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Keeping History Alive: Kustomrama is an online encyclopedia dedicated to traditional hot rod and custom cars.
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Our mission is to PROTECT, PRESERVE and SHARE traditional hot rod and custom car history from all over the world.

15/08/2026

Many of the most famous custom cars didn't stay the same for long. They kept changing, year after year.

Part of that was the builder chasing a better idea. But part of it was the shows. To keep winning, and sometimes just to get back in the door the next season, a car had to show up looking different than it did the year before. So the great ones got restyled again and again.

Take Duane Steck's Moonglow, the 1954 Chevrolet. Most people picture one car. There were actually five different versions of it between 1956 and 1959. It started out icebox white with a four and a half inch chop and made the cover of Car Craft, then came back in silver with scallops and won its class at the National Roadster Show in 1958, then came back again in candy blue with peaked headlights and landed on another magazine cover in 1960. Same car, five different looks, each one chasing the next show.

That happened all over the custom world. And it raises a good question, one a reader named Paul got us thinking about.

When a famous car got restyled, did the change actually make it better? Or are there cars you wish they had left exactly the way they were the first time?

Give us the car, and tell us which version gets your vote. The first one, or the one that came after.

Thanks to Paul for the idea.

14/08/2026

Most of what you find on Kustomrama did not come from us. It came from you.

Go clicking through the site, and you are really looking at thousands of small acts of generosity. A guy who dug the only known photo of a car out of an old box and scanned it. A widow who kept her husband's build album for fifty years and finally decided the world should see it. A builder who read a page, spotted a wrong name, and took the time to set it straight. A son who wrote in with the real story his father never got credit for.

We do the digging, the writing, and the chasing down of loose ends. But the raw material, the photos, the memories, the corrections, comes from the people who lived it and the families who kept it. Without them, there is no archive. There is just an empty page.

That is exactly what is happening in this photo. Ralphy Morales did the assistant work on Gil Ayala's Wild Bird back in the day. Years later, when Bjørn Inge Jansson set out to restore the car, it was Ralphy's memory and his old photos that helped put the pieces back together. Here he is sharing them with Bjørn Inge and Ayala's daughter. And when the restoration was finished, Bjørn Inge drove the car across the country to show it to Ralphy in person, and to sit and talk with the man who was there. That is how the history actually gets saved. Person to person.

So if you have a photo in a drawer, a story nobody ever wrote down, or you know we got something wrong, you are exactly who this is for. Send it our way. Help us keep it from being forgotten.

What is sitting in your family's boxes that the rest of us have never seen?

Photo by Raymond Mosken.

13/08/2026

The 2013 Coupe Devils Bonanza in Norway had something you do not see every day. A top chop, done live, in front of the whole crowd.

Brad Masterson of Masterson Kustom Automobiles flew over from the States for the fifth annual Coupe Devils Rod and Kustom Bonanza, and he did not come to watch. He came to chop a top. The car was Erik Skaug Nævestad's 1947 Plymouth coupe, and right there at the show, with people gathered around under the Coca-Cola umbrellas, Masterson went to work cutting the roof down.

That is a bold thing to do in public. A chop is delicate work, and doing it live, on somebody's car, in front of a crowd, takes real confidence.

The story did not end that weekend. The Plymouth was finally finished in June of 2016, and it made its debut at that year's Coupe Devils Bonanza. From a roof getting cut in front of a crowd to a finished custom, three years in the making.

Some of the best custom car history is not from seventy years ago. It is being made right now, at shows like this one.

Were you there in 2013 when Masterson made the cuts? What is the wildest thing you have ever seen done live at a show?

12/08/2026

Dallas, 1951. A Dallas Times Herald photographer lined the local hot rods up along a residential street, and there stood Gene Howard next to a roadster that did not start out in Texas.

The car was built by Bob Berkshire of Tarzana, California, a member of the Idlers. Berkshire flew P-51s in the war, got shot down over France in 1944, and spent time as a POW. According to sources, he built this roadster in a chicken shack while he was recovering. He shaped the body from sheet steel, built his own tube frame, and ran a 1946 Mercury with Visel pistons, Edmunds heads, a Weiand manifold, and Harman cams. Ed Iskenderian and John Athan were among the club guys who helped him along the way.

In 1950 he moved to Dallas for engineering school and brought the roadster with him. Gene Howard drove it around town, it ran with the Chaparrals of Dallas, and that August it showed up in Hot Rod Magazine. Then it faded out of sight for decades, until photos surfaced on Instagram in 2015 showing it had survived in Cincinnati.

Did any of you know this car during its Dallas days, or run with the Chaparrals? We would love to hear from you.

Photo from The Jim Overbey Collection, courtesy of Karl Knecht.

Link to more photos and the full story in the comments section below.

11/08/2026

Some people drive across town for a show. Janne Vuorinen drove his chopped 1949 Ford three-window coupe all the way from Finland.

We had the pleasure of meeting Janne at the A-Bombers Old Style Weekend in Sweden. He made the long haul with our buddy Otto Mattila, and they brought their girls along for the ride. A great new custom in the scene, and some great new friends to go with it.

That is the part these weekends are really about. The cars get you there, but it is the people you meet standing next to them that you remember.

It was a pleasure meeting you all. Here is hoping our paths cross again down the road. Maybe next year at the Coupe Devils Bonanza. You never know.

10/08/2026

The traditional way of building these cars was never written down in a manual.

