Ratrods.....I just don't get it (a tragic before/after)

[metalho]

Originally Posted by bmita

i guess i will put my two cents in, it is his money, time and idea so be it.to me its by no means a rat rod. what makes me made as hell is the term RAT ROD i wish main stream america never learned the those two words. my hot rod is based on a hot rod sedan built by a small town teenager spending all his hard earned cash on it in the late 50's or early 60's. true nostalgia rod it has flat paint, no interior but the seat, a sbc. but to every time someone walks up to it i always get NICE RAT ROD. so you can understand how i feel after that. i guess i need a thicker skin my buddies tell me....................

Amen! Throw the term out lol........Rat rod to me is when you can see 30% daylight through the cab.

[CRguy]

Originally Posted by bmita

i guess i will put my two cents in, it is his money, time and idea so be it.to me its by no means a rat rod. what makes me made as hell is the term RAT ROD i wish main stream america never learned the those two words. my hot rod is based on a hot rod sedan built by a small town teenager spending all his hard earned cash on it in the late 50's or early 60's. true nostalgia rod it has flat paint, no interior but the seat, a sbc. but to every time someone walks up to it i always get NICE RAT ROD. so you can understand how i feel after that. i guess i need a thicker skin my buddies tell me....................

You're absolutely right. Car people know the difference between a hot rod, resto rod, old school rod, etc., and a rat rod.
This is my old school rod: A 29 Sedan, all steel, with TCI Chassis and Chevy 350.

Note: It's not the car in my Avatar. That was my A in High School - 50 years ago!

Mel

[BILL WILLIAMSON]

The term "RAT ROD" was coined by Hot Rod Magazine in a 1972 featured car article. It's HRM's FAULT!!
Bill W. (Vermin's owner/driver & Dog Instructer!)

[FordMike]

Well I'm not trying to cause any grief but the "artist's conception" is already a completed, running, and driving hot rod. It was built by Jimmy Shine and from what I've heard its actually a nice job, not a cobbled rat rod.

I hate rat rods as much as the next guy, as a matter of fact I cringe at local shows when I see the abominations that leave some people's garages but there have been some truly great hot rods built.

In my eyes I've seen how much effort it takes to build a hot rod and restore an early Ford and I'd be willing to bet once the "would be" hot rodder that the OP is talking about sees how much work, skill, and money it takes to put something like that little hot rod truck together he will be selling it off and cutting his losses. I wouldn't doubt you'll find that same truck all taken apart and the paint stripped off for sale on Ebay or Craigslist within the next year. But we shall see....

[brokenspoke]

Originally Posted by metalho

Amen! Throw the term out lol........Rat rod to me is when you can see 30% daylight through the cab.

Plus a unsafe POS

[Bob-A]

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Bikers from the '60s and '70s chopped a lot of cool old Harleys back in the day. Now there custom bikes are worth maybe half or less depending on
the quality of work compared to the same model restored original. I customized a '65 Harley Panhead back in 1981 and still ride the bike to
this day. It has a lot of chrome with some non-stock features and I did not
chop, torch or grind anything on it. However, I'd still only be lucky to get 7 or 8 grand for it. If it was restored stock I could probably get twice that amount for it or more.

I can appreciate a person's talent and engineering ability on just about anything that can be created. But to me the concept of restoring an old vehicle to its original state. Takes perserverence, hard work and dedication that is beyond anything else.

Bob-A

[Gumpy]

A person has the right to build anything they want with whatever amount of money they want to spend but a stock lookin truck should stay that way..I remember an episode on tv where Boyd Coddington took a 59 bel air he paid around 25k and completely stripped it to build something out of it...that doesn't make sense!

