PARTS IS PARTS!
By noderel:
Without parts, there is no hot rod hobby, and without used parts there are no hot rodders! Boy, will this stir up the industry suppliers! And a fair number of modern hot rod assemblers. Even so, let’s see where this leads. After you read this column, get online to HotLine and give me feedback. Be interesting to compare yea’s to nay’s.
A few years ago, I created a magazine called Street Rodder (remind me to bring you up to speed on this subject, since it is about this time some 40 or so years ago that I did this one) and at that time there was no such thing as a street rodding industry. Translation, there were a handful of companies making hot rod parts, and selling those parts to hot rodders. Nothing for “street rodders”.
It was a time when we still thought that experienced (used) automotive parts could be moved sideways and adapted to any kind of hot rod we wanted to make. There weren’t any TV shows to pimp celebrities. Magazines were full of honest how-to articles rather than blatant pitches to pimp advertisers. Hot Rod builders were pretty much on their own, although there were a handful of hot rod shops that could build street rods, usually for a turnkey project of around ten grand. Try that on your today budget!
It was a time before plastic everything automotive.