By the August 1959 issue of Car Craft, "Weirdo shirts" had become a full-blown craze with Roth at the forefront of the movement. Roth began airbrushing and selling "Weirdo" t-shirts at car shows and in the pages of Car Craft magazine as early as July 1958. Roth is best known for his grotesque caricatures - typified by Rat Fink - depicting imaginative, out-sized monstrosities driving representations of the hot rods that he and his contemporaries built. As a custom car builder, Roth was a key figure in Southern California's Kustom Kulture and hot-rod movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. "Big Daddy" Ed Roth (March 4, 1932 – April 4, 2001) was an artist, cartoonist, custom car painter, and pinstriper who created the hot-rod icon Rat Fink and other extreme characters. Cadillac V8 with four Stromberg two-barrel carbs 1939 Ford three-speed transmission solid front axle with coil springs live rear axle with a cross spring two-wheel hydraulic drum brakes at the rear. Revell Models released a 1:25 scale kit of the Outlaw in 1962 and re-issued it in 2001. Roth noticed people were having troubling pronouncing the word “Excalibur,” so he changed the car’s name to “Outlaw.” It was first shown at Disneyland in 1959 under the name “Excalibur,” because of its shifter, a Revolutionary War sword which was used by an ancestor of Roth’s wife. Roth financed the Outlaw’s chrome plating with money from the sale of his first car, the “Little Jewel." Most of the drive train was scrounged from junkyard parts and the entire car cost $800 to build. Much of the car was fabricated by hand, including the frame rails, body and most of the suspension. It set the standard for radical custom for years to come.
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