No sh*t:dead: instant advantage of 1.8 or 2L (or what ever they have) engines in the golfs
Styling Rat Cinq?!!?
- Thread starter olipirate
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Styling Rat Cinq?!!?
No sh*t:dead: instant advantage of 1.8 or 2L (or what ever they have) engines in the golfs
I really dont get the whole Rat scene. Whats the point in spending money on a car etc and then making it look like a pile of crap?
Rat styling (if you could even call it styling) is rubbish. Makes the car look uncared for and like a shed. Regardless how fast it is, it still looks like a £50 shed. They are generally poorly modified with hand painted paint jobs or matt black from a halfords can paint job and cut springs to lower it beyond any sensible level (might look cool but go over a hill too fast and youll kill youself). Plus you will make your car unsellable as noone will want to buy a rusty, half arsed attempt at modding a car.
The sleeper look is much better. Strip it down to the bare essentials inside and despec the exterior to look like a lesser model. Then get some black steelies and there you go
Its all opinion really with rat looker's, they seem to be marmite cars, love or hate..
Personnally i love rat lookers. I got into them due to being heavily into the Air-cooled VW scene where one could argue Rat's first became a big thing (i'm not saying they invented it b4 anyone goes off at me).
There numerous reasons why people build air-cooled Rat's, but i think the main ones are:
Building a car upto current show standards is a huge under-taking, i don't know who of you have seen a top show VW these days but they are amazing, top to bottom, completely clean, so much straighter and better condition than it ever was when it was brand new. Now if you got one of these cars its probably the case that you are scared to leave it in say a car-park due to people banging the door. Here enters your Rat, a rusty old car that doesn't matter if it get a prang here or there - this is esspecially true of campers which take a beating on camping holiday's etc.
Then theres the shear cost of getting the body and pan of a VW upto the show standards i mentioned before, after 40 years build up of crap stuck to it.
I'll also add if you ask any True Rat Look devotee, you will be told that if your car isn't actually a solid car, with the oomph behind it looks as if it lacks and shiny shiny wheels then you haven't got a Rat car, you've got a shed, thats dangerous and shouldn't be on the road. A rat should look like its not road worthy but it has to more than that to be a REAL RATTER!!
OK rant over.
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I hadnt really intended to deliberately 'rat' my cinq but its got a few dents here and there and im pretty much to lazy to clean it so its sort of becoming a rat slowly haha.
when its particularly dirty ill get a photo up to show you, but as blu said itll never be a true rat with alloys and all that sorta stuff!
when its particularly dirty ill get a photo up to show you, but as blu said itll never be a true rat with alloys and all that sorta stuff!
Seen loads of polish cars with bonnets like that, i'm pretty sure they are lightweight ones rather than rusty steel jobbies but they are distinctive. To me though they just look unfinished
phatsam7
New member
like the car bra...
thats a DUB thing that might go quite well on a Sei
thats a DUB thing that might go quite well on a Sei
they arnt rusty bonnets they're fibreglass bonnets
Thats what i thought... Why they don't do anything else to them is beyond me, they'd look better even if just primered in white or black
paint adds weight? *shrug*
Lol!!
Back in the 80's me and my friend's cars would look like this because this was all we could afford. This is what 1970's cars looked like when they got to 10 years old! Then we'd spend hours with Halfords spraypaint and bodyfiller trying to make them look nice again. Now it seems as if people WANT to make their cars look like a rusty old heap barely clinging on to an MOT?!!!
For those into guitars it's similar to deliberately making a new guitar look like a 'relic'. You take a good condition guitar and spend ages/ money trying to make it look like a beat up relic that's seen better days. Relics are big news and I really can't get my head round it! An original but well used 50's/ 60's Fender or Gibson that had been beaten up over the years has a charm to it, but making a new guitar look like that?
See pic below for an example.As for rat cars, I thought that in general they used to be a sign of a 'work in progress'. They were cars that were scruffy but sound and were gradually being brought back up to scratch whilst still being used on the road. That meant being painted (often by hand) in primer only, or having very rough paint but nice shiny wheels. Again, back in the 80's a paint job was hellishly expensive so sometimes people would just paint the whole car in matt black until they could afford a decent paint job. But of course, it was the engine and suspension/ brakes that had seen the most work and as such these cars were also sleepers (these I DO like
)However, with the UK climate the last thing I'd ever do is allow rust to get onto bodywork. The cars would dissolve in a matter of months!
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My mk1 Golf looks like that
and i'm going to cut into chunks as it looks Nasty!!
and i'm going to cut into chunks as it looks Nasty!!
majority of them are all euro, you would never get away with that in the uk especially the one with the oil drum on the roof
You see quite a few rats coming straight outta the USA, reading through my VeeDub mags, i find many a car that people on holiday have seen whilst travelling, theres a split screen camper known as the ACME bus in cornwall or devon that was plucked straight out the desert, been there so long the paint has just burnt off. Its been fully covered in lacquer though so shouldn't get any worse in our climate really.
Another one of my fave rat veedubs is a uk built one, this guy has restored a camper bodyshell to be solid and then took it bare metal down the beach and chucked sea water all over it and left it there for a while – it now looks so old its untrue but is all solid still and properly protected from the element again with matt lacquer all over. The lengths some people are going to is extreme.
And just recently there was one that was again found in the desert wriddled with bullet holes, quite blatantly been used for target practice by some rednecks. Has had all the running gear sorted and now runs round California – where these cars can really be used as its bone dry all the time and no salt on the roads so they are fine, if you like the look obviously..
Another one of my fave rat veedubs is a uk built one, this guy has restored a camper bodyshell to be solid and then took it bare metal down the beach and chucked sea water all over it and left it there for a while – it now looks so old its untrue but is all solid still and properly protected from the element again with matt lacquer all over. The lengths some people are going to is extreme.
And just recently there was one that was again found in the desert wriddled with bullet holes, quite blatantly been used for target practice by some rednecks. Has had all the running gear sorted and now runs round California – where these cars can really be used as its bone dry all the time and no salt on the roads so they are fine, if you like the look obviously..
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do u think i could get white walls for a cinq ? cheers
yes tyre paint or equivalent
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