January 17, 2010
The History of Shadow's Alley:

    The other day I had been making some additions to this web site and couldn't help but notice that I have been doing this for almost nine years.  Next year will be Shadow's Alley's ten year anniversary.  Built somewhat out of necessity, I wanted a place for friends and family to view and display their projects, but I also wanted it to be useful for anyone visiting the site.  I have a few loyal visitors that find it a useful resource and there are others that just pass through once or twice.  The biggest asset to the site is the links page.  Almost daily I get requests from other website builders to add their website to one of my links pages, whether it be for the real deal hot rods or for the scale model rods.  Each site is carefully reviewed before they are added to this site. 
    Over the years I have seen a lot of websites that I link to come and go.  I try to weed out the junk sites, but every once in a while one will slip by me.  You've seen them.  When you do a search for a specific part or service and the search engine that you are using, comes up with sites that are totally useless.  The kind of site that advertises that they have a part for your 194? Ford or Chevy or whatever and when you get there, it is just a list of other sites that don't have what your looking for either.  Their parts search come up with item not found or they only go back as far as 1982.  Man that ticks me off and I'm sure it does a lot of you. 
    Another reason for Shadow's Alley is that I am totally into Hot Rods, Customs and all types of vehicles.  I have been since I was eight years old when I got the chance to work on a guys hot rod at a gas station down the street from where I lived.  It wasn't a big job, but the young man building a 57 Chevy saw that I was interested and asked if I would sand and paint the headers for his car.  That's all it took. I was hooked.  Around the same time my older brother had a 46 Ford coupe that was unbelievably cool.  He would take me to school with it once in a while. He also had a friend that had a 62 Ford Falcon that they had totally customized. It was probably one of the first customs to have shaved door handles on the outside.  All that was there to open the door was the push button from the handle.
     Yes, I'm really into hot rods.  I have a 40 Chrysler New Yorker Coupe and when I began looking for parts for it, my bookmarks became so extensive that I decided to build the website so that all the resources that I needed could be found easily.  I've purchased parts and products from many of the sites listed here.  And I'm sure a lot of you probably have also.  I don't have a bunch of pop up advertisements all over the site and I don't ask for donations to keep the site going.  It's a hobby for me and I enjoy helping people when I can.  So I hope you find Shadow's Alley useful for whatever your automotive project.  If you get a chance, Please sign my Guest book and let me know what you think about the site.

Best Regards: Rich "Shadow" Zawaly