Table of contents for January/February 2021 in Rodding USA

Henry Dana grew up in Staten Island, NY, and began drag racing in 1961. He went on to gain drag racing fame on the East Coast running a ’56 Chevy wagon in the Junior Stock class. Henry left N.Y. for sunny Florida in 1969 and eventually opened Dana’s Transmission Service in Fort Pierce. He and his wife Nancy caught the street rod bug when they attended a rod run in Gatlinburg, TN, in 1974 and built a ’34 Ford sedan, which they drove to the 1975 Street Rod Nationals in Memphis. They officially opened Dana’s Hot Rod Shop in 1979 and built a reputation on Henry’s high-quality craftsmanship and the impeccable paintwork sprayed by Nancy, many in the renowned “Dana Red.” Henry eventually left Florida and moved to Mooresville, NC…

Stepping back to October 1981, I was in my first couple of months of employment at Street Rodder magazine, and I received an assignment to photograph the Oak Creek Rod Run in Sedona, Arizona. I jumped into my ‘34 Ford coupe and drove the 450 plus miles to cover the event. Any event coverage assignment also consisted of photographing 3-5 cars to run as features in future issues. I spotted a red, chopped ‘34 Ford sedan and talked to the owner about shooting it for a feature. The owner’s name was Larry Way from San Jose, CA. With the stunning red rocks of Sedona, it’s not hard to find a great background. Larry had his teenage sons, Randy and Mike, with him at the photoshoot. The car feature ran sometime…

As a teenager in the late ‘60s, I loved hot rods. I grew up in several small towns in Oregon, so hot rods were few and far between. But I saw many when I went on a trip to Los Angeles with my parents in 1964. Through the ‘60s, I cut pictures from hot rod magazines and put them on my wall in my bedroom. These always included ’32 Fords and Model A’s. I still have those pictures. As I got within ten years of retirement, I knew I wanted to build a late ‘50s or early ‘60s style hot rod. Eric Black in Portland did multiple renderings, and I settled on gold. I had initially planned to have rear fenders and cycle fenders like the Lloyd Bakan coupe but…

Part 5: Issues 13-15 ISSUE 13 (Feb-Mar, 2015) January always features two of the best back-to-back shows in the country, in the Scottsdale Barrett-Jackson Auction and the Grand National Roadster Show in Pomona. R-USA covered them both with extended features in this issue. While at the GNRS, we photographed the new “Lakester” roadster from Brookville Roadster. We also featured an in-depth look at the “new” United Pacific steel 5/w coupe body along with a 3-D printed car from Local Motors. Car features included a few Fords and a Rambler sedan. ISSUE 14 (Apr-May, 2015) Issue 14 featured our first “driving” cover with 15-year-old builder/ owner Sarah Hoffman at the wheel of her ‘29 Ford rpu. She did most of the work on the rod while Grandpa Ron offered his…

Jerry Mlady has been into custom cars and motorcycles since he was a kid. In the third grade, he wrote a letter to Ford Motor Company asking what it would take to be a car designer for them and got a friendly letter back from a Ford Vice President telling him to be good in math and algebra in school. He aquired his first car when he was 15 in 1967. Jerry says “I bought my brother’s old ‘51 Ford sedan with a flathead V-8 for $200, and I put a two-deuce Fenton manifold on with dual exhaust with glass packs. “ In 1972, Jerry was drafted, so he enlisted in the Army for two years while the Vietnam war was raging. Instead of being shipped to the war zone,…

During these strange and uncertain pandemic-driven times, car enthusiasts based on the West Coast have come to the realization that the 2020 show season stopped somewhere around March 15. Yet rodders resolved to find alternate ways to get their “car fix,” so to speak. They include smaller impromptu get-togethers, a handful of Cars & Coffee-style meets and cruise nights, along with driving events such as the Quarantine Cruise featured in Rodding USA #47. Motorsports had to adapt, no matter if the competition is run in a straight line, on an oval, or road course. The bottom line: spectators cannot join the fun for the time being. One example of such an affair took place this fall in Santa Margarita, a quaint town located about three hours north of Los Angeles.…

