoulder.
There is nothing more aggravating than having a dead battery, and it always occurs at the least opportune times. Our street rods are often stored or sit for periods of time. How many times have you decided the weather was perfect for an afternoon cruise and had a problem cranking the car?
Kirby Kennedy grew up around street rods in his hometown of Selmer, Tennessee. His father, David, had several rods and even operated his own shop. Kirby hung around Kennedy’s Kustom Auto Shop and helped with many of the projects. He also learned many of the required skills to build a rod along the way. Once Kirby reached high school, he knew quite a bit about the history of hot rodding and had developed a fondness for traditional hot rods. His school required each graduating senior to complete a project before they reached graduation. While only a sophomore, Kirby decided to build a traditional-styled hot rod.
Here in the United States, we have been conditioned to find vintage tin in many places. The availability of good cars to build into street rods has become more limited as the years have passed, but depending upon your choice of bodies, there are still quite a few options. Of course, the advent of reproduction bodies has added to the choices. Now put yourself in a foreign land and think about how hard it would be to find a good 70-plus-year-old imported American car to build. That is what Wayne Streams faced as a native of the United Kingdom. Building street rods has grown in both popularity and participation in the UK. There are many vintage English vehicles available, but American cars are the most cherished among British rodders.
Mark Turner is an avid hot rodder—he eats, sleeps and breathes hot rods and muscle cars, and he jumps at any opportunity to add another car to his collection. On one of Turner’s many trips to check on the progress of a Camaro he had being built at G&S Custom Fabrication & Suspension in Athens, Alabama, owner Greg Blaydes told him about a ’67 Camaro RS/SS convertible being built whose owner had lost interest and was looking to get out from under the car.
If you’re in the planning stages of building your car, or even if you have finished and are driving it, there are lots of free or inexpensive things you can do to make your ride faster and/or more efficient. This month, The Auto Builder gives you 25 of those ideas. Most of these free tips simply involve putting your car on a diet. Every 100 pounds of weight removed from your car equals dropping 1/10th of a second at the strip. Even though you may not be racing, the same theory applies to the street, and also to the extra weight you must lug around.
Let’s face it, most of us are working within the confines of a set of unwritten, yet clearly defined, rules of hot rodding. Stance, engine choice and wheels are for the most part selected from a menu of items that come “pre-approved” by our peers. Sure these rules work most of the time, and they provide a degree of certain acceptance when you’re building a traditional pre-’49 hot rod. But all in all, it also makes us a group of conforming nonconformists. However, for some hot rodders (and they are in the minority) building hot rods is about pure ingenuity, a total lack of peer pressure and joy of mixing parts from various sources and making it all work.
Ryan Newman grew up with a steering wheel in his hands. From the age of five, he has been behind the wheel of a racecar. Now, almost 20 years later, Ryan drives for Penske Racing South on the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series. In 2003, Ryan won eight races, 11 poles and was named Speed Channel’s Driver of the Year. In 2004, he will be driving a Dodge sponsored by primary sponsor Alltel with associate sponsorship form Mobil 1 and Sony Electronics on 38 weekends.
Although there is no set list or solid criteria we look for when choosing a feature car, we typically know the instant we’ve found one. Sometimes it’s a flawless paint job and subtle body mods that draw us in; other times, it’s a fully built motor loping angrily. Other times, though, we come across a car that is just plain cool—not the fastest, or even highly modified, but the kind of car you just look at and say, “Wow, check out that…” So it was at Goodguys Charlotte this year: sitting proudly in the mist and drizzle was Doug Wayne’s ’66 Galaxie convertible. At Auto Builder, we have a soft spot for large vehicles, and, realistically, Ford is not known for making many great small cars. Even small Fords are big, and if you don’t believe us, stick an early Falcon next to a Scion. But few companies do big as well as Ford, and even from a distance, we knew this Galaxie was as cool as it is long.
Ford fans will always have a soft spot in their blue-oval hearts for the Windsor, the Cleveland and the big 460 FE engines—and deservedly so. If you’ve ever crawled a junkyard for one of these engines, you’ve likely passed over more than a few 351M and 400 engines to find what you are looking for. Poor factory numbers and bad word-of-mouth have made these cousins to the mighty Cleveland about as wanted as poison ivy at a nudist colony, but there is power to be found in those engines—and cheap, too.