LEGEND: DAVE HART
AFTER HALF A CENTURY ON THE TOOLS, LOCAL ROD AND CUSTOM PIONEER DAVE HART CAN TELL SOME WILD TALES
Five decades spent tinkering with cars and bikes has left Dave Hart with some pretty cool stories
TAKING up the tools more than 50 years ago, Dave Hart has pretty much done it all when it comes to customising cars. Mechanic, painter, ’beater and graphic artist, he has designed, built, beaten and painted countless cars, vans and bikes, and he’s still building them today.
Dave has a rare blend of vision and skill, which he has applied in a variety of arenas throughout his life. While he has done his fair share of your typical ’32-34 hot rods, he isn’t afraid to tackle unusual makes and models, and he can put seemingly mismatched stuff together with the best of them. He has also painted surfboards for world champions, created crazy T-shirts for his club mates, and fixed choppers for the Hells Angels!
He’s a founder member of the Northern Beaches Hot Rod Club, a veteran of the NSW Street Rod Committee, and a chronic collector of all things rod and custom.
We stopped by his Central Coast shop to have a long chat – about the only kind there is when someone has as many stories in the vault as Dave!
How did you get your start working on custom cars?
I just wanted to be a mechanic, so I got an apprenticeship with the council when I was 15, which was in 1967. I was there for the four years of the apprenticeship, although they tried to get rid of me a couple of times because I wouldn’t have a haircut. After that I bummed around the Brookvale area before partnering with Rick Pacey, starting Kustom Kreations. He was a signwriter and painter and I was the mechanic. That didn’t last long and I went and worked at an exhaust shop in Brookvale that was also big-time into drag racing.
What was the first car you built?
A four-door Model A sedan, which I started when I was 16. I saved up a few dollars from my council apprenticeship and bought it from a bloke in Engadine who was initially planning to restore it. I sold off the original running gear, and I didn’t realise those original bodies had a lot of wood in them. I didn’t know much about wood in those days, so I sourced a body that was mint and put all that together with a 283ci Chev, which I bought off Speedway racer Bill Warner, and a Powerglide, which was almost brand new out of a ’69 Monaro. It was one of the first Chev V8s in a hot rod in Australia.
How did you get involved in the classic Aussie biker movie, Stone?
By 1973 I had made my mind up to get in my Model A and move to the Gold Coast. But before I had the chance to leave I got an offer to paint 15 bikes for the Stone movie. The Hells Angels somehow got the contract to do the work but didn’t have a painter, so they set me up with a compressor in a garage in Redfern and I spent two weeks painting the bikes. I had picked up the basics of painting when working with Rick Pacey and used all the simple little tricks at the time like bubbles, fish scales and stuff like that.
How long did you end up working with the Hells Angels?
About four years. I was pushing out 12 bikes a week sometimes, doing everything from paint to sissy bars, fabricating exhausts, welding up coffin tanks, building entire choppers. It was a shopfront with a residence upstairs. I’d be rubbing down panels in the bathtub and spraying them in the kitchen! Occasionally members would stay there, sleeping amongst the bike parts. I even found myself painting police Kawasaki bikes. They’d arrive brand new in crates and we’d paint the black and white on them for the cops. The Hells Angels working for the police!
Where did you go from there?
I worked out of my parents’ garage for about 12 months painting surfboards for Morning Star and pro surfers like Nat Young and Mark Richards. After that I did more normal painting work in a shop with one other guy, picking up panelwork skills along the way. By the time the licensing system came along, I was a mechanic, painter and panel beater.
You must have seen a lot of change take place in the scene over that kind of timeframe.
I was there at the start of the Australian Street Rod Federation and the first Nationals. It was always hard getting these cars registered, and we all went along to a public meeting of hot rodders at Parramatta, where it was decided to form a committee to try and make things better for mainly home-built cars like T-buckets. That was the formation of the NSW Street Rod Committee. I joined the committee in about 1984 and have been with them since then. Now I’m one of four inspectors that inspect the cars to be registered all over NSW. We inspect them and process the applications without the RMS ever seeing them.
Did any of the early rodding pioneers influence you?
I HAD MADE MY MIND UP TO GET IN MY MODEL A AND MOVE TO THE GOLD COAST, BUT I GOT AN OFFER TO PAINT 15 BIKES FOR THE STONE MOVIE
Obviously Ed Roth with the crazy cars and monster T-shirts. I got to see most of his cars in person over about eight trips to the USA. They were what they were, you know. They weren’t supposed to be street rods – they were radical show cars. Being a bit of a drawer myself, I was able to do my own monster shirts. When I was working for the bike shop I did one for myself to wear to a car show, just using coloured Texta markers on a white T-shirt. People liked them and I ended up doing a few dozen just for the guys in the club – all hand-done and oneoff. A bit of a sideline developed there doing crazy T-shirts.
Are there any Australian builders that you admire at the moment?
I admire Kyle Smith [Smith Concepts]. I knew him in the Northern Beaches Hot Rod Club when he came in with the Valiant ute he had. He started by learning the pinstriping stuff himself and now he has a business cranking out real good custom cars, bikes and lowriders and he’s really kicked on. He’s done real well. He puts the hours in and he gets the rewards.
How many cars do you think you’ve built over the decades?
I probably had a major part in about 40 cars; maybe a dozen of those have been complete builds from the chassis up. There has been a lot of finishing-off work over the years, too. There would be times where I would fly into a shop for the weekend and do a flame-job on a car, do a couple of 14- or 15-hour days masking and painting.
Do you see yourself ever hanging up the tools?
Nah, I’ll keep on. I’ll be limited to what I can do in the future, like, sanding back a whole car – I go a day and end up with aches and pains because I don’t use those muscles much anymore. Small jobs will be okay, like roof chops! A couple of hours on a Model A coupe and I’ll have it down by myself. Custom work, like changing headand tail-lights, and working on a good car. Most of the cars I’ve had to work on have been rust-buckets or shit-heaps; you have to do so much work to them to get them solid again before you can even start the custom work.
MOST OF THE CARS I’VE HAD TO WORK ON HAVE BEEN RUST-BUCKETS OR SHIT-HEAPS