Rachelle Jacobs is the sort of girl who doesn't mind picking up a wrench and getting her hands dirty. Then she'll clean up, put on a dress, heels, some red lipstick and pin curls in her hair, and head out with her boyfriend to Lost Weekend in Alameda to do the Western swing to a smokin' rockabilly band.

[MP3: "It's a Doggone Shame," Cari Lee and the Salddle-ites]

Jacobs, a.k.a. Bad Luck Betty, is one of many women in the Bay Area who not only love to build cars with their own hands but also to immerse themselves in the subculture surrounding the local car-show scene, which fetishizes everything vintage, from '50s clothes, makeup and hair to old-fashioned pastimes, music and dancing. Old cars, old style, old sounds.

Some of these women form all-girl car clubs like Hell's Belles in San Francisco, which expanded to Seattle and Los Angeles, and the Radiator Hoes in Alameda, which expanded to Raleigh, N.C.

Jacobs, who founded the Nor Cal Rockabilly listserv on Yahoo, has a jacket club of her own, a la the Pink Ladies in "Grease," but her club, the Bombshells, is more about socializing than cars, since only three of the dozen members have classic cars.

"They all want 'em, but no one really has the time or the money -- or anyone to help them work on 'em or get to know how to fix 'em," Jacobs said.

The 26-year-old San Jose resident, like many of the other women, learned about cars from her dad, who helped her restore her first car, a '65 Dodge Dart GT. Now Jacobs and her boyfriend, Josh Hepburn, are pouring their time, money and energy into a 1950 Plymouth "lead sled" that they're restoring together.

At the San Francisco Rod, Custom & Motorcycle Show at the Cow Palace last weekend, the local car clubs and grease monkeys hung out in the Suede Room, named after the shine-free matte paint most used on their customized classic cars and home-built "rat rods." A few tattooed young women with thick eyeliner and leopard-print heels, their hair swept up into bouffants, were dotted among the men with slicked-back hair and tattoos.

Some were classic-car owners or vendors like Jenny Parker, who makes her line of Trophy Queen handbags and accessories out of old car seats. Some were girlfriends, wives and friends of car clubbers. But others were there to show off their own hard work and sweat, and to swap tricks of the trade.

Kelly "Tink" Floyd, 28, of Santa Rosa, a pin-curled rockabilly chick who showed off her pride and joy, her white '50 Ford Coupe shoe box, bought a '67 Mercury Comet at 17.

"My brother taught me how to rebuild it, made me do all the work on it, but told me what to do," she explained. "My mom had a 1934 Buick, so that was what I grew up with -- her working on that, and me playing in it. My family was very antique-oriented."

Her friend Annika Ofverberg, 35, the only woman in the Lucky Bastards car club, started working on cars a year and half ago when she decided to hot rod a 1930 Ford Coupe, featured in the show.

"I was still doing the feminine stuff -- sewing, cooking and gardening," Ofverberg said. "Finally, I got bored with that, and wanted to build my own car. Actually, it gives you more of a sense of accomplishment even than sewing the whole outfit, or gardening."

In her flannel shirt, Chelsea Gonzales wasn't into car-scene fashion; she was more focused on getting her candy-apple 1950 Chevy 510 in running condition in time for the hot rod show. A few days before, she threw in the towel -- so now she's only a prospective member of the all-girl car club, Skirt Skrapers, that her friend Suzie Gambino formed the day before the Cow Palace gathering.

"My knuckles are bloody," Gonzales said. "I have bruises all over my legs. Believe it or not, I don't think I could have more bruises on myself."

Despite being only a day old, the Skrapers had an impressive showing in the Suede Room -- four cars -- including Christine Amenti's gold 1965 Ford Galaxy, a present from her fiance in which he painted his wedding proposal to her.

