Ace-Garageguy

That's seriously wild. I like how your mind works.

Still watching. Still awestruck. Incredible work. By the way, I kinda thought I was a passable machinist 'til i saw this. Your freehand skills with a mill are truly inspiring. I gotta practice, practice, practice. Man, your stuff is nice.

Looks serious, fast and clean. Great choices on everything. Custom built headers? And I'm guessing the TS-4 is an armor color....correct?

Wonderful to see such a mess turned into such a beautiful model. Inspiring. Really like your subtle custom touches on the car too.

Really beautiful, as everyone else said. I'm truly amazed by the quality of your BMF work too.

Wayyyyy cool, and it looks like fine workmanship too.

Super great looking build. Ya just don't see a lot of Ardun powered Willys drag cars.

That's really wild. Put a big ol' smile on my face too. LOVE your trailer design.

Bernard Kron has done some really nice custom logos and made decals for some of his builds, and I'm pretty sure he's discussed the how-tos as well. He's got a belly-tank lakes car project on here on the workbench right now.

Looking great. That's some seriously slick paint, and nice job on those fender corners.

I just need the stock valve covers to finish a '32 Ford with an Olds motor I've been on for years......

Sweet build. I love these in 1:1 and you're doing justice to a very special car.

Semantics indeed, because words actually have meanings. Perhaps the terms haven't been sufficiently defined. My humble attempt: A traditional or retro hot rod is a car built with an assortment of parts from various sources with an emphasis placed (hopefully) on mechanical superiority and high-performance on a budget, which was the goal of the original hot-rodders. A finished appearance, shiny paint and upholstery were and are desired, but secondary. A rat rod is much like a traditional hot rod in some ways but the primary emphasis is on a visual rebellion against high-dollar trailer-queen "street rods", and visual attention getting shock-value. Mechanical excellence and high performance are decidedly secondary. PS. I don't mean to offend anyone, or to imply that rat-rods aren't cool or worthy expressions of automotive creativity. An it was certainly unfair of me to imply that ALL rat rods are unusable junk. As 91blaze said, that's an unfortunate stereotype and I'd like to apologize for making it. There are indeed well-built and drivable rats, and I should know better than to bash anyone's freedom of expression. The truth is, as I've said before, I LIKE some rat rods. HOWEVER, there ARE differences between the two genres, as surely as there are differences between pro-street and pro-touring, for example, and considerable argument could conceivably be avoided if the differences between the types, and the definitions were more universally understood and agreed upon.

Thanks for the interest and kind comments, everyone. Joker, I don't know what kit the wheels are from. I got them in a box of mystery parts, and because they looked so much like vintage Radirs (though they lack the sharp rib in the center of real Radir spokes) they actually inspired this build. I'd like to point out that this build represents a TRADITIONAL 1:1 HOT ROD, built TODAY with mainly junkyard parts, but respecting correct and safe engineering and function. Though it may not be shiny when finished, it will most definitely NOT be a rat rod. The suspension will be 4-link front and rear to provide acceptable handling, but using a vintage front dropped tube-axle. I've bought similar units for less than $200. The rear brakes will be discs, representing what's available on some junkyard Ford 9" units. Front brakes will most likely represent repop '40s Ford, with finned Buick alloy drums. These can STILL be found on derelicts if you look hard enough, and are sufficient to stop a very light car with authority. Buick nailhead engines, as well as Olds Rockets, early Caddy V8s etc, can also still be found at the scrappers. The trans represents a fairly late-model junkyard 5-speed. Vintage or repop Radirs are available without breaking the bank, as are bias-ply wide whites and piecrust slicks. The frame could easily be built from rectangular mild-steel tubing by anyone with moderate measuring and welding skills. Granted there are some pricey bits represented, like the vintage GMC 6-71 blower and the Cragar chain-drive for it. But you save your lunch money to get the cool stuff you really want, right? The T body-shell can be had rusty but restorable for about the same $$ as a not-too-good f'glass copy, and the sheet steel, welding rod and a little bondo to fix it nice are really cheap. The cooling system will represent a rig that could actually be driven in traffic. Although the tiny rad shell won't possibly accommodate a rad that will do much, a larger rad will inhabit the heavily-louvered trunk, including an electric fan. Also bear in mind that provision has been made for allowing an actual human to operate the thing. This is a 1/24 scale driver figure, much closer to the camera than the 1/25 scale car. The point is, a normally-sized person could fit in the car without having to remove his head or feet to be cool. Heavily chopped and channeled cars built in the '50s were pretty hard to get in and out of sometimes, and this would be too. Paint may be primer or shiny. I don't know yet. BUT, it's possible to do damm close to a show-quality paint job in the garage or driveway if you learn the techniques instead of whining that only big-bucks cars have great paint. I know, because I've done it in my own garage. The POINT is, it's a HOT ROD, not a poorly thought-out cartoon of a rat rod. It represents a real, fast, safe, reliable car that a guy could build on his own. End of rant.........