In the early to mid-’60s, Garry White of Richmond BC, was one of the numerous junior high guys who didn’t have a full-time job after school, which meant no money to buy a car. So helping his high school buddy keep his ‘46 Ford on the road was as close as it got for him. As fortune would have it, he was given a ‘46 Ford Tudor sedan that a friend wanted to get rid of, and that propelled his interest and love affair with cars to greater heights. It was the early ‘80’s, and as many can appreciate, a chosen career as an engineer and a love of things mechanical soon had Garry looking for a project car. While talking to his next-door neighbor, who owned a ‘37 Ford,…

LOKAR RETRO STYLED LS PLUG WIRES LOKAR adds to their LS Classic line with the introduction of their new retro-styled LS plug wires. These high-quality plug wires feature 7 mm Kevlar spiral core suppression wire, high-temp EPDM jacketing, and silicone boots. The wires are 9 feet long with 40 ohms of resistance per foot, giving you the versatility and performance to remotely mount your coils. The kit comes complete with pre-installed 90-degree coil boots, straight unterminated plug boots, 90-degree distributor boots, and terminals.Manufactured in the USA and giving the nod to the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, they feature black silicon jacketing with white printed graphics for a classic muscle car appearance.. 865-824-9767 www.Lokar.com SPEEDWAY MOTORS BUICK BRAKE DRUMS IN the past, acquiring a set of finned Buick brake drums for…

I had previously bought a deuce roadster in the early seventies, which had been raced on the grass tracks around Auckland back in the early sixties. I turned that car into a resto rod, which is now owned by Steve Sharpe. But the photos of the day when I pulled it out of the garage tomb where it’d been since 1964 drew me towards a new project. Perhaps I could replicate that car with modern chassis, suspension, and drivetrain? The more I thought about it, the more I liked it, but I’d make one concession, and that was to build it as a three-window coupe, not a roadster. From my roadster experience, I found they were a ton of fun, but, at 60mph, they were noisy, drafty, cold, and wet…

This F100 Was “Made for Driving” Lee Sesler was born in North Denver, Colorado, in 1943 and has been into custom cars and racing all his life, thanks to his dad’s involvement in the hobby. At the young age of 15, he purchased his first ride, a 1948 Ford sedan for the hefty sum of $65.00, and this was the beginning of many more to come. At age 18, he joined the Sabars of Denver car club. From 1961-62 he worked at the Continental Divide Raceway along with other club members, and this added racing to his car hobby likes. The club had their own race car, a 1931 Ford Model A named “Doorstop,” which competed in the A/C class, and Lee was the driver. He then built his own…

If you’ve been involved in the custom or hot rod scene for any amount of time, you have most likely heard the term “Carson Top.” Little did I know at the time that the final Carson Top by a family member of the originators would be restored right here in my home town, San Luis Obispo, California, but first a bit of history on the famed Carson Tops. When custom car building began, there were names such as Bailon, Emory, Winfield, and Barris, the early pioneers, designing from mild to wild. Anything goes as long as it modified the look of the factory available automobile. Simultaneously, two names emerged as the go-to shops for interiors and tops, Carson and Gaylord. Carson and Gaylord were located in Southern California, and both…

As 2020 comes to an end, custom car enthusiasts across the U.S. have become accustomed to hearing that their favorite event has been postponed or, as in most cases, canceled. As we headed into November, COVID cases continued to climb, and we were anticipating that the Goodguys 23rd Speedway Motors/Southwest Nationals in Scottsdale would fall victim. To our delight, Goodguys, the City of Scottsdale, and the State of Arizona worked together and pulled off the three-day event, which was held on November 20-22. The event was limited to 2,000 entries, which is about half of the usual attendance, along with a limit of 6,000 people on Westworld’s grounds. Everyone and I mean everyone, had to wear a mask at all times unless drinking or eating. For the most part, all…

Since a young (14 years old) teenager in 1950, Max McLain has been building hot rods while growing up in California’s oil-rich southern San Joaquin Valley. With his meager tools in the shed, Max channeled the Model A Roadster, laying the groundwork for a lifetime of building many different hot rods. By the time Max had relocated to San Luis Obispo, working as a pipefitter, he had honed his talents, with his skills producing high-end street driven cars, including a ‘23 T-Bucket with torsion suspension built in the early seventies that won the class at the GNRS just a few years ago, some forty years since the original build. Max was also instrumental in the founding of San Luis Roadsters in 1972, with a total of 10 founding members, four…