ROD REVIVAL

MORLEY HAS AN ALTERNATIVE ON TRADITIONAL HOT-ROD DRIVETRAINS, AND IT JUST MIGHT SAVE YOU A WAD OF CASH

- DAVE MORLEY

Because I'm a sucker for a cars and coffee event these days, I've been spending a few choice Sunday mornings gawking at other people's toys.

And, with the (slightly) improved weather here lately, a few of those shows have featured plenty of hot-rods. I wouldn't call myself a total hot-rod guy, but when I see one I like, I really dig it.

The ones that appeal most to me are the fair dinkum, old-school rides with plenty of ingenuity on show. There's an element of craftsmanship, too, in making a functioning vehicle out of whatever was lying around at the time. Let's be honest here, anybody can go out and buy a crate engine, order up a set of remade rails, flash the plastic on a front and rear suspension setup and then plonk a brand-new fibreglass body on top. Okay, maybe not just anybody, but you get my drift.

But I prefer the approach that says: Okay, we have a set of 32 Ford rails, we can recondition the suspension and add proper dampers on engineered mounts, and then we can take the original steel body, remove the rust and add a set of era-correct wheels. Bingo, it's a hot-rod. It might not be perfect, but it's for damn sure you won't see another one exactly like it.

But this is also where we come to the subject of powering that hot-rod. To a bloke like me, the correct way to go is to use what ever is lying around, cluttering up the shed. And using the old brain muscle to come up with something nobody else has thought of yet. Obviously, a more modern, more powerful donk is acceptable, because that's just following hot-rodding tradition to the letter. But why does it automatically have to be a V8?