Forty years ago, a young kid of a filmmaker decided he was gonna stick a finger in the eye of the Hollywood Establishment and make a movie based on stuff he knew about, on his terms, in his old stomping grounds and anyone who said he couldn’t do it could suck it.

In 1972, George Lucas set about making a movie about his own high school years in Modesto, CA. But much of the film about hot rods and girls and cruising and music and uncertainty and bravado and fun and drinking and girls and cars and girls and cars, including the final dawn race on Paradise Road, was shot much further west in Petaluma (as well as the Mel’s Diner in San Francisco, locations in Mill Valley and Sonoma). By the time American Graffiti was released the following year, the backers never imagined the low-budge flick would break even, much less become one of the most beloved and profitable films of all-time.

Forty years later, the yellow Deuce 5-window known simply as “the Milner Coupe,” is still owned by a San Francisco fireman and was brought out once again for the annual celebration of the movie in Petaluma. But this time, it was staged against a certain black ’55 Chevy for one more race down Paradise Road. Sorta.

Nomads Robbie Morris and Dave Tanimura trucked out to Petaluma the other night when we heard a vicious rumor that the most famous street race in the history of hotrodding was gonna be staged one more time at Midnight on Frates Road – the real-world stretch used to represent the original Paradise Road in Modesto.

Did the race happen? You’ll have to wait on that one, but for now, nerd out on some footage Morris nabbed at some point before Midnight on Tuesday in downtown Petaluma…

Welp, we’re back after a week out of the office working on some projects. And one of the highlights of the first day back in the shop was a note from an old friend of ours with a pic of a grungy old T-bucket attached…

We were introduced to Brian Bossone some 15 years ago on the East Coast when he was running some bitchin’ 9-second Mustangs out of his Every Last Detail shop in Maryland. He was helping a mutual friend who was building his “Flying Four Doors Of Fury” ’84 LTD sleeper and we were in over our heads on our ’63 Riviera project that we thought a blown Nailhead was a good idea for. Once we saw the custom work that Brian was doing on late-model Fox Body Mustangs, we just knew he had a flair for the weird and wouldn’t bat an eye at our plans for the Riv.

Things change and we left the East Coast for San Francisco, while Brian ended up as one of the forces behind the “Pinks” franchise on the Speed Channel, among other things. We’ve still got our well-earned “ELD” decal on the toolbox, but that shop is long gone and Brian is now in Texas, working on some new projects.

Which brings us to the inbox that we found his note in over the weekend: a shot of this old T-bucket and a note from Brian, hisself. Turns out, it’s a vintage Dan Woods fiberglass car masquerading as some weird ’70s/’90s/’00s mashup that was finally put up for sale not too long ago – just begging to be restored to its original trim and back to its former glory.

Woods was one of a very few guys (along with Andy Brizio and his “Instant T”) who started making fiberglass Model T body-hot rod kits in the late Sixties and early Seventies. It was the age of the showcar and there was no better period of time to embrace the idea of an easily-purchased kit to get one’s swerve on a la “Beer Truck” in just a few weeks. Dan sold more than a few of ‘em.

But then, as these things do, the trend lost its head of steam. The custom van era had taken the last bit of air out of the room and the pinkbubblegumheartbeatstripe Eighties forced these buckets into back sheds or the back forty (“Hey, it’s fiberglass…it’ll never rust…”) or just cannibalized for the signature Woods frontends and original motors. Some, of course, were kept and run for years – but added onto and taken from to the point that there was little left of their original great style. But that’s not exactly what happened to the one Brian picked up: giant disk brakes, worked-over shitty 305, goofy modern M/T drag radials and the wrong pedals and shifter are still glaring problems to fix to get this thing back to feeling like its old self, but those things are easily fixed. The major features that make it a Custom Carriage Works T-bucket are still there: the Dan Woods frontend, the Woods-widened Skylark wires, the T grille and hardware…Brian found a good one.

Back in ’02, we spied one of these bodies stashed under the eaves at Cole Foster’s Salinas Boys shop. When we pointed to it, he was all, “Hey, don’t laugh – that old fiberglass is gonna be collectible soon…you watch…” Welp, here we are and Cole was right: this stuff is back and we’re stoked that Brian is making plans for a proper Nailhead to replaced that wheezy 305 and we’re hoping he just hangs those early Sanderson headers on the wall of this shop, runs spindle-mounts up front and finds the right candy metalflake paint scheme to properly honor one of the weirdest and most glorious periods of hot rod history.