[sturgis39]

In the early seventies was the first time I heard the term "rat". Rat bikes started showing up at the Sturgis Motor Cycle Rally. They were actually old bikes that were brought back to life. They were not made but cool old original bikes resurrected from the dead with old original paint. A lot of them had the loss oiling system. The loss oiling system meant the motor did not have an oil pump. They had an oil tank by the gas tank and the oil lubricated the engine by gravity and left an oil stream on the road. When parked, there was usually a puddle of oil under the bike. Most of the riders had oil stained clothing. There are still rat bikes at the rally but the crowd has changed. The term now is "rubs" which is short for" rich urban bikers", They now arrive with big motor homes and trailers for their bikes. They have their oil changed at dealers. In the old days, the bikers rode their bikes to the rally and it looked like they worked on them all the way home and back. The rally has now changed to more of a style show. I still enjoy the rally and the attendance is 300,000 to 400,000 people. There are about ten bikers killed every year. There are all kinds of vendors at the rally which includes custom bike builders. The rally use to be a week long. The rally is about three weeks long because people come early and leave late to miss the crowds.

[Rowdy]

I don't get why they would destroy a nice truck, however I have not problem with them using discarded bodies most of you would not touch and would just be crushed. Rod

[tom o tom]

beauty is in the eye of the beholder!

[cuzncletus]

Something we all need to think about is "who's gonna want this thing besides me?" While we all fall in love with our machines and believe that it's true love forever, usually they end up eventually getting sold to make room for the next true love.

A good friend of mine built a gorgeous stock bodied 32 pickup with 392 hemi power. I fell in love with it and wanted to buy it at his very fair price. Problem: I couldn't fit in it with the recessed firewall. He was selling it because he couldn't either despite him being probably 100 lbs. lighter than me. A chopped and channeled 33/34 Ford truck body will likely fit only a kid or a contortionist. My bet is the builder of this truck will fall out of love with it very quickly when he drives it, then sit there in frustration when buyers start screaming for a chiropracter when they crawl out of it.

The old bikers who responded to this post are right. Remember rigid frames and girder front ends? We all loved the look; nobody rode one very far. What a shame to waste the potential of this truck to end up using only the body. The builder will soon find there's a very limited market for big truck fenders, frames, and parts.

[Chris in WNC]

Originally Posted by Gumpy

A person has the right to build anything they want with whatever amount of money they want to spend but a stock lookin truck should stay that way..I remember an episode on tv where Boyd Coddington took a 59 bel air he paid around 25k and completely stripped it to build something out of it...that doesn't make sense!

Boyd had the same advantage those "Picker" doofuses have- the TV production budget lets them do stuff they would loose their butts on in the real world :-)

[bmita]

more i look at the drawing it does look like jimmy shines truck, i seen it in person and it beautiful. as for the old bikes i remember them some. there was a few in our area when i was growing up. there are a few still around here today believe it.

[pyrodork]

personally, i feel restorations and hot rods are just taking someone else's creative mind and using it yourself. there's even kits to do the thinking for you. i'm a huge fan/supporter of rat rods, and my AA is going to be one (however, i didn't have much to start with when i bought it).

the art of rat rods is using your own imagination to create what has never been created before. donatello wouldn't have been donatello without imagination, right? i'm plenty sure the nay-sayers had a lot to say about him in his day.

i come from a creative family. my mom's side influenced my desire to use my mind and continue expanding it. my father's side taught me how to fix the things i already have and to use intentional things for unintentional purposes. my mind is always flowing with things i come across; and how i can create a way to use them in one of my several ongoing projects.

fact of the matter is, there's a lot of people who don't have several thousand dollars to throw on getting everything perfect or getting original this or rebuilding that; or even dropping a 350 chevy in every chassis. i'm one of those people. i made less than $5000 gross income last year; yet i got my AA, graduated college, got my 40+ year-sat AA running with not much more experience than self-made trial and error, became homeless, and still can't afford to eat on a daily basis. this is how america was made, folks. my grandma called it, "american ingenuity." i read this thread and the majority of you are so closed-minded that it makes my brain hurt. maybe it's not your style, but the least you can do is appreciate someone else's imagination that they dared to make a reality. you did that with henry j, did you not? just because it's different doesn't make it wrong. and in this day when every art and music class is being cut from public schools, anyone who steps up to that plate is on the chopping block. consider their courage to break from the mold.

for the record, i believe that is too nice of a truck to chop up. i also believe that street rod drawing (it's not a rat rod, folks) has little creative element based on decades of the same thing; but i appreciate that someone likes it and will gladly enjoy it alongside with them.