Nobody learned to chop a top or lead a seam or set up a flathead from a book. You learned it standing next to somebody who already knew, in a garage, holding the light while he worked and asking questions until he got tired of answering them. The knowledge moved from one set of hands to the next. That is how it always went.

That is also the part I think about the most. A lot of the guys who built the first generation of hot rods and customs are getting up there in years, or already gone. When one of them passes, he takes a little of that hard-won knowledge with him, the stuff that never made it into print.

But here is the good news, and I see it every time I am out at a show. The chain is not broken. There are young people doing this now, chopping their first top, learning to tune carburetors, asking the old guys how it was done. Kids in home garages far from anywhere, building the real thing because somebody took the time to show them. The craft is still moving hand to hand, the way it always has.

That is really what keeping history alive means. Not just the photos and the facts, but the skills, passed on before they are lost.

That is my brother Olav in the photo, out at his Mercury project, and that is his daughter right beside him, already leaning in to see how it is done. The next one.

Who taught you? And who are you passing it on to?

09/08/2026

In June of 1953, Hop Up and Motor Life ran a story on Al Garcia's 1948 Ford convertible. It got one big thing wrong, and it took sixty years to set it straight.

The magazine gave Gil Ayala credit for most of the bodywork and the design, including the restyled front. Ayala was a big name, so it made sense on paper. But that is not how it happened, and in 2014, at 84 years old, Al finally told the real story.

Al bought the Ford in 1950. He was twenty, and it was a cherry black convertible when he got it. His father owned an auto body and paint shop called National Auto Works, in Southwest Los Angeles, over on Figueroa Street, which was automobile row back then. Al had grown up in that shop. He figured he already knew a thing or two about dolling up a car.

The metal man at National Auto Works was Harold Blake. The shop closed around noon on Saturdays, and that is when Al would stay behind and work on the Ford. Before long Harold started staying late too. He got curious about what Al was doing, and he began to help. Little by little, the car took shape.

So where did Gil Ayala come in? "I only had contact with Gil Ayala," Al remembered. "Yes, we talked some about different ideas, but after the windshield work I did the rest." Ayala chopped the top and made the windshield frames out of stainless steel, cut them to fit, gas welded them together, filed them smooth, and buffed them to a polish. Great job, Al said. But the priming, the sanding, and all the prep work was his own. Ernie Escontrias, at the shop, laid down the final coats in Emerald green lacquer.

The whole build, restyling, interior, and top, came to 1900 dollars. Al sold the convertible to a fellow in Los Angeles in 1956 or 1957.

For sixty years the printed story stood. That is the trouble with a magazine, it freezes whatever was on the page the day it went to print. Al set it right while he still could, and now it stays right.

Thanks to Al Garcia for telling us how it really went.

Click the link in the comments to read the full story on Kustomrama.

08/08/2026

Ask a room full of hot rod guys what belongs under the hood, and you will not get one answer.

For years, the Ford flathead V8 was the only real answer. It powered the dry lakes cars, the first generation of hot rods, the whole look and sound of the early scene. To a lot of people, a traditional rod is not traditional without one. The finned heads, the burble, the history. You can hear a flathead coming.

Then the overhead-valve V8s showed up. The Oldsmobile Rocket and the Cadillac in 1949, the Buick Nailhead in 1953, the Chevy small-block in 1955. More power, more room to grow, and by the mid 1950s plenty of guys were yanking their flatheads and dropping in a Rocket, a Nailhead, or a Caddy. That was period-correct too. It was just the next chapter.

So it is an old argument, and it never really gets settled. Do you keep the flathead for the look, the sound, and the tradition, even if it gives up power? Or do you go early overhead V8, the way a lot of guys actually did back then, and chase the performance?

Flathead or overhead V8. Which one lives in your traditional hot rod, and why?

The photo shows a Buick Nailhead in Chris Casny's 1931 Ford Model A Coupe.

07/08/2026

It's Friday! Hope your weekend looks like Ed Roth's did here, in a paint-splattered tee, fitting a bubble top to the Road Agent like it's the most normal thing in the world.

📖 Photo: Petersen Photo Archive

07/08/2026

The hot rod was born in Southern California, but it did not stay there.

Most of the magazines came out of California, so that is the history most people know. The dry lakes, the Barris shop, the deuce coupes cruising Bob's Big Boy. All of it real, all of it worth remembering. But the bug spread a lot farther than the West Coast, and it spread fast.

By the 1950s, there were guys chopping tops in Brooklyn, building hot rods in Norway, and racing home-built Fords in small towns nobody outside the county had heard of. Same spark, different garages. A master mechanic in Brooklyn shaping a radical Mercury with a Cadillac grille. A club in Sweden throwing a party around old Fords and Knuckleheads. A handful of guys crowded into a garage in Oslo in the winter of 1959, pulling the old flathead out of a 1932 Ford to drop in an Oldsmobile V8.

That is the part of the story we care about most. Not just the famous California cars that already made the magazines, but the whole thing, everywhere it happened. The cars that never got a photo shoot. The builders who did their own thing far from the epicenter and never got the credit.

Keeping history alive means all of it. Wherever the car was built, whoever built it, if it was done in the traditional spirit, it belongs in the record.

Where did the hot rod and custom scene take root where you are? Tell us about the cars and the guys who started it in your corner of the world.

Photo courtesy of Dagbladet / Norsk Folkemuseum, from Digitalt Museum.

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