Sad news: Hot Rod fabricators and customizer killed in devastating shooting

The craft of hot rod building has gone through a technological transformation over the past 30 years. A new generation of young builders has been unafraid to embrace high-tech tools and materials in order to gratify a clientele that is not only younger but also less influenced by the history and culture of traditional hot-rodding. But even as this new generation of customers and builders create a style and feel all their own, more traditional builders are preserving the old ways and maintaining a loyal customer base for those who desire to preserve the historical narrative and techniques of traditional hot rod building.

Bobby Alloway of Alloway’s Hot Rod Shop in Louisville, Tennessee, is one of those builders fighting the good fight to preserve traditional hot-rodding ways with time-honored fabrication techniques and old-fashioned craftsmanship. His approach to building hot rods and muscle cars is focused and unwavering: get the stance right, give it a badass engine, and make it timeless. Alloway also has a knack for addition through subtraction, in strong opposition to some of his younger competitors—a sort of reductive genius that forces the eye to focus on the purity of form and color rather than a pile of bolted-on billet tchotchkes