This past weekend I went to a Swap Meet / Car Show held at the world famous Don Garlits Museum. I went with a friend we will call MurderStang. MurderStang is an ACTUAL hotrodder not a wannabe like me so he is always a wealth of information and often has awesome ideas and insight. But I digress, as we walked to and fro looking at all the cars and customs it really struck me how deeply the car culture is struck with fads.
There were a ton of really awesome cars at the show. This show was more about honest hard working driving hotrods. So the field filled with a few trailer queens but for the most part well used cars filled the ranks. That is when i noticed the newest soon to be tired fad... the rat rod. Funny thing about hotrods they are really slaves to what is cool. Some are tried and true timeless classics for sure. Never met a 57 Chevy i didn't like. When you see a lot of different cars in these shows it sticks out when a car was built.
The billet crazy of the 90s, the zz top fueled color-gasms from the 80s and now the patina drenched rat rod craze. I have nothing against all of these movements in the car world, hell I am a wannabe at this point so I have no room to judge. What does weigh heavy in my tiny pea brain is when I finally do get my hotrod and when I do start building and customizing it how do I avoid creating a fad filled car? I don't have the money to build and rebuild a car. Yes, I realize that hotrods command special handling and obviously driving one on a regular basis will require lots of fixing and re-fixing.
I guess it comes down to building a car that is timeless in design and powerful enough to not get pushed around. For me anyway, others will have way different goals. When I think of the cars I drool over getting they all have my flare but don't go overboard.
Wheels seem to be the hardest hit when it comes to fads. The first dead give away to when a car was built is the wheels. Second is the paint, man does paint show fads more than anything! I often think if you paint a car solid color and possibly close to a factory color you are safe. If you start putting stripes and ribbon stripes over ghost flames over pinstriping in neon colors well you might want to just start putting money away for the repaint now. That is part of the problem, custom cars are mostly one-off vehicles built by one person for one person. Judging if it is cool or not should not really come into play but obviously it does. And just because something is cool today does not mean it will be tomorrow. Just ask the guys riding the OCC choppers how much street cred they get. For now I will only dream and scheme, dodging fads and hoping for my hotrod to arrive.
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