Antique & Classic Cars Blog

When the snow flies and the garage doors go down, it’s fun to pop into a shop and see what’s getting worked on out of sight. Here’s a couple goodies underway at Quality Coaches on 38th Street in Minneapolis. This is one of the few shops left that caters to British cars (among others). Owner Mark is a Moss distributor with old British parts kickin’ around, unused parts on shelves, and the same price for new ones that you’d get going to direct to Moss.

This Morgan has a long and interesting history. Its owner bought it when he was 16, decades ago. Rather than dump it when that was convenient, he held on, moving the car to many different parts of the country. It came to Quality in pieces (but not all of them)–and a little bent up from a front-end collision years ago. They had a body shop pull it straight; Lee Lawrence of Classic Iron Cars in Savage threw some beautiful British Racing Green paint on it and the motor’s been rebuilt too. This ‘53 uses a Jaguar gearbox–plenty strong for the 4-cylinder engine–so it was cleaned up but not rebuilt.

Here’s another fun little project–Subaru WRX turbo-four in the back of a Karmann Ghia. While the WRX is a world-beater rally car, the engine will push this VW (through a race transaxle) in straight lines: down the 1/4 mile.

This Mini Marcos is also an engine swapper. It originally had a Mini engine (old Mini, 1275 cc) up front, and now has a water-cooled motorcycle engine in the back. There’s a race class for bike-powered cars, for which this one was probably built.

And a final bit of tinkering for the day is this Yamaha moped, which my friend Randy is building as a pit vehicle. Randy runs an MG Midget in vintage racing–and has inspired a friend and me to try the same with a car I bought in ‘79, gave away in ‘04, and which has found its way back to me (more on that periodically).

Hope y’all got some fun stuff in the works.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.