keeping cars crusty, better than a trailer queen? : culture|garage

keeping cars crusty, better than a trailer queen?

December 15, 2007

Posted by Chris

Tags: news

One of our recent members, wonword, recently posted a thread filled with aircooled love. The pictures are quite amazing. Recently, I had noticed that seemed to be an odd trend. Rather than sanding, painting, etc, people were proudly wearing their faded paint. BusinessWeek also picked up on this. According to BW, one of the biggest trends now is not restoring vehicles, but rather preserving them. The dents, the dings, the uneven gaps, those all help tell the story of the car from its initial build to its life on the road. Want to see some more incredibly preserved and pseudo-restored ‘dubs? Check this out!

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2 Responses to “keeping cars crusty, better than a trailer queen?”

Deek Says:
December 15th, 2007 at 1:38 pm

There is a thread somewhere on VWVortex with literally thousands of these pictures (once I find it, I’ll post it)

I love the idea and it really seems to work best with the aircooled dubs.
wonword Says:
December 15th, 2007 at 7:05 pm

To me, it is truely amazing that horrible some of these look before hand, and how they are transformed into something so unique, that it is almost hard not to like it. Call it what you want, a rat rod, a hoodride or a rusty jalopy, there is definitely rat restoration culture out there( fits culture garage perfectly).Like you said, the patina (original faded paint) and small things that most would see as a “project” are just another piece of history to give the rat some character, not just with VW’s, but with all cars. Infact, it is becoming so popular, people are faking patine by weird methods like using oven cleaner to take away the top layer of paint in spots that it would naturally fade (i.e. under the headlight buckets and on the roof of beetles).