Lowered by the Valley Custom Shop
VALLEY CUSTOM LOWERING KIT
In the mid 1950’s the Valley Custom Shop in Burbank, California produced a high standard front end lowering kit for several cars. The shop advertised this mail order product with a series of really neat ads in the custom car magazine during this time.
We have seen those really nice little ads, the Valley Custom Shop used in Rod & Custom Magazines from 1954 and 1955. Most of their ads promoted the front end lowering kits. But we had never really been able to find out, what exactly was included in this particular kit that could be mail ordered. Until recently, when the Valley Custom Shop showed two nice black and white photos on Facebook, where we could see the kit for the 1949-53 Fords. Just as was mentioned in their ads, the kits appear to be done very nicely. A high quality product, with well illustrated instructions.
The Valley Custom Shop created, or had created, a series of magazine ads for this product. But unlike most other companies, who used the same ad over and over again, they came up with a funny new ads, to promote the lowering kits for each new magazine issue. Since the product was promoted for quite some time, we think it was a well sold product. A lot of cars, back in the mid 1950’s, must have been lowered with the help of one of these Valley Custom Shop lowering kits.
Below we show a selection of these ads.
Awesome, they appear to be two types of kits. Both are bolt on “stepped A arms” . They even provide a spacer to re-mount the upper A arm to make it level again. Ads are pretty creative too.
Great kits these both seem to be.Love the shoebox in the pic you used for this story. Im not sure why we dont see any fords getting that treatment. These kits seem like the real deal for the time and Valley Custom was the king of great advertising with their business cards or the ads for these kits. Talk about a shop who didn’t really get the credit they deserved. The more im finding out about this shop…..the more I like it.
When I was striping out of the House of Chrome, when it was on Gil’s property, I had Gil put a similar setup on my ’51 Chevy but the lower control arm shackles where welded to the control arms. I wonder who had the idea first?
Ok, I get it now. The bottom picture is bolt on and welding both needed. The instruction picture is saying AA and A should be the same when welding them.