Behind the Build Ep. 2 | HOT ROD Shop Tour with Hollywood Hot Rods

No stranger to the spotlight, Troy Ladd and Hollywood Hot Rods are known for turning out very high-quality, award-winning cars for more than 20 years. Their work has been the subject of dozens of magazine features and has received some of the nation's top awards, including America's Most Beautiful Roadster at the Grand National Roadster Show. Throughout all of this, owner and founder Troy Ladd is humble, approachable, and just as passionate about his work as he was the day he started the company. How does he maintain that level of passion and quality? Let's go behind the build to find out. So this is our, we call it the Mulholland Speedster. This is a car that we built for America's Most Beautiful Roadster in 2007. Pretty much won everything for a year, everywhere we took it, because it was so different than just like a regular hot rod. Then we designed it with the help of Eric Black, so it's literally a coach-built car. So it's not like a modified something, it's our own thing. So this particular owner doesn't like full trailer queens and that kind of thing. He drives his cars. And so in this case, I was driving it. He says, take it out, drive it. And the fan, one of the blades of the fan came apart at speed and went right into the hood and dented the hood. But also the alternator came apart. So did the alternator come apart and mess up the fan? Because the fan was mounted to the alternator. Or did the blade come off, off balance it? Exactly. Who knows? When I called the owner, Bruce, he's awesome about things like that. He's like, I drive my cars. When you drive them, they break. So it's really a cool attitude. And he kind of makes fun of like, if you don't want it to break, go put it on a trailer in a museum. If you're going to drive them, you got to be ready to fix them. So this is like completely custom, like you say. So what's the process of fixing it? Did you work with a buck? Oh, to build it? Yeah. Can you metal finish that? So it has parts that we used from a Packard. I think it was 36-ish. So the damage that happened, we just metal finish it back. So we didn't have to remake anything. It wasn't catastrophic. It happens. And just recently, too, we actually changed the carburetors because he wanted it to be a little bit more drivable. It was hard to start and things like that. We just upgraded it as the owner. He's like, it's slow. Make it faster. Oh, it's hard to start when it's cold. I love it. Because you wouldn't really think a car that's won so many awards would have this kind of service history, I guess you could say. Or a number of repairs after the fact. So I think that's great. What's it like to drive? Is it nice? It's not very fast. For me, it's scary because it's a big, long car. It's a 12-cylinder flathead with this Latham supercharger. And this is all stuff we just made up. So I found those Latham superchargers. It was on eBay or something. And it just looked cool. So then we made a manifold to go to the Lincoln 12-cylinder flathead. Again, there's really no rules. We just make stuff up. And then we made up the carburetors because they used to have Winfield Ds. So they were super rare and super cool. So that's why we use them. We just recently changed to these. I don't even know what these carburetors are. These are from Amazon, I think. That's great. The point is, all of this stuff was just made up. We just make it up as we go. For a show car, that's all well and good. But then when you start driving it, you learn. Like, okay, that didn't work with this. Or let's change that. Yeah, we had it at West Tech on the dyno originally. And I think it set a record on their chassis dyno as the least. It was good to see. It doesn't make that much power. Yeah, it was the least amount of horsepower that the chassis dyno had ever seen. And since then, we've increased the horsepower. But then, again, it's all relative. Because I think the 12-cylinder stock is 80 horsepower. Oh, yeah. They never made that much power. So we're way past that. So in reality, it's a high-performance engine. That's awesome. But there's a lot of hidden technology and stuff in this car, too. Because I'm a big fan of the new MSD programmable boxes. We've been doing it on all the vintage cars. Lock out the distributor, use an MSD programmable, and then you can do your timing curve on the laptop. So this has got two of those boxes because there's two coils and two banks of points and all of that. We embrace form and function here. That's one of our big things, is I love things that work. It's fun to dive into something that you don't know about and then learn it and then succeed at it. Well, that's a good opportunity to go back and look at the Bonneville car. Yeah, it's here. You can go check it out. So here's our little Bonneville car. I know that you guys actually shot this, so we'll see it in your book