Post by johnbalich on Dec 14, 2007 15:54:40 GMT -7
Eight Cylinders, Apple pie, and Mom.....
Chapter one of “The American Hot-Rod”
How old is “Hot-Rodding?” It likely dates from the time an unknown Roman first stripped some of the “chrome” (Gold Gilt?) off of his chariot before a big ‘pink slip” race! But the Hot- Rodding we know, really began right here in the USA. Yes, true Hot Rodding is as American as Jazz and Baseball, and the archetype Hot-Rod is American made. In its purest form, a ‘real’ Hot-Rod is American in make, is rear wheel driven, and has eight cylinders. It should be assembled in a nameless garage or barn, by young men wearing dirty blue jeans and white t-shirts while they smoke hard-pack Marlboros. It is a labor of love.
As soon as the horseless carriage came on the scene, men started racing them. The first automobiles were expensive toys of the rich. Only the wealthy could afford or justify such a luxury. The men who raced these cars were “gentleman racers.”
American Hot-Rodding owes a huge debt to Henry Ford. When he priced Model “T” Fords within the reach of the common man, history was changed in a thousand ways. An average man could aspire to own one of these modern contraptions. In fact, prices for the venerable T not only started relatively low, they actually dropped several times. In 1908, Ford first produced the Model T and it was priced at 850.00 By 1924 the price was 290.00! (Many workers made in the neighborhood of 2500 a year.)
Eventually, inevitably, these cars, either new or used, filtered down to Mr. Average Joe. The automobile age had truly arrived.
Hot Rodding in the USA has always been associated with the Joe six-pack, the tinkerer, the experimenter, and the Yankee with all his ingenuity. It is from the hands of the American boy, that these creatures were born and thrive. These boys had more ingenuity than money, and an urge to build something a little better than the next guy.
Henry Ford: “There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made --and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains he will apply those ideas.”
Make no mistake; there is a distinct American culture. We are more than the sum of different parts and more than our unique backgrounds simply melted together.
Some where, some how, in the New World we developed a ‘can do’ attitude as well as a ‘make do’ philosophy and an innate need to tinker or improve or customize our machines. From James Watt to Orville Wright, from Howard Hughes to Mickey Thompson, and countless others, we have been tinkering ever since. Someday we will tinker with our hydrogen powered cars too. We can’t seem to stop ourselves.
This may raise a few eyebrows, but I think ‘cheating’ is also part of the tradition and history of Rodding. (In fact, cheating is a Yankee tradition. Remember those sneaky Patriots shooting from behind rocks and trees while the silly British soldiers marched in formation?) Let me explain the role cheating plays in progress. Suppose two guys, henceforth known as Tommy Taylor and Freddie Brown, race their Model T’s around the horse track at the edge of town, and Freddy Brown kicks Tommy Taylor’s butt by a wide margin. What do you suppose our boy Tommy does before they met again? He tinkers! (He cheats, of course) Poor Freddy doesn’t know that Tommy had the blacksmith grind the backs of the camshaft lobes to change the valve timing! He doesn’t know that Tommy has appropriated a set of rear gears from a work truck, much lower in ratio. (Tommy is a smart boy!) Of course, Tommy begins a heretofore unprecedented winning streak. Eventually Freddy gets wise. After he is done crying ‘foul’, he applies the same tweaks to his ride, (plus a few more he fails to mention to Tommy) and the ground rules change, leaving Tommy to think of even more modifications to keep his hold over Freddy. Thus we now have the first rules concerning modifications to factory built autos.
This process goes on and on. Hot-Rodders keep tinkering, often at the edge or just beyond the rules. The governing bodies and the racers and fans take a look at the latest tweak, and if they like what they see it gets adopted as a rule change! I’m not advocating cheating; just pointing out that it actually has had its place in the evolution of our toys.
NHRA fought off Funny-Cars, ‘til they finally threw up their hands and made them legal. The same is true for Nitro-methane. (Two of the greatest days in American history are respectively, the day on which Prohibition was repealed, and the day NHRA declared Nitro to be legal.)
