A visit with Stony Smith, one of Canada’s most respected custom car builders involves a jaunt past Southern Ontario farmland, before turning down a snow covered, unmarked gravel road, leading to the top of a ski hill. Hundreds of school kids clamber off the ski lift and schuss down the piste, oblivious to the creative madness that is happening just a couple of hundred metres away.
The scent of wood smoke hangs in the air among the trees surrounding the shop, where the proprietor of Oddball Kustoms plies his trade. A crisp layer of newly fallen snow crunches under foot as one explores the eclectic collection of past, present and future project cars scattered around the compound.
The open exhaust pipes of one of Smith’s more notable creations, dubbed Rus-T, are coated in a blanket of glistening white crystals, next to a vintage flat front GMC van that has seen better days.
Footsteps in the snow lead one past an old truck which looks like it may have been liberated from the set of MASH to a doorway which has been heavily decorated with hot rodding stickers.
Push open the door and one is faced with a gentle blast of warmth from a wood fired barrel furnace. As your eyes adjust from the brightness of a sunny Winter day to the dim workshop, you become aware that this is no ordinary space. A nearly complete Sixties era Chevy pick-up dominates the space in the front room, while another sits on a lift in the back. A rat rod in progress sits off to the side, while Smith’s bearded face is focused on an ancient looking rear axle housing. Pretty much every surface of the space is occupied by treasures collected throughout the years.
As a teenager in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, Smith’s first car was a ‘78 Honda Civic, complete with a body made of Swiss cheese, as was the standard for Japanese imports in those days. It didn’t run and had to be pushed to the local garage. The lessons learned resurrecting that car taught young Stony that his passion was for the mechanical aspect of cars, more than the actual driving