eventually, right? Kev Elliott, they built this car, I think, 15 years ago, and it had a Ford Focus engine in it. Bruce, the same guy that owns the Packard, he wanted to see if Bonneville was something we wanted to do. We bought it, went out with the Ford Focus engine, and blew it up the first run. So after that, we all sat down like, okay, so are you in or you're out? Are we done or should we continue? And he says, I want to do it more and make it real fast. So this is important, what we're talking about. And this is 122 cubic inches limit. So for our class, the record was 186, which was what we thought was a reasonable record. So we want to be there. So this block is a Billet K20, and it's good for 1800 horsepower. And that depends on how you dress it. So I got the long block from Ford Piston, then I came up with the rest of the components. That's how this came to be, and it was really fun because the challenges are so unique. All that effort, and you get Speed Week, and then you get the World Finals. You get those two shots, and that's it. That's what's so frustrating about this. You can't do any kind of testing. Even when you're at Bonneville, the car is never allowed to move under its own power unless it's on the race course. So you don't even get to take it for a little test run or anything. So our overall goal when we get there is we'll both get red hats. A red hat is breaking a record over 200. You're at like 213 miles an hour. Are you doing things like, let's turn up the boost? Are you messing with timing? So to get to the 213, every run was that. It's like, OK, we got a 201. What happened? We look at the log. Air intake was too high, so we had to go out again. And then it was like 204, and the boost was low. What happened? We tried to do a gear mapping to keep the wheels from spinning. So we were pulling boost out in one, two, and three gears, and then letting it have boost four or five. And we manually turned on the intercooler at the starting line to pre-cool it. And then that's when we got our 213. So as you know, that stuff is really fun for me. And I applied some of that stuff to the car that I built in your magazine, too. And it's here, so we can go check it out. And you know I love that car, Troy. So yeah, here's my old number 17 car. There's so much fun events right now, like racing events and things, that I wanted something that was traditional. And I wanted to prove that I could make a 6 Stromberg car go faster. So the key with this is it's an absolutely mild-mannered, street-driven car. It never overheats. I also wanted to prove that you could have a 10-second car that you could daily drive if you wanted. I have O2 sensors, and you can see them in the exhaust. And I can record. So that's part of it. I drive it, monitor it. It's extremely effective. I've seen you driving it around. I've seen you race it at Pomona. And I just love this car. I love the articles. It was such a good article. We had so much fun doing that. Do you want to go through the drive train? How big is the engine? Oh yeah, sure. It's an actual 392 Hemi. And these are Hot Heads aluminum heads. 671 blower. eBay find. It doesn't have Teflon strips, but it has actually a machined aluminum strip. It's a non-contact type of thing, which is cool. It has an old Ed Iskanderian-like cover on the back. It's a Hunt Magneto that's actually just used for a signal. Again, use the MSD programmable so I can do my timing curve. I can change timing. So there's a little bit of a mix of technology that things work. But with the Magneto and all that, it's perfectly traditional. Even though I can run the engine efficiently with some modern stuff. It's backed by a Magnum T56 six-speed. Just because they're strong and I had one left over from something. Oh, that's the other thing I should say. A lot of this was built with stuff you had here. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was part of the thing is I had enough leftover stuff. When I see something, I'll buy it. And I think the block came from eBay. It was like $500 on eBay or something. I'm like, oh, I've got to buy that. Of all the cars that we build, the show cars, this is my favorite car. I love this the best. Just a super, super funny story. Before power tours, as a matter of fact. And so I wanted to do race gas and slicks before I went. And I went to the gas station to do a mix. And there's a whole car club of Mustangs and Chargers. And then I roll in with this and they're all looking at me. I'm like, you guys don't even know. I'm on race gas and slicks right now. There's not one of these cars on street tires that could beat this. I bet some of those guys were like, this thing is super cool. They do. And I've actually had kids and even tuner guys and stuff. I wouldn't think that would even care. I'm like, that's awesome. Car guys are car guys, right? Exactly right. And they're just trying to go fast, too. I'm just faster. Well, cool. 