Like Jacobs, Gonzales, a 29-year-old San Jose resident, learned mechanics from a bike-loving dad. "Working with my dad on antique motorcycles, I got to know carburetors. I got my first car when I was 14 -- a '54 Chevy Apollo. Me and him drove that from Boise, Idaho, and had a number of problems on the way here. When you have failure, that's when you learn. You'll never forget."

Her friend, Skirt Skraper Susan Olsen, is a 37-year-old mother of four who drives a blue-flame-covered 1954 Cadillac. Her 5-year-old daughter, Gaby, has watched her work on the car, wrench in her tiny hand. "If that car could talk, it would have some stories to tell," Olsen said.

"It's kind of nice seeing something so old still alive, just the nostalgia of the old cars and keeping something that old running," Jacobs agreed. "People honk, throw their hand out the window and give the thumbs-up. A lot of the older guys appreciate it."

"I like how simple they are to work on," Gonzales said. "Simple and tough as hell. These cars now days, there's no way you could do as much to it. My Apollo, when I was 15, I tore my aunt's fence down backing that thing up. But I had like a scratch on my bumper and that's it."

"The nice thing about being into old cars and working on your own car is you can fix it on the side of the road," Jacobs said. "With a new car, if something's wrong it'll just turn off, and you need a computer to tell you what's wrong with it. With an older car, if it's got spark and it's got gas, one thing will lead you to problem-solve the next."

The Suede Room stands in sharp contrast to the main floor, where $100,000 hot rods are restored to perfection with reproduced parts in shiny chrome. The folks showing their cars in the Suede Room are the ones who stayed up all hours tinkering with their vehicles. Getting them running well takes priority over paint jobs.

"People put their heart and souls into these cars down here, and there, it's how much money do you have to put into your car," Olsen said. "It's nice to look at, but you know someone didn't sit up in their garage till 4 o'clock in the morning to go to a show at 5 o'clock in the morning."

Olsen and Gonzales believe women bring a different perspective to car repair -- the ability to look at a problem in more than one way. "We don't get pissed off and throw tools," Gonzales said.

And they say the guys are excited to hang out with girls they can share their love of cars with and compare notes on drive lines, transmissions and fuel injection. "You know, it's not as hard as they make it sound," Gonzales said.

"When you work on cars, everybody wants to help each other," says Floyd, whose boyfriend is in the Poor Boys car club. "It doesn't matter if you're a guy or a girl: In this scene, if you need help or have questions, everybody bounces ideas off each other, and helps each other out."

But Gonzales, who is friends with the Road Zombies, says her talents can be threatening to men, explaining that the Volkswagen tattoo on her back gets the attention of guys who are surprised how well she knows cars. "Some guy will be like, 'I don't even know how to change a tire,' and I'll be like 'Oh, Lord!' Why would you want to know more than the person that you want to date?"

Now that the girls are getting under the hoods with the boys, it may seem like a contradiction of sorts, dolling up the way women did in a period where they were expected to stay in the kitchen while the husband tinkered.

But for Jacobs, everything about her life outside of work is drenched in '50s nostalgia. Her house is decked out in vintage kitsch, her nightlife look is '50s pinup, and she and the Bombshells like to go bowling, drink beer and dance Western swing. Her favorite music is from that era -- Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Wanda Jackson.

"I'm not into the modern culture at all," she said. "I don't like the music; I don't like the clothes. It's like they wake up in the morning and try to look like crap. You know, the emo look -- I just don't get it at all. It's not for me."

But with her tattoos and post-women's-movement empowerment, even though Jacobs is nostalgic for the pop culture of the past, she's not that nostalgic.

"My morals and virtues are definitely not in the '50s," she said. "I live with my boyfriend -- that would be unheard of. As well as just working on cars in general, having a job where I do travel -- I'm pretty modern in that aspect. The culture itself has progressed and changed a lot over the years. Girls aren't as feminine as they used to be, yet they can still attain the look. You get us drunk, and we all sound like sailors.

