| Issue #36, December 1, 2006 |
Pimp Your Ride For a Happy Holiday
Hello, and welcome to the Holiday Edition of “Pimp My Ride.” Today, we will be hooking up my boy Manny’s dark green 1972 Chevy Nova for the holidays. Now, you may have missed last week’s show, when we fitted an animatronic turkey atop an ice cream truck, filled the freezer where the ice cream used to go with cranberry sauce and stuffing, and even attached a hose that shot gravy. I’d say that was pretty fly, but turkeys don’t, so I’ll say it was dope, because they are.
The dark green tone of the Nova’s paint job makes it an ideal candidate for conveying Yuletide joy to pedestrians and other motorists who catch a glimpse of this ride. The first thing we need to do, of course, is install some hydraulics. This is one of the toughest parts of our Christmas customization. Santa wouldn’t roll without switches, so why should Manny? For this purpose, it was necessary to take the car to my man in Hunt’s Point Market in the Bronx, as none of the Hamptons shops seemed to specialize in this kind of customization. With the hydraulics, Manny has the option to roll in many different ways. He could pop one rear wheel up high with the opposite side down way low in the front, so he kind of looks like he is creeping around the corner when he passes the Golden Pear in Southampton. Or when he jets to B’Hampton to get his latte on at Starbucks, he can bounce the front end a little first, just to show them that he doesn’t front on that skinny decaf mocha stuff.
After the hydraulics are installed, the next step is to upgrade the rims and get the interior in the festive spirit. For the spinners and custom tires, there is none better than Will Castro at Unique Autosports in Holbrook. Will pimped out Tom Wolfe’s white Caddy and many members of the G-Unit posse’s rides, so you know my man can handle Manny’s Nova. First, we did up the inside of the car with some fresh and clean white-on-white upholstery and spruced up the dash with wood grain. Will also put some nice red inlays around the handles and window cranks inside the driver and passenger-side doors. We did up a little custom white shag for the floor mats in my shop and that worked out nice.
We went to Randy Feinberg of Randall’s in Southampton for the red racing stripe painted on the side of the car. We also wanted him to custom-paint the 20-inch rims installed by Will. Once the silver spinners were painted red, we all felt much more in the spirit. Manny sang “Ode to Joy” to keep the guys entertained while they painted. For the hood, I needed to bring in a custom artist to keep the Christ in Christmas. Using a high-quality airbrush, my artist painted a baby Jesus in his manger across the hood, with the North Star twinkling up by where the windshield wiper fluid shoots out.
The next step was easy for me to do myself. I purchased a set of multi-colored string lights from the Five and Dime in Sag Harbor (the big, old-fashioned kind, of course) and strung them up around the interior roof of the car and lined the rear window (fastening with carpet tacks). I got juice to the lights by wiring them through the dome light. I popped out the bulb and assembly (you’ll want to pull the fuse first) and twisted the string lights right onto the wire. The colored lights operate with the switch to turn on the interior lights – or when the door is opened.
Of course, one of the most important aspects of the hip Holiday sleigh is the booming sound system. For this reason, we filled Manny’s trunk up with top-of-the-line subwoofers, bass tubes and an amplifier to make it all run smoothly. We custom-built a wood box for the subwoofers and coated it with silver fiberglass (for the tinsel effect) and left some room for the bass tubes. Most folks have their own favorite holiday songs. My preference is for Iggy Pop’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” which maybe technically isn’t a Christmas tune, but it has some kick-ass sleigh bells through the entire song. The bells really resonate through the whole Nova with the Bose tweeters we installed on top of both ends of the dashboard. And what a dashboard – Chevy had the good sense to design a dash you could attach a cutting board to and slice lemons on.
After Iggy Pop, we like to rock to The Walkmen album Bows and Arrows. That record has a song by the name “North Pole” that has sleigh bells on it, too. Again, not technically a Christmas carol or anything, but nice seasonal music just the same. Manny always throws on a little “Christmas in Hollis” before we roll out the driveway, and damned if that Run DMC song doesn’t get the nostalgia flowing (along with the Cristal).
We play all these tunes through the iPod Nano, which we wired directly into the Alpine stereo. The red Nano really brings the whole theme of the car together, as it stands on the dash in front of the snow globe. Besides the color of the Nano complimenting the décor on the car, we feel good about giving something back to the community by purchasing a product.
To recap, we pimped Manny’s ride with the red spinners, hydraulics, white upholstery, white shag mats, red racing stripe, Jesus on the hood, multi-colored lights all around, a booming system, fat tires and topped it all off with the Nano. Ho, Ho, Ho, but get ya own. – John Capone
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