Antique & Classic Cars Blog

With the economy booming, car sales skyrocketing, and piles of cash heaped so high on the average desk that they obstruct this very blog, the time has come for it to follow many of the vehicles that have been mentioned here–Studebaker, Packard, Tucker, Plymouth, Hudson, Duesenberg, Auburn, Cord, Shelby, Vincent, Norton, BSA, Ariel, Corvair, Stutz, Triumph, MG, Austin Healey, Sunbeam….

It has been a pleasure to write for you, to meet you at car and motorcycle events, to trade ideas with you on these pages, and to further automotive tales and daydreams.

My Weekend Garage column will still appear in the Star Tribune and my books…

The Fast and The Furious: the Official Car Guide

Dream Garages

Survivor: The Unrestored Collector Car, and

Survivor Motorcycle: Tips and Tales in the Unrestored Realm (2009, pending)

…are available through Amazon.com and elsewhere for anyone who liked the prose and stories here. More books are likely to follow and someday, perhaps, I will have my very own blog on cars, motorcycles, films, funny fiction and other stuff that makes life worth living.

Keep turning wrenches, reading, writing and talking about the vehicles you love, and I’ll see you around the roads and the shows. Again, it’s been a pleasure shooting the breeze with all of you in cyberspace.

Peace. Kris Palmer

**Yes, that’s a Douglas Adams title.

A friend drove by this in someone’s yard with a for-sale sign on it. Hadn’t been washed in a while and paint condition was hard to judge. Looked nice, though–which was good and bad.

This friend has cars. He has bikes. He has gadgets and gizmos of all sorts and they’re all pretty darn cool. He knew he was going to have to stop and check out this ‘62 Galaxie 500. He was kind of hoping the far side would be smashed up or there’d be rust holes in it. Or the interior would be in tatters. Or missing.

Not that he would wish an ill fate on any mechanical thing. But if it was rough, he wouldn’t have to buy it. If it was nice, well…they’re not making ‘em any more and somebody’s gotta look after our automotive history.

As you can see, it was nice. Very nice. Original. Unrestored. Interior dead flawless.

Came out of Texas. Nice and dry. Always garaged. Seldom used. Never abused. One of those cars grampa gets, stops using, parks. Nobody takes it. Nobody hauls it out of its quiet, protected haven for a long time.

When it emerges, it’s a time-warp car. All the peers it knew on the road are gone. Now it’s an artifact. Somebody’s gotta take care of it.

(Check out the child seat. “Your baby is held comfortably but securely in his Infantseat. He’s completely safe from rolling, falling, smothering or other accidents.” I don’t see many like this in use anymore. Maybe they overlooked something.)

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety decided to test what they learned in science class in high school and discovered–Gasp!–it’s still true. Big objects still win out in collisions with small ones. Yes, when the 300-pound linebacker on the football team hits the 145 pound kicker head on, the little guy still sails farther.

The test the institute made, as you likely already know, was to smash road tots like a Smart Car, Honda Fit, and
Toyota Yaris head-on into a Mercedes C-Class, Accord and Camry with each car doing 40 mph. They align the vehicles so that the drivers’ sides hit (about 40 percent of each front-end makes contact).

There is no basis in logic or denial to assume anything other than what did happen, would, in these collisions. The little cars got damaged much more severely. There was significant intrusion into the little cars’ passenger compartments. Featherweights can’t knock heavyweights out of the ring. A Bobcat can’t push a Caterpillar D10 aside.

“Safe” is a loaded word with no stand-alone meaning. It has meaning only in context. Knives are safe in a drawer and usually in a chef’s hand; less so wielded by a killer.

Tiny cars are not inherently unsafe because you might get hurt if a big car hits you head on. You’ll get hurt more on a motorcycle or scooter, still more on a bicycle, and if you’re walking by the road with only some khakis or a skirt between you and the sedan, we don’t need a study to announce “Skirts Unsafe in Frontal Collision.” Motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, skateboards, Skat-Skootas, and Chuck Taylors are not inherently unsafe. They’re just not well matched against a ton-and-a-half of steel going 40 miles an hour.

It took years and thousands of deaths for people to realize that many SUVs with short wheelbases and high centers of gravity were unsafe when they went off the edge of the road and rolled over, collapsing their roofs with their substantial weight. Were they inherently unsafe? They were unsafe in that circumstance—but did well in collisions in which they remained upright. Big, heavy vehicles can also be a downer if you end up in a lake, whereas a VW Beetle will float a while. Safety is relative.

To borrow from the gun lobby, cars don’t kill people, drivers kill people. Any car of any size, as well as motorcycles, scooters, bicycles, unicycles, roller skates can be operated safely. If we all try our best to do so, we won’t kill ourselves and we won’t kill others, no matter what form of transportation we choose.

For when you’ve got that really important meeting and you’re getting out the door a little late…get one of these.

A 2,000-plus bhp car would make a great sleeper, though not much about this one’s potential remains hidden.

Those yellow bicycles that various cities have tried on a take-it-as-you-need-it basis keep popping up in form and concept.

My wife was at the car wash this week and saw an Hourcar, this principle applied to automobiles. We even talked about doing it when either of our vehicles is ready for the great wrecking yard in the sky (or the metro, more likely).

Not sure I’m quite ready to become a shareholder in the company but the idea–offering cars that people can use only when they need one and foregoing parking, insurance, maintenance, gas, etc., for a shared car seems logical. Their main argument is that we pay a lot for these things and only use them a little each day.

If people would just come up with bedrooms, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and laptop facilities on the same basis, a lot of us could save a fortune–if we could get our scheduling down. Maybe that’s the trick: your own car ties you down to payments and expenses; sharing one ties you to careful scheduling.

In northern climes, as winter grinds on into March, males of the species often leave home to provide help with car repair.

Replacing rear struts can be a perfect opportunity for such a gathering. On this Golf, my wife’s, they are secured with one bolt below and one nut, plus locknut, above.

Required tools include garage, heater, spanners, sockets and drives.

Bonus items, such as floor lift, group of friends, beverages, and televised hockey game recommended.

Best practices require one person to position strut while the other fits necessary hardware. One or the other holds work light, or a second wrench. Additional males follow hockey game, reporting on scoring, consuming beverages, telling jokes, and periodically checking on auto repair as needed.

I can report (for the benefit of all spouses concerned) that last night’s emergency gathering at Tim’s Pretty Good Garage for fitment of struts was a complete success. Thanks to all present. We couldn’t have accomplished it without everyone’s participation.

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.

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?