Lon's '36: "Rags to Roadster" Part 1

A few months back, i was approached by Lon (BigRat on the HAMB forum) to do a bunch of idea sketches for a 36 Ford Roadster that he was entertaining the thought of building. He has a 36 4 door, and is working with a super talented fabricator named Chris at Salt Lakes Speed Shop to basically turn it into a 2 door roadster. After talking through a few likes and dislikes, i hit the sketchpad to come up with a few different options on possible directions:






After some thought, Lon picked this as the general game plan.




Much more to come...

Phil Noto Sketches.

Perhaps a bit off the hot rod topic, but my buddy just turned me on to this guy. I really dig the mid-sixties/seventies vibe goin on in some of his sketch work, and i totally respect anyone who is awesome at drawing the human form.

Check it out: http://www.notoart.com/Titlepage.html

McCulloch Superchargers

While looking for some reference for a new piece I’m working on, I came across some cool images of McCulloch superchargers…these things really are awesome.

Sins Of Steel 2010

***A few weeks ago, my home desktop had a catastrophic meltdown. Long story short and much cursing and angry glances at my now deceased computer later, I’ve lost a whole bunch of content. Needless to say, my blog entries are all screwed up as far as time lines go. I should be caught up very soon though, so bare with me.

That said, here's my better late than never entry about the Sins of Steel show.

Sins of Steel is a traditional car show held in Davisburg MI, possibly as response to Billetproof moving elsewhere. Whatever the drama that caused the break up into separate shows makes no difference to me… From where I’m standing it just makes for two traditional shows versus just one! This show happened to be particularly important to me, however, since i was able to debut my work for the first time! My buddy, and fellow artist/gear head Wayne split the spot with me and sold some of his illustrations. Being in the same industry as myself, cars come easy to him, but he also does bad ass caricature and Roth style monster work that I’m a huge fan of as well, and our work is different enough to complement each other, so it was a great mix. He showed up at the house around 6:30 am, and after a few checks over and under the cars, we were ready to head out!

Once we set up, we kicked back and started into the cooler of cold beverages, and proceeded to meet good people, sell some work, and enjoy the day! Here's Wayner and our setup.

There was plenty of good stuff to look at, here are some of the cars I personally dug:

..and who would wanna cap off a PBR filled day without a good ol' smokey, stanky rubber burnin session!?

good times for sure.

41 Zeph Re-Design

Final Design on that restyle of the 41 Zephyr:

Original Sketch:

Morris Minor!

I love these cars. They are so tiny, but I’ve always thought they had a cool, albeit goofy look to them.
A while back, while scanning CL for projects, I came across an ad for a 59 Morris Minor “Unfinished Project” in Ca. It boasted a built 360, custom frame, mustang II front end and a ford 9” out back. It still needed floors, but all the “hard work” was done. The pictures were grainy but the description and price seemed pretty promising.
Since my father is a Mopar man with a taste for the odd, and since I have more projects already than I have time or money for, I sent the ad along to him.
Long story short, the car is a basket case. The motor was bad, the frame was crooked, and over all it was a backyard project gone awry. Alas it was still a cool car! And the idea of a little gasser inspired beast was enough to get the ball rolling!

Here’s a sketch I did when we got the car:



The theme is Gasser…inspired. I do like the nose up look, but for this car, I figured a slammed stance would suite it well. It will retain a hood to convey more of a sleeper look...as sleeper as a Morris with 10” slicks out back can be, anyway. Along the way we have found a parts car to donate most of the original parts that we are currently missing, which is cool because I prefer a bit of original trim as opposed to it being all smoothed out. I’d also love to bring some of the stock interior back into it (there is only a dash shell in the car as far as interior goes now.) Since the car will see more street time than strip, the dune buggy racing seats that came with it can go where they belong; out on the curb. I’ll post some pics of the progress on this as it happens. In the mean time, here’s a peak at what it looked like when we got it home:

Rethinking a 41 Zephyr

Don’t get me wrong here, I can totally appreciate when someone puts countless hours into building a car, and i have lots of respect for those with fabrication skills. In the end, if whoever is driving it is happy…then job well done. I try to be pretty open to new ideas and different approaches to building custom cars, but what the designer in me can’t get my head around, is lack of …design. Personally, i feel that when someone takes the of “I’ll know what it supposed to look like when it’s done.” approach without a road map, even if only a vague one, the result is often unsuccessful. Not to say the quality is bad, or that it can’t have nice details but as a whole, it falls apart.

Case and point? I came across this 40 Lincoln Zephyr online.

The car was originally a 5 window coupe that’s since been chopped, hard topped, sectioned, slammed, and modified within inches of its life, and the result kills me.

Focusing on the design this particular car, its kind of hard to find any tension, or a flowing line left on it. The proportions are kind of wonky and what’s left has a broken look to it.

There are a host of things i could take issue with, but i figure instead of standing on a soap box, i might as well throw down some lines and thoughts of how i would approach the same project.

Here’s a rough sketch:

The idea is to start with the same car, and follow roughly the same list of modifications but still make it look cohesive as opposed to the sum of a bunch of separate features. It’s chopped, sectioned, dropped, hard topped etc, however I chose to keep the longer roofline. If you want a 3 window, start with a 3 window…or at least reference one. I was looking at Zephyrs and came across some 36 front end shots. Those lights are wild! So I figured I’d throw ‘em on in there for fun. The fenders have been extended, and the intention is to keep some of the flow and shape of the original fenders,. The front wheel wells have been massaged to work with their new shape.

As a whole, I think it could be a sweet car. That’s my two cents anyway.