They are five friends who love old-style street rods.
But they also are as varied as the world of hot-rodding itself.
It’s a world that includes the bright polish and gleaming chrome of Gary Thompson’s modified 1937 Chevy coupe ... and the rustbucket look of Ryan Balkenhol’s “rat rod” pickup truck, which has a deceptively fine engine beneath its junked-car exterior.
It’s a world that includes folks like Larry Thompson, Gary’s brother, who still tinkers with his rodded-up 1936 Ford pickup ... and folks like Rick Schlup, who used to do it all himself but is now content to pay Greg Giger to work on his car, so long as Schlup gets to drive the result.
They are not a formal club and probably never will be. But as a group, they are as steady as you get, generally getting together on Saturdays at Giger’s Street Rods for a morning only a gearhead could love.
“We’re kind of lone wolves running in a pack,” joked Gary Thompson.
They are not the only ones on the prowl. According to the Specialty Equipment Market Association, about $899 million was spent in 2004 on street rods, usually defined as hot rods dating from before 1949 with some modernization.
It’s a market that’s showing no sign of shrinking. But calling it a market may be deceiving. At its heart street rodding, like the larger world of hot rodding, is about individuality.
“It has everything a modern car has, but Detroit doesn’t tell me what to drive,” said Schlup, whose ’53 “Buford” (Buick body, Ford drive train) falls just outside the classic definition of street rods, though he has worked on older cars.
Then again, any hot rod is such an amalgam of parts that assigning a year is an exercise in optimism. Schlup’s car includes the suspension of an ’84 Oldsmobile. Thompson’s coupe has the pop-out headlights from a 1987 Mazda. The idea is not to faithfully recreate an era but to have a little fun.
And fun they have — especially since every one of the five friends drives his rod on a routine basis.
“What I enjoy is that people look at the car and smile,” Schlup said. “You never see people look at one and not smile.”
“People roll up, they wave at you,” Giger agreed. “It’s cool.”
Most of the group comes from “car families.” The exception, ironically, is Giger himself. But while his folks may not have been into cars, he became a passionate convert at the age of 7 or 8 when he got his first ride in a ’64 or ’65 Corvette.
His shop has been the unofficial gathering point for the group for several years. Most of the group fits comfortably in the “baby boom” generation with the exception of Balkenhol, who at 27 is often called “the kid.”
“I can build something and (the Thompson brothers) can make it look pretty,” Balkenhol said. “But that takes a lot of budget and years of experience that I don’t have yet.”
Balkenhol’s unpretty pickup, though, is on the leading edge of a trend. “Rat rods” with their weathered look and no-frills approach began as a West Coast reaction against the rising cost of the hot-rod hobby. It’s now become such a popular subgenre that some builders will artificially deteriorate their cars to make them look more rusted-out than they really are.
Balkenhol didn’t need that kind of help. His “Beverly Hillbillies”-style truck was already sufficiently rusted when he first helped get its body out of a friend’s pasture.
“It had about 300 pounds of dirt in it,” Balkenhol said. “I saw it one day and asked about it and he said I could have it. Free is always good.”
From that point, there was no turning back.
“I like the individuality of it,” Balkenhol said, “It’s a creative experience — build what you want, build what you like. It’s an art form.”
It’s also a time-consuming art form, as all their wives have noted. But nobody’s really complaining. There are just so many individual touches someone can do, right down to the lightened body of Larry Thompson’s pickup, which includes a radiation symbol on the side door and the checkerboard pattern of a P-51 Mustang fighter plane on the hood.
“It’s not really practical for anything but having fun,” Thompson said. “That’s what I love about it.”