KP Books

Building Street Rods: All You Need to Know by  Ken Wickham

Custom Bodywork Handbook by  Eddie Paul

Reviewed By  Dick Christ, IPMS# 18127

MSRP: $24.99 each OK, these are not the type of books you would expect to see reviewed by IPMS/USA. Both these books would be of interest to the builder of custom car models and anyone interested in cars built for the movies. The title of the first book, Building Street Rods: All You Need To Know, is a bit ambitious. This book provides good overall guidelines and instructions on planning and building a street rod. The first three chapters cover the history of street rods, general information on planning the project (including cost estimates) and the advantages and disadvantages of the two types of body materials, steel and fiberglass. The next five chapters cover the mechanical details of building a street rod. The chapter on chassis and suspension includes descriptions and pictures of the various types of front and rear suspensions used on street rods. Rebuilding the engine is covered next, including all of the steps for a basic rebuild and upgrading the engine, including costs. Expect to pay $15,000 for a high horsepower engine with lots of chrome details. Designing and installing the braking system is the next chapter. Following the chapter on brakes are two chapters on restoring, modifying, and installing the body on a street rod. Chapters 9 through 11 cover the most visible parts of a street rod - bodywork, painting, and finishing. Bodywork includes fixing minor damage and paint prep. Painting has an explanation of the various types of automotive paints and how to apply them. Color sanding and finishing is covered next. Some of these techniques can be applied to models. Electrical wiring and interiors are covered in Chapters 12 and 13. Not much detail here on either subject. The next three chapters cover finishing up your project car: restoring trim and finishing up. General instructions here and not many specifics. The chapter on care and maintenance has some suggestions that apply to any car, not just street rods. The last chapter covers some general suggestions on how to pick a shop to help you build a street rod. I found the book interesting, probably because I am a car junkie. There is not much here for the model builder and I would not recommend this book, unless you want to build a street rod. The second book, Custom Bodywork Handbook by Eddie Paul is a much more interesting read. Eddie Paul is a well know builder of custom cars. His client list includes Jay Leno, but his claim to fame is cars for the movie industry. His credits include Cobra, Streets of Fire, Mask, XXX, Fast and Furious, 2Fast and 2Furious, and Taxi. Eddie discusses building cars for the movie industry. He works on a handshake. This handshake covered building 80 cars in one month for The Fast and Furious and 200 cars in two months for 2Fast and 2Furious. Some of the techniques used to build the movie cars are similar to ours. This book has much more detail than Building Street Rods and it starts with metal working. Various alloys and the uses of the alloys are discussed. Both aluminum and steel are covered. Techniques and tools for forming and shaping metal are described and explained. The basics of bodywork are covered in the second chapter. Two levels of detail are explained - movie cars and show cars. Movie cars need to look good at 20 feet and show cars at one foot. Picking the car for the project, metal treatments, rust repair (minor and major), and aligning doors, hoods, decklids, and fenders. The tools, materials, and techniques are covered for each subject. Chapter Three gets into the details of forming metal. Building mock-ups, masters, and patterns are covered. This includes all of the tools need for these jobs. Next are the techniques of forming metal using hammers, dollies, planishing hammer, and the English wheel. Chapter Four takes the techniques in Chapter Three and applies them to projects. The first project is a sunken antenna. Building a corner radius for doors and windows is explained. More advanced techniques include frenched headlights and tail lights, fender flares and chopping the top of a street rod. Some of these techniques apply to scale cars as well. In Chapter Five, some customizing tricks are explained, projects like adding electric windows and electric doors. Next is my favorite section. You may ask how does a shop turn out 200 custom cars in two months for a movie? The answer is one large vacuform machine. In this case, one that will handle a 4 by 8 sheet of plastic. That is 4 by 8 feet. All those body kits you saw in the movie were made on a vacuform machine, then fastened to the body and painted. This chapter also explains the various types of automotive body fillers. This book is an entertaining and informative read if you are interested at all in metal forming, building custom cars, or some "how did they do that" information on movie cars. I would recommend this book. Both books provide a list of resources and Eddie Paul also includes a glossary of terms. Thank you to KP Books for providing the review copies of these books.

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