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SUCCESS STORIES | ||||
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ROLLING BONES PERFECTS THE ART OF BUILDING A HOT ROD When it comes to restoring the quintessential American hot rod, one company with a reputation for excellence is New York's Rolling Bones Hot Rod Shop. To the guys there, rebuilding the past isn't just a job, it's an art form. The team of three is so meticulous, they only build 1 1/2 cars a year. "We don't consider ourselves car restorers. We see ourselves as artists capturing the look, the feel, and the soul of a hot rod. Our job is to bring the classic hot rod back in a way that allows it to tell a story," said Ken Schmidt, one of the co-founders of Rolling Bones. The Rolling Bones story actually began by accident. Schmidt and Cornell never planned to do this for a living. It was early in the decade and Schmidt was busy building a hot rod for himself. At the same time, Cornell was hard at work in an old Upstate New York barn. He too was building a hot rod. After finishing their respective projects, the guys met on the road. Their cars were such a hit, people began begging Schmidt and Cornell to sell them their cars. The guys refused. There was no way they were going to part with something they had painstakingly built. However, they did agree to custom build hot rods for other people, setting the stage for the eventual birth of Rolling Bones. Finding the perfect car hidden away someplace is a big challenge. It can take months. The reason: Rolling Bones will only work on cars built between 1929 and 1934, a narrow five year window, at least 75 years in the past. A truly classic hot rod is so rare, Rolling Bones only works on them 60 percent of the time. The other 40 percent of the time they are using custom stamped steel. Once the perfect car is at hand, the dream quickly begins to take shape as the team finalizes a design and begins the building process. The guys rely on a lot of specialized tools when putting together the car's chassis and body, chief among them is a plasma cutter. "We use our Powermax plasma everyday. Looking back, I don't know how we ever built a hot rod without one," Schmidt said. The guys settled on their Powermax after seeing someone cut with one at an auto show. "We knew without a doubt that it was the one we had to have," said Rolling Bones' Cornell. "It was by far the best plasma cutter I'd ever seen." Before discovering plasma, the guys at Rolling Bones used to rely on torches and grinders to cut the metal for their cars. It was a long, tedious, process and required a lot of secondary clean-up work. And even though its only been a decade since Rolling Bones made the switch to plasma, the guys there say it's hard to imagine using anything else. "Plasma is so much cleaner, faster, and handier. Plus, the metal doesn't get as hot," Schmidt says. One of the things the guys love about their plasma cutter is its ability to cut out shapes for their cars. To do that, the guys first create a wooden template that's an 1/8" smaller than the metal body part they ultimately need. Next, they place the template on top of a sheet of metal and cut around it. Once the metal shape is cut out, the team welds it onto the car. "Bringing a hot rod back to life is a very labor intensive process, but the use of plasma makes things so much easier for us. Using our Powermax system on metal is kind of like cutting through paper with a pair of scissors," Schmidt says. "One other thing that makes us feel really good about using Hypertherm plasma is that it's an American company. We know they put the same care into their plasma systems that we put into our hot rods." |
