I may offend some people with this blog/rant, but the 1st amendment allows me to speak my mind and piss you off. If you take offense please do the following: go fuck yourself, take your elastic-jean, loafer-wearing ass to a shop and let guys like me bone you in the wallet.
I’ll go back to a bit of my background. I am currently working as a white-collar Test/Reliability Engineer in the Aerospace industry. Hey, I gotta pay them bills, white-collar work be damned! But before this, I was blue-collar all the way. My first two jobs were fetching shopping carts all summer at Home Depot and Costco. Then I worked in the tire shop at Coscto for six years (fuck I miss those days) until I graduated college and work where I do now. The transition to white-collar work was hard to say the least. I’ve been here for five years and still find myself going into “shop-mode” a lot, i.e. kicking my computer when it freezes up, dropping f-bombs when tests go wrong, etc. It’s hard not to swear when talking to my co-workers. Office folk don’t seem to understand the Greaser shit. Casual Fridays sees me wearing blue Dickie’s pants, a black t-shirt and my black Dickie’s jacket (to cover the tattoos). My wallet chain and pomp top it off. I stopped wearing my cuffed Levi’s since the comments of “hey rebel” got on my fucking nerves. Point is, I can never leave my blue-collar roots and my Greasy ways. I’m a Hot Rodder Greaser all the way, I spend all of my money on tools and car parts and I fucking love beer. I make a decent amount of money; my bills are paid and I have enough left over to take my wife and daughter out to dinner when we feel like it. I can barely afford new billet street rod parts. Forget about paying someone to paint my shit, upholster it or do any work on my projects. I could probably budget for it, but that shit ain’t gonna happen on my clock.
I carry this attitude over to my projects. My old man is a mechanic by trade and taught me most of my wrenching skills. My favorite saying from my dad is, “If man built it, I can fix it”. This mantra allows me to tackle any repair project that I come across, be it on my cars or my house. Also I’m not afraid to tackle a fab job. I’ll give it my best shot, and if I fuck it up then I’ve learned something. If I succeed, then I’ve learned something. It’s a win-win. Greasers that turn wrenches have this attitude. We won’t throw in the towel on our project and pay to have shit done while we sit by with our thumb up our ass. If we get stuck, we’ll get help and get it done.
I can’t wrap my head around the fact that people want to own old cars and not want to learn to work on them. There is nothing wrong with wanting to buy an old car and wanting to learn how to work on it. That’s how we all started. But the guys who just open up their checkbooks and buy a classic and won’t even attempt to work on them just pisses me off. I guess the only thing those people are good for is keeping shops in business. I’ve made my fair share of cash on side jobs.
What pisses me off the most is people with large checkbooks and pussy hands (no grease under the fingernails or knuckle-buster scars) entering a car show and winning without having turned a single goddamned bolt on the thing. As they say, “There’s no substitute for cubic dollars”. They need to have car shows where rich yuppie fucks can compete with their trailer queens to see who got shafted the most. Real car shows are for guys like us who performed all fab or at least attempted to. I suck ass at upholstering, but I’ll give it my best shot. At least I can say I did it myself and I would take pride in it. Never mind my first carpet job on my Olds. Looks like shit but at least I did it myself with only a box cutter knife. When I attend car shows, I always check out the owners of the high-dollar cars. First thing I look at is their hands. If you have pussy hands, then I know all you got is a fat checkbook. You don’t impress me. I admire the guys who build their cars. The Barrett Jackson auction astounds the shit out of me. People paying upwards of hundreds of thousands for a car that begs to be driven. And you know that those cars are just going into some display case. Jay Leno may collect cars and have lots of cash, but at least he drives them and wrenches on them. That kicks ass in my book.
Another style where my dad and I diverge on our tastes is Street Rods. Sorry, but all of the billet, crate engines and high-dollar paint jobs do not impress me. While we’re on the subject, crate engines to me are cheating. It’s not that fucking hard to build an engine. If you take your time and invest in a good torque wrench and micrometer tool set, it can be done. The machine shop does all of the hard work for you. Whatever. I love the spirit that Hot Rodders have, being low-budget and making shit work with what you have. Can’t afford a spray-gun paint job? Rattle-can that shit. Get a pair of glass packs and weld those fuckers in yourself. Bonus if you install cut-outs.
To wrap this up, I just want to say that we as Hot Rodding Greasers love to work on our stuff. We’ll tackle any repair job without hesitation. You’ll never catch us dead with our rods in a shop. I am reminded of a guy I once saw at the Sears auto repair shop with his ’55 Chevy getting the battery replaced. Fucking made me sick to my stomach. Didn’t deserve that car. As long as I’m old enough to wrench, I’ll be working on my projects. I won’t be buying billet parts or paying thousands for a paint job. I’ll be making brackets out of steel on my lathe/mill machine and rattle-canning it. My gas and stick welders will lead the way with my drill press, chop saw and angle/die grinders. Just like the Hot Rodding cats of the 50’s built their machines, so will I. And that’s the Rockabilly, Greasy Hot Rodder’s way.
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