I watch “Fast N Loud” and do so for entertainment only. What they do to some of these vehicles makes me cringe. I would go another route with the vast majority of these cars and trucks but alas…I don’t have a TV show.
LOL, well said, missileman.
Thanks mountainbike.
I never understood finding an old car, slamming it together, and selling it to make a few thousand dollars. What’s the point or the fun of that? You should find an old car, take your time restoring it, and have fun driving it. I’m not in favor of the show room quality but enough to bring it back to the way it was so its a good driver.
I like watching Counting Cars, a spin off from Pawn Stars. Danny Koker, one of their “experts” would come to look at a car and tell them stuff about it. Like Rick Dale, he got his own show(American Restoration) from it.
If you’ve ever seen some of the personal cars the pawn stars drive, you know there’s no way they’ve made that much money just from being a pawn shop. I’ve seen “Old Man” driving a Jaguar and a Bently on the show. Rick Harrison admitted on Top Gear US(when they actually tried celebrity interviews) to owning a Porsche Panamera, and Chumlee said he drove a Maserati.
They make the money off the TV shows. There’s big, big bucks for the stars of a popular TV show. Potentially millions.
Those shows are all crap including Pawn Stars; which my wife watches all the time. She doesn’t believe that it’s staged…
A valuable Gibson guitar brought in one time? The guy that brought it in owns the guitar store where it was for sale…
The appraiser who valued it? The luthier who works for the guy that owns the store that owns the guitar…
Body Coddington turned out some beautiful cars but the show sucked and from a mechanical standpoint and shunting the paint aside, there was some real backyard garbage going on.
IMHO Boyd Coddington was more dysfunctional than the made-up dysfunctional characters in situation comedies. May he rest in peace.
Gee, I happen to like Pawn Stars. I really like Rick’s personality, and I think that’s pretty darn close to “who he is.” I think Chumlee and the Old Man made to be caricatures of who they really are…I mean, nobody could be that stupid and figure out how to breathe on their own!
I mean, it’s pretty widely known (and obvious) that Top Gear is staged, and that is one funny show! (The UK one, that is.) I don’t think the “authenticity” of the show has much to do with the entertainment value.
They probably all play their parts up a bit. For that kind of cash, I’d be whatever the producers wanted.
I don’t remember the name of the show but, this was 8-10 years ago.
This guy had a shop where students would work along side his mechanic’s painters, and body men. He’d always be restoring a muscle car or a old pickup. Then they would take the car to some big auction and see what they could get.
It wasn’t as glitzy and scripted as the shows today, but was fun to watch.
Yosemite
@ok4450 I tend to watch an episode once, then could care less if I watch it again. I know it’s staged, even read where they’d be filming an episode and ask someone standing in line outside if they’d like to be on the show, then give them an item to “sell”.
One lady brought in some odd looking stone, saying she found it somewhere, took it to all kinds of geologists and such, but no one knew what it was, and that it weighed 40 pounds. They put it on the glass counter, called “The beard of knowledge”, and viola, he knew what it was as soon as he seen it; despite many experts looking at it and not knowing what it was.
There’s another issue with those car shows that involve rebuilding a car for someone. That is the when the car owner ends up owing taxes on the materials, parts, and value of the car after it’s been redone. I’m sure the scenario is the same on all of them per the IRS.
When Chip Foose (a butcher of originals IMO) was doing the show “Overhauling” that was plainly spelled out on the OH website; near the end of the page of course.
Imagine someone’s old '68 Mustang which is worth about 7k dollars. Now imagine all redone by Foose who puts a value of 150k on it. Taxes on 150k will be due and will be more than the car is worth.
Who was the kid with the wired jaw that designed and cut wheels that Boyd fired. He was moonlighting for the competition and got fired for that. I always thought that was a raw deal and lost some respect for him. A guy has a right to work for or do whatever he wants in his off hours as long as he doesn’t steal materials or designs. I was hoping that 57 Belvedere would have turned out.
I like Wheeler Dealers and What’s My Car Worth?. Wheeler Dealers is a fun take on restoration. It seems like they make very little on the cars, not enough to pay Edd and Mike’s salaries. But they to get well on the royalties for the show.
What’s My Car Worth it ales us through the valuation process with real experts and pits the owner and the experts against each other. Then the auction shows who, if any, of them got close to the real value. The cars are interesting classics. Some of them are available to anyone, and some are multimillion dollar examples.
@Bing, that guy with the wired jaw was Mike I think was the name and to me he came across as pretty sharp with the machine work. I agree that what he does on his own time is nobody’s business as long as it’s not involving theft of customers, materials/tools, and so on.
A Subaru dealer I worked for once stated that mechanics were not allowed to do any outside work on their own time; even on weekends. They were even known to drive by employee homes and check out what was in the driveway. I did some side gigs no matter what. People had no intention of going to the dealer ever and approached me about it; not the other way around.
That '57 Plymouth (Miss Belvedere) was a sad story that was made irritating by the Discovery Channel. They hyped that car and the alleged mystery behind it along with making a full hour long show of Boyd Coddington doing the unveiling. It was all staged garbage.
Officials did a sneak peek of that car when it was disinterred and announced there was 4 feet of rusty water in the tomb so anyone that heard that story on the local news here knew the car was scrap metal for the most part long before it even made the national news.
If that was widely known then I have to wonder how many of those people who flew in from halfway around the world would have even bothered.
The officials who buried that car in 1957 were apparently not forward thinkers either by not taking drainage and aeration into consideration.
The gas-monkey garage has done a couple good builds…but only a couple. Most of the time it’s just a quick flip. I don’t understand why every vehicle they work on has to be lowered.
And some of their builds baffle me. They’ll spend the time removing the front and rear suspension system…yet they’ll leave everything else a pile of rust. They’ll give a car a complete paint job, yet the interior is still a rust bucket. 99% of their builds are just patch up to look nice for a quick flip. They have done a couple frame off builds that were decent. I’ve seen their upholstery person (Sue) put a new interior (carpet/seats and head-liner) into one of their cars that had more rust then paint. What a waste.
I do like the vehicles from Counting Cars on the History channel. I’d consider buying one of their cars or bikes.
A lot of classic car people who didn’t care for Gas Monkey became absolutely disgusted with them after the Woodill Wildfire episode.
Those clowns took an extremely rare and original car in great shape and butchered it.
If the above mentioned clowns really cared anything about cars they would never have done this in a million years of Sundays.
They did the same thing with the bike building episode when the bearded one built a pink chopper. The bike looked great and was actually rideable.
The glaring problem was what they built it out of. They used a stone stock Harley Shovelhead bagger and ruined an original by scrapping most of it in the name of a TV build chopper.
A previously modded rat shovel could have easily been obtained for this project while leaving the original alone. A rolling piece of history now gone forever.
@ok4450 I was actually toying with the idea of driving down there from Minnesota for the Plymouth unveiling. Decided it was just too far and the timing wasn’t right but I was on the edge of my seat waiting for the vault to be opened. Too bad.
That Plymouth unveiling was pretty sad. The Civic Center in Tulsa was packed for the unveiling with Boyd Coddington doing the honors although it was unveiled here long before.
While the car was not shown on the local news, officials stated the 4 feet of rusty water had taken its toll during the “sneak preview” and everyone around here knew it was toast.
It’s a crying shame about that car. If it had been preserved properly the value would have been priceless.
And this is just my opinion which may or may not turn out to be correct, but I think at some point Miss Belvedere is going to resurface. A company that manufactures rust products bought it and is allegedly restoring it. It’s been stated that a donor car has been acquired.
So if Miss Belvedere turns out to be 98% donor an 2% original is it still MIss Belvedere? Not.
The passage of time, fading memories, and I expect a donor car to surface and be presented as the real deal for well into the 7 figures.