With platinum getting all the attention, gold was starting to look as dated as a Look magazine cover photo of Burl Ives. But then something weird happened, at least in the hot rod world. Gold, the more metallic the better, came back with a tide of 1960s-period hot rods, a likely reaction to the highly graphical, megabux rods featured on every cable channel north of PBS. While, in some ways, Jorge Zaragoza's 1936 Ford Coupe falls into the second category — with its Roush-tuned big-block and Tremec five-speed, in others, it's an emblem of retro understatement. That's not unexpected considering Zaragoza helped restore Tom McMullen's iconic, flamed deuce highboy, featured on the cover of Hot Rod in 1963.

Jorge Zaragoza's Golden '36 [Rod and Custom]

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