Antique & Classic Cars Blog

A friend of mine lives in Singapore. Yesterday, he sent me an email saying he had spotted an Aston Martin DB6 behind a gas station. He thought it was cool but wasn’t going to pursue it–”I guess I can do without the restoration cost of an Aston Martin,” he said.

I told him he owed to himself to look into it. If he learned down the road that someone else picked it up cheap, he’d kick himself. So here it is. Any self-respecting sports car lover digs a DB6.

This beautifully homely creation sat in a junkyard for many years before the right eyes recognized it as a marvelous piece of innovation and craftsmanship. Today it runs and drives (rides).

It is a motorcycle, in that it has the familiar characteristics of one—a motor and two wheels and an upright riding position and handlebars, fork, driven rear-wheel—but its genius, no doubt intentional on the builder’s part, is that it uses virtually no motorcycle parts. Only the twist throttle–perhaps not the original piece–appears to be from a motorcycle. Even the handlebars are cut down tubular table legs. Every other part comes from a car (wheels, engine, gearbox, frame members, headset) or a home (cut-down radiator) or something else non-motorcycle. Seat looks like small tractor.

Engine and gearbox are Chevrolet, frame pieces Model T, headset a Model T wheel hub. The tank across the top is coolant; fuel tank is below handlebars, which, as you note, do not connect to the fork directly, but through shafts like some of today’s most “innovative” show bikes. (Chrome pipe “above” headset is actually behind the bike and not part of it.)

This playful invention was crafted in 1939. The farmer who built it is pictured above it, astride the beast. (It resides in a private collection within 12,450 miles of the Twin Cities and belongs to a Mr. A, or a Ms. Z, or someone in between.)

Route 52 in Coates has some intriguing motorcycles for the passing motorist–sculptures of a chopper and low-slung drag bike.

There are at least a dozen sculptures here, all worthy of a look and free to passing eyes.

Sometimes the best part of a trip is what you see on the way.

There was enough sunshine and warm weather to make a drive to Red Wing–specifically Treasure Island Casino–a pleasant outing.

It’s entertaining on such journeys to go light on the pedal, linger here and there and snap a few photos.

Stay in the greater metro and it seems there isn’t a farm left that isn’t crowded by highway or malls or new housing. Not so. And a beautiful old church, free of the same encroachment, may be found among Minn.’s small towns as a reminder of simpler days.

This garage in New Trier, founded around 1856, may be the oldest one in Minnesota. Our best guess is that it was once a fire station, or perhaps stables. Could have gone into the New Trier Trophy House Restaurant next door for the answer, but I was convinced a quick Google search would unearth it. For once, there was a factoid the internet would not yield.

This is the best line in Spinal Tap, the Christopher Guest film that helped popularize the mockumentary. It is, if you’ve only recently emerged from some subterranean cavern, what the guitarist says about one of his amplifiers. It is special because “it’s ‘one’ louder.”

Horsepower’s perennial grasp on the consumer marketplace is a bit like that. The mystery applies to daily-driver commuters rather than fun/collector cars driven once in a while, or raced or dragged; with the latter, some hot-shotting around is a part of the joy. But why a high-horse commuter with 400, 500, 600 horsepower? They go to 11, in theory, but they’re never taken anywhere near their limit because you’d be arrested or die or kill someone or all three. The number of people capable of driving a car of that power on the road at top speed in miniscule. Schumacher, McQueen, Bond.

Be fun to hear someone patting the hood of an AMG Mercedes, saying, “It’s got 550 horses.” You could reply, “I have 600 pens in my desk.” He’d look at you as though you were pretty odd, since you could never use that many.

So why? Why can’t we shake horsepower fixation–and will we even now, with TV and web pages proclaiming the end of the world is nigh (and Jennifer Aniston has a new look)?

I’d say it’s because we just can’t picture anything else–horsepower crosses the daydream barrier. Cars going fast, we know. We like. We can name the muscle cars, the great movie car chases, the burnouts we did or witnessed in high school.

Worthwhile attributes don’t translate to good mental imagery. Bonnie and Clyde or Dillinger wouldn’t have become so notorious with highly efficient cars. You could elude police with a fast car, some lead-footing and plain lead. You couldn’t by convincing them you were getting great mileage, polluting less and that on balance, they should let you go.

And of course there’s money. Speed is power is money and money can, in fact, get you anything. You’ll never see handsome young men marrying 80-year-old women on fixed incomes. You will see 80-year-old men marrying women fresh from a swimsuit calendar for reasons only money can explain.

Cars also have the money/power link. Heavy hitter muscle cars have sold for some of the highest prices ever paid for an automobile, even though there’s no difference in build quality between a Hemi ’Cuda and an AMC Hornet station wagon.

As the economy backfires and smokes, it will be interesting to watch where horsepower goes in the next couple years. Will we get more miles for our money, or will cars come with 300 horsepower and a $10,000 rebate? Can stimulus ever match stimulation?

This has been kicking around the internet for a while, but I hadn’t seen it until a friend and blogger here sent it along: a WWII tank, submerged in a peat-bottomed lake in Estonia, was pulled free by a large bulldozer.

A little searching seems to confirm that this is a true story. About the only think I could think of to produce fake footage of this type would be if the tank were used in a movie and was being newly recovered.

I apologize for the Russian dating link that may appear on the page. Please ignore. The rest of the site is informative and includes both still photos and video clips of the tank extraction.

It’s in extraordinarily good condition and may have had to wait so long, for, among other reasons, a really powerful modern bulldozer to pull it out.