"We're not dressing as we would have in the '50s. If you see us on a daily basis, we're wearing jeans and boots and T-shirts. I'm sure as hell not wearing a house dress and heels every day.

"No way in hell would I want to go live in that era. I'm a little bit of a feminist," she says, in a tone that suggests she's a whole lot of a feminist.

In the rockabilly set, it's all about the music: traditional old-country-style rockabilly like Alameda's Cari Lee and the Saddle-ites, San Francisco's the Haywoods and Sonoma County's 1/4-Mile Combo, formerly known as Hopped Up, as well as neo-rockabilly bands like the Chop Tops from Santa Cruz, the Cockfight Kings from Sacramento and Texas Steve and the Get Gone Trio from Alameda. The scene is so small, devotees will travel all over the Bay Area to see their favorite bands, to the Knockout in San Francisco, Lost Weekend in Alameda, the Jury Room in Santa Cruz and the Voodoo Lounge in San Jose. Even as far as Willemina's in Sacramento, which is booked by Bombshell Syndi Steinberg.

Aside from all-girl clubs like the Belles and Hoes, there are a plethora of predominantly male car clubs around the bay, including the East Bay Sinners, the Road Zombies, the Poor Boys, the Lucky Bastards, the Saints, the 500s, the Rumblers, the Road Zombies, the Strangers, Koffins and Swanx.

Jacobs says most of the guys in the car scene tend not to be clean-cut, pompadour and Western-jacket sporting rockabilly dudes but tattooed, "dirt under the fingernails, dirty jeans, plain shirts -- they're real steak-and-potato type guys. They're not so much into the fashion, they're all about the cars. But they do like the music."

And the scene is so small, it has room for the metal-inflected psychobilly sound and lovers of straight-up punk rock.

When Jacobs founded the Nor Cal Rockabilly list in 1998, she found that other women had similar problems: "They were all complaining that they can't get away from their boyfriends, and that none of their girlfriends were into the music, so they can't call them to go to shows."

So that same year, she formed the Bombshells, a club of like-minded women, as "an excuse to go bowling." Car shows, vintage shopping, rockabilly shows, swing dancing and drinking are all typical Bombshell outings. The girls wear their jackets everywhere, except possibly to work. They also have embroidered cardigans and custom hot rod shirts.

These days, it's getting harder to qualify for a personalized Bombshells jacket, though.

"We'd love to have new members who bring something to the club -- a really cool chick who gets along with us, and has the same kind of independent free will -- sassy, total smartass, you know, everything that we are," Jacobs said. "Over the years we've had members that just kind of flake out and lose interest, so we've gotten pretty uptight about bringing in new people."

For every possible new member, there's a secret "prospecting" period where the Bombshells bring her out, see whether she meshes with the group and is committed to the club. Finally, there's a surprise initiation where she's presented with a jacket with her name on the front.

One nightclub in San Francisco used to make a special cocktail called the Bombshell -- a raspberry Stoli with cranberry. All the members would order one, take a big gulp and make the initiate drink the rest. One initiate was a teetotaler, so they made her walk around a car show with a tiara and fairy wand. "She was borderline crying, she was so happy."

The Bombshells will host a car show on April 28 at Demarco's Twenty-three Club at 23 Visitacion Ave., Brisbane. The Bombshells 9th Annual Booze Broads & Hotrods show will feature rockabilly sounds from San Francisco's Charlie Roman, San Diego's rockabilly Rhythm Stompers (www.myspace.com/rhythmstompers) and Sonoma's 1/4 Mile Combo (www.myspace.com/quartermilecombo.) Vendors are now being accepted; inquire by e-mailing badluckbetty13@yahoo.com. Doors open at 7 p.m; show at 8 p.m; $15 cover. 21+ only. For more information, go to www.thebombshells.net and www.myspace.com/bayareabombshells.

