The Volksrod is really a hot-rod that is based on a Volkswagen Beetle but in the style that you may expect from Hot Rods build from Model T Fords or Model A Fords. Some believe that the scarseness of old cars to modify and customise has led to the increased popularity of volksrods while others suggest it could be due to the customising community looking for something a little bit different.

A Volksrod is easily identified as it will usually be in the style of a Rat-Rod and most commonly painted matt black. The wings are usually removed and replaced with wheel hugging mud-guards, to prevent stones from damaging fellow drivers cars.

The front suspension is either moved forward to make the wheel-base look longer with some reworking of the stock suspension and steering components. Another popular modification is remove the stock suspension and steering components and fit the suspension from an early Ford. This popularity of this modification has lead to the creation of several kits that have been made available.

To see the entire article together with some volks rod pictures click here.

A Rat Rod is difficult to define but you know when you see one! They are often based on cars from the 1940′s to the 1960′s but some examples are as recent as the 1970′s. Some Hot-Rods are assembed from a selection of parts usually dating around the 1930′s.

To the people not familiar with Rat Rods these cars may appear unfinished and shoddy but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Rat Rods were originally developed as an alternative to the glossy high-price Hot-Rods which were never driven and trailored to shows. Rat Rods are all about the fun of building and driving them and appearance take second place. The majority of Rat Rods that are seen at the shows will be dented and rusty but importantly they will have been driven there. If a part needs to be replaced then the owner will often fabricate the part themselves of fit a part that does the job equally well. If the Rat Rod is painted at all it is usually matt black or primered and often will have Maltese crosses on the doors and skull accessories such as the gear-shifter.

For the builders of these cars it is all about building a car that performs well both in speed and acceleration as well as handling and braking. For that reason the majority of the ‘comfort items will be stripped away such as headlining, interior trim to give the best power to weight ratio possible. Many of the cars have heavily modified bodies and are often roof-chopped, channelled, lengthened, shortened etc.

The typical choice of engine for a Rat Rod is a V8 which would probably be a Ford Flathead V8 or an early Chrysler Hemi.

To see then entire article together with some Rat Rod pictures click here.

The term Hi-Riser refers to a modified vehicle that has been modified in such a way to that the ground clearance has been increased greatly over the factory standard. This is achieved by adding large oversize wheels with very low profile tyres. The sizes of these wheels are typically between 20-26 inches but with the demand to get bigger and bigger some cars now feature 28 inch wheels and maybe more.

To get such large wheels to fit into the wheel arches the owners of the hi-risers have had to adopt modifications commonly seen on monster trucks and kits are available to give the car the required lift. Particular attention must be paid to the braking system due to the increase diameter of the wheels and the suspension in general which needs to be stiffened to avoid excessive roll when cornering.

Inexpensive automobiles are commonly used to create a Hi-Riser and the model and its age will determine which category the Hi-Riser is in. The most popular models that are used in the creation of a Hi-Riser are the full-size Chevrolet cars such as the Impala, Caprice, Monte Carlo, and Chevelle. A Box is usually a 1970-1990 Caprice or Impala and so called due to their squared off front and rear ends, giving a box-like appearance. A Bubble is usually a 1990 Caprice or Impala and so called because they are rounded at both ends.

A Donk is in a league of its own and is generally created from a mid 1970s Impala, Caprice and Monte Carlo or any mid 1970s ride with a sloping rear end. The stance of a Donk is very important and is slightly different to a Box or Bubble in that the front of the car is slightly higher than the rear, giving a nose in the air appearance. The name Donk has come from the “badonka-donk” noise that the rear suspension makes when it goes of bumps in the road.

Other manufacturers that are commonly chosen for Hi-Risers are Buick, Pontiac and Oldsmobile.

There are several options that are available to lowrider enthusiasts to achieve the desired ‘in the weeds’ look. These include dropped spindles, chopping the suspension springs, hydraulic systems and airbag systems. In the modern lowrider culture airbags or hydraulics are usually preferred over dropped spindles or chopped springs since the ride height is adjustable.

Airbag Suspension

The use of airbag technology is now the most common type of suspension modification due to its price and simplicity. A cheap system can cost about $400 to install leading up to about $1000 for a more advanced system.

To create an adjustable ride the coil springs are replaced with a rubber bag that is filled with air from a central reservoir which is filled using an air compressor. To raise the car the bags are inflated with air and to lower the car the bags are deflated. A simple system consists of a air-bags, a compressor, a reservoir and control unit.

It is important not to drive with the suspension completely lowered all the time as it can lead to premature failure of the airbag itself as the rubber will become fatigued. It is also probably dangerous and impractical due to the inability to move the wheels fully as they will be tucked up under the wheel-arches. Conversely riding with the suspension fully raised will lead to a very harsh ride and may cause cracking around the mounting points of the airbags.

While airbags give the ability to adjust the ride height it tends to be slower than its hydraulic counterpart.

Hydraulic Suspension

With a hydraulic installation it is possible to make the jump, bounce and hop due to the speed at which the ride height can be adjusted. In the air-bag system the suspension spring is replaced with a rubber bag that is filled with air in the hydraulic system however the spring is replaced with a bladder that is filled with fluid under immense pressure very quickly. This rapid expansion causes the car to lift very rapidly and depending upon the speed of the flow can cause the car to jump of the ground.