[View with PicLens]

If you remember anything about 9th Grade History class, or at least the Zeppelin album cover, you’ll already know a little something about the spectacular end to the mighty Airship Era: the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937.

Welp, while you’re suffering a Monday hangover at work apres Cinco De Drinko, we’ll remind you of the anniversary of the Hindenburg’s fire that was captured so well on film at Lakehurst, NJ on May 6th of that year. Looking back, it seems weird to see this giant, gas-filled passenger balloon with the Nazi swastikas on the 4-winged tail floating over New York City in those early photographs. But in ’37, we wouldn’t enter WWII for another four years and Hitler wasn’t a name to be erased from family histories yet.

What does the Hindenburg disaster have to do with car culture? Some might say nothing. But we contend that mechanical innovation, bitchin’ lightweight aeronautical equipment and technological advances in aerodynamics had everything to do with the development of car culture in this country – all embodied in airship travel of the early twentieth century. And the link between WWII vets, Southern California’s automotive aftermarket industry, iconography of mid-century American outsider culture, land speed racing and military surplus had so much to do with what influences us more than half a century later can be traced back to our relationship with the Germans pre-WWII and the young airship industry of the period. And let’s not forget the really cool Bavarian “Hindenburg” typography on the skin of that gas balloon. That shit was sick.

So, dig on some of the most famous newsreel footage of all-time in quiet reverence to the 36 souls lost that day 76 years ago and maybe even play “Your Time Is Gonna Come” from the Zeppelin album that bears the Hindenburg’s notorious image. And read up on just a few of the mountains of details of the wreck when you get a breather. Droppin’ knowledge, kid.

It’s no secret we do what we do out of one of the greatest and most unique cities ever built. And one of our favorite San Francisco photographers is Fred Lyon: he’s on the high side of the nineties now, but he still shooting and we’re working up the nerve to ask him to work with us on a project.

Another seemingly disparate topic we love is the experience of driving in San Francisco. Hard to explain it, but as we were looking at Lyon’s work, it suddenly all came together for us: his images do a great visual job of exactly that! So, we thought we’d take you for a drive through our beloved hometown through the beautiful, mid-century work of Fred Lyon…

THE FOG
Let’s start with the image above. The fog in San Francisco has much to do with what we locals like to call ‘microclimates.’ For whatever topographic and oceanic reasons, the fog here can be localized to the point that it’s foggy in one neighborhood and sunny in the next – sometimes mere blocks from each other. The fog can be as fast as it is thick, too. It moves with the wind and one usually begat the other, making it a real challenge to drive in, but have no fear: when you reach the edge of the Sunset District (one of the foggiest neighborhoods…go figure) and drive into, say the Inner Richmond, you can actually watch as the front half of your car is shining in the sun and the back half is still shrouded in the dark fog. It’s like driving through a waterfall – it’s that dramatic. So cool…

THE TRACKS
Most cities have some sort of light rail or street car system that puts steel tracks in the road surface. But we’ve also got the cable cars, on top of street cars. What does that mean? Well, it adds a whole ‘nuther element of craziness to driving. When the streets are wet, combined with the hills, those thin ribbons of steel and the big, flat service plates at intersections and random spots along them turn into small, skinny ice skating rinks for drivers. And riders – bikers say that San Francisco is one of the hairiest cities to ride in and if you do on any regular basis, you’ve earned some sort of stripe. We’ve seen loaded tour busses try to make a left up a hill, get the rears over those tracks on a wet day and get hung up for hours till one of those rig wreckers shows up to pull it. And that’s a show worth stopping your day for.

THE CABLE CARS
The cable cars, ah the cable cars. There aren’t nearly as many as there used to be and the lines are pretty much restricted to one section of town anymore, but they’re slow and really popular with tourists. Both of which are to be avoided at all costs if you’re driving. Get stuck behind one of these and you’re going to see exactly what it means to ‘yield to cable car.’ It’s 19th Century technology on a 19th Century schedule in the middle of a very 21st Century city. Good times.

