Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Can you believe another summer has dashed past us?

If you’re looking for one more opportunity to gather with a lot of cool cars–and a good cup of coffee–fire up your fun car and head out to the Auto-Motorplex in Chanhassen tomorrow morning between 8 and 11 a.m.

Last month brought out a large collection of Porsches, sport VWs, beautiful and quick machines by Ferrari, Jaguar, Lotus, Maserati, along with some good-ol’ American iron. Some 300 collector and sports cars were on hand.

The sounds are as good as the views. Here’s some shots from last month. (You can Mapquest from the Auto-Motorplex link–it’s an easy drive from the Cities out 62 to 212 to 5, then left on Audobon.)

If kids grew up in a year and then all you did was haul them around, they wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining or life-changing. Such are longterm car projects. They can take years and that’s part of the journey.

Onlookers often have a broken-fixed perspective on others’ cars-in-progress: what you dragged home or took apart is broken . . . and it has no use until it’s fixed. That’s not how we tinkerers see them. A car project isn’t like a lawn creeping up to mid-ankle that you should get to, A-SAP, and be done. It’s something indefinite and far-reaching that you improve in fits and starts, like your vocabulary or your golf game or your house. Then, milestones seem more fun and you can trickle out the cost so it doesn’t feel like a mugging.

This week, my longterm American-V8-in-a-TR6 project hit a nice–and nice sounding–milestone: a set of dual exhausts with 2-inch pipes and Thrush mufflers. Greg Alford and his crew at AutoMax on Lake Street set me up (That’s Terry Anderson, owner of TA’s Shell, helping me get the unregistered car there and home legally). I had a stainless steel dual exhaust designed for the stock straight-6 that I thought about fitting. Glad I didn’t. This system looks and sounds fantexcellent. The width and placement of the mufflers I couldn’t have improved upon and the sound is superb. There’s no question when these pipes bark that this Brit–like Shelby’s Cobra and Alpine’s Tiger and Aston Martin’s Vantage and Jensen’s Double F and Interceptor–packs eight cylinders of Yank’ wallop.

Sure, it’s taken years to get here, but the car was once (in 1993) like this….

Got disassembled to a bare body and chassis and blasted, painted, and fitted with this motor, blogger-pulled from a wrecking yard in Willmar….

And rebuilt to look like this, so far.

One project? This car is dozens of projects (and of course, as soon as it’s done, ya gotta get another).

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Here are the answers to the Friday Fun quiz:

1. Ferrari’s 308 uses a mid-engined, water-cooled V8. The “308″ stands for 3.0 liters and 8 cylinders. Rear-wheel drive.
2. VW’s Beetle has a rear-mounted, four-cylinder engine whose unique sound relates to its air-cooled design. Rear-wheel drive.
3. The classic Cords of the 1930s used a liquid-cooled 8-cylinder (inline  in the L-29 and vee in the 810 and 812) engine to drive the front wheels. The gearbox is mounted forward of the front-mounted engine.
4. Chevrolet’s Corvair used a rear-mounted, air-cooled six-cylinder engine to power the rear wheels.
5. Czech manufacturer Tatra built cars with air-cooled, rear-mounted V8 engines powering the rear wheels.
6. France’s Renault 2CV used an air-cooled 2-cylinder engine to drive the front wheels. A small number of 4-wheel drive versions were built.
7. The rear-engine rear-drive Tucker ran a water-cooled six adapted from an air-cooled six-cylinder helicopter engine.
8. Oldsmobile’s Toronado is a front-drive car powered by a liquid-cooled front-mounted V8 engine.
9. Trick question. Jensen’s FF powers all four wheels with a liquid-cooled front-mounted Chrysler-sourced V8 engine. Answers of front or rear-wheel drive are both right–partially right.
10. This early three-wheeled car used an air-cooled two-cylinder engine mounted in plain view on the front of the car.