You May Have Noticed... This Site Is DEAD AS SHIT!

One of the problems with saving toward a long term goal is it seems like the reality of achieving said goal feels like it will never be. I have long maintained that my goal was to get a 32 ford (fiberglass wannabe since a real one is like forget it) or a factory five Shelby Cobra kit car. Seems simple enough, get a goal and save for it. But then since you don't really think it is ever going to come you "borrow" some money for a kick ass guitar, or you slam a truck into a fence basically taking away all the money you had been getting from a side job for like 2 years.

Long story short, you lose focus. I am still putting money away but when you start thinking that you will be able to get your hotrod around 2018 give or take that sucks. In a moment of weakness I started looking around for other options, a Datsun Fairlady or a VW manx were some of the contenders that popped. Should i just start wheeling and dealing like I do with guitars? just keep buying and selling Until I work my way up? Part of me says yes start wheeling and dealing and having fun with lots of different cars. The other stupid logical part of me says stay the course and get the one you want.

Truthfully there is no real "right" answer. I guess time will tell. I would say I will try to be more dedicated in keeping this site updated but we all know how full of shit that lie would be. I WILL try but you know your wannabe hotrodder is just that, a wannabe.

Maybe I Need To Evaluate My Strategy

 

War Inside My Head

So, I went to an auto auction in Zepherhills Florida last weekend. I woke up early and drove over with a pocket full of cash and a mind full of dreams. As I walked the car corral I didn't see anything that really jumped out at me. There was a pretty wicked 67 Ford Gasser that looked like a beast until I opened the hood and saw it was all show and no go. Sorry bro, gassers are supposed to be smelly ugly beasts that have about as much engine hanging out of the hood as they do under it, not some lame ass 302 with a sad little 2 barrel carb. But whatever, it was early and I had the auction to go to.

As I sit down and look over the sheet to see which one of these little beauties would be taking my hard earned cash I noticed there was about 10 golf carts for sale, odd but whatever. Auctions are kinda like a rolling carnival of lawless oddities. In my little pea brain I am busy doing the internal math that will keep me in the good graces of the accounting department. Because the other interesting thing about Auctions is they pretty much charge everyone for everything, buyers premiums, sellers premiums... hell I think there is a "being alive fee" in there somewhere. After about 30 minutes of hearing the barker go over about a million things and plug everything under the sun he finally starts.

An elderly man sits next to me as the auction kicks off. He is writing everything down on his paper... what the bids go for and if they sell or not. Nothing is selling, i mean NOTHING. I look at him and say "what the hell is going on here?" He exclaims that for the most part only about 10% of the cars in an auction actually sell because everything carries a reserve price.

About 30 cars into this 60 car auction I have seen about all I need to see. Oddly enough the very thing that represents actual free market has perverted into complete and utter bullshit. Auctions should be the complete celebration of free market, wanna know what something is worth? Auction it off... what ever the crowd pays that is exactly what it is worth. Sadly, television and "reality TV" has once again reared its ugly head and created a fantasy world where 1967 Camaros are worth 120k and old British roadsters actually run. So, looks like my money and my effort will be better spent elsewhere. No more auctions for this wannabe hotrodder... time to hit the market and see what I can shake loose.

How Many Barns Could There POSSIBLY BE?

So, a while back I first heard the term "Barn Find" and I was like "Wow, that's cool!"
Fast forward a few years and lets just say the Wannabe Hotrodder is a bit more skeptical of the term. Now, by nature I am a very skeptical person. Hell I typeset coupons for a living, disclaimers are in my blood. On the surface the whole premise of a true Barn Find is very interesting and exciting and brings out the inner Indiana Jones in us all. Imagine you happen upon a old forgotten dust filled barn, as the heavy door creaks open the sunlight sends a beam of glory on the time capsule of an unmolested antique car. Almost as if you carry the staff of Ra and you have found THE holy grail of cars (and don't worry, in my mind the car is ALWAYS the worlds greatest find not some run of the mill Nash). Doesn't that just bring a tear to your eye? Sure of course it does! Here is the rub... its all bullshit.

Lets look at the reality of it, barns are the perfect place for rodents, birds, snakes, all kinds of glorious insects and pretty much any other form of wildlife that would like to escape the outside to go. As a youngster I spent many a day slaving away for $1 per hour helping bail hay, barns are just tiny islands of dirt, dust and death. Not exactly a first choice to house an antique car.

Wanna guess the SECOND best place for said beasties to go? Yup, that antique car sitting inside the barn. Just sitting there all full of yummy stuffing and electrical wiring to chew on. At the very least it will be used early and often as the barns rodent outhouse. The other neat fact about cars that sit unused they just kinda rot into themselves. So, regular upkeep and care that everyday cars get from their owners a true "barn find" has been left to rot. They never show any of that on the reality shows created to prop up all this kind of craziness but trust me, a real barn find is going to stink like death and shit and pretty much every single part will be ceased up and total shit.

