Antique & Classic Cars Blog

If you grew up watching the cartoon and making the noises, e.g., chuk-yoong-yoong-yoong (automatic jack sound, puts the car in flight–oft heard at 24 Atterbury Drive, Malvern, PA in the 1970s), you’re gonna love this:

51 Episodes, free. Caught one last night.

The hardcore set will understand this tidbit:

“Melange still races…..”

(The show says the name comes from Napolean’s horse, but my 5 minutes of Googling indicates Napolean’s favorite horse was named Marengo. I’ll write that off as a translation error–perish the thought there are any factual errors in one of the defining shows of the 1970s.)

A reader emailed on the Marquis deSoto, ruminating on whether the complete Mercury was still under there. This prompted a little detective work on this cool car. The NYT piece describes it as a ‘98 Mercury Marquis blended with a ‘57 deSoto and 10 other classic cars.

Here’s what I see so far:  it looks like the interior, top, front doors, mirrors and rockers are (mostly) Mercury. The center of the hood looks Mercury too. Then what do we have?

‘58 Lincoln headlights

Dagmar portion of a ‘56 Caddy front bumper

‘57 DeSoto fins, lights, back bumper and trunk lid

‘57 Buick bodyside chrome trim and portals

Anything else stand out for anyone?

Humans are built funny. It’s hard to kick as high as someone else’s face. But it’s easy to put your foot in your own mouth.

My wife had a shoe-leather tasting opportunity yesterday on a roadtrip to St. James, Minn., in Watonwan County. There is a pork plant there whose unmistakable aroma permeates the air.

She’s working as a special assistant state public defender and was in the town, her first ever visit, for some hearings. As she parked and got out, the DOJ hearing officer and supervised release agent were on the sidewalk.

The first words from her mouth were, “Do you smell bacon?” They were standing directly in front of the sheriff’s office.

“It always smells like that,” one of them said. Good thing, too.

It’s such a distinctive smell, and therefore such an obvious remark, you can bet officers occasionally have fun messing with new visitors.

Officer Sternlook: “What did you just say?”

Hapless Visitor:  “Uh… never mind.”

A few posts down are some model cars from the World of Wheels. Models are fun because you can make them your own. The same applies to full-size cars and motorcycles–part of the reason enthusiasts love them and maybe something those who don’t understand the whole into-cars or into-bikes thing fail to grasp.

The fact that a car is a huge hunk of metal mostly built by multi-million or -billion dollar companies doesn’t mean there isn’t room for unique styling from one or two people with a garage, a torch, a welder, an air compressor, a spray gun.

Here are three totally unique takes on the basic car and motorcycle theme. They look like nothing else on the road and didn’t require Detroit or Japan to handle the details. These machines emerged from their builders’ minds.

For many people, a car or a motorcycle is a way to get to work. For these folks it’s an opportunity to express something unique. Not a bad hobby, eh?

Living in the Minneapolis city limits has many benefits–access to the beautiful parks and trails for one, views of the skyline, quick transit to any of the excellent food, music, beer, theater, comedy and art venues scattered throughout the place, plus short commutes for downtown work.

But snow emergencies go in the other column on the pros/cons sheet.

The city will make some money today because it’s lulled us into a sense of complacency by not declaring snow emergencies for several prior storms as big as yesterday’s.

Still, when your phone rings and the caller ID displays a neighbor’s name you’re not expecting to hear from at 8:15, you pick it up. And when he tells you a nice man is backing his flatbed up to your truck, action is the thing you spring into.

What you’re wearing, whether you’ve showered or combed your hair, who’s watching and what they’re going to say, all recede to the farthest reaches of significance.

When my ringing phone had my neighbor Don’s name displayed, and he provided the previous information, I bolted out the door sockless, jacketless, and 90% witless—but the ten percent I took was enough to convince Mr. Tow to let my Dakota go. Which is key because nothing–nothing at all–spoils a day like standing around the impound lot waiting to part with 200 bucks so you can have your vehicle back to stick it ten feet from where it was three hours earlier, pointing the other direction.

