Instagram story viewer> @kustomrama> Posts

Kustomrama

@kustomrama

59.2K

followers

3387

following

Keeping history alive

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

A printed car history book freezes the story the day it goes to the printer.

Whatever the author knew on that deadline, right or wrong, gets locked between the covers forever. If a name was misspelled, it stays misspelled. If a car was credited to the wrong builder, that mistake gets quoted for the next fifty years, book after book, until nobody remembers where it started. We have all seen it happen. One error in one magazine in 1958, repeated so many times it becomes accepted fact.

Kustomrama was built to work the other way.

It is a wiki, not a book. A living record. When somebody who was actually there reads a page and says, that is not quite how it went, the page can change that same afternoon. When a family digs up a photo that fills a gap, the gap gets filled. Nothing is frozen. The history keeps breathing, getting more accurate and more complete as more people add to it.

That means we get things wrong sometimes. We would rather publish what we have, let the people who know better step in, and fix it in the open, than sit on a story for years waiting for it to be perfect. The record gets stronger every time somebody corrects it. That is not a weakness of the format. It is the entire point.

So if you have ever read something on Kustomrama and thought, I know more about that than what is written here, you are exactly the person we built it for.

What page would you add to, or correct, if you had the keys?

Click the link in our bio to start digging on Kustomrama.
#Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive by @kustomrama

1k

11

2 months ago

A Saturday with my son in the Kustomrama Dream Truck.

Drove it, wrenched on it, and started installing some new pieces ahead of the Coupe Devils Bonanza show later this month. A handmade set of knobs by @hoc_kustoms is on the way to the dash. New merch is in the works too, built around an original @tomkellydesign design.

Keeping history alive looks like this most days. A truck in the driveway, a kid in the passenger seat, and a list of small jobs to get through before the show.

#Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive #KustomramaDreamTruck taken in Bø i Telemark by @kustomrama

484

5

4 months ago

Dean Micetich of @dicemagazine tracked down the son of the man who built this car. Doug Knudsen had no idea his father’s 1932 Ford 3-Window Coupe still existed.

Wayne Knudsen built this chopped and channeled coupe in Toledo, Ohio, in the mid-1950s. He was a Cluster Busters car club member, and the bodywork was done by Ted Maedel’s shop. After building the car, Wayne joined the Air Force. The coupe changed hands, was parked in 1972, sold for $550 in 1997, and sat in a garage until Dean found it in 2023.

When Dean connected with Doug, the family shared construction photos that had never been seen outside the Knudsen family. Thanks to Dean, those photos are now preserved on Kustomrama.

Click on the link in bio to check them all out.

Have you ever discovered the history behind a car you own? Tell us below.

#Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive #DiceMagazine taken in Toledo, Ohio by @kustomrama

3k

37

6 months ago

The last drive of the year is almost never planned. You take the car out on a Sunday because the roads are dry and the light is good, you put it back that evening, and three weeks later you realize that was it.

Then comes the other part. Stabilizer in the tank. Air in the tires. Battery out or on a tender. Wipe it down, because whatever you leave on the paint in October is still there in April. Cover on. Light off.

It takes an afternoon, and it is the job that tells you the year is done. For a lot of us the winter is when the real work starts anyway, and the car goes from something you drive to something in pieces on a stand.

That is our own Dream Truck in the photo, on a November afternoon back in 2015. Cold air, dry road, nobody around.

When do you put yours away, and what is the last drive of the year usually for you?

#Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive taken in Ammerudgrenda by @kustomrama

443

5

8 days ago

In July of 1957, Rod & Custom gave two pages to a car that was still in primer.

It belonged to John North of Rockville, Connecticut, president of the Choppers of Rockville. A 1936 Ford four-door sedan. The magazine called it “4 Door Charmer.”

Chopped four inches in front, five in back. A 1939 LaSalle grille worked into a revamped shell. The fender headlights gone, replaced by 1940 Chevrolet units molded in tight. A scoop full of DeSoto teeth under the 1941 bumper. Shaved handles, dual spotlights, fender skirts. A 1948 flathead with an Iskenderian mushroom cam, Weiand heads and Offenhauser triple carbs. A 1940 Ford dash with a Stewart-Warner Hollywood panel. Moose lettered in script on the rear quarters.

