Mark Belcher’s stunning ’38 Chevy stars on the cover of this month’s Custom Car. A painstaking built topped off with a jaw-dropping paint job, it’s closing right in on perfection.

Eric Michaud’s kustom Thunderbird is pretty eye-catching too. Another labour of love, another unmissable paint scheme – though with full-body flames over a green body with a purple roof, definitely one to challenge the norm, even in California.

Back home, our coverage of the NSRA Spring Rumbles concludes with a third instalment of stories from around the country. And we’ve got the story of the inaugural Street Weekend – as well as the Sportsman Nationals that went with it.

And topping it off, this month’s Readers’ Rods feature is on a bare-metal ’31 Tudor done in the original hot rod style, channeled not chopped and looking like a time traveller from back in the day. Proof that while a top paint job is a wonderful thing, down and dirty can be cool as it comes too.