THE HILLS
Combine everything above with our hills. If you’ve never driven these streets, you’ll never forget your first time. When out-of-towners come to visit, we like to drive them around a certain route we figured out will do ‘em up just like a rollercoaster: when we pull up to the edge of California St. on Jones St. and pause so they can see nothing but the neighborhood hilltop a quarter mile away with nothing but air under the front bumper, then dip over the edge and instantly change our aspect about 60º, well, there are few things funnier than the face in the passenger seat.

THE HILLS (AGAIN)
Remember what we were saying above? Well, an interesting result of the steep streets is what has to happen to the sidewalks on either side of them: steps. You know you’re on a steep hill when the sidewalk turns into a series of cement steps because the laws of gravity make the street impossible to climb or descend without notching it like this.

THE COMBINATION OF HILLS AND TRACKS
Not to belabor the point, but we couldn’t talk about this stuff without showing you Lyons’ version of the famous view of California Street down on the flat section of the Financial District, looking up the hill in the background. Fucking glorious. And for the right money, the city will shut down this street so you can bomb it to your heart’s desire. We don’t have that kind of money.

CHINATOWN
Our Chinatown is the best Chinatown in any U.S. city. Believe that. And as wonderful and mysterious and other-worldly as it is, it’s just as insane to drive in. The laws of western civilization’s driving culture are to be found in practice absolutely nowhere near Chinatown. There’s some sort of cultural disconnect between Chinatown’s residents and the mechanical limits of a car and we can’t figure out what it is. Now, we’ll also say that for every rule, there’s an exception and we’re working on an amazing story right now of some hidden gearheaddom under the surface streets of this fabled land within San Francisco. But, for the most part, the driving habits that have their roots in Chinatown and have spread out to other neighborhoods (you’re taking your life in your hands when you get behind the wheel anywhere on Clement St., for instance) will make your insurance company question every word that comes out of your mouth when you submit a claim…in Chinatown.

THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
Know what happens when you combine tight lanes of opposing traffic with no shoulders, made up of roughly 50% tourists and some of the most spectacular scenery in the world on either side of said traffic? You get the Golden Gate Bridge. At least once a year, there’s some sort of horrific tragedy on the bridge made up of distracted tourists driving into oncoming traffic on a street surface with only flimsy orange plastic rods sticking up out of it to separate opposing forces meeting at 45mph. Which is also why a speeding ticket is double on the GGB. Believe that.

Don’t get us wrong – we’d live and work nowhere else. San Francisco is the best combination of car culture, food, music, art, architecture, landscape, weather and a nervous tectonic plate that’ll keep you on your toes. It ain’t for everyone and that suits us just fine, too. But when you come to visit, give us a hauler and we’ll take you for a little drive. Promise.

We got to talking here at the shop the other day about what it’s like to do what we do. In most ways, we’re just like you: going to work every day, working on a car project (or seven), getting together with friends over drinks, wishing the weekend would last longer..y’know, the usual. Except that what we do for a living is documenting what YOU do.

Life In The AUTOCULT. It’s really all about you. So, when we’re producing a photoshoot or making a documentary or publishing a book or getting the magazine to press, we try to remember to shoot some video with one free hand while we’re doing everything else. And it was brought to our attention that you might want to see some of these brief, captured moments. Well, that’s easy enough…

Welp, it’s happened again: another Winter gone and the official start of Summer is on top of us. Days are getting longer, hot rods are getting warmer and there’s a growing number of us buying up tubes of marine-grade bearing grease and slathering up the ball hitch on flatbottom boat trailers.

Here’s to Summer. A long, hot one…

1932 was a good year…at least, looking at it through the lens of hot rod history. Ford had just introduced what would become known to us as the ‘Deuce’ and the first mass-produced V-8 engine. We could just stop right there, but Dan Strohl over at Hemmings just enlightened us on another relatively obscure knowledge-drop that changed the world that year: tractor tires.

Yep. Tires on a tractor. See, up till ’32, nearly all tractors used in the U.S. ran medieval-looking steel wheels with cleats riveted to them for traction. Which seemed to work fairly well in the fields under low-impact and low-speed situations, but combine them with a zero-suspension setup and a tractor (and its navigator) wouldn’t last more than a few scant years without a near-complete rebuild. The thing would almost literally shake itself apart.