An early hot rod story: My Dad, who was born in 1918, told me of a man in town (Los Angeles) who specialized in “Cut-Shorts.” What is a cut short? Well you first take a Model T, and strip off everything that doesn’t make it faster. Fenders, running boards, rumble seat, you name it. Now, this is where the cut short begins. You next remove any body part aft of the driver. That is, the “turtle deck’, pickup bed, what have you. You then cut short the entire frame to the new body confines. I am guessing without looking that perhaps 18 inches or two feet and Lord only knows how much weight, are removed from the car. Of course all the running gear has to be reconfigured, but that is no big trick to our early day “Chip Foose!” The now much lighter and more nimble ‘hot’ car now easily leaves tamer vehicles in the dust. Some day soon I am going to build of a 1/24 or 1/25 model of one of these early custom rods.
The next huge boost to Hot-Rodding arrived in1932. Why nineteen thirty two? Once again, Henry Ford had a ‘better idea’. (No, I’m not a shill for Ford, I am actually a closet Mopar fan, but history is history) It was known then and to this day as the V-8 engine. (Cue the choir). What an improvement over the venerable four cylinder engine! (Um….twice as good?) (I think Henry Ford may be the patron saint of the American automobile, although I really didn’t realize how much until I started to research for this project.)
Let me state DRAKE’S FIRST LAW OF HOT RODDING: Real Hot Rods Have Eight Cylinders! (Unless we are speaking of a twin engine dragster in which case of course the number is sixteen.) Now I have seen many six-cylinder and even four-cylinder Rods. I have seen dual cylinder creations, single cylinder crates, as well as lawn mower powered karts. Hot Rods come in all shapes and sizes, and I love them all. However, like baseball and hot dogs, like Bogart and Bacall, like Rock and Roll and guitars, Hot-Rods and V-8 engines belong together. There can be no argument; there is something magical………… something quintessentially AMERICAN, about…………. 8 cylinders, Apple pie and Mom.
See you next installment,
The Drake
Chapter one of “The American Hot-Rod”
How old is “Hot-Rodding?” It likely dates from the time an unknown Roman first stripped some of the “chrome” (Gold Gilt?) off of his chariot before a big ‘pink slip” race! But the Hot- Rodding we know, really began right here in the USA. Yes, true Hot Rodding is as American as Jazz and Baseball, and the archetype Hot-Rod is American made. In its purest form, a ‘real’ Hot-Rod is American in make, is rear wheel driven, and has eight cylinders. It should be assembled in a nameless garage or barn, by young men wearing dirty blue jeans and white t-shirts while they smoke hard-pack Marlboros. It is a labor of love.
As soon as the horseless carriage came on the scene, men started racing them. The first automobiles were expensive toys of the rich. Only the wealthy could afford or justify such a luxury. The men who raced these cars were “gentleman racers.”
American Hot-Rodding owes a huge debt to Henry Ford. When he priced Model “T” Fords within the reach of the common man, history was changed in a thousand ways. An average man could aspire to own one of these modern contraptions. In fact, prices for the venerable T not only started relatively low, they actually dropped several times. In 1908, Ford first produced the Model T and it was priced at 850.00 By 1924 the price was 290.00! (Many workers made in the neighborhood of 2500 a year.)
Eventually, inevitably, these cars, either new or used, filtered down to Mr. Average Joe. The automobile age had truly arrived.
Hot Rodding in the USA has always been associated with the Joe six-pack, the tinkerer, the experimenter, and the Yankee with all his ingenuity. It is from the hands of the American boy, that these creatures were born and thrive. These boys had more ingenuity than money, and an urge to build something a little better than the next guy.
Henry Ford: “There is an immense amount to be learned simply by tinkering with things. It is not possible to learn from books how everything is made --and a real mechanic ought to know how nearly everything is made. Machines are to a mechanic what books are to a writer. He gets ideas from them, and if he has any brains he will apply those ideas.”
Make no mistake; there is a distinct American culture. We are more than the sum of different parts and more than our unique backgrounds simply melted together.