Not really. Most "rat rods", in case you haven't ever seen any or in case you haven't been paying attention, can't actually be driven for anything other than posing, because they run poorly and stop even worse. They vibrate, rattle, shake, stink, overheat and leak because the builders didn't think actually understanding how a car operates is a pre-requisite to building one. REAL HOT RODS actually operate as cars: they go, stop, steer, etc. REAL HOT RODS can still be built from scrounged parts, but they pay attention to things like good welding, proper mechanical function, and safe engineering. We've got some traditional cars in town, REAL HOT RODS, in primer and built with junkyard small-block GM, Ford and Mopar V8 engines, junkyard 3 and 4 and 5-speeds, scrounged Ford 9" rear ends or Chevy 12-blots, etc. They are NOT SHINY, but they're NOT CARTOON JUNK either. They actually WORK AS TRANSPORTATION, and the owners and builders of these CAREFULLY CRAFTED CARS hate having their vehicles referred to as "rat rods" by ignorant watchers. HOT RODS and RAT RODS are two different things. Hot rods work. Rat rods are semi-functional caricatures of hot-rods.

All absolutely correct. The handling issue was significant though. The more torsionally-rigid tubular front axles tended to increase front roll stiffness, which in turn caused an increase in understeer, or front-end plow. This was already a problem with nose-heavy cars running smaller-footprint tires on the front (the big-and-little look), and was further aggravated by the tubular-axle / split-wishbone (or hairpin) combination. The binding of the suspension was also hard on components, and broken welds and brackets were not uncommon.

Congrats on completing a really good looking first car build. As far as the doors go, the gap at the top is easy to correct on the next one, but the hard part, which you nailed, is getting the door gaps nice and tight on the edges, when closed. They look great.

Great looking build.

This one's been stalled for a while 'cause I couldn't find a set of headers for the Buick nailhead I liked. I've found some nice, soft aluminum welding rod of the right diameter to scratch-build some pipes from, so she's moving again. The body and chassis are the old AMT chopped T kit, and the mockup has a blobular AMT Buick from a '40 ford. To get the stance on the mockup, I drilled holes in the body shell for steel axles, moving them until I had the look I wanted. Then I opened up the holes to accept a Ford 9" axle from one of the Revell '32s. Obviously, the frame needed to be zeed heavily in the rear. Using the body as a jig, I made up and glued in rough frame extensions and glued them in place, being sure to keep the axle locations marked. The object was to get the maximum amount of zee in the available body space. With the glue thoroughly dry, I removed the frame from the body, then marked everything that wouldn't be frame rail (noting how much room there would be for axle travel) Here's the modified frame, with a fabbed front crossmember and suicide perch, and temporary mounts for the engine and gearbox. Also showing is a scratched firewall. This shot shows clearance for the magneto in the cowl top marked, and the sectioned grille shell in progress. And as she sits.....

Robert, I'm doing an all-steel '33 Plymouth for a client. Not a truck, but you said you could use measurements from a closed car body. PM me with the diagram or dimensions you need.

OMG !!! OMG !!! there's a spiderbot crawling up my leg !!! OMG !!!

In more than 45 years of using the stuff, industrially and in hobby applications, I've never seen lacquer thinner "go bad". If the can is sealed, there's really no place for the rather simple components to go. HOWEVER, if the can is open, even slightly, some of the more volatile components can evaporate out, changing its performance. Acetone is a component of lacquer thinner, and acetone will readily absorb water. I suppose it's possible that a slightly-open can of lacquer thinner could have absorbed enough water from atmospheric humidity to have weakened it enough to be causing your problem. Are you absolutely certain you're trying to cut the same kind of paint or material you've always used it on? Lacquer thinner is not a universal solvent, and it won't work on some things. Just a thought.

I agree Greg. Very cool as sculpture. But not really kinetic sculpture, if you catch my drift.

