custom car
George Poteet is not the kind of guy who does things halfway. He likes to jump into a project with both feet and with his eyes wide open. Such has been the case over the many years he has been building street rods and customs. His street rods have been trendsetters. Most of you are familiar with the Sniper, an unbelievable Viper-powered ’50s Plymouth built by Rad Rods by Troy. More recently, his ultra-traditional black Deuce five-window built by David Lane renewed interest in building more traditional rods. It is no surprise that when Poteet decided he would like to run a car at the Bonneville Salt Flats, he would do it in a big way.
For many hot rodders, the word “custom” conjures up images of chopped, channeled, molded and frenched cars with wild metalflake paint jobs. Such radical customs no doubt helped define the custom movement of the 1950s, along with such phrases as “if it don’t go, chrome it,” but in virtually every town in the USA there was a contingency of mild customs providing their owners with daily transportation, an occasional trip down the dragstrip, and a starring role in the local armory car show a couple of weekends a year. No, most of these cars didn’t hold the local track record, nor did they make it to the ISCA Grand Finale, but they were good examples of shade-tree customizing and hot rodding. Known mostly as a “mild custom,” a term that no doubt originated from car show classes, this style of car was extremely popular.
When Jim Anderson builds a car, he really builds it. Other than paint and a few of the more intense aspects of the interior, he takes on the task of reconstructing the entire car into what he thinks it should be. And when asked what he thinks a vintage car should be, he responds that it should be fast and handle well.
Every creative endeavor, from fine art to mechanical invention, requires some type of high-wire act—a unique and delicate balance between vision, creativity and capability. When the cogs align, and the elusive look rises to the forefront, there’s no questioning the purity of its origin.
Everyone is talking about old-school-this and old-school-that, but we here at The Auto Builder don’t really care about old school, true school or new school. What we do care about is bringing our readers the best damn cars from around the world. Whether we are featuring drift, show, street or drag cars, one thing is certain: we will bring you the best cars that are out there. And sometimes the best is simple and to the point, as if you built the whole car in your garage.
“I started building this car a little over 15 years ago after completing a Pro Street ’70 Camaro RS for my then-16-year-old son, Brad,” says overhead door installation specialist Jim Meltzer of Ventura, California. “I always had the urge to build a ’59 Pro Street Chevrolet El Camino (hence the nickname “U.S. Pro-1”), having owned one of those cars when I was just 21 years old,” he says. “Forty years later, the ’60 came along, and I figured that was close enough. The El Camino project was a joint collaboration with my sons Brad and Rod, and it got off to a great start. We made plans for a big motor and even built a full rollcage for that huge hunk of steel with the intentions of actually racing it.”
