UPDATE: 10/10/09 - I've been getting a few calls and emails about restarting Church of Hot Rod. If interested, leave a comment here or reply in the forum. Ah brothers... It was another fine couple-o-Sundays. Cool morning air and hot coffee strong enough to peel paint off our vintage rides. After notifying a few people at the Chandler/Gilbert Community college car show, I expected there to be a few more members. I've also been fulfilling my duties as an elder in the church by notifying RoddinandRacinTV.com and cruisinarizona.com. If you're looking for a great excuse to get out of bed and meet some fellow rod and custom car enthusiast over on the East side of town on Sundays, please come on over. Time and Place: Every Sunday morning at 7 AM over at the Starbucks in downtown Chandler. The address is: 1 San Marcos Place, just west of Arizona Ave, south of Chandler Blvd. We're kinda hard to miss, just look for the Hot rods! Can I hear an AMEN? For winter (yea right, it's still in the 80s in November!) we're meeting at 8:00AM.  Feel free to email...

Lead East in Parsippany, NJ is definitely not like any other car show that I have ever visited. Actually the guys and girls over at Appleton Productions Inc., the company that produces the show, like to say "Lead East is NOT a car show, it is a party, a 50's party!" And you had better be well rested before you attend this party or you won't survive. Because, the party is pretty much non-stop from Thursday to Sunday night every Labor Day weekend. The event, billed as the "World's biggest 50's party", emphasized the music of the 50's with Doo Wop groups such as Kenny Vance & the Plantones, Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon, Little Isidore, and many more playing in the Hilton Ballroom. Rockabilly groups such as The Greyhounds and The Razorbacks also cranked it up to annoy the neighbors. Keeping everyone informed was the job of DJ Jerry "The Wolfman" Burst as he played the tunes and made announcements broadcasting through a low power FM broadcast and being piped to the very large speakers set ontop of the hotels. This was great because Lead East actually encourages everyone...

How long has it been since you were excited about a car movie? Looking back there were a few good car movies, (Who remembers Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry) especially my all time favorite "American Graffiti". Has there been or will there ever be a car movie with such massive appeal and with an equally massive following? Released in 1973, American Graffiti still spawns clone cars and I saw "John Milner" (Paul Le Mat) at this year's Grand National Roadster Show. Wikopedia's got a ton to say about American Graffiti, but none more amazing then this: Graffiti is the highest cost-to-profit success in film history. When I first saw the trailer for Deuce of Spades, the first thing I thought of was American Graffiti. Deuce of Spades is a true car movie and it's focused purely on hot rods. I can't wait. I'm not saying they're similar, because they're not! Faith Granger, the woman (yea, a woman) behind Deuce of Spades tells me, " American Graffiti is a feel good movie about cruising and coming of age... and having fun." Deuce of Spades, on the other hand, is "An...

UPDATE: 10/10/09 - I've been getting a few calls and emails about restarting Church of Hot Rod. If interested, leave a comment here or reply in the forum. Whatever you do on Sunday, it's always a great to meet friends and go for a drive. We're pushing it here in Chandler, Arizona cause it's still damn hot, even at 8 AM in the morning. This was a special Sunday cause our better halves joined the normal Sunday coffee run and we made it a breakfast cruise over to the Good Egg near Chandler Heights and Alma School. We had some special occasions to celebrate too. (click and save this photo, it'd make a great desktop!) Bonnie, my hot rod, was celebrating the repair of a CRACKED FRAME, found, luckily while the car was parked in my garage. Doug from Squeeg's Kustom, helped me fix the crack on Saturday and make today's breakfast 5 roadsters strong. More on that later. (of course I took pictures!) I celebrated the cruise-in by putting a new red rag on the oil breather. (nothin but the Sunday's best!) My lovely wife Miyuki also joined...

MyRideisMe.com featured a blog a while ago about the stunning, Grand National Roadster Show stealing (click to read->) 27 Chevy Modified built by Dan Collins of the Old Gold Garage. The car was built for his wife, Tiffany Collins, who actually purchased the car in a rusty hulk in Temecula, CA. If you dug this car, check out how the car was deservingly featured on the cover of Rod and Custom Magazine and they took some great studio pictures of the car and filled in some details. Take a look at the Rod and Custom online story. Congratulations Dan and...

I got in touch with Noddy Watts the man behind "Beach Hop" New Zealand's #1 Nostalgia festival. I'm saving my pennies (ok, quarters!) to attend this show. He're what Noddy had to say about it: "New Zealand is a small country with just 4 million people at the bottom of the South Pacific. Is Hot Rodding known in this island paradise? Hell yeah! One of New Zealand's biggest Festivals just happens to be the "Beach Hop" - celebration of the 50s & 60s. Over 100,000 people attend the free 5 day event - that is 2.5% of the entire population! A highlight is the 1300+ entered Hot Rods and Classic Cars that take over the town for the week with non stop cruising and car shows - amongst stunning South Pacific coastal scenery - blue seas and white sands. Take a look at www.beachhop.co.nz Held in the popular seaside holiday resort of Whangamata, the fun never stops with music, kulture, fashion, more music, hot rods, motorbikes, dancing, dragsters, scooters of this golden era. With 100,000 people attending, this is one of the largest events of its kind in the...