I think someone kinda needs to talk a little about the history of the PHILOSOPHY of hot-rodding. In the beginning, it was about going FAST, pure and simple. Fenders came off of cars because they were heavy, and slowed you down. Bigger engines from junkyards went into light cars to go faster. Engine mods were developed to go faster. Tops were chopped to lessen wind-resistance, to go faster. The big-and-little tire thing evolved as lakes guys experimented with different rear tire diameters to effectively change gearing, and to get their engines running in the sweet spot, to go FASTER. And a lot of the mods on hot rods trickled down from track-racing cars, and made the cars handle and stop better. So, being about going faster, performing BETTER, a REAL early rodder would spend his coin on cams and heads and machine work and gears and on and on, and the shiny paint was pretty far down the list of must-haves. Guys WANTED pretty shiny cars, but paint jobs cost proportionately what they cost today, and choices got made. It DIDN'T start out as any kind of rebellion, but it morphed into that because the fast old beaters were seen as threatening and perceived as being unsafe by Joe Average and his wifey, and the followers took up the torch, not really even getting why it was cool. There was a group of hangers-on, pretenders, "squirrels" driving "shot rods" that just didn't get the safe speed thing at all, and they made nasty heaps with what they thought were cool parts....coon tails and dummy spots and fake exhausts and moon-disc wheel covers on cars that would never get within 100 miles of the dry-lakes (where actual knowledge and mechanical ability and craftsmanship mattered). They drove like idiots and gave the movement a bad name. A lot of those cars got lowered by torching springs, and used absurdly long shackles, and many were indeed death traps. NOT real hot-rods. I currently work with a shop that builds "traditional" hot-rods, some from real hard-to-get old stuff, just like in 1949, and some from catalogs. These things cost from $50,000 to well over $150,000, and to me they kinda miss the mark, because REAL hot rods are built by their owners, from scrounged or junked parts. The more traditional cars, or more "retro" are nothing more than a rebellion by a faction of the car culture against the mega-money billet-encrusted trailer-queens that went so absurdly far the other way. Traditional cars have been built quietly for as long as there have been rods, but they've become more hip and fashionable lately partly because of the rat-rod's spectacular visibility. And to me, the whole rat-rod thing, though I do actually like some of them, is an offshoot of the "squirrels" of the '50s who didn't really get it, but wanted to play anyway. The suede paint thing is an example. Guys in the beginning WANTED SHINY CARS, but many couldn't afford them, so the cars ran in various colors of primer 'til there was enough jack to spring for paint. Flat paint isn't traditional, or retro, or anything else so much as a fad, based on misunderstanding. And while there ARE some pretty fast, safe and great-handling rats, the majority just aren't. It's getting better, but I've followed some of these piles down the road with the wheels shaking from out-of-balance or out-of round so bad they couldn't go over 40, I've heard no end of rat engines tuned poorly, missing on a couple of cylinders, etc. but LOUD, and I really don't get why why anyone would want rabbit-dung welds or a Coke-opener nailed to his door. To me, a traditional hot-rod is built the traditional way, primarily by the guy who owns it, so from that perspective, a lot of the rats probably come pretty close to the mark. But i'd really like to see more emphasis put towards good engineering and great performance, instead of rolling piles of parts assembled for maximum visual shock-value and little else. It's STILL possible to build a FAST, SAFE old car out of junk, and do it cheap. As far as rebelling goes, I'd rather do it by being able to smoke the guy in the Lexus in the next lane than by driving something that requires you to get a tetanus shot after you work on it. PS. I like the look of rusted old cars, I like patina, and I really admire the modelers who can achieve it convincingly. I love the look of the old VW bus Dr. Cranky posted too, but I also know that the structure is hopelessly compromised (notice the riveted rocker-panel) and with all that corrosion, you'd have to run secondary ground wires to EVERYTHING to get any kind of electrical reliablilty. I also know from many years of first-hand experience just what it would take to restore the poor thing, and I probably won't live that long. I'm with the poster who thinks it's cool to get a patinated car, a barn-find, leave its history visible, and get it running well and regularly. I also personally think the pretend-patina, fake rust on real cars, and building for purely attention-getting is silly. PPS. In the final analysis, I can pretty much find something to love about ANYTHING with an engine in it.

Modeling is pretty cheap compared to building 1:1s, which I haven't been able to afford for several years, thanks to the greed-crazed idiots who got us in this economic mess. I'm thankful I can still indulge my car jones with models. Amen.