shop
Few things are more fun than spending a day doing a good old-fashioned garage crawl. No, that doesn’t mean getting down on your hands and knees looking for the washer that just rolled across the floor; we’re talking about doing the tour—runnin’ from one garage to the next just to see what folks are building, what kind of cool tools and memorabilia might be around, and of course, spending a little time swapping lies. Yeah, a garage crawl day is pure fun.
We always find it amusing when a bench racing session turns to building street rods. It seems there is a huge contingency of rodders and observers of street rodding who believe that every car in the fairgrounds area was built by a professional shop. We’re not about to argue the point that a lot of people now pay to have work done on their cars, whether it’s chassis work, bodywork or upholstery. However, there is still a large group of people who spend evenings and weekends out in the garage forming brackets, repairing rust, blocking panels and wiring hot rods. In short, they are building cars the old-fashioned way—at home with the help of a few friends.
For every hot rod shop that has a show on TV, there are countless smaller shops that will never get mainstream TV exposure or clothing lines sold at Wal-Mart. But all across the country, it’s these smaller shops that turn out the majority of the street and super rods that you and I enjoy, and that we see at shows. And even though these little guys may not have big reputations yet, they churn out consistent and excellent work—and, that is precisely how some of these smaller shops will eventually become bigger shops with even more prestige.