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When I get to rebuilding this engine, I'm going to spray a little bit right here because I'm going to want to spin this engine around while I'm rebuilding it, and it'll keep this part of the engine staying lubricated and moving freely. To learn more about Gel Lube and the brand's other products, visit WD-40.com. In the next episode, I'll share with you one of my favorite products from their specialist line, so be sure to stay tuned. Now back to behind the build. We were talking about some of the custom work that's gone into it. First of all, what year is this? 37.4. And you showed me a picture of the stock roof, which is kind of like this bubble. It was a five-window coupe, so it's just literally a bubble with a post. So we kind of came up with this is we wanted to do like a hard top, so no door frames, and almost like instead of the five-window look. And so this is kind of what we came up with, and we knew we wanted a teardrop roof, and we knew we wanted the shape. So what happens is at first we cut the old roof off and try to make different versions of it. And then in this case, we probably looked at four or five different versions, you know. Does it stop here? Does it stop here? Does it stop there? What's the chop? What's the front A-pillar angle? So this car is going towards a swoopier, sexier version. So then you can see like we have stuff here. We're like, okay, this is an awkward square corner. If we're starting to make things swooping around, do we want to make a radius? What is the radius? So we don't ever do anything easy, but you do have to keep in mind is the time and money for that worth that. I love how you brought that up because I was wondering if it's easy to start going too far into the styling, and you get really carried away, right? It's always easy to get carried away. There's a running joke in the industry like no cars would ever get finished if it wasn't for car shows and deadlines. That's the thing. No one would ever finish a car unless there was a car show to finish it for. That's how part of the design process works. I think that's a good segue to go upstairs and look at the Wall of Fame upstairs. Awesome. I think that's a pretty good idea. Cool. This way? Yeah. I love every time I come over here, Troy. It's always cool to see all this stuff. I know. I've been so fortunate over the years to be able to work with guys like you. The magazines have been good to me. A lot of people have been asked, like, oh, so what's the secret to your success and things like that? Well, for me, it was just I sold my soul to this hard work. I literally quit my job and had to sleep on the floor. I had 99-cent cheeseburgers for my meals just to survive. You really have to just give it your all. But also doing good by people and customers and even guys like you. We're all in this together, and it's awesome to be able to promote what we do. You guys promote what we do. The guys that work here, all of us, we're more artists than tradesmen because you do this for the passion and the love. It's not for the money. I would explain to people that this is like the ultimate American dream. You're guys with an idea and a passion, and I got to build a business around it, and we succeeded at it. And a lot of people have seen our work and what we do. So there's no reason for people to be bitter. Just go do it. Anybody can do it. But it's hard. It's hard. One last thing, just because you said just go do it. You've got a couple dozen years of experience. For someone who is young right now and thinking, how can I do that? What would your advice be? It's hard. Really hard. Be realistic about it. Be realistic, yeah. When I did this, there was literally no time for friends, family, parties. Every waking moment was survival. Another piece of advice, too, I think, under-promise, over-produce. There was a lot of things where, in the beginning, customers were like, I don't really want to do, can't afford to do that or this. I'm like, we'll just kind of do that extra cool thing, even though I couldn't charge them for it. Just so that when they went out there and somebody would see that cool thing, they're like, oh, those guys did it. So there's some of that. You have to have a business to survive. You've got to eat, but you also have to promote yourself with art. So if you can figure out that balance, you'll be okay. It was a real treat to spend the day with Troy and his guys, seeing how they plan and execute their work. As Troy emphasizes, they are artists, and the cars they build are amazing works of art. I especially appreciate that their cars are also built to be driven, and it was impressive to hear how much science Troy puts into ensuring that these are functional works of art. Let us know what inspired you from watching this, and let us know where you want us to go for the next episode of Behind the Build.