Antique & Classic Cars Blog

We all know how traffic lights work. They’re green a while, then red a while, and yellow just a bit between. If we have someplace to go–hence being in the car–isn’t it common practice to look down the road at the traffic lights to see what lies ahead? When I see a light go red, I lift my foot off the gas and coast until I have to brake. This saves gas and reduces brake wear. Some people are oblivious to the whole lights-follow-a-pattern thing. It’s like a race to see who gets to stop first.  If you’re behind me and the light ahead changes, I’m not gonna stay on the gas till I hit minimum braking distance from 30 to zero then kill-stomp the brake pedal. You can roar around indignant if you want…. They’re your brakes.   

The post below mentions some curious photo problems at a recent hot-rod-shop shoot. Here’s one that turned out. While the car is important–a rare Muntz Jet–it’s the reflection that matters here. See how clear the broom, lights, trash can and puddle are, and how straight? (The broom curves because the body side does.)

That’s what a high-quality paint job looks like and it comes from lots and lots and lots of block sanding–never with your fingers. After all the prep work that goes into the car before this stage, it’s easy to find yourself tired by this point. But the good shops sand on. As Stefan Gesterkamp, the pro who painted Jay Leno’s one-of-a-kind carbon fiber EcoJet show car, puts it: the devil’s in the detail. Yeah it is.

Aware of the hardcopy Locals in Motion pieces Jim Bohen and I do on the local car scene, Bo Vescio invited me up to Rogers to check out his shop, Vescios Customizing and Restoration. When time permits, pro photographer Tom Witta from the paper will join me on a shoot, but this time I didn’t give him enough notice.

My 10 megapixel Olympus Stylus digital is a smart little machine and usually up to the task. This shoot was an exception. There are lots of cool projects underway here that I hoped to show everyone. Yet the camera started seeing spots. A first guess for why was a dirty lens (or lens filter).

But the spots moved, changing size, number, and position in the frame. I cleaned the lens (filter–it’s not removable) to little avail. The spots still appeared randomly, typically in shots that involved a dim foreground with a bright light in the background.

This is a restoration shop, so there is sanding dust in the air. Still, the behavior is hard to explain through either floating particles or something in a fixed position on the lens. Too bad, because there was a cool ‘68 Charger in the works that we wanted to pair up beside a new one for a contrast shot. None of those photos was spot (or rather spot off)–though a couple in the 50 or so taken look half decent in small size.

Lots of smart people peruse these posts. Anybody had a similar experience?

Fortunately, there’s a dog on the premises and adding a nice dog always helps a photograph…. ‘Course the crew’s a photogenic lot too–where’s Monster Garage, Minnesota edition?

The BOP (Buick-Olds-Pontiac) 215 cubic inch V8 has followers on several continents. GM developed it in the ’50s, employed it in the early ’60s, sold it to Rover in the mid-’60s and Americans, Brits, Australians and others have been building up hot rods with the lightweight mill every since.

While the motors are easy to come by, bellhousings to fit American 4 -and 5-speed manual transmissions to them are not. (This part bolts between the engine and transmission and houses the clutch.)

Good news for shifters: Steve from San Diego likes 215s and shifting, he’s a fabricator and he lives by a foundry. He’s cast his first bellhousing and plans to make other useful parts too–like the flywheel inspection cover and taller valve covers to accept roller rockers. Cool. His posts about it, here.

In the recent Coolest Car Ever posts, a few people nominated the Batmobile (my vote). I was up in Rogers yesterday and hoped to snap a couple pics of the example the Ellingson Car Museum used to have on hand. Alas, its owner came for it. Supposedly the car was one of the five knockoffs George Barris made of the Futura-based original during the series.

I was hoping to maybe even wrangle the chance to sit in the thing but it wasn’t to be. But don’t count Ellingson out on cool cars. Among its many treasures is one of the ten Chargers the studio owned when they discontinued the Dukes of Hazzard.

With frame-bending jumps in most episodes, the show had a voracious appetite for Dodge’s sleek muscle car and consumed some 180 to 200 over its run.

This one escaped serious damage, though. The actor who played Cooter even signed the air cleaner. Sweet.

Ran across some custom license plates while searching for TR6 stuff. One was “six appeal,” which I’d seen before.

A Saab 900 Turbo convertible in Chester County, PA, that passed me when I was cycling in the 1980s bore what remains my favorite custom plate:

Snaab.

I was talking to a guy at a friend’s party last night about “fun” cars. He noted that with credit many young people today have new Audis or BMWs. He said he’d much rather have an old Porsche or a classic BMW like a 2002.

With summer coming on (hopefully), here’s a pros and cons list of classic car ownership. As always, your input is welcome.

Classic car pros:
1. Looks–daring and distinctive lines.
2. Ease of troubleshooting and repair.
3. Memories.
4. Sense of greater ownership in a car you maintain or restore.
5. Community of fellow enthusiasts with whom to trade tips, lore, parts, and an extra set of hands.
6. Greater driver involvement–fewer automated features softening and homogenizing the feel through the wheel and pedals.
7. Uniqueness.
8. Generally sustained value (over price when new).