So another benefit of city living–neighbors who are up, alert, and ready to spare you a lot of wasted time and money. Thanks Don!

It’s easy to fool the eye with a camera. Toy guns, fake armor, half-cars sitting on flat beds to film actors, gaffer tape holding things on, etc., are commonplace and seldom noticeable. Movie cars–selectively shot, usually moving, cleaned up in post–just don’t need to be that nice. Where a car is featured, the studios will have several to drive, a few to wreck if necessary, and then one or more “picture cars,” which are promotional, kept very nice, and used to pimp the production.

Amidst all the no-dollars-spared hot rods, customs, and restored stock eye-morsels at the World of Wheels, the Mach 5 from the new film looked weak. This presumably was a picture car, one built for display only. Fans who grew up watching the original Speed Racer from the 1960s–which admittedly was from a 2-dimensional cartoon–couldn’t help but be disappointed. The drawn car had flowing lines, sweeping curves, and an interior akin to those of its real-life sports counterparts of the time.

The movie car looked just like what it was–a one-off fiberglass body plopped onto a late-model Corvette. It appears they even kept the Vette windshield, which looked about as classic as, well, a late-model Vette. The interior is busy, packed with air-conditioning vents and other modern features that look neither classic nor cinematic. And the lines just didn’t hold up when the car’s sitting still and you can walk around it like a drill sergeant during basic-training inspections.

There’s no blaming the builders. When crunch time comes, Hollywood car builders work as hard as anyone on the planet, meeting impossible demands on impossible timeframes with every job they take. They can make cars look like anything and do anything, keeping in mind the health and safety of the stunt personnel who climb in and make the money footage possible. The disappointment viewing a car like that up close is just the nature of the beast. A Mach 5 that satisfies the middle-aged kids who grew up with the Trans-Luxe cartoon would need to be manufactured by a top-notch custom coachbuilder on a budget of . . . unlimited. It would have hand-beaten panels, custom everything, gauges and dash and wheel and seats to rival the fastest, sexiest Ferraris and Aston Martins and Jaguars of the day. (I would have started with an E-type Jaguar, not a Vette.) Just building a one-off, polished, period-looking engine would probably run half a million bucks.

When studios are paying human stars 5, 10, 20 million dollars a picture, they’re not investing in hand-shaped aluminum-bodied one-off racers that will win at Pebble Beach and make your jaw fall on the ground and shatter when you see them. Turn off the camera and lights, send the cinematographer and editor home and push a movie car into the middle of a car show and your surprise will be just like seeing a big name actor in person. “Hmm. I thought he’d be taller.”

The metal bodies Chip Foose (P32) and Old Skool Kustoms (chopped ’36 Pontiac 3-window) displayed struck a lot closer to my idea of beautiful coachwork–but then, these are cars built to be seen up close in real life.

View enough museums and collections and certain spaces just cry out for cars, bikes, and other collectible vehicles.

This space on Central Avenue just north of downtown Minneapolis really caught my eye. They were manufacturing for the war effort here in the 1940s and it has the feel that almost nothing has changed since the men and women laboring to stop the Nazis finally moved on to post-war careers and families. You can easily picture the assembly lines at full tilt.

Once that image fades, I look at all this space and dream of rows and rows of gorgeous cars sheltered from the snow and rain–Bugatti, Duesenberg, Stutz, Auburn, Delage and more modern fare too, the E-Type’s iconic nose, Cobra’s bold wide-mouth grille, a GT-350, and what about the glorious ’50s–the near perfect first generation Corvette and T-Bird, a Chrysler 300, and how ’bout some period Nascar and drag-racing offerings….

The building’s maintenance man was kind enough to let me wander and shoot a few pictures. I could have stood there filling in dream cars for another hour. Here’s a flyer describing what was once made in this space. The well-known aircraft data tool, “the black box,” was apparently developed here. Lotta history….

Sports Car Market posted on all the big recent auctions in the south, which demonstrate that at least at these venