Hot Rods & Custom Stuff: Doing It All In Southern California

Hot Rods & Custom Stuff has been in business since 1989. When it began it consisted of one rented bay and a tiny attached office. Today the company consists of five buildings and has 35 full-time employs who have all the work they can handle. Located in Escondido (in North San Diego County), HR&CS and provides one-stop shopping for those who love and drive hot rods and classic cars of all types. Not only do they perform complete frame-off restorations and customizations, they will service your daily driver even if all you need is an oil-change. 

The brains and brawn behind Hot Rods & Custom Stuff are mom-and-pop owners Randy and “Peaches” Clark. Randy is the grandson of and old-school fabricator/blacksmith/welder who made his living making metal conform to his wishes.  At age 12 Randy purchased his first classic car, a Model T, for which he paid the grand sum of $12. It didn’t run, but that didn’t matter to him. Later, he traded it for a 1930 Model A five-window coupe that did run.  That car carried him through high school and his first job working at a gas station (of course!). To make a long story short Randy has been buying, selling, trading and working on cars all of his life, “I’ve owned thousands”, he says.  You might say that owning and operating one of the premier hot rod shops in the country came naturally to him.

The backbone of HR&CS is the fabrication shop. Here is where metal is cut, bent, hammered, straightened, welded and reborn.  Frame-off restorations and customization projects start here. With a full compliment of welders, cutters, English wheels, power hammers and talent there is very little that cannot be done with a piece of metal. From the scratch fabrication of steel tube frame, to repairing 50-year-old sheet metal that looks like it has been used for target practice, it can be done here.  Chopping, channeling and customizing are all in a day’s work for the HR&CS fabricators.
While the fabricators are busy chopping and channeling, the mechanical shop is busy wrenching. Here’s where the motors come to get rebuilt, tuned, or hopped up. Here, too, is where you can get your baby tuned by someone who still knows what the words “gap” and “dwell” mean (ever tried to get your ’57 tuned by someone who only knows what to do if a computer tells him how?).  At HR&CS the guy who wants classic car tuned by an old-school mechanic is just as important as the guy who wants a show quality ride built.  The mechanical shop is also where after-market upgrades like disc brakes, AC and power windows are installed in finished cars.

As you might have guessed, a shop this big turns out some pretty big projects. One of the best known is the M-80, a ’49 Chevy Business Coupe that made its debut and the 49^th annual Detroit Autorama in 2001.  By the end of the show it had not only won the Riddler Award, but the Yosemite Sam Radoff Sculptural Excellence award, among many others. Many cars have rolled out of the Hot Rods & Custom Stuff garage and straight into the pages and covers of the nations best know car magazines, and on to win hundreds of awards at shows nationwide.