Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Ok, that’s a pretty obscure Bowie reference, but then a Borg Warner T10 4-speed is a pretty obscure box of gears today. You can only stare at something with that much potential, looking all greasy and rusty and sad, before you gotta recast your schedule and make it look its worth.

So into the truck it went along with the rebuild kit my loving spouse got me for Christmas (seriously ladies, no sweaters; buy car parts or wrenches and you’ll be amazed how often the trash and recycling get taken out).

This was a good project to take ’round to my friend Tom’s engine shop, given he has every tool known to man, a large heated workspace and experience rebuilding this very gearbox.

He shook his head at the price I paid. “A hundred and ten bucks?,” he said. “It was worth that 30 years ago.” A customer stopped over and he liked it too. When he heard the price, he said, “You stole it.”

We cracked the case and internals looked good–so good in fact that changing the oil might have been enough for another 50,000 miles. But my mission was a rebuild….

(This tool for removing the press-fit speedometer drive gear is handy.)

Things came apart pretty well, though those thick C-shaped snap-rings are tenacious. I pinched my hand pretty good with the handle when the snap-ring jaws slipped off the clip–but there’s no sympathy for non-permanent injuries here. Tom just says, “toughen up.”

Next step was to de-gunk. Fortunately, one of the tools on hand is a pressure washer. Every shaft, gear, housing and other metal component big enough not to fall through the cage floor got the pressure wash and solvent treatment. Bolts and smaller stuff just got solvent, and then polishing on a wire wheel. The wheel also zipped all the rust off the shifter rods.

It was a promising start–and fun, so time was in warp drive. The devoted half day sped by on afterburners with only disassembly and some cleanup checked off.Not sure why I thought this would be a one-day project. The brain cells behind that determination have been reassigned from Logistics Department to Beer Tasting.

There was more wrenching ahead. Stay tuned!…

Friend of mine manages a used bookstore and some neat stuff crosses the threshold once in a while–for sci-fi fans, he’s got an original Weird Tales with an H.P. Lovecraft story in it—waaaaay cool.

What he isn’t into, lucky for this scribbler, is cars. When a couple ’60s-era rod cartoon mags walked in the door, he bought me a few issues.

How sweet is this old stuff, from the days when Big Daddy Roth’s work made covers and page spreads all over the newsstand.

He even picked up this old Harley Davidson accessories catalog from ‘69.

No long-haired tattooed specimens here–which ’60s is this?

Checked out the show today and here’s a few snaps of some of the fun iron on hand. Whatever your pleasure, be it the bone stock rotisserie resto job or the free-form rat rod rolling artwork, there’s a good afternoon’s worth of winter fun at the River Centre.

This bubble-top machine greets you as you descend the escalator. Fun to see a Hot Wheels car at full scale.

Always love Cobras and this well-done kit was on hand with a GT40 knockoff, plus various hi-po Mustangs–a tribute to the blue oval.

Interesting old stuff’s always a treat, whether traditional in inspiration or ratted up with some unpredictable parts.

I say, is that a Citroen DS one-spoke steering wheel? If you’re going to innovate with old stuff, may as well do it with old innovation.

Multi-gauge’s looks couldn’t be cooler.

Here’s a new take on gunning it.

Lots of cool looking old hot rods built up or being built up made it to Saint Paul.

And who doesn’t love an old speedster from the Model T era?

What’s the motorcycle doing there? It’s a Boss Hoss, so it squeaks under the felt rope with its 502 cubic inch V8–just what you need when your 1,000 cc bike isn’t enough.

Vroom!

Avoiding rush-hour traffic is one of the better perks of the freelance lifestyle. Seldom must this scribbler enter the iron-ant swarm between 7 and 10 am… This morning was different.

Two hours to drive the 60-mile round trip to Stillwater. How do you folks do it? Dental work–the comfy chair, that bright light in your eyes, the smell of tooth-dust honed off by a screaming drill–is more comforting than moving inch by inch in a school of cars that’ll do 100 now forced to go 10, or 5, or 0.

Road rage is easy to understand when you have somewhere to go and no way to get there other than creep–which has prompted my theory that traffic jams cause vampirism:

The early vampires were ordinary commuters who went mad from daytime carriage traffic and took to travelling only at night. The whole bloodsucking thing arose incidentally–Transylvanian restaurants close early.

Honestly, how long can you sit in gridlock accomplishing nothing before you start wishing you could fly over the blockade or give some rude driver a good chomp?

Here’s one you may have missed: the Chevy 789, a drop-top from custom California builder n2a Motors, featuring–as all you classics fans can see–design elements from the ‘57, ‘58, and ‘59 Chevy lineup.

She runs a modern Corvette chassis and puts out about 400 ponies, good enough for a claimed 190 miles per hour.

Though he couldn’t go into specifics because it’s not out yet, company head Gene Langmesser says the car stars in a made-for-TV movie, something along the lines of Gone in 60 Seconds.

Naturally the car’s built with all modern performance and safety equipment and on those terms can leave its design progenitors sniffing radials’ dust and road debris.

What do you folks think?

(Photos used with permission from n2a Motors.)

