Creations ’N Chrome: One of Southern California’s most unique custom car builders
Creations ’N Chrome in Valencia California has built a reputation for themselves as being one of Southern California’s most unique custom car builders. Their work, particularly their stellar Fox body notchback “Top Notch”, has received attention at the national level for being bold as well as thoughtful and for taking unexpected directions in aesthetic as well as technical design. At the helm of all this sits Mr. Gary Watson. Gary has been neck-deep in car culture essentially since birth. His parents owned an auto body shop and on his second day home from the hospital, his mother brought him in to work with her!
Creations ’N Chrome specializes in the modification and restoration of American muscle cars from the 1960s to the mid-1970’s but after seeing the cars of the 1980s and 1990s becoming more and more popular, Gary decided to try something new and set about building Top Notch, possibly the coolest Fox body ever. Top Notch was born out of a desire to combat the stagnation in the custom Mustang world that Gary perceived. As such, he wanted to start with a chassis that was readily available, cheap to acquire, and something that had plenty of aftermarket support. He found a plain-Jane 1990 Mustang notchback and set about working his magic. Because Top Notch was going to be a shop demo vehicle, it was important for Gary to only use parts from companies for which Creations ’N Chrome was a vendor.
Motivation for Top Notch comes from a Ford Racing Aluminator Coyote V8 with a Vortech supercharger that are collectively good for 1000+ horsepower. Suspension is a combination of a JME Pro Series front setup and a Creations ’N Chrome custom 3-link system in the rear with JRi coil over shocks. The wide body comes from Maier Racing and the gorgeous three piece wheels come from HRE. The end result of this impressive parts list is a terrifyingly fast car with a lot of mid-eighties DTM Mustang flavor that will flat-out embarrass many modern supercars.
Creations ’N Chrome is adamant about using high quality parts for all of their builds which is part of the reason they insist on using exhaust components from MagnaFlow. Because their work is so strongly skewed towards custom, MagnaFlow’s huge catalog of individual tubes and mufflers make building a quality stainless system relatively easy, no matter what kind of project it’s for.
When asked what’s next for Creations ’N Chrome, Gary tells us, "We're going to continue to push ourselves to new highs in quality and innovation. You have to stave off convention and look forward if you want to succeed in this business.” We agree, and we can’t wait to see what rolls out of Creations ’N Chrome in the future.
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