Antique & Classic Cars Blog

[An earlier post on this car got lost due to a technical glitch.]

On a visit to Bo Vescio’s shop last year, I spied a Muntz Jet mostly torn down with a fresh coat of white paint. The engine and interior were out, trim off. It was just a freshly sprayed body on a rolling chassis. They’re rare cars.  The Muntz Registry puts total production at about 200, while Sports Car Market’s analysis projects from the somewhat erratic chassis numbering a figure closer to twice that. The book I had as a kid listed a figure between those two.

I’ve seen Muntz Jets in car books for 30 years. The story is interesting–TV manufacturer turns auto manufacturer with a car based on a Frank Kurtis design that Muntz charges 1.5 times the price of a Cadillac for. Yet the black and white hand drawings in The American Sports Car, a book my mother got me when I was in about 9th grade, didn’t do the car justice.

Fully restored in three dimensions, the Muntz Jet is a delightful, playful car to behold. TV hustler, Earl “Madman” Muntz, went out of his way to make the car unique by his own efforts and buyers’. He would go to great lengths to give customers the colors, fabrics, look and feel they wanted. (He called it a “sports car,” but with its massive Lincoln flathead V-8 and automatic-only gearbox, it wouldn’t fit our modern conceptions of that term.) Early engines were OHV Cadillac V-8s.

Style and flair ooze from the car. Muntz’s symbol was a pirate figure in red long johns–bold and unembarrassed–set into the steering and road wheels. The split vee-shaped windshield evokes a speedboat, while the bevy of Stewart Warner gauges has an aeronautic feel.  There is even a cooler–for sodas, iced tea, lemonade…–under the arm rests in the back seat. Faux alligator upholstery and top add a Hollywood feel showman Muntz, married 7 times, came to project.

This is an American dreamboat born of inspiration and innovation. What a cool car to restore and treasure  to honor the many visionaries who threw a hat into the car-maker’s ring.

Values are in the $50,000-$100,000 range, with the most unusual (i.e., celebrity owned or customized) models bringing highest dollars.

We motorheads have long seen the graceful curves and striking lines designers pen into cars as art. Sometimes the lines are so alluring, the rest of the art world takes notice too.

Fans of the glorious Tatra will be pleased to know the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has included one the Czech-built, air-cooled, single-finned, suicide-doored, rear-engined eye morsels among its exhibit of exceptional modernist works.

For the motor-fluent, we drink in such details even in a roomful of exceptional automobiles. But nothing calls home beautiful form in a car like setting it on its own among other alluringly crafted artworks.

The musuem’s Tatra T87 has a sweeping aerodynamic body that calls the eye back and forth along its length. In an era when the needs inside the car–for headroom and luggage room and crush zone and visibility–often set baselines for the outside design, it’s fun to see a car that looks like it was born on an artist’s canvas and carried to three dimensions by loving sculptors.

If you’ve never seen a Tatra and enjoy modernist art, get over to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and check out this spotless example. The museum is free and there is much else to delight you among the many floors and walls.

How many decades has it been that you turn on a TV show or watch a movie with a car in it and they’ve got a stickshift foley track (sound added after shooting) paired with an automatic transmission car?

Does anybody who pays even a little bit of attention to the way cars sound not know the distinctive break and drop in engine note that comes from clutching and shifting versus the UHHHH-uhhhhh slipdown of an autobox shifting on its own?

 Guess the field of producers and editors doesn’t attract a lot of car guys and gals. Or the foley effects the studios have been reaching for are 30-40 years old (since few people driving the cop cars, taxis & family sedans we hear these sounds in is driving a stick).

Case in point, Supernatural, a cool show with a bitchin’ black ‘67 Impala 4-door. Kudos to them for choosing it and great engine sound. But it’s singing through a stickshift. And Dean and Sam are driving a column shift autobox Chevy. Not saying it’s a bad show. Far from it. Ain’t no stickshift car, though….  

What to see while you’re taking your classic for its last few cruises includes more than this year’s incredible leaf display. It’s also Halloween and some people throw down big for the dress-odd holiday. This house south of 46th Street on Chicago Avenue South boasts a phenomenal display every year, from a dragon bursting through the upper story, to a skeleton-crewed ghost ship, to this year’s diabolical giant jack o’lantern.

If Halloween brings nothing more to mind than the cost of candy and fears some youth might fling a roll of TP over one of your trees, drive by this place and see what creative minds can do to boost kids’–and parents’– fun on a cool holiday.

If debates, baseball and bank bailouts have had you living in your own head, get out of there–and out of the office–awhile and take in the leaves.

These photos snapped in front of my house don’t do them justice. This has to be one of the best falls we’ve had in years. The maple trees especially are like a freeze-frame of some splendid top-shelf Chinese firework, erupting in green, yellow and red.

A pair of sunglasses with amber lenses magnify the effect. Wow. Makes you glad to be alive and to live in a state with such beautiful natural sights.

Beautiful weekend and as always motorists galore on the highways.

Here are three unsafe things I observed…. how many times can you do each one before something happens?