Revised, Thursday:

Reader “ds” noted the 789 resembled the Batmobile. Here are two concept drawings in support of that view:

Snowy, salty, frigid winter is no time for cool cars–except indoors. This weekend, the World of Wheels show will be cramming a lot of nice iron into the St. Paul River Centre. If you want to shake off the cold and dream of summer, this’ll be the spot for it.

Time flies, at least for us mortals. For engine parts, however, it strolls leisurely and sometimes sits down for a nap. That’s why New Old Stock parts are so much fun–their materials, design, packaging, are frozen in time.

Old parts are survivors of simpler times, when you could pop a hood and recognize everything without having to follow wires or peer under covers and into cramped nooks.

At Little Dearborn I snapped some Hadees thermostats. Tom at Adelmann Engine, which has been around for almost 60 years, has plenty of them, plus the old applications guide. So if you’re out on I-94 and your Crosley or Kaiser or Hupmobile or Nash-Lafayette starts overheating, maybe you better look up the part number for a new thermostat.

There are lots of boxes and parts that have sat idly by at Adelmann since mid-century last, witnesses to rebuilds of hundreds of engines–some for rare, fast, unique or otherwise amazing vehicles.

The sheer size of some engines or their components can also surprise the modern driver. A Lincoln V12 is a mighty hunk of cast iron.

And the connecting rods from a smallblock Chevy–strong enough for uncountable millions of miles on our roads–are insignificantly puny compared to the same part in a stationary diesel engine once used for an oil-field pump.

This pair of Ward Riverside ribbed dirt-track tires has shod the front wheels on many a racecar going back the late ’30s or early ’40s. Tom once met a guy with racks of them, never used. He bought a pair for $13 apiece. Today unused examples go for over $150.

With so many cool parts, something as desireable as a triple-carb intake for a flathead Ford nearly goes unnoticed atop one of the many rows of shelves.

The yellowed ad framed on the wall? How many times have customers walked by it and not noticed that it’s a real magazine ad for a Tucker, one of the great failed efforts to take on the big American manufacturers with something different. Cool!

Every once in a while you stumble across a part for one project while you’re searching for something else. Buy the part anyway! If it’s an obsolete one, who knows if it will be there when you consider yourself ready for it.

I stopped by Quality Coaches in Minneapolis to order a couple gaskets for the TR6’s bumper–owner Mark Brandow is a Moss (British parts) dealer. In addition, he has salted away a lot of neat parts, so while there I kept my eyes open.  Sure enough I spied a clutch cover and disk for a 215 V8–just what I need for the ‘63 gearbox I’ve been so excited about since chasing it down in Wisconsin. These parts have been at Quality a long time–Mark accumulated them with the same thoughts many MG and Triumph drivers have of maybe chucking a 215 aluminum V8 under the hood. He has done so with a Devin (and TR8 gearbox) and may not need the other stuff any more. No sense waiting till he sent it away.

The cover had some shelf rust on it, but a glass-bead cabinet makes quick work of that. The pictures here show the same clutch cover before and after I hit it with glass bead at my friend Tom’s shop. I cleaned up the disk contact surface (which had the writing on it) with a wire wheel on a bench grinder. Might even hit the outer shell with some Alumiblast paint, if overkill-fever strikes.

Tom busted me for shooting the cleaned up part on the black rug in the front of his shop, while the as-bought photos I snapped on a steel shop table. Looks a lot better regardless of the improved background. Somehow it’s easier to get excited about bolting on goodies when they look good–even if you’ll never see ‘em once fitted.

Chrome bumpers are important to a classic car’s looks. Rusted or bent up they can detract from nice paintwork. The ones on my TR6 were passable–not superb but not so bad that I should be arrested for putting them on a restored car.

The chrome portions (excluding license-plate light fixture) came in three or four pieces, depending on year. Mine are the 4-piece ones with “overriders,” which keep a vehicle in front of behind from riding over the cross-piece and taking out your grille or denting your tail panel at parking speeds.

The back bumper needs to rejoin the car but I’d taken one of the side pieces off to facilitate removal. Looking at it now I realized the mounting bolts were bent. Tracking down a new bracket, to which the three bolts are welded, was one option. But shouldn’t we be able to fix this?

Step one was to hold the bolt tight in a vise. An adjustable wrench, positioned at the bend, would provide our leverage.

Cranking only on the bent portion put things back pretty close to straight. Sure, it also smushed the threads some, but naturally we’d be chasing the threads anyway.
A quick cleanup with the tap & die set yielded perfectly useable results.

And remember kids, do try this at home–when things get bent out of shape. There’s a rubber piece that goes in there that maybe we could have made, but I was passing by Quality Coaches, a Moss Distributor, so I ordered one up for the bumper sections and for underneath the license-plate light fixture.

More bumper work to come…

You probably saw the piece on India’s Tata Nano, which will sell new for about $2500. Wow. I paid $2300 for a ten-year-old British car in 1982. And the Nano gets 50 miles per gallon.

Many concerns in translating such a tot to our roads–emissions, crash safety–but it’s an interesting development. Maybe your kids will be chatting it up decades from now on the Classic Tata Nano site….