All of it in dark primer.

And here is the part we keep thinking about. The magazine noted the car was newly built, but styled the way 1936 Fords had been restyled about fifteen years earlier, around 1941. In 1957 this man built a car to look like 1941, and a national magazine gave him two pages for it.

He traded it in later that year on the Fairlane that became the White Pearl.

Thanks to Mark North for his father’s photos.

Would you have painted it, or is it exactly right as it sits?

Link in bio.

#Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive taken in Connecticut by @kustomrama

248

6

11 days ago

Low sun. Long roads.

Fall is coming, and this month we are switching things up. Instead of a September playlist, we are sharing Low Sun, Long Roads, the Kustomrama Fall Drive Playlist. 69 tracks and growing, picked for slow drives through changing colors, dark country roads, and long nights in front of the fireplace.

From the beautifully worn-in sounds of Blaze Foley, Bert Jansch, and F.J. McMahon to Junior Kimbrough, Fred Neil, and Charles Bradley, this one moves a little slower and digs a little deeper.

Put it on, take the long way home, and let fall roll in.

What goes on when you take the long way home this time of year? Tell us what is on yours, and we will keep adding.

Link to the playlist in our bio.

#Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive #LowSunLongRoads #FallDrive #Playlist taken in Ammerudgrenda by @kustomrama

487

1

12 days ago

Almost nobody filmed the boring part.

When somebody brought a camera out in the 1960s, they pointed it at the parade, or the drag strip, or the finished car in the sun. That is most of what survives. What almost never got filmed is the ordinary work. The garage. The shop. A guy with his head under a hood on a Tuesday night, getting a car ready for a show that is still three weeks away.

This film is mostly that, and it runs almost half an hour.

Mats Wallander has edited it for us from Super-8 material shot in the Stockholm area between 1963 and 1968. Christer Lundberg and Richard Bergström put the footage together on a DVD and showed it at a memory gathering for Lars-Erik “Junken” Ljungqvist at Pampas Marina in 2011, and they narrate it themselves.

There is a ride in a 1937 coupe to open it, and racing at Skarpnäck. But then it settles into ten minutes of garages and shops, another eleven of tuning and preparing cars for shows, running hot out in Huddinge, and a visit to Björn Wallman at the end.

Heads up, the narration is in Swedish. The garages need no translation.

We wrote here a couple of weeks ago about wanting to document the everyday side of this history, the shops and the people and the work that never made the magazines. This is what that looks like when somebody actually filmed it.

Thanks to Christer Lundberg and Richard Bergström for saving it, and to Mats Wallander for the edit.

You can find a link to the full film in our bio. If you were around Stockholm in those years, tell us whose garages we are looking at.

#Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive #SwedishHotRods #Stockholm #Super8 taken in Stockholm, Sweden by @kustomrama

1k

15

12 days ago

Hood off, small-block out in the open, 1959.

This is Frank Maratta’s 1930 Ford Model A coupe, “The Rake,” sitting open for the crowd at the Hartford Autorama. Frank bought the Model A for $35 and put about $4,000 and six months into it. Under the hood sits a full-house 283 Chevy, stroked and bored to 352, fed by six Stromberg carburetors and making around 360 horsepower. Gold metallic with white scallops, and a steep nose-high stance that earned it the name. By 1959 it was a two-time A/Gas regional champ.

The photo was taken by Brian Frederick, one of the five original members of the Ty-Rods of Rockville, who shot the New England scene through the 1950s and 1960s.

Did you ever see the Rake run, or catch it at a show back in the day?

Full story on Kustomrama, link in bio.

#Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive #TheBrianFrederickPhotoCollection taken in New England by @kustomrama

224

1

13 days ago

In 1959, a 1958 Impala pulled up to the line at Lions Drag Strip in Long Beach with a 348 in it, making more than 300 horsepower.