The pumps required to fill the bladders are very power-hungry and often require the lowrider having several batteries to make the system successful. The flow to each bladder, usually at each corner of the car, can be controlled independently using a solenoid valve that can be switched to give the appearance of dancing. In many cases it would be unsafe to be in the car whilst the car is moving so the switches for the solenoids are made externally accessible.

Installing a hydraulic system on a lowrider can be very expensive when compared to the airbag system.

There has been a lot of speculation in recent years about the continued validity of web directories and whether they still have a place in search engine optimisation. A directory is a hierarchical list of links commonly grouped into logical categories. In the early days of the Internet and search engines the number of sites linking to a particular site was used as the main factor in determining the value of a website. This lead to the creation of link farms which were basically no more that sites that just contained pages of links, similar to directories. Most modern search engines now instantly recognise link farms and penalise or ignore them from search engine listings.

Many people still find directories a useful resource when looking for things on the Internet although with the arrival of social bookmarking sites they have stiff competition. A well maintained directory can not only be useful resource for any site visitor but also provide valuable inbound links to a site.

Category Selection

Page rank is still valid for Google at the moment, although it seems to have less value now, and is an important aspect in deciding which category your site should reside in a directory. An example is could be if an automotive directory has a sub category of custom parts and accessories with 11 links in it and another sub-category of paintwork with only 4 links in it then paintwork would pass more page rank to your site. However something to bear in mind is that relevance also plays an important part of the category selection.

What is a good directory?

To determine whether it is worthwhile submitting to a directory it is probably worth asking yourself whether whether in the absence of a search engine you would personally use that directory? If the directory is full of broken links or irrelevant or poorly written content then it is unlikely to be worthwhile. The good folk at Google sometime manually adjust their index to remove or lower the value of anything that appears to be a ‘spammy’ directory.

There is a lot of debate over paid and free directories and their value as a web-resource. Both types of directory should have equal value in the face of a search engine however paid directories tend to be better maintained as they usually have a team of moderators checking each submissions. Free directories generally depend upon volunteers which lead to people playing the system to allow their own links to be submitted to the directory.

Recognised Directories

There are many directories that are recognised as ranking well in the main search engine algorithms but the main two that most people will come across are DMOZ and the Yahoo! directory.

The DMOZ or Open Directory Project was founded in 1998 and was created in the spirit of the GNU software foundation and was intended to be a completely ‘open’ directory maintained by a team of volunteers. The index is well maintained to this day and is regarded by Google as a trusted source.

There has been a suspicion for some time that Google now uses a trust rank to filter out spam from its index. It is believed that it does this by selecting a few known good sites from around the web which are known to have a good stance on rejecting spam. The trust rank then emanates from these sites and filters through the Internet giving each site a trust rank in a similar way to the page rank.

Since the DMOZ is one of these sites getting listed into the index is very valuable indeed, although near impossible to do!

Another directory commonly regarded as worth while for submitting to is the Yahoo! directory. A site can be submitted to this directory as either a free listing or a paid listing. It is always worth a free submission but acceptance is fairly rare and you often have to pay the $299 yearly fee.

If the site is for a particular niche market then such as, say, car customising and modification then it is definitely worth submitting your site to a niche directory. The reason for this is that is the traffic coming from niche site will be extremely relevant to the content provided by your site. Something that is often overlooked is that these directories may capture traffic for keywords and phrases that hadn’t been previously considered. Since the indexes in these sites are generally fairly small the chances of a visitor to the directory reaching your site is fairly high.

Although submitting to all the various directories can seem like a momentous task it is unfortunately still valid in order to get anywhere near the first few pages in the search engine results.

Over the past 50 years Hot Rod magazine has been at the forefront of the performance movement by featuring photographs and articles of dragsters, roadsters, slingshots, buggies, kemps, coupes, and their drivers. Now you can take this nostalgic look back through pages that have captured the imaginations of gearheads nationwide by featuring the works of customizing greats Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Von Dutch and George Barris, to name a few. Complete with five full decades of archival black and white and color photographs of the cars and personalities that make up hot rodding history.

Buy from Amazon
UK  50 Years of Hot Rod (Motorbooks Classics)
US : 50 Years of the Hot Rod (Motorbooks Classic)

Just Customz Review

Most car enthusiasts will be familiar with the Hot Rod magazine and this book is a chronical of Hot Rod magazine. The books is categorised into 5 chapters covering the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, the eighties and lastly the nineties.

In the fifties the magazine was mainly covering the drag racing as it evolved into the sport we see today and the formation of the NSRA.

Through the sixties the magaizine covered the big names such as Mickey Thompson, the Summers Brothers and Art Arfons as they became legends in the newly formed automotive arena. As well as covering drag and competition Hot Rod also had pictures of some of the amazing creations by big names such as Ed Roth.

As time progressed hot rodding and car customising became a huge industry and with the arrival of names like Boyd Coddington in the nineties a Hot Rod became the new must have accessory. Celebrities such as ZZ Top all put in their orders for the next cool ride the majority of which adorned the pages of the Hot Rod magazine.

It is interesting to see how the hot rod and car customising community has formed throughout the last 50 years and this book shows it in a very visual and easily digestible format.

If you would like to see the entire review of 50 Years of Hot Rod then please click here.