[BILL WILLIAMSON]

Yo Pyro, Dog here, hope you don't put me & Ol' Bill in the closed mind dept. We fun guys, we'll make your brain LAUGH like a cat in a birdcage!!
We like stock "A"s, old style hot rods, vintage dragsters, & we saw a recliner with a chainsaw motor on it that we'd trade our firstborn for!
A few seem to think they were appointed to tell the WORLD how to run their cotton pickin' business, GIVE it up, they won't listen anyways.
When 99 guys can't even agree on what weights of oil work O.K. in a Model A~~~~~~~???
Buster T., Bill W's OWNER

[Mike V. Florida]

Originally Posted by pyrodork

i read this thread and the majority of you are so closed-minded that it makes my brain hurt. .

It has nothing to do with being closed minded. This site as declared by the owner, is for restoration of Model A's.

We can talk about gray areas all day long, and have, but this is not a gray area this specific thread has NOTHING to do with restoration.

Many of those that post here also post on the HAMB site (the Hamb site is "... is dedicated to spreading the gospel of traditional hot rods and customs to hoodlums worldwide.").

Many of my "fans" would be suprised to hear that I subscribe to Hot Rod Magazine, read the Hamb threads, and have subscribed to the build threads on several traditional Hot Rod sites.

It's a matter of audience.

[CRguy]

Someone that would drive one of these crusty, junky rat rods confuses me. What pride is there in having something like that?
These rat rods remind me of houses that some people live in that are falling apart, dirty and unsafe with junk laying all around. Are they proud of those?
If that's all a person can afford, maybe they should be spending their money on other, more important things.

Mel

[1928Pickuppain]

I love survivers not rat rods any time somone throse battery acid on a good body id like to smak them but if its been in the woods for 50 years and you have to replace 90% of it to make it all workable bay all meens turn it into that rat road that looks likie it was driven though hell and back and survived. I built my harley from all old used beat up parts whatever i could aford. put my money into making it mechanicly bulit prof and loved it. still loved the look of it. just tore it down and repainted it last summer when layed up after a few surgeries, got a full up overhall. more or less becouse it was time if i had let the origonal rust keep going i would have had holes in all my tins. And it would have cost me more to fix and replace parts than do to it right 1 time. now that its painted and all the jazz is done i can let her age grasfuly over the next 20 years back to were i started.

[Cool Hand Lurker]

The worst thing is that the project has high odds of never being finished.

[P.S.]

From "pyrodork"s point of view, rat rods are OK because they may be the "poor man's restoration" or the "poor man's hot rod". Hey, that's fine. The problem is (as Mike pointed out), this particular web forum is for the restoration of the Ford Model A cars.

Disclaimer- I am not a "car guy". My point of view is not from a car hobby perspective.

One could argue that the poor man cannot restore a Model A the way this forum intends, and just throws together what they have on hand to get the car on the road again, even if it means a V8. However, the line is clearly crossed when you start cutting it up, like chopping the top! That doesn't save money. "pyrodork" has already made it clear that he is of limited income, and would prefer to spend what little income he has on cars rather than food.

Originally Posted by pyrodork

i made less than $5000 gross income last year; yet i got my AA, graduated college, got my 40+ year-sat AA running with not much more experience than self-made trial and error, became homeless, and still can't afford to eat on a daily basis.

We may find that odd and backwards, but to him, it makes sense. Who are we to judge? Hey, that's one way to fight the nation's obesity problem. Even though, that behavior borders on mentally disabled or dangerous to one's self.

When I see a rat rod on the road, my instinct is to give it plenty of room because I assume there are a lot of loose parts on that thing, and it's dangerous, barely fit to be on the road. Not to mention the feeling that one would require a tetanus shot after being in it. It's seriously doubtful that one would be safe in a car like that on any road, much less a highway. To us non car hobby people, an automobile is transportation, not a lifestyle. Therefore, a rat rod is of little use, and certainly not practical. I suppose to a car hobby type person, rat rods might be attractive. To me, it's just lame. To each his/her own.