1948 Chevy full kustom project.

You bl00dy Canucks with your decadent colonial ideas about not needing pennies. You’ll be wanting home rule next! 😉😂


Its hard to answer your point without covering the entire history of kustoms.
But, if we view kustoms as basically ‘cosmetic hotrodding’, it starts to make more sense. In simple terms, the practicality or performance of a kustom comes second and third to the aesthetic. You want to try to make the car look like what the original concept drawings or the rendered promotional artwork did- a car that was longer, sleeker and more attractive than it did in real life once those boring practical people who insisted you had to be able to get in it with a hat on and be able to carry adult backseat passengers without scraping on the floor stuck their 2 (Canadian) penneth in.

Another thing that would have been very much in the mind of any restyler at the period would have no doubt been the heavily stylised Streamline Moderne posters of trains, planes and racing automobiles, which relied heavily on one device because they all used the medium of the day- flat printed media- the use of perspective to suggest speed. All the cars and trains depicted below have big brash front ends, usually drawn from a low angle, tapering away to obscurity towards the rear. So much so they often don't even bother to finish drawing the back end in a lot of them.
These images are literally selling you the progressive dream you are trying to create, all progress, newness, speed, modernity. It’s basically dieselpunk before the term existed. so it would be foolish to not use their exaggerated styling cues to make your kustom stand out.




So what if you take that aesthetic and apply it to an actual real life vehicle? When you buy wholesale into that cartoony look, What do you end up with?
Well, tapering away towards the rear is good. So fade-away roof chops, taildragger stance. (Rear lowered more than the front) extended (but low down/tapering) rear wings/fins, moving rear lights down and back. Remember this is still just before the space race, so fins are not a thing yet.

At the front end you want the opposite. A big brash grille and bumper and bonnet peak smashing its way into the future, all chrome and progress. ‘Get out of my way’, but also ‘look at how opulent i am’.
Another key feature is tall, thin upright grilles didn’t exist postwar. They were seen as old fashioned by then. It was all about big low wide mouths full of chrome. So if you were building such a thing, with such an image in mind, you wouldn’t go for the old hat style of a tall narrow grille.

But yeah, if you’re buying into that sort of look you end up with a car with exaggerated features to some extent, but that’s kinda the whole point. The earlier, much more restrained westerguard style kustoms that just did things like grille and bumper swaps for parts off more upmarket brands were an important step in the progression on the kustom as an art form, and have come massively back into fashion recently, but they’re quite tame compared to what started happening once people really started sinking their teeth into the ideas and metalwork as few years later.

You got me fully hooked now. Simple, artistic approach.

Great to get some context education on the culture (should that be Kulture). Really love this thread. Great to see some bold creativity taking shape before our eyes.

tbh all the background stuff about kustoms is a subject I really like the theory and reasoning behind. If you think about it, it’s all a bit nuts people went as far as they did and spent as much time and effort restyling cars the way they did, but as a concept it’s intrinsically linked to the postwar dream, and not just in America.

I could write a whole thesis on it, but don’t worry I won’t do it just here.

It got a bit out of hand by the late 50's, and today a lot of it is populated by the type of people who will tell you any creativity is wrong and everything should fit recipe X to create a car.

I look at it this way from an outsider's point of view- I get what they were doing and to an extent what they are trying to preserve but there are some shapes and designs that still look good 80+ years later that cannot be intrinsically incorrect.

You've hit on the Dick Tracy right there and it looks good.

Edit: Yes, golden rectangles too. Fibonnaci would be wrong only if Fibonacci didn't exist, nor did mathematics.

--Phil

Me too.

Wonderful car, love the way its going and love your description of the "look". Makes perfect sense and you managed to get a perfect description in a couple of sentences - genius!

fascinating thread , i am potentially doing my first roof chop on my next project , so this is so useful , thank you Daz.

Sort of semi-serious I guess, it it would be a big project I don’t have time for at the minute. Maybe in a few years once I’ve got a few things sorted out in life I could dedicate the time to it. It’s a big subject and I’d want to do it justice.

I wont go into detail on here Daz , in case it doesn't come off , but i will bung you a pm .it's all still in the theoretical stages acquisition wise at the mo