And then, on Labor Day in ’32 – in the midst of The Great Depression – the venerable tractor maker, Allis-Chalmers, introduced it’s Model U complete with pneumatic rubber tires at a public demonstration in Kansas to some fanfare. And the company sold exactly ONE.

So, A-C wondered, what now..smart guys? Welp, the engineers were convinced of a few things: rubber tires would make the tractor last longer, run faster (faster than the blistering 5mph most tractors were famous for), allow it to traverse paved roads and barn floors with less damage to everything and everyone involved, cause less fatigue to the farmer and cause world peace. Maybe not the last thing.

And the ad guys at Allis-Chalmers came up with an idea: land speed racing! Why not? The rubber-shorn Model U came with a 4-speed transmission, but the 4th gear was plated over for the stubborn farmer who opted out for the steel wheels. With 4th gear at the ready, the U could triple its known speed and that was a sensation ripe for the taking-advantage-of by the marketing department.

Enter the fastest guys of the era: Ab Jenkins – ”The Mormom Meteor” and an aging Barney Oldfield – the first guy to drive a mile a minute (or 60mph, if that works for you). On the back of an Allis-Chalmers tractor, Oldfield ran just over 62mph on a set of speed-rated Firestones in 1933. And then Jenkins hit 68mph on his tractor at the Bonneville Salt Flats in ’36 – claiming that the ride was akin to “…riding a frightened bison.”

Did it work? You betcha. Rubber tires would become standard equipment on tractors from that period forward, thereby changing farming and, ultimately, the way we eat. How’s that for a mind-blower?

If you’ve ever ridden atop an early tractor, with its rear wheels bolted directly to the rearend housing and its front runners clamped to a 3-piece solid steel axle, you’ll know that the only suspension comes from the air in its big, fat tires. A 35mph ride down the road between fields in high gear is a wild one and not for the faint of heart. Now, imagine going twice that fast with marginal steering, a small hand lever accelerator just below the steering wheel, the aerodynamics of a bookshelf and only a pair of questionable rear drum brakes for the other end of the endeavor. Some will try to convince you that 80mph in a flathead-powered hot rod is some sort of special experience, but we’ll submit that 65mph on a pre-war tractor trumps that shit all day long.

Like we said, Dan Strohl over at Hemmings did a great job on this and we’ll throw a piece by the Northern Automotive Restoration Club and the thread by the Allis-Chalmers forum nerds into the further-reading mix, too. Those early days of automotive innovation…what a great time to be alive…

If you’ve been following us on FaceySpacey, you’ll know two things: 1) we keep getting banned for days for posting pics of beautiful women and 2) we just found a little stack of Premiere Issue copies.

And if you know that, you’ll know that we’ve put together a very limited edition package of goods to make those 25 copies of our long-sold out AUTOCULT Premiere Issue just a little more special. But let’s back up a little…

In the Premiere, we featured our story about Les Dunham and his Dunham Coachworks in north Jersey. What’s amazing about Les ain’t just that he’s clear into his Seventies and still working every day, but that he single-handedly created the tao of the pimp car back in the late Sixties and early Seventies. If you read the story, you’ll understand how Les’ custom cars broke the still-heavy color lines and his work ended up in one of the classic films of underground culture, “Super Fly.”

As a kid in the Fifties, Les was doodling hot rods and customs and custom-painted bikes on just about any flat surface in front of him. And while there are die-hard Dunham Coachwarks fans who know his work, almost nobody had ever seen the collection of sketches Les had squirreled away in a box that he pulled out for us to slobber over when we spent the day with him at his shop. And in that box was a set of old, yellowed and very brittle pencil sketches on cheap newsprint that he preserved from his grade school days. It’s probably no surprise that we zeroed-in on one of those sketches in particular: that of a reclining pinup girl in bikini-n-heels on an era-perfect Harley with an early example of Les Dunham custom paint. BITCHIN. We’re the first to ever publish that sketch…

Les would go on to take the calculated risk of making his own way in the world and his Dunham Coachworks changed the world in ways that are evident to this very day. If you ever find yourself in Boonton, NJ, stop in to see Les and go grab lunch with the man. It’ll change your life, swearsies. And in celebration of one of our favorite guys on the planet, we’re putting Les’ early pinup sketch on the back of our limited-edtion NOMAD sweatshirt.

