| Ford 1946 Ford Tudor Super Deluxe Sedan Restoration Custom Hot Rod SCTA Rat Rod
$15,000.00 (0 Bids) |
| Chevrolet : Other Pickups EASY DRIVER 1948 chevy panel all steel hot rod street rod custom chopped daily driver
$15,900.00 (34 Bids) |
| Ford : Fairmont No Reserve1978 Ford Fairmont Futura Fox Body 2 Door Hot Rod Project
$600.00 (1 Bids) |
| Chevrolet 1938 chevy 2dr. sedan project restore hotrod ratrod
$1,525.00 (5 Bids) |
| Dodge 1948 DODGE STREET ROD HOT ROD A C 360 SMALL BLOCK AUTOMATIC RUST FREE SHOW CAR!
$8,300.00 (6 Bids) |
| Ford Watch Video Street Rod Hot Rod Chopped All Steel Show Car Custom
$16,600.00 (18 Bids) |
| Chevrolet : G20 Van Kustom 70's chevy van 1972 disco custom rat rod hot custom 1970's a team
$2,551.00 (15 Bids) |
| Chevrolet : HOT ROD RAT ROD TRUCK RAT ROD 1942 RAT ROD HOT ROD
$9,900.00 (0 Bids) |
| Chevrolet : Chevelle chevelle 1967 cheverolet chevelle hot rod big block blower motor
$11,100.00 $30,000.00 
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| Buick 1939 Buick Hot Rod
$20,000.00 (0 Bids) |
| Mercury : coupe Coupe 1949 Mercury coupe, rat rod, hot rod, restore and rat rod parts
$50.00 (0 Bids) |
| GMC : Sonoma street rod hot rod pro street tubbed
$7,300.00 (15 Bids) |
| Ford : Other Pickups Hot rod Vintage 1934 Ford Pickup Old school street rod -hot rod- ready to go
$17,350.00 $25,000.00
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| Chevrolet Coupe 1941 Chevy Coupe hot rod custom paint and interior.
$6,175.00 (19 Bids) |
| Replica Kit Makes replica 1925 Ford Model T roadster pick-up, hot rod, rat rod, replica
$6,300.00 (8 Bids) |
A lot has been written about the origins of the hot rod and the development of the culture that gave rise to them and then grew up around them. This is my own personal take on the subject, and I'm sure others with more detailed knowledge (including the many who were there) might well disagree with my thoughts. With that caveat, I place the defining origin point for hot rods and hot rod culture as the end of World War II. A number of factors came together at one time -- the period between the end of the war in 1945 and the begining of the 1950s -- and mainly in one place -- southern California -- to create a unique environment in which the hot rod and its culture were born.
At the end of the war, a legion of young men returned to America with a wad of demobilization cash in their pockets and a sense of freedom and excitement bred by their experiences in the war. With a period of peace and the steadily increasing prosperity of the country as a backdrop, these young men had a "can-do" attitude and a desire to express themselves in ways that their time in the military had stifled. And, all of a sudden, there were a lot of inexpensive used cars available. For five years Detroit had basically been in the business of supplying the military. Now all that production capacity was turned to creating a stream of new cars to satisfy the pent-up demand of a civilian population that had scrimped and saved throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s and the sacrifices of the war years. Men who'd stayed behind to work in America's offices and factories had a lot of savings and they were ready to ditch their aging cars from the 1920s and 1930s for gleaming new models offered by the Big Three (and the others who are now gone, like Wilys and Kaiser). Their trade-ins became the starting point of the hot rodders, and came to define the way they were built and how they looked.These factors dictated the core aesthetic of the classic American hot rod. It was the later Model Ts and the plentiful early-30s Fords and Chevys that became the raw material for the young men who created hot rodding and hot rod culture. Here's a picture of a '32 Ford Roadster, a contemporary car, but one built on the style of those first hot rods. The basic performance and engineering elements of the hotrod came together in these cars: More power, less weight and a look derived from these things leading to chopped tops, channeled bodies, pinched frames, dropped axles and, eventually wide tires.
And why southern California? Again, a lot has been written about the question of why southern California became the seed-bed for so much cultural change in the second half of the twentieth century. Part of it was Hollywood, part simply that the western part of the country had reached a critical mass of prosperity and population sufficient to establish itself as a new center of culture distinct from the old center in the northeast. But a few factors made southern California the right place for the birth of hot rodding. One was the climate: with year-round perfect temperature and little rainfall, young men of little means could work outside on cars that had few creature comforts themselves. More important, Los Angeles was the first city truly shaped from its beginnings by the automobile: There were more roads, and new ones there. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, was "the lakes," the dry lake beds just east of L.A. that became a magnet for the chopped and stripped-down speed machines. Here the hot rodders found miles and miles of hard, glass-flat surface upon which to run their machines.