For some people, the factory-finished automobiles and trucks that roll off assembly lines and out showroom doors are a good start, but they need a little something more. Or a lot of something more.
From the relatively simple addition of pin stripes or smoked windows to more complex and expensive enhancements such as remote control hydraulic suspensions or specially crafted grilles, doors, fenders and hoods, car owners with unique and sometimes unorthodox visions rely on customizers to translate their ideas to steel, plastic and fiberglass.
“I want to make my car stand out, make it look different,” says Chris O’Martin, an auto body repairman who is having pin stripes painted on his new royal blue Pontiac Grand Am at Kustoms By Drex in west suburban Cicero.
He already has added dark plastic “styling” covers over his headlights that make the front of the car look like the face of a menacing insect and a rack of foglights beneath the bumper to compensate for the reduced effectiveness of the headlights. He also wants to paint the insides of his wheel rims, have cartoon characters painted on his rear window and possibly lower the car.
A young man with a great deal of enthusiasm for cars in general and custom cars in particular, O’Martin also has a 1985 Buick Riviera in which he has invested much time and money to customize and which he takes to custom car shows, where it competes for attention, trophies and, sometimes, money.
Though he works on car bodies for a living, when it comes to custom work, he brings his car to John Drexler, owner of Kustoms By Drex. “I’m just not brave enough to do any of the body changes myself yet,” O’Martin says.
Drexler, who runs his customizing business out of a small, unmarked brick garage on South Laramie Avenue across from Sportsman’s Park racetrack, represents a unique breed of gearheads and fendermen: car customizers who wed their mechanical and artistic skills to create vehicles that make personal statements ranging from the subtle to the eccentric, for their customers.
“I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager,” says Drexler, 35, of his custom paint work. “Really, it began when I was building models as a kid, and it just kept going from there. I had an art teacher in high school who encouraged me to develop my talents, and so I started painting helmets and sulkies for the jockeys over at Sportsman’s. Since I always had a love of cars, it was just natural for me to move into this. The great thing about this work is that it lets me combine the things I really enjoy: painting and cars.”
His customizing isn’t limited to painting, and stashed around his shop are examples of the body work he has done for customers and himself. One of his works-in-progress is a 1970 Monte Carlo being “chopped” down to low-rider status. Low riders look dramatically different than ordinary cars, hugging the pavement and raising or lowering at the driver’s will via an automated hydraulic suspension. The roof of the car has been lowered as well, using an angle chop that makes the front lower than the back, effectively shortening the windows to mere slits.
Another work-in-progress is a 1977 Caprice that is having its hood, trunk and doors reversed. This process is precisely what its name states, with these various portals opening in the opposite directions they were designed to open.
The most impressive custom job in Drexler’s shop, however, is his 1976 Camaro, which he has modified and painted so radically in the last 18 years as to render it essentially unrecognizable from its original incarnation. Fenders and side panels project dramatically outward, wheel wells barely contain wide, racing-style tires, towering twin overhead cams burst from the hood like a furious chrome-plated jack-in-the-box and the ensemble is wrapped in a midnight black paint job highlighted by airbrushed ribbons of yellow, orange and blue.
Like many custom car craftsmen and enthusiasts, Drexler takes his car to a variety of shows, where it gets stares along with tricked-out trucks and wild hot rods that owe more to the Batmobile than they do to Detroit.
“The classic reason for customizing cars is that the owners want to do something different,” says Jeff Smith, editor of Hot Rod magazine, the granddaddy of custom car books. “We all strive to make a personal statement in our lives, and many people express themselves through their vehicles.”
Smith says that though customizing provides an outlet for personal expression, the process is not so much a novelty any longer as it is a thriving industry, to the tune of more than $1 billion annually in the U.S.
As such, some of the spontaneous and groundbreaking creative genius that marked car customizing in its formative years of the 1930s and ’40s has been replaced by a certain amount of “monkey see, monkey do,” Smith says.
“For a variety of reasons, the nature of this business has changed,” he says. “There are still new design ideas, there are still new trends emerging, but it’s not as individualized as it once was. The way society is set up today, with the majority of our population concentrated in urban and suburban environments, styles are quickly picked up and widely copied.”
The implication is that even though each customizing job is tailored to the individual, today’s custom car designs, like any other fashion, are being spread to the masses with brisk commercial efficiency, and the most unusual ideas can quickly become common.