If you missed the feature on Les Dunham in the Premiere Issue because it sold out before you could get your hands on one, this is the perfect opportunity – and the very last one to come from right from the publishers – to own an original copy as one piece of the Part Deux package. Not only that, but you’ll be one of 25 people to rock the AUTOCULT NOMAD sweatshirt featuring Les Dunham’s early pinup art. We’ll only make the 25 sweatshirts once the packages are sold so that we get each of your sizes, so it’ll take a little longer to get yours once you place your order. But all good things come to those who can hold on in these days of instant gratification, right?

If the Premiere Issue and sweatshirt aren’t enough, you’ll also get an AUTOCULT shirt of our choosing – don’t worry, we know you’ll dig it. We’ve got a few of these packages left, so place your order right now and we’ll throw a few extra goodies into your box, too.

Ever go to a flea market and find those boxes of old, brittle photo prints of anonymous family vacations, backyard barbecues, cars, farms, amateur street shots and allah-knows-what-all? Yeah, we love that shit, too. We’re always looking for the rare-ass hot rod snapshot or biker photo, but we’re always left wondering what the situation was that prompted the camera to be taken out and used to record that frozen moment. And did those people ever expect their photos to be rummaged years later by hipsters in skinny jeans and lumberjack beards at yard sales and swap meets, taking phone-pictures of their pictures to Instagram it later with a digital filter meant to replicate the original picture? The world is a weird place when you stop long enough to think about it.

Enter Chicagoan, John Maloof: in ’07, he picked up a trunk full of negs and filmstrips at an auction and discovered some fairly goddam amazing photography by a complete unknown. Turns out, some of the most important American photography of the Twentieth Century was made by a nanny nobody seemed to really ever know as well as the children she attended to. Sort of.

We’re not gonna ruin it for you – just watch the yet-to-be-released documentary trailer below and if you’re not as stunned as we were the first time we watched it, you don’t have a soul, kid.

To some, money’s the thing. MONEYMONEYMONEY. It rules them and they’ll make a life’s worth of bad decisions in its pursuit and, at the end of their day, still have nothing to show for it. To others, relationships are that thing: making their own lives better and richer for knowing someone special and passing some of that wealth on when the opportunity makes itself known.

Kent Fuller, for us, is one of those who’s made us richer for knowing him. Now, we’re not fishin’ buddies, but then again, we’re not entirely sure Fuller fishes. But when Vern Tardel introduced us to Fuller years and years ago when his streamliner was coming together in the back shop at the Tardel hot rod ranch in Santa Rosa, CA, we just stood there with those two mighty men in the heat of the day under that tin roof and just…well…got richer.

Fuller is known as one of the fathers of drag racing: his Magicar FED chassis and innovations on The Salt and in hotrodding (Volksrod, anyone?) revolutionized the world of speed in ways that few others could ever claim.

Remember that streamliner we mentioned above? Welp, that thing is just about finished. Ten years ago, we published our own feature on Fuller and we sat with him and the ‘liner as he told us how he was fixin’ to pilot this thing at Bonneville. We’ll claim we got lost in the sheen that handformed aluminum was giving off or maybe we were a taco low in the tank, but we blurted out, “Uh, do you think you’re building your coffin?”

Crickets.

Fuller is famous for not being a man of voluminous oration. And he gave us that well-known stare, followed by an uncomfortable silence, followed by us shuffling our feet, followed by a feeble attempt at changing the subject, followed by Fuller continuing on with his plans. Followed by us still remembering every detail of that silent beat-down that we learned oh-so much from lo these many years later.

Now, here’s your opportunity to be a part of something special: Fuller, with the help of his family, has taken the last push of his streamliner build to the interwebs – Kickstarter, to be exact. If you’re not familiar with Kickstarter, it’s a crowdfunding platform that allows anyone to contribute to a project to see it through to fruition. In this case, you’ll be helping Fuller finish up the last bits of his flathead-powered, handbuilt race car and get to Speed Week for one last run.

This is your chance to get rich quick: make a contribution to Fuller’s Kickstarter project, help him roll that car out onto the salt of Bonneville for the first time and know that you’ll be a wealthier soul for knowing you were a part of something special.