The hot rod is as American as baseball, hot dogs and the good ol’ red, white and blue. After World War II when a handful of teenage Californian rebels – rebelling against anything and everything – started spending their lawn-mowing money on old jalopies and making them go faster, nobody could foretell they would spawn a multi-billion-dollar aftermarket tuning industry.
This generation of enterprising but cash-strapped car enthusiasts gave birth to the hot rod, typically a budget car turned up to 11, and created an automotive niche that’s stood the test of time. Today legendary original hot rods fetch million-dollar price tags at auctions. But if you don’t want to put out the cash, you could just strip, drop, chop, channel and make your own. As long as it’s loud, fast, and dangerous, it’s a hot rod. Here are the three most popular hot rod models:
Ford Model T
Built from 1915 to 1927 in vast quantities, the earliest, pioneer hot rodders depended on scouring junkyards for any one of 15 million Ford Model Ts produced in America, ripe for hot rodding. They’d pick them up for pocket change, discard the lowly four-cylinder motor and drop in a Ford Flathead V8 way too powerful for the T-Bucket’s flimsy ladder frame. The name, by the way, comes from the model’s body shape, which was originally steel, naturally, although today you’d be hard pressed to find a nice period body.
1932 Ford Model B
After the hot rodders moved on from the ancient Model T, the next logical step up was Ford’s Model B. Manufactured until 1934, after WWI these were still pretty outdated and generally disposable vehicles, which for California’s car-mad youth equalled cheap. The Model B is really the hot rod that popularized this huge automotive sub culture, and today a decent original car ready for modifying will fetch loads of cash. It’s worth the search – and the savings – as the quintessential deuce coupe really is the signature image of a hot rod. More specifically, that would be a 1932 (the two denoting the deuce), two-door Model B in either a three- or five-window body style.
Gasser
In comparison to the abovementioned cars that doubled as the family car, gassers, were built for one purpose and one purpose only: racing. These hot rods were born on the drag strip, still based on regular grocery-getting production cars, but stripped of any and all extraneous weight and jacked up on truck axles at the back for better weight distribution, not to mention to handle all the extra power as well. Modifications jumped with this type of hot rod, using lighter fiberglass windows, big crate engines and superchargers from airplane engines.