The first step in fixing a problem is admitting you have one. Hi, I’m Craig, I don’t know crap about bodywork. (Hi Craig). With that out of the way, I moved onto the next step. That’s seeking help. I turned to my new friends over at Squeeg’s Kustoms in Mesa, Arizona. Squeeg’s has been turning out show quality paint and bodywork since 1964 and Doug Jerger, the owner and Squeeg’s son, has kept the business rolling. One of Doug’s latest paint jobs was for his America’s Most Beautiful Roadster (AMBR) contenting 32 Roadster. I was in good hands for my shotgun lesson in body work to support the 63 Falcon Wagon project. When hot rods and custom car building’s in your head nearly every waking minute, hanging out in a shop like Squeeg’s might as well be Disneyland. When I pulled up, Doug and the Jerry Courlton were standing out front marveling at the fresh custom paint on Jerry’s Corvette super gas race car body. Wow. It’s tough to put down this many colors without having that, “I’m stuck in the 80’s” look, but Doug nailed the graphics and...

Hot Rod Friends at their Best What do Hot Rods, cool Kustoms, the LA Roadster show and Octopus have in common? The Throttle Kings of Southern California. In 2007 when MyRideisMe.com was barely idling, I hit the LA Roadster show hard with cards and t-shirts to spread the word. That was when I first met Victor Busatamante. Victor listened about my dream of "Myspace for car guys" and offered a beer to celebrate that I was done jabbering. By that time, I had the pitch down, but even I was tired of hearing it. One beer led to another, then Victor and his buddies were making carne asada and fed me well. You don't meet guys that generous every day. I was grateful for the hospitality so I loaded up the boys with MyRideisMe.com t-shirts. Fast forward 1 year to 2008. As Saturday at the Roadster Show was winding down, I set out to find Victor and his guys again. Not so hard, just look for the guys having the most fun! A little ways out, I found them. This year was no different then last. Everyone was having a...

I think it was Earl Sheib who said, "Body work is glamorous!" He was lying! Ok, I made that up. Body work's dirty and you have to use a bunch of tools that make noise. I like that part! But, it takes so much time. It's hard work. This week, I enlisted another friend, Joe Nagy. He came over to hit the roof of the wagon, and that we did. (for a good laugh, check out the Earl Scheib home page and the endorsement from Danny Boneduce) On the left, you can see where we started. For some reason, I really like wagons, but I guess that was before I wanted to paint one! The roofs, as they're known, are LONG. I'm pretty lucky that the roof's straight and basically trouble free except for more of that black primer filled with that strange oil the previous owner used to keep it sorta-shiny. (I already said, please don't do that...) Joe and I fired up the wire wheel and DA sander only to find that sucked. From there I decided to go back to the paint stripper to ease the...

2010 Pin-up Girl Wall Calendars Pinup models go with Hot Rods like whipped cream on pumpkin pie. That's why you'll find hot rods, muscle cars and even some hot bikes shot with the much finer sex in the pinup photo gallery at MyRideisMe.com. It just seemed like the right thing to do! Then, with the popularity of the killer photos of one of my favorite models, Zoe Scarlett done by Photographer: Dirk Behlau and, the most popular blog at MyRideisMe.com about the Hot Rods and Pinups II book shot by David Perry, I start thinking... why don't I shoot some pinup pictures? Piece of cake, I'll let you in on the secrets: 1) Get a hot girl and 2) pose her next to a rad hot rod. Done. Except for a couple of things... imagine this: Excuse me hot rod owner, I think your wife's hot. She looks like a pinup model. Can I take some pictures of her? At that point, either you're feeling the left side of your face caving in or you've met Don Simms and you'll be fine. Don and his buddies from the Throttle...

I met Keven Carter doing what I do best... surfing the web for the best Hot Rod and bike sites out there. Keven's been sharing his work at Photobucket where old ladies looking for pics of grandkid and quilting pics browse. I talked him into letting MyRideisMe.com have a few. It's a cool mix of black and whites and color shots of mostly period correct style hot rods and kustoms with a few pinups mixed in just for fun. Keven shared this brief bio... Ever since I was a young boy I wanted to grow up and own a car with fins. Since the automotive world looks to never go back down that road, I was compelled to look to the past. I have always been fascinated with old cars and vintage design elements, from packaging to advertising. I'm a graduate of The Center for Creative Studies (now College of Creative Studies, CCS) in Detroit, Michigan where I received my bachelors of fine art with a focus in Animation. My creative endeavors aren't limited to animation, but rather they span from Video installations, Sound Design, Film Production, Music, Photography,...

2010 Pin-up Girl Wall Calendars Instead of working on my projects in the garage, MyRideisMe has me spending most of my free time on the web, working, or sometimes just surfing. I caught a (insert nifty surfing metaphor here) wave when I found David Perry's website, DavidPerryStudio.com. I contact David when I saw this picture: I recognized the the lovely Heidi Van Horne and I recognized that's the cover from a book for sale in the MyRideisMe.com Amazon store. The book is: Hot Rod Pinups by, none other than, David Perry. Here's the description of that book: For as long as young men have been channeling, chopping, and hopping up rods and customs, women - whether loyal girlfriends or trouble-seeking "bad girls" - have been integral to their scene. In this unique portfolio evoking great 1950s pin-up artists like Vargas and Elvgren, talented photographer David Perry depicts models in and out of cherry-picked rods and customs wearing painstakingly chosen period dress and hairstyles. More than 100 photos present these modern-day pin-ups under three themes: Garage, Cruising, and Race. In addition, essays explore each topic and are also accompanied by...