Kustomrama, Sørum (2026)

Our mission is to PROTECT, PRESERVE and SHARE traditional hot rod and custom car history from all over the world.

26/06/2026

A spring’s worth of designs in a few seconds!

Stickers, caps, and the new hand-painted sweaters, all coming together for the Coupe Devils Bonanza this weekend.

Swing by the Kustomrama table in Blaker, June 26 to 28, and grab something before it is gone.

Which one would you wear?

25/06/2026

Fresh from the press!

Last night I drove over to Jan Ove at Jarlsberg Yrkesklær, and we stood late into the evening hours putting together this year’s Bonanza series. Twenty-five hand-painted sweaters, each one sprayed by hand, so no two are exactly alike.

The design is Tom Kelly’s. The Crazy Painter himself, last of the trio with Ed Roth and the Baron. Kelly was born in 1940, started striping in the Baron’s shop at thirteen, and worked alongside Roth and the Baron at the Southgate shop through the late 1950s. A real link back to the early Kustom Kulture era we spend most of our time documenting on the wiki. He drew us a wild enPSYCHOLOpedia monster behind the wheel, and the car he put under that monster is no random custom.

It is Björn Ramsten’s 1957 Chevrolet. A Stockholm custom that Björn built as a teenager and finished in 1967. Inspired by Bill Cushenbery’s Limelighter, the car got a rolled pan, an asymmetrical hood, dual headlights, and a perforated mesh grille Björn cut himself after deciding tube grilles had gotten too common in Sweden by then. He painted it Hunter Green Metallic, a 1956 Chrysler color. Björn is a good friend and a beloved Kustomrama contributor, and seeing his car turned into something you can wear, drawn by one of Roth’s old Crazy Painters, is the kind of thing that makes this hobby special.

Last year we made a small run of hand-painted Kraze Painter sweaters, and they were gone before we had a chance to catch our breath. This is this year’s version. Twenty-five only.

The only place to get one is at Blaker this weekend. Walk over to the Kustomrama table at the Coupe Devils Rod & Kustom Bonanza, June 26 to 28.

Big thanks to for the design, and to and for the late night and the help putting them together.

I made a quick reel of us building them. See you in Blaker.

22/06/2026

Two of the best in the business here in Scandinavia will be set up at the Coupe Devils Bonanza this weekend.

Von Sven from Stockholm, Sweden and our own Richie BC The Pinstriper are both bringing their brushes, their paint, and a full kit up to Blaker. Bring a car. Bring a bike. Bring a guitar. Bring a toolbox. If it has a flat surface and a story, one of them will put a line on it.

Pinstripers like Von Sven and BC are part of why the early Kustom Kulture scene felt the way it did. A brush, a steady hand, and the kind of patience that turns an everyday object into something with a name on it. The kind of work that does not photograph as well as it lives. You really have to stand next to it while it is happening to feel what the craft actually is.

June 26 to 28. Blaker. Find them in their tents and bring something for them to work on.

18/06/2026

Some of the best places to see traditional hot rods and customs were never museums in the traditional sense. They were monuments built by the same people who built the cars.

Starbird's National Rod and Custom Car Hall of Fame Museum opened in Afton, Oklahoma, in 1995. Forty thousand square feet on eighty acres, just off Route 66, run by Darryl Starbird himself, the Bubble-Top King of the late 1950s and early 1960s show car circuit. Starbird filled it with his own cars and with loaners from Barris, Roth, Posies, and most of the other big show car names of the era. Predicta was there. Li'l Coffin was there. The Lincolns and the bubble tops and the candy paint that defined a moment in time, all under one roof on a two-lane stretch of America that was already past its prime when the museum opened.

The museum closed around 2022. The collection got split up. Cars such as the Predicta and Li'l Coffin moved to the Museum of American Speed in Lincoln, Nebraska. Other cars went to private collections. The eighty-acre lot in Afton sits quieter now.

This is one of those quiet patterns in the hobby. The places where the cars lived together often disappear before the cars themselves do. A shop closes. A swap meet ends. A museum on a roadside that used to bring tourists in by the busload sells the building and lets the cars go to wherever they get the best offer.

That is part of why we keep photos. The cars survive. The room they were sitting in usually does not.

Did you ever make it out to Starbird's? What other custom car museums or shops do you wish you had visited before they closed?

Click the link in the comments to read more about Darryl Starbird and his museum on Kustomrama.

Thanks to Kustomrama contributor Alan Taylor for the photos from a cross-country trip he made out to Starbird's with legendary hot rod builder Andy Brizio.

16/06/2026

Today we want to talk about Robert Rojas.

Robert is one of those quiet contributors who keeps the Kustomrama archive moving forward without ever asking for credit. He buys old photos off eBay, mostly California sellers, mostly customs and hot rods from the late 1940s and 1950s. Then he scans them, sends them our way, and lets the rest of us figure out who is in the picture.

The lead photo in his most recent batch shows a lowered Chevrolet Fleetline with an unidentified guy leaning against it. A great photo and car! Wow! Another shot from the same lot shows a mild custom Chevy with the trim shaved off. A third shows a chopped Ford sedan. None of the names, locations, or photographers came with the photos. They might have ended up in a landfill if Robert had not been the highest bidder.

This is exactly the kind of work the hobby quietly depends on. There is no big Hollywood reveal at the end. Just a person making sure forgotten cars do not disappear forever. Robert has told us more photos are on the way.

If you recognize any of the cars in his batch, or you know the photographers who covered the California custom scene in the late 1940s and 1950s, drop a comment. The lookup never ends.

Click the link in the comments to see Robert's contributions on Kustomrama.

15/06/2026

Monday thought.

Most of what we publish on Kustomrama is really a story about handoff.

A guy builds a car, drives it, sells it, loses it, finds it again, hands it to his son. A grandfather buys a Starliner in the early 1960s and has the Alexander Brothers restyle it, and sells it in 1963. Forty years later, the front license plate from that car gets bolted to the nose of his grandson's Starliner in a garage in Michigan. A magazine cover from 1957 gets carried home from a swap meet by someone who recognizes the car in their childhood photo album. A 5-year-old kid spends a Saturday in the passenger seat of his dad's truck and starts learning what a chopped roof actually looks like.

That is the work. Not just preserving the cars. Preserving the small, quiet moves by which the cars get passed on.

A lot of what we cover is not really about who built what first. It is about who picked it up next. Sons finishing what their fathers started. Strangers buying photos off eBay so the cars in them do not disappear. A craftsman in Norway hand-turning a set of k***s that will go into someone else's truck and outlive them both.

Two weeks from now, my own car club is hosting the Coupe Devils Bonanza in the woods of Norway. Sixteen years in, and the show is mostly that same handoff out in the open. Kids climbing onto running boards. A dad explaining what a louver does. A builder telling someone who is half his age where the original part came from.

What got carried forward to you? What are you carrying forward to someone else?

Adresse

Sørum
1925

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