Hot Rod magazine, of course, contributes substantially to this process, as do the dozens of other custom-car periodicals that cater to this market and help shape demand. Even such radical design effects as channeling, which lowers the car body on its frame, or sectioning, which seamlessly removes three- and four-inch lengths from the middle of the car, are enjoying widespread popularity, thanks to the media.
Drexler says that even MTV has gotten into the act, helping to launch something of a street-rod revival when the so-called ZZ Top-mobile, a highly customized 1948 Cadillac, received mass exposure in several popular videos by the Texas rock ‘n’ roll trio.
At Klassic Kustomizers in Naperville (the prevalence of K’s in place of C’s reflects the nature of the business-“customized spelling,” Drexler says), most of the clients are men, and most of the men see their cars and trucks as toys, albeit “big boys’ toys,” as one customer says.
“People come here because they want to do something special, they want to be different,” says Ed Mesik, who runs the business with his son Nick. “And they come here because they want quality work done right. They could do it themselves, and some people do, but we do it right, and we save them a lot of time and frustration.”
Mesik also says he saves his customers money. “You get your basic press-on stripes at the dealer, you’ll probably pay about $95. Here you pay $60, and the dealer probably would have brought it here anyway.”
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On this day, Steve Karason of suburban Lisle has brought in his pickup truck, which has undergone considerable modification at the Mesiks’ shop. The red 1992 Ford Ranger XLT has been outfitted with a racer back, a moon visor (if it didn’t have lights it would be called a sun visor), a wraparound hood shield, a bank of fog lights, a custom grille, running boards and a tonneau cover, which covers and seals the truck bed like a zipper-lock sandwich bag.
“This is an ego trip for me,” says Karason who, at 50, says he’s old enough and makes enough money to do some of the things he couldn’t afford to do when he was younger. “I’ve always been into customizing. I like having something nobody else has. I like to drive around and get stares and comments from people. It’s satisfying.”
Like many custom car drivers, he babies his toy. In the last year, he has driven it just 150 miles, and says that Nick Mesik has put more miles on it than his wife has.
Next for Karason’s truck may be some custom paint and detail work, the merits and possibilities of which he is discussing with the younger Mesik. Karason, who works at a bakery that supplies buns to McDonald’s, is thinking of having his nickname, McCheese, added to the side of his truck.
As might be expected, custom work does not come cheaply. The moon visor, for example, cost close to $350 installed at Klassic Kustomizers. Wheel covers can run from $30 to $1,100 apiece. A press-on stripe runs about $60, and a simple painted stripe can cost double that. None of these jobs require much more than snapping, bolting or sticking on factory-built accessories. Do-it-yourselfers might be able to complete these jobs in a weekend or two, if they had the time, the tools and the patience.
When custom engine work is done, when trick suspensions are added and when exteriors or interiors are redesigned from scratch (as in channeling, sectioning, chopping and reversing), professional skills are required and bills can soar into the thousands and even the tens of thousands.
“I have customers who can drop $30,000 to $40,000 on a car without batting an eye,” says Jim Takemoto of North Shore Motor Sport in Lake Bluff. “Sometimes I have a car here for months.”
Takemoto says that customizing hasn’t gone unnoticed by the auto manufacturers, who are increasingly vying for a piece of this business.
A noticeable increase in the aftermarket conversion of production vehicles into high-performance street machines has prompted companies such as Chevrolet and Ford to put high-performance cars into the showrooms again, Takemoto says.
Among the recent trends he is seeing is a move toward bigger and fatter wheels and tires, which he says is primarily cosmetic but offers some performance value, such as more traction (these tires can run up to $700 each). He also says that custom paint jobs are getting more conservative, with pearlescent and metallic colors giving way to more traditional, if richer, hues. Chrome is making a serious comeback on custom jobs, he adds, reversing a trend that saw bumpers and weather stripping match body colors.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, Takemoto says a lot of the trends begin in California, where agreeable weather and Hollywood eccentricity combine to make that state the custom car capital of the U.S.
“People see a car style on television, and the next thing you know they’re asking for it,” he says.
Pro athletes, whose cars frequently are seen at North Shore Motor Sport, also are a big influence, Takemoto says. “We have a lot of people who want to know what Michael Jordan does to his car, and then they want to do the same.”