1.  Slowing down to merge. Going slower is generally safer–you overtake things more slowly and have more time to react to problems. Merging is different. I exited 77 south (Cedar Avenue), which then loops around and becomes an entrance ramp onto 62 (east in this case). A woman in a Toyota was in front of me and at that critical moment when the ramp begins to straighten out and you need to get on the gas so the difference between your speed and the speed of the cars you’re trying to merge with is minimal, she started looking over her shoulder and braking.

Not safe.

Merging at highway speed leaves lots of time and options; creeping up at 40 miles an hour gives you less opportunity to fit into a gap and encourages further braking and problems for people on the ramp and the highway.

2. Entering oncoming traffic to pass a bicycle. Some drivers are overly cautious of passing a bicyclist, so they go all the way to the opposite side of a two-way road, fully into oncoming lanes. That works when you can see a mile straight ahead. It’s dangerous on hills and curves. Three feet, carefully taken, gives the cyclist and driver room to get along. Way more takes away all of the motorist’s options and requires a major swerve to avoid approaching traffic. Guess who’s in the way of that two-ton swerve? A man, woman or kid on a 30 pound bicycle. Note that we cyclists have a duty to stay by the side of the road and not steer erratically.

3. Motorcycling without a helmet. I’ve seen parents and children on motorcycles bareheaded. Survey emergency-room doctors on the wisdom of doing that. Saturday I saw a guy on a wicked cool lime-green custom frame V-twin. He was bareheaded; his young daughter (presumably) on the back had a helmet. That’s 50 percent right. If you’re wearing eye protection adding a helmet won’t make it harder to crash. But it’ll make it easier to get back up–and the girl on the back really wants you to.

It’s Friday and your boss wants you to relax so you’ll be mentally prepared for the weekend, the essential re-charging days that allow you to be so productive Monday through Thursday when the real money is made.

Here’s a little quiz for ya.

For each of the following cars, identify whether the engine is in the front, the rear or the middle, whether it is air or liquid cooled, and whether the front or rear wheels are driven. (No internet searches before answering :^) )

1. Ferrari 308
2. VW Beetle (”old” version)
3. Cord
4. Chevrolet Corvair
5. Tatra
6. Renault 2CV
7. Tucker
8. Olds Toronado
9. Jensen FF
10. Morgan V-Twin

Answers at the bottom, here. (If you comment, please put it by the answers so readers don’t see them up here.)

AutoWeek has a feature at the back called Photo Without Caption, showing some conundrum confronting drivers.

Here’s a nice paradox out front of Edina’s York Plaza apartment complex. The right sign is plainly visible in this shot.

Here’s the left sign.

One of the last beautiful Saturdays of the year played great host to the final Cars & Coffee gathering of 2008. Cars editor, Angelo, and I headed over to take in the sights, the java–and some donut holes, a most welcome addition to any morning activity.

About 250 cars showed up.

The carbon fiber hood on this RX-8 looked rad and fit perfectly. The tuner crowd has fed an elaborate aftermarket with some very nice parts. The gaps around this hood were even all the way around and it took no fussing–just a bolt-on part.

Angelo wanted to rustle up a trailer and make off with this Volvo 1800. More known for safety than hot styling, Volvo made an early styling epiphany with this one–a car fit for a saint, or rather The Saint.

Acura’s NSX (Honda NSX in some markets) was also well respresented. What a sleek, aggressive looking machine–a Japanese Ferrari.

Lotus knows from styling too. My last trip to London, these were popular along the ancient streets. Lots of style and performance, easy to maneuver and park.

This Auto-Motorplex garage has a neon “Man Cave” sign, though the message is already clear–a Vette and a pinball machine.

And this image, which captures the C&C atmosphere pretty well, is not so much an effort at black-and-white artistry as a good way to play down the bright teal biffy at the far end of the shot. :^)

When other people do dumb stuff at the wheel, we point it out on this site.

So, in the spirit of fairness, when I have done something dumb, it’s time to ’fess up. Two nights ago, I was heading east on 38th street going to help a friend pull an old refrigerator out of his basement. On the way, my wife called me. I took the call pulling up to the intersection of 38th and Hiawatha.

Yes, the light rail passes right through there. Because I was distracted on the phone, I stopped a reasonable distance from the traffic light but not before the pivoting warning arm for the train.

Ding, Ding, Ding went the warning bell, which took a second for me to process because, as Pee-Wee Herman puts it in Big Adventure, I was “trying to use the phone!”

A long bar to stop jabbering nincompoops starts coming down on top of my car (luckily, depending on how you look at it, I was in my wife’s Golf and not my classic MG). This bar settles on the top of the car about the time the fact that the train was soon coming settled on my distracted brain.

Fortunately–again depending on how you look at it–John Law was sitting at a red light on Hiawatha at the same intersection. He flicked on his spotlight and shined it in my windshield with a pretty clear meaning: Hey idiot, the train’s coming.

“Uh, honey, I gotta go.”

I threw it in reverse and backed up a few feet. Fortunately the guy behind me had left a little room. As soon as I was back where I was supposed to be, the officer shut off his light and roared off, no doubt annoyed he’d had to deal with that low-IQ situation on the way to some genuine law enforcement priority.

My car was not on the tracks—yet sitting near them with a warning hazard blinking in one window, a patrolman’s spotlight shining in your eyes and a large, reflective-striped barrier plunked down on top of your wife’s car is no way to demonstrate the moral high ground.