So why the big ruse by the reality shows and auction houses? What could possibly be the reason for everyone to completely lose their shit at the mere utterance of "Barn Find"? Simple answer is money. Reality shows sell a dream, they show cars being restored in an hour and they relish in the fact that so many viewers will honestly believe that there are incredible glorious rare cars just sitting in every barn across the nation. Might wanna think twice before approaching that farmer, they are often armed and usually drunk. In my opinion your time and money would be much better spend just finding an honest car from an honest hot rod enthusiast. Will it be perfect? Of course not, but there will probably be a lot less rat shit to clean up.

Auctions Continue To Create A World That Doesn't Exsist

So, in case you missed it cars that many of us grew up seeing every day are now made of pure gold. Either gold or unobtanium. Either way they are EXPENSIVE. Well, depending on where you look they are. See, there is a massive disconnect between reality and what television or "TV" might have us believe. Not sure what I am talking about, please let me expound.

When you think of the awesome Detroit steel of the 60s and 70s it raises the hair on the back of your neck. They are big and mean, fast and loud. They are in a word AWESOME. They had wicked names like firebird and mustang and cougar and chevelle... names that evoked passion and desire for bad mistakes and burning tires. Growing up with them they always hovered in the affordable range. I am pretty sure you got a 65 mustang free with a fill up and a large slirpee for a while in the mid-eighties. Detroit made about 78 billion of these bad ass cars so they were always plentiful. The ones that didn't wrap themselves around a telephone pole that is.

Fast forward to the twenty-teens, a time when the 1% walks with impunity and reality television shapes what we think is reality. Dark times man, dark dark times. Sure, it started simple enough. Watching dudes work on stuff and make cool restoration projects. Then we got introduced to "flippers" or low level scavengers that are buying junk and as the old saying goes... polishing a turd. Fair enough, that has been going on forever but what hasn't gone on forever is television creating unrealistic prices. I was watching a super hyped "superbowl of auto auctions" the other week where a richey rich who had been buying up all of hotrod history for a million years decided it was time to flaunt his status and sell everything so we could all bask in his "i am way better than you" cult status. SO, other richey rich types showed up in droves to prove THEY could be that cool and rich too. As a result us common jerks got to watch mustangs sell for hundreds of thousands.

By the time it was over said richey could actually build his own world and live in a different galaxy made entirely of gold. Now, I am not just writing to rail against rich folks... I mean I will but that is not why I am here TODAY. The effect of reality TV creating this superbowl of car pricing is the entire baseline for old muscle cars took a dramatic leap upward. Remember like 2 paragraphs ago when I talked of those "flippers"? Yeah, well now those polished turds cost 10 times more than they did a year ago because every slack jawed yokel watched those shows and were like "I got one of those... so it MUST be worth as much as barrett jackson got."

Bad news, it isn't worth that much. The ones that were sold on that sad day were the absolute top of the top cars created or restored by the best of the best and most were 1 off super rare touched by god editions. So for those of us out there looking, we now have a few years more to save our money. After the flippers lose their asses and get no actual bites on the cars they are trying to get gold for the market will re-adjust back to reality. So just like the housing bubble, the gold bubble and every other made up price increase the muscle car bubble will burst. And when it does I will be there to grab up the prize, until then I will watch and wait.

More fads than you can detect with a fad detecting fad machine!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt_zum97kjE

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.

JESUS BUILT MY HOTROD!

Hotrods they are a'changing! I have a modest little Honda S2000 daily driver that is pushing around 265 HP. It is my every day drive to work car. It is fast, not like break your back fast but damn fast. It was made in 2005... way back when 265 horsepower sounded impressive. Since then I have seen the average horse power of consumer cars climb and climb. There are freakin' boring ass family cars running 300 HP from the factory. Now, would they beat mine in an honest street race? Probably not as there are about a billion and one things that contribute to who crosses the finish line first and most family cars ain't got em. BUT, with the new technology pushing the boundaries more and more every day hotrods have to be absolute monsters to even get noticed anymore. It is not uncommon for a hotrod to hit 600 - 800 or more horsepower to seem respectable. Hell, my friend Murder Stang is shooting for above 1000 horsepower on his vintage mustang. It is no wonder, Hellcats come stock with 707 hp from the factory and every other major car company is racing (literally) to beat that number.

Hotrods with outrageous horsepower are not surprising as the true hotrod culture has always taken the lightest and fastest and made it part of their car. Some of the purists out there bitch and complain if you bolt anything new on an old car but the harsh reality is hotrodders increase power and speed any way possible. You can keep your "Pre-blah blah blah or nothing" bullshit along with numbers matching and patina. With the modern horsepower war ramping up from all sides how will the garage tree mechanic or wannabe hotrodder keep up? I guess the same way we always have, run what ya brought until you can beg borrow and steal the next performance part. 

So, if you are sitting at the light next to a goofball 4 door accord don't laugh too hard as the kid driving it tachs the engine and cranks up his Skrillex CD. It just might make a fool of you unless you put the pedal all the way to the metal and ride out every gear. In traditional Wannabe fashion I will continue to dream and scheme all the ways my car WILL be the fastest... that is until I own my hotrod and it isn't. Till next time keep the rubber side down and rev it loud.