MAGAZINE

You don't hafta be a greaser. Some of us pick certain periods or styles to mimic when we build cars, and then screw it up by adding some gadget that we saw advertised and bragged about in a magazine feature. The ad and the feature are always in the same issue. Who'd a-thought?

Scratch on it a minute.... flathead motor, Jag rear-end. Mutually exclusive. Oxy-moron. Don't try this at home, or the Cool Cops will come in the night, break into your garage, lie in wait, and cut off your whatchacallits when you come out to remove the fliers from the floor of your car that you left there when you came back from the parking lot car show.

Some people are rewarded for their misguided taste: A car was recently featured in a mag, that had the look. Steelies, stance, all that jazz.....white interior.....and a billet steering column , billet pedals, billet A/C control panel and billet shifter. I get it: Country Living outside, Star Trek inside? It would've been so easy to not cross it up.

You could fix the outside. Boyds with o-ring tires would probably do it, if you wanted to go completely that way. That'd be easier than polishing a bunch of billet, or plating it, or painting it, on the inside. But just don't mix em up. Hop Up has seen a lot of "de-toxing" going on , wherein 80's-built cars are being personalized to fit the more traditional taste of the owners. At the core, they're really just old Fords that need redder lipstick.

If we have an absolute need to employ some gadget, some design, some part....that is not appropriate to the project....then we're just going to have to find a way to have another project. Those kids don't really need college anyway, do they? It's probably humid at Disneyworld this time of year so a home vacation would be cooler: a good time to start a new chassis; Communism probably isn't really dead after all, so we don't need to save for the future because they'll probably blow us to smithereens before we can spend it anyway, and we don't want to wear out the car we got now, do we? Let's do another one so we can save it for those uneducated, unemployed, unenthused, 3 generations-under-one-roof louts we aren't sending to college because we know they won't ever be able to afford a hobby now, will they?

But you guys - you Hop Up Guys - know all that dope already, don't ya? One car, two or......who cares?

Moral? No mixed metaphors. Or at least try to make em not so obvious.

Hop Up Honor