Some where, some how, in the New World we developed a ‘can do’ attitude as well as a ‘make do’ philosophy and an innate need to tinker or improve or customize our machines. From James Watt to Orville Wright, from Howard Hughes to Mickey Thompson, and countless others, we have been tinkering ever since. Someday we will tinker with our hydrogen powered cars too. We can’t seem to stop ourselves.
This may raise a few eyebrows, but I think ‘cheating’ is also part of the tradition and history of Rodding. (In fact, cheating is a Yankee tradition. Remember those sneaky Patriots shooting from behind rocks and trees while the silly British soldiers marched in formation?) Let me explain the role cheating plays in progress. Suppose two guys, henceforth known as Tommy Taylor and Freddie Brown, race their Model T’s around the horse track at the edge of town, and Freddy Brown kicks Tommy Taylor’s butt by a wide margin. What do you suppose our boy Tommy does before they met again? He tinkers! (He cheats, of course) Poor Freddy doesn’t know that Tommy had the blacksmith grind the backs of the camshaft lobes to change the valve timing! He doesn’t know that Tommy has appropriated a set of rear gears from a work truck, much lower in ratio. (Tommy is a smart boy!) Of course, Tommy begins a heretofore unprecedented winning streak. Eventually Freddy gets wise. After he is done crying ‘foul’, he applies the same tweaks to his ride, (plus a few more he fails to mention to Tommy) and the ground rules change, leaving Tommy to think of even more modifications to keep his hold over Freddy. Thus we now have the first rules concerning modifications to factory built autos.
This process goes on and on. Hot-Rodders keep tinkering, often at the edge or just beyond the rules. The governing bodies and the racers and fans take a look at the latest tweak, and if they like what they see it gets adopted as a rule change! I’m not advocating cheating; just pointing out that it actually has had its place in the evolution of our toys.
NHRA fought off Funny-Cars, ‘til they finally threw up their hands and made them legal. The same is true for Nitro-methane. (Two of the greatest days in American history are respectively, the day on which Prohibition was repealed, and the day NHRA declared Nitro to be legal.)
An early hot rod story: My Dad, who was born in 1918, told me of a man in town (Los Angeles) who specialized in “Cut-Shorts.” What is a cut short? Well you first take a Model T, and strip off everything that doesn’t make it faster. Fenders, running boards, rumble seat, you name it. Now, this is where the cut short begins. You next remove any body part aft of the driver. That is, the “turtle deck’, pickup bed, what have you. You then cut short the entire frame to the new body confines. I am guessing without looking that perhaps 18 inches or two feet and Lord only knows how much weight, are removed from the car. Of course all the running gear has to be reconfigured, but that is no big trick to our early day “Chip Foose!” The now much lighter and more nimble ‘hot’ car now easily leaves tamer vehicles in the dust. Some day soon I am going to build of a 1/24 or 1/25 model of one of these early custom rods.
The next huge boost to Hot-Rodding arrived in1932. Why nineteen thirty two? Once again, Henry Ford had a ‘better idea’. (No, I’m not a shill for Ford, I am actually a closet Mopar fan, but history is history) It was known then and to this day as the V-8 engine. (Cue the choir). What an improvement over the venerable four cylinder engine! (Um….twice as good?) (I think Henry Ford may be the patron saint of the American automobile, although I really didn’t realize how much until I started to research for this project.)
Let me state DRAKE’S FIRST LAW OF HOT RODDING: Real Hot Rods Have Eight Cylinders! (Unless we are speaking of a twin engine dragster in which case of course the number is sixteen.) Now I have seen many six-cylinder and even four-cylinder Rods. I have seen dual cylinder creations, single cylinder crates, as well as lawn mower powered karts. Hot Rods come in all shapes and sizes, and I love them all. However, like baseball and hot dogs, like Bogart and Bacall, like Rock and Roll and guitars, Hot-Rods and V-8 engines belong together. There can be no argument; there is something magical………… something quintessentially AMERICAN, about…………. 8 cylinders, Apple pie and Mom.
See you next installment,
The Drake