It was not a catalog car. It had a Racer Brown cam and kit in it, and the heads had been ported and polished by Jocko. Behind the engine was a C&O stick Hydro, which, according to Junji Nakamura, was a first for all of Southern California. Later on, it rolled on Buick Skylark wire wheels, sitting on adapters cut for the car by Henry’s Machine Shop over in Bixby Knolls. That is four different specialists in one paragraph, and every one of them was somebody you could drive to.

Junji and his older brother James ran the car at Lions. And Junji had the sense to point a 16 mm camera at it.

That is the film here. Junji sent us the clips, digitized off the original 16 mm, and we cut them together. Sixty-seven years later, you can watch the car move.

Junji has been documenting Long Beach car culture since the 1940s. He has spent a lifetime pointing a camera at other people’s cars, and a good part of that work is now part of the record on Kustomrama. So when he wrote in and asked for one of our Long Beach Division shirts with an Impala on it, we were not going to say no.

We built it for him. Then we put it in the store, because if it is good enough for Junji, it is good enough for everybody.

Thanks, Junji, for the memories, the film and the idea.

Now we want the rest of it. What did you run at Lions, and is there film sitting in a box at your house? And does anybody still remember Henry’s Machine Shop in Bixby Knolls?

Click on the link in our bio to check out the Kustomrama Long Beach Division shirt, the one Junji asked us for, with his Impala on it. Order today and get 20% off #Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive #LionsDragStrip #LongBeach #1958Impala taken in Long Beach, California by @kustomrama

1k

12

14 days ago

Gary Niemie would not make you a set of knobs if you drove a hot rod.

Not a boat either, and not an airplane. Kustoms only. If your car did not qualify, he turned the job down. Once he said yes, he came to your house and installed them himself.

Bill Snyder of Long Beach has a 1949 Chevrolet with a maroon and grey dash, and every knob in it came off Gary’s lathe. Door lock buttons. Window cranks. The shifter. Even the push buttons on the stock radio. The whole bill, around 1990, was 220 dollars.

He does not make them anymore. According to Bill, he gave it up after California banned the plastics and glues he relied on. That is how the trade ended. Not because nobody wanted the knobs.

There is a long list like this. The chrome shop that closed when the plating rules changed. The lacquer you cannot buy. The trimmer who retired without teaching anybody the pleats.

Thanks to Bill Snyder for the car and the story.

What is a trade in your corner of the world that you have watched disappear?

Link in bio.

#Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive by @kustomrama

235

3

15 days ago

No engine, no transmission, no interior, and a $13,000 price tag in a New Jersey listing in 2014.

That car was Gil Ayala’s Wild Bird, a 1955 Thunderbird out of Gil’s Auto Body Works in East Los Angeles, and it had been on the cover of Motor Life in May 1957. Rear fenders stretched 7 inches for Lincoln taillights. Gold mesh fins that doubled as radio antennas. 1955 Pontiac bumpers set into a contoured grille shell.

A Norwegian bought it, had it restored in Florida, and then drove it across America before putting it on a boat home.

What car from your area still bugs you because it got parted out?

#Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive taken in Oslo, Norway by @kustomrama

599

14

16 days ago

In 1996 the Newsboys put a small silver spaceship on the cover of an album called “Take Me to Your Leader.” The packaging won a Dove Award. Most people who bought that record probably figured the ship was art.

It is a car....sort of

Brannan CJ wrote in to tell us the ship on that sleeve is the X-PAK 400, George Barris’s air car. It rode on a five inch cushion of air, it ran over land and over water, and Jack Sutton hand-formed the aluminum body. Metalflake over 35 coats of lacquer, wireless remote control, a phono-vision phone, and a radar screen.

Then it gets better. Brannan says the same car shows up in a 1960s episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour called “Hangover,” where Tony Randall looks at it and delivers the line, “Take me to your leader.” Whether anyone at the record label knew that thirty years later, we have no idea.

Nobody knows where the car is today. It is believed to have been sold to settle a storage debt, and the trail goes cold there.

Thanks to Brannan CJ for connecting the dots.

Where else have you spotted a famous show car where it had no business being? A movie, a show, a commercial, a record sleeve.

Link in bio.

#Kustomrama #KeepingHistoryAlive by @kustomrama

113

2

18 days ago