Classic car cons:
1. Rust–the fiendishly destructive and costly old-car nemesis.
2. Storage space/cost.
3. Insurance cost beyond daily driver.
4. Parts can be hard to find, expensive.
5. May require frequent maintenance or repair.
6. No airbags; may lack headrests, seatbelts.
7. Restoration takes longer and costs more than most owners project.
8. Many older cars do not perform to modern standards.

Nice thing about sustained values is that as long as you didn’t get taken on the purchase, or go upside-down on a restoration, you can usually sell a classic for little loss or some gain.

A woman called me a few days ago asking for an interview. I wasn’t sure why someone would want to interview me, but she hadn’t said “Detective” before her name, so it sounded OK. Turns out she was doing a piece on car-book authors for a regional publication called, “What’s Playing.”

One of her questions was, “When did you first become interested in cars?” To a non-car nut, that may seem like a reasonable–even essential–question. But car nuts will tell you that they’ve always been interested in cars. It’s like asking someone from Latvia, “how long have you been Latvian?”

When my brother and I cleaned out the family home several years ago, one of the old photos to emerge shows a tow-headed two-year old astride a red plastic Triumph TR3. I am grinning, of course. The photograph predates my memory, yet I am a car nut then as now.

I wonder how many readers of these pages can remember some moment that triggered a fascination with cars…. My guess is almost none.

Car fascination is akin to appreciating a mountain range or a roaring waterfall or a soaring eagle, even if it’s the first time you’ve seen one. You don’t decide to appreciate it; you appreciate it because it appeals to your sense of wonder or freedom or power or speed.

It was no conscious decision to emerge from the primordial muck any more than it was to invent the wheel. The former led to becoming a creature with arms and legs. The latter set the stage for the car, so we could use our limbs to steer and brake and shift.

Isn’t the universe great?

Conventional wisdom holds that Triumph’s TR6 was built in England. New evidence suggests otherwise–or at least that the rear bumper bolts were not. Given their insane hardness, a more likely source is Krypton. (You can imagine how much force someone from the Superman or Superdotter family could apply with a wrench, or heaven forbid, a breaker bar.)

So some of this Kryptonese hardware got into the rear bumper on my car and, outrageously, rusted. When I put a wrench on the two bolts in question, they snapped off.

Drilling out a broken bolt seemed like a useful blog post. You file the break point flat, rap a center punch in the middle, and start a metal drill bit in the indentation, running it all the way through the remaining bolt portion and out the bottom, right down the center. If you’re a little off, you can angle the drill bit back toward center and correct the offset. Run a few increasingly larger bits through until you’ve drilled out just about everthing except the threads remaining in the bolt hole. Take a fine-pointed punch, stick it between the clinging threads and hole and give it a rap. Gradually, you can peel the threads out in a coil.

But NOT if the bolt is from Krypton. I managed to get some combination of my old bits much of the way through. Then no more. Bought some regular high speed bits. Krypton laughed. Returned them and bought a set of titanium bits. Krypton shook its head.

The titanium were not my first choice, though everyone knows titanium is nearly as tough as Kryptonite. So finally I bought some individual cobalt bits, which I’ve had luck with in the past. One of these did some damage, then seemed to go dull.

The hole is pretty well centered now. Just need to get through the bottom of the bolt and run a couple more bits through it. But a morning’s worth of effort hasn’t put a bit all the way through. It will be a disappointment for me if I have to take a simple drill-out to a machine shop, but when you’re dealing with extra-planetary stuff, that’s what it might take. If the shop that advertises “we can deal with the hardest metals” has a stocky guy with wavy black hair and glasses, who grins a little when I describe the problem, I’ll know I’ve found the right place.

In the bike-show piece below, I mention the Ural motorcycle story I heard at a party 15 years ago–that Urals looked so much like BMWs because the Soviets got hold of a BMW production facility during the war, seized the tooling, and turned out the same bikes with a different badge.

The story sounds good, given the resemblance, but none of the PBS documentaries I’ve seen has indicated that the Germans established motorcycle manufacturing plants near Russia or that the Soviets invaded Germany and swiped one.

The Ural website gives two stories, the “official” one, in which the Soviets slyly purchased Bimmer bikes through Sweden and reverse engineered them, and the “more likely” one, in which Germany provided them with blueprints and casting molds as part of a friendly agreement (the Molotov/von Ribbentrop Pact). Either way, production began in Moscow but the Soviets moved it into the Ural mountains for fear the Germans would bomb it, hence the name.

Yeah, history. It’s interesting but so much of it is yesterday’s news. Point is, Urals are cool and they look a lot like BMWs because they derive directly from the war-era Bimmer R71–that whole boxer engine, hang the cylinders out horizontally to minimize vibration, improve airflow for cooling and provide easy access for maintenance thing.

(I like the Ural sidecar look but if Schwarzenegger, the Terminator himself, can crash a sidecar bike, they’re not to be approached cavalierly on the first ride.)