Antique & Classic Cars Blog

The car is your canvas. That’s the beauty of rods and customs. What the manufacturer did can stay. Or go. Or a bit of both. You can find another like it, or sorta like it, or totally different. Take your plasma cutter, your welder, your filler, your english wheel, and bend and shape and weld and don’t stop until it looks like what you had in mind… or drew on a cocktail napkin… or saw in a comic book in the 1960s.

Steve & Melissa Gerhardt’s ’51 Ford is a nice showpiece of the customizer’s art. Fifty-one blue oval it mainly is, but not those fins. They came off a ’56 DeSoto. Steve bought the car with much of the metal work done but it wasn’t finished. He did up the interior. Check those door pulls and the gauges across the dash.

Flames are commonplace ’round the fairgrounds late June, but metal flames cut out of the hood? That’s customizing with a little help from air resistance. Huh? Well, the hood blew open and bent it. Gerhardt coulda sourced another one. What fun is that? Instead, he had a friend work it a different direction–into cut-out flames. Removing some metal created a bitta space for a high-rise intake and dual quads. And a coupla gauges–more gauges–too.

The Gerhardts run with the Old Flames Car Club, which has about 30 members. They’re based in the Prior Lake/Savage area. Another OFCC member is Jesse Novak, who likewise had some fun with his ’30 Model A sedan. Hot Rod Chassis & Cycle in Addison, Illinois, did his chassis but Novak’s poured some time and love into this one too. That’s a ’53 Mercury cop car flathead under the hood, sourced for $100–though not in that shape!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Back to the 50s, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.