"I've bought books on hairstyles and makeup from the '40s and '50s," said Rachelle Jacobs. "It's just insane how little technology the women had, like the hot rollers and all that. Nothing compares to what we have now, with all the products, yet the hairstyle was just amazing. They had nothing to work with, but they were just so talented. I have all this stuff, and it's hard for me to get my hair perfect.

"You just get frustrated. Like the pin curls and the big barrel rolls -- it's all extremely hard to do. Those women, I understand why they'd get their hair set and not wash it for two or three days, but I can't do that. It's just incredible, the amount of labor that goes into the look."

The makeup is less hard to achieve, now that the pinup, Bettie Page pout has come back through the likes of Christina Aguilera and Scarlett Johansson.

"MAC Cosmetics has a lot of colors that were used back then," Jacobs said. "You can still attain the look, you know, red lipstick, pale skin. You darken your eyebrows a bit. The culture now is still using the glamour of the '50s and '40s."

But Kelly Floyd and Annika Ofverberg, who get grungy in their garages, downplay the role of fashion and glamour in their lives. However, when they finally have their cars in shape for a car show, they get the grease off their hands and get dolled up with lipstick and pin curls, just to feel clean and girlie again.

Ofverberg, who did all the welding and grinding on her 1930 hot rod herself, said she doesn't bother to fix her hair much. "Honestly, you used to do it all the time," Floyd interjected, "but she's been building her own hot rod, and it really does take a priority."

Ultimately, the cars are more important than the image, Jacobs said.

"Really, I'm a tomboy at heart," she said. "The only time I dress up is when we're going to a show, or we're going to be dancing. I never wear anything even remotely girlie when I work on the cars, you know. It's not about fashion."

Here are some Web sites where you can learn more about rockabilly and car culture:

Girls' Clubs

The Bombshells social club: www.thebombshells.net

The Bombshells on MySpace: www.myspace.com/bayareabombshells

Hell's Belles car club: www.hellsbellescarclub.com

Hell's Belles on MySpace: www.myspace.com/hellsbellescc

The Radiator Hoes car club: www.radiatorhoescarclub.com

The Radiator Hoes on MySpace: www.myspace.com/radiatorhoes

Bands

Cari Lee and the Saddle-ites: www.saddle-ites.com; on MySpace: www.myspace.com/carileeandthesaddleites

The Haywoods: www.myspace.com/thehaywoods

1/4 Mile Combo: www.quartermilecombo.com; on MySpace: www.myspace.com/quartermilecombo

The Chop Tops: www.thechoptops.com; on MySpace: www.myspace.com/thechoptops

Texas Steve and the Get Gone Trio: www.gitrealgone.com; on MySpace: www.myspace.com/texassteveandthegitgonetrio

The Cockfight Kings: www.myspace.com/cockfightkings

Nightclubs

The Knockout, 3223 Mission St., (415) 550-6994, www.theknockoutsf.com

Lost Weekend Lounge, 2320 1/2 Santa Clara Ave., Alameda, (510) 523-4700

Jury Room, 712 Ocean St., Santa Cruz, (831) 426-7120, www.myspace.com/juryroom

Voodoo Lounge, 14 S. Second St., San Jose, (408) 286-8636

Willemina's Bar & Grill, 1023 Front St., Old Sacramento, (916) 444-7465, www.myspace.com/willeminas

Rachelle Jacobs' recommended sites for Rockabilly style

Whirling Turban: "Fabulous custom reproduction dresses"; www.whirlingturban.com

The Diva Pinup: "Best accessories"; www.thedivapinup.com

Daddy-Os: "Clothing for guys and dolls"; www.daddyos.com

Layrite: "Best hair pomade"; layrite.com

Plush Living: "Clothes"; www.plushliving.net

Vintage Vending: "Retro decor"; www.vintagevending.com

Re-Mix Vintage Shoes: "Best shoes"; remixvintageshoes.com

Jenny Parker's Trophy Queen: "handbags and accessories"; www.trophyqueen.com