street rod
For the most part, street rodding is viewed as part of our American heritage, every bit as much as the blues and jazz, hot dogs and apple pie. It incorporates many of the traits we Yanks are known for,
combining ingenuity and individuality, plus a large dose of style gleaned from the numerous vehicles of our past. If you have any doubts, just look at the enthusiasts throughout Europe, Australia and other rodding hotbeds around the globe. They love American rodding.
It’s a simple concept really. You see, when you build six-figure cars for one person, many others stand by and wish they, too, could have such a fine piece of work. Of course, all that one-off bodywork, tube frame construction and sculpted interior is just too pricey for most street rodders, and that doesn’t even consider the price of an artist concept study and subsequent drawings.
However, after spending all that time, money and effort to produce an aesthetically pleasing and award-winning design based on the venerable ’32 Ford, why not mass produce the car in fiberglass with the same great chassis and super smooth lines? That thought crossed Boyd Coddington’s mind when he did the original Boydster, a fenderless highboy roadster. The next progression was to add fenders to the car and so, being a sequential kind of guy and is good with numbers, Boyd decided to call this one the Boydster II. The car embodied all the great style of the first car, but now with fenders.
With fenders or not, an early-’30s roadster is easy to build, and there are a great number of parts available for them.
When we first began publishing back in 1999, I wrote about my friend’s ’32 Vicky. That car, and a ’57 Chevy, was photographed by Scott Killeen and graced that issue’s cover. This helped serve as our coming-out statement for our company—the rest is history.
Maurice and Lynne Hoover were already the veterans of two wild project car builds—a ’67 El Camino and a ’67 Camaro—when Maurice decided he wanted to build yet another. He says, though, that when he brought up the subject of another project, his wife, Lynne, was not particularly pleased. Maurice went ahead and brought home a ’67 Nova anyway. While in some situations such a move could have worked out for the worse, before long Lynne came to like the car, and the two dove into the project.
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.
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.
Doug Schultz of Maple Valley, Washington, is not your typical home builder. Several years ago, he owned Street Works, a shop for hot rod and racecar fabrication. He built a black-and-silver ’62 Impala, which we featured in the December 2002 issue of this magazine, as well as a ’67 Nova that earned Goodguys’ Street Machine of the Year honors a few years back. Today he’s a fabricator and press-brake operator with his local municipal government, but during this time, he never lost his love for cars.
If you’re searching a crowd, you’ve got to look hard, and still you might miss the builder of this astounding yet subtle Corvette. It’s almost as if the man and his cars are one and the same—loaded with talent, with their most impressive aspects available only to those who take the time to notice.
It’s been said that in a perfect world creativity would flourish without criticism. Most attempts to reach a certain artistic understanding are generally met by some degree of judgment, and sometimes offhanded ridicule. Call it a misunderstanding, envy even, but the bottom line comes down to outrageous personal expression, whether some understand the need for it or not.
