Word: rodding
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Southern Californians in their teens and twenties had taken to jalopies and hot rods. The thing to do was to buy an old car, preferably a '32 or '33 Ford and strip it down to the essentials. With a flair for mechanics and enough money ($1,000 to $2,000), a kid could go on from there, transform his jalopy into a well-engineered hot rod, complete with extra carburetors, lightened flywheel, supercharger and five to ten coats of glistening lacquer...
...rodders look with disdain on the lowly jalopies, call them "peanut wagons," "crocks" or "goats." A hot rod is different. "The only way I can define one," said one Los Angeles youngster, "is that it's something with four wheels that's got something inside." The hot rod rolls out of a backyard garage a bumperless, fenderless, hoodless, roofless, uncomfortable concoction which runs so fast its driver must chug and jerk through town in low or second gear to stay under the speed limit...
...hell-raising skirmish good for scaring the citizenry and testing the latest motor and fuel adjustments. The real hot rodders meet on weekends at the hard-packed sandy stretches in the dry lake beds of El Mirage, 106 miles northeast of Los Angeles. There, under careful racing conditions, hot-rod clubs known as the "Dragons," the "Cranks" or the "Gents" skim over the sand at speeds of 100 to 180 m.p.h...
...rod buffs, known as "hop-ups," strip the bodies from junkyard cars, replace them with low-slung, homemade roadster bodies. On the engine they install a high-compression cylinder head, a dual manifold and a special camshaft. After months of work and $800 to $1,200 spent for parts, they have a racer that will turn up 140 h.p., capable of speeds over 100 miles per hour. They have been clocked at better than 140 m.p.h. at the Southern California Timing Association's Muroc Dry Lake track, a center of U.S. "hot-rod" racing...
Last week, Cincinnati's Powel Crosley Jr. became the first postwar U.S. auto manufacturer to make a deliberate play for the hot-rod market. He introduced a two-seater "Hotshot" Crosley roadster, looking like a dime-store version of the once-famed Stutz Bearcat (see cut). Although Crosley estimates that not more than one out of 100 owners will use the Hotshot as a racer, he has made it easy for them to do so. Windshield, lights, bumpers and top can be stripped off in a few minutes, readying the car for road or track racing. Its overhead-valve...