Oh my; this poor little Rambler American has had to endure another make-over. And there may be more to come. Everyone has been invited to add their creativity to it.
I first shot it back in 2011, and its CC is here. I titled it “The Hip, Ugly American”. Little did I know how hip it was destined to become.
In 2014, it sported a new Tiki motif, with bamboo trim inside and out.
And now it’s got a wild new paint job. Is there a proper name for this style?
There’s a sign on the windshield. Is it for sale? maybe I’ll buy it to spare it any further indignities.
Um, no. An invitation to join in on the new paint job. I’ll pass. I’m pretty easy going about what folks do to their cars, but I have a bit of a soft spot for this old flathead Rambler. Was it really that bad to deserve this?
The detritus of the work so far is on the front seat.
Does this make my butt look bigger?
Not limited to cars, apparently!
Dazzle paint on ships was designed to confuse German subs as to which direction they were heading. Could have a similar effect on people and autos around this Rambler. Kinda in it’s name..
First thing I thought of when I saw it. The colors are correct too .Very World War 1.
IIRC, wasn’t that done on ships during wartime to keep the enemy from correctly gauging the length or some such tactical reason?
yes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
If I didn’t know it was recently done, I’d have guessed it was an old hippie mobile from back in the day. Despite what modern movies show, not everyone was in a VW in the sixties.
So then would the car also have the “Dazzle” pattern, as I believe that was called?
But seriously- that just makes me sad. They’re only original once.
Oh boy… That reminds me of the wild paint job on Fozzie Bear’s Studebaker.
And not in a good way, just checking flights to Eugene here….
I can get to Seattle for $377, I say we mount a clandestine campaign to rescue this poor car. Who’s in?
The art style looks a touch African to me, but then I know nothing about African art.
Would that make this an African American? 🙂
Well I like it even like it is. It still looks like a copy of a MK1 Cortina done by someone with poor eyesight and no sense of style but that paint job improves it a lot.
What ungodly sin has this car committed to deserve this punishment?
Get that car to Earl Scheib immediately!
The effects of inflation on Earl Schieb. $29.95 used to be the deluxe job and included reds.
As I recall, originally Earl’s price was $19.95 (in the ’50’s and early ’60’s).
Around 1970 my brother got his ’56 VW Bus painted for $29.95, but he had to settle for orange. More popular colors were a little more. Around the same time Dad had his ’66 Beetle resprayed in it’s factory light blue green color, he went for the “Deluxe” which included a lot of extra prep that ran $79.95. Both paint jobs were quite well done, which was lucky, they varied a lot in quality depending on which shop and who did the job. No peeling on either car, the Bus was already in primer when sent to Earl.
My grandpa would still bitch in the 80s about how the Earl Scheib paint job on his Rambler came off in sheets.
I remember when it was $19.95. The paint wasn’t that bad but the prep work(very little)sucked. If you did your own prep work you could get a half way decent paint job for cheap. The same is true today, you can have the best paint but unless the prep work is good you get a lousy looking paint job.
I’ve never painted cars (beyond touch-up) but have painted houses (interior only) many times; the prep work (patching, sanding, cleaning, masking, removing items not to be painted) was harder and more time-consuming than the actual painting.
X3
Fordite immediately came to mind when I saw the layered swirl pattern. In response to the question after the fourth photo, would Ramblerite be a good name for the style?
Inviting people to tag it is a hippiefied mistake. It looks cool as it is – good colors and a consistent pattern – and most banger jerks will just mess it up.
I guess that communal mindset dies hard.
It would be a dirty trick if some one other than the owner put that sign on the car.
It would be hard to have your tag show up against that pattern with the amount of black that’s there. You’d need to use something like fluoro orange – and then it would just look a mess.
Like putting a kick me sign on ur ass
If I hadn’t seen the empty rattle cans in the front seat, I would have assumed that was just a vinyl wrap. I kinda like it.
The bad part of camouflage in a modern hipster town: you’re likely to get T-boned by an ‘autonomous’ Tesla that can’t recognize you as a car.
Oh man, this has made my day! Love the sign that they put up there. In some ways, it reminds me of this really clapped out 60’s Parisienne that someone had painted pink on the exterior, graffiti’d all inside the car (don’t know how they knew what speed they were going, since the gauges were spray painted over), and was a “custom convertible”……in that they chopped the roof off, and it was permanently a convertible. This was back in the 80’s when I was a kid……as a car lover since I can remember, I was both horrified by it and felt bizarrely proud of them for making the car one of a kind. As I remember, it had some 60’s Cutlass rally rims on it, too.
A friend had a dayglo pink 60 Laurentian back in the day but with white top six cylinder quite slow it argued with a power pole and lost so that was the end of that but it sure stood out.
I had a chance to buy one of these 20 years ago. 6 cyl auto. It had trouble with hills that my VW Ghia didn’t even need to downshift for, but I should have pulled the trigger. It would have been an interesting little project.
The Curbside Classic effect, maybe in reverse: I saw one of these 2-doors the other day, in plain white, with blackwall tires. It clearly was a daily driver, though. It’s a car so incredibly ugly that it’s cute in spite of itself. Seeing it made me think of way back in 1971 when someone graciously lent me a wagon version of an American so that I could get a woodworking project home from high school.
Ugly, yes. It’s tempting to say with a bit more work the car could have looked attractive, but we don’t know what hard points he was constrained to use in the redesign. Larger taillights would have helped, but would accentuate the narrowness. The wheel arch treatment definitely looks odd, and wider tracks would have helped enormously – but probably outside the budget.
I think it is cool that people have followed instructions and “coloured in between the lines”
no chrome, no glass just a funky paint job on a funky little rambler.
rambler always went its own way against the big three and this little guy is just keeping up the tradition!
Looks like some pretty skillful spray painting there in this version, whether or not you like it. Odd to invite others to join in. What else is there to add? Where would you add?
If you’re OK with the loss of originality, then this looks great.
Kind of like a BMW prototype disguise, by Hollywood?
My buddy Tom in Silverlake has several iof these and some are ‘ customed ‘ like this .
I like it oddly enough .
-Nate
The current paint job looks nice enough! Leave the poor thing alone. Last year I found generation Taurus covered in Chalkboard Paint and the owner would leave a tupperware of chalk sticks on the trunk lid to encourage creativity. I thought that concept was neat.
Interesting, I wonder if he’ll get many takers? True that it will be hard to stand out against what’s already there.
And really, as long as they do avoid the glass/chrome, it’s just paint. Yes, it’s only original once, but how do we know that turquoise wasn’t a repaint itself? A lot can happen in 55 years.