1933 Hot Rod Powered by 510-inch big-block Ford

Think there weren’t hot rodders around in the late 1800s? Just check out those horse-drawn carriages: big ’n’ little wheels, pinstriped panels, lacquer paint, and leather upholstery are all design characteristics that could be found back in the day. (Did you know Studebaker started out by making covered wagons back in 1852?) And of course by the late 1800s several companies had figured out they could add a steam engine to their carriage, which would lay the groundwork for what would eventually become the automobile.

Steam power was all the rage before the turn of the last century, but what would today’s hot rodders have built if they were around back then? That concept is what makes the basis for an art movement popular today called Steampunk. Incorporating aspects of industrial machinery and steam-powered devices (think: springs, gears, levers, gauges with arrows, riveted steel or aluminum, relief valves, and a fair share of bumps and bulges), the Steampunk of today is about as far away as you can get from the look of those smoothy hot rods that were the fad back in the late 1900s.

Today, the group of hot rodders who actually build their own cars can be considered artists, for they design, fabricate, and create a new way to look at something, and Chris Miranda is one of those guys. With a creative soul Chris could have ended up building anything—concrete block walls or furniture—but he fell in with car people early in his life and it stuck.

Chris works at West Coast Auto Craft in Cloverdale, California, and was set to work on Greg Clouse’s newly purchased Factory Five 1933, a fiberglass body over a sophisticated tubular chassis with performance suspension parts. As a competitive motorcycle racer with access to NorCal tracks, such as Laguna Seca and Infineon, Clouse wanted the car to have a race look to go along with its performance underpinnings.

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