Truly restoring a car means that you have to follow the factory specs of what your car should have looked like when new. There isn’t much room for creativity when building up your car in that manner. On the other hand custom cars leave the doors wide open for what you can do. Whether its a mild custom with just some things done to clean up the appearance of your vehicle or if it involves creating an entire new persona of your stocker. When it comes to painting a custom car you don’t want to just go with a stock color that everyone else at the next show will have on their car. Custom Paint mixing can be a scary task and many factors can change the color or “formula” along the way. We decided to take away some of the complexity of picking and mixing a custom color for your ride.
Tag: kustom
The History of Pinstriping
Hand painted pinstripes have been part of cars, since before the horseless carriage became horseless. Back in the day carriages had accent stripes around the edges of the panels, a contrasting color stripe applied along the edge of the wooden wheel, and a long thing strip on each spoke. Stage coaches, being the shuttle bus of their day, were larger with more panels to paint, and often were also lettered with the name of the stage line as a promotional tool.
The Basics to Pinstriping Paints
Rick Harris is one of the best pinstripers working today. He can production stripe factory cars, He’s striped custom electric guitars for Gibson, he’s hand lettered and striped NASCAR race cars, and more. Over 2 years in the Gibson factory he striped over 1000 custom Les Paul guitars. Back in the 90s when the American car companies had a big problem with delaminating paint, he was one of the guys who redoing the warranty work. These pictures are mostly taken from a live stream event he did with Kevin Tetz for the Eastwood YouTube channel.
Build a chassis/fixture Table on a budget
In a effort to make my life easier I decided I would build a table that I could build and modify chassis on in the future. I only had a few simple rules; it needed to be mobile, I needed to be able to easily level it, and it needed to be AFFORDABLE. If you haven’t checked, the metal required to build a heavy fabrication or chassis table new is big bucks. I’d rather save that cash for my project cars and repurpose some metal from my local scrap metal yard.
Project Pile House- Shaving the Door handles
Since guys have been customizing cars, shaving the door handles has been one of the most common modifications to make the car look as smooth as possible. This process can be a pretty simple process, but there are a few things that can make it go smoothly. I decided to show the process on Project Pile House.
Decorate your lid! Custom Painted Motorcycle Helmet
Recently the trend for fully customized motorcycle helmets has picked up again and we’ve even begun to see custom helmet “shows” where artists, owners, and painters can show off their helmet. We decided to brew up our own custom helmet using a vintage helmet and show the process along the way. Mike L. is our resident paint tech guy and he did the work to transform this helmet.
How to Control Warpage on Sheet Metal on a Weld Joint with Gene Winfield
There’s a misconception among enthusiasts and even some professional body guys about welding sheet metal. The fact is that no matter how good or careful you are, metal WILL warp when you’re welding on sheet metal.
Starbird Rod & Custom Live Choptop Workshop- How to Chop a ’56 Lincoln Mark II
At the 51st Annual Darryl Starbird National Rod and Custom Car Show over the February 20th-22nd weekend Darryl Starbird and Star Kustom Shop chopped a 1956 Lincoln Mark II. The chop began Friday when the show gates opened and ended when the gates closed Sunday afternoon. The event was held to showcase and educate the public on how master customizers lower the lid to enhance the profile and look of automobiles.
Custom Built Tailgate for Pile House
Possibly the biggest undertaking yet on this truck was making the new custom bed for Project Pilehouse. To quote Ron Covell in a metal shaping class at Eastwood headquarters; “I think those bedsides were the single largest pieces I’ve ever seen bead rolled in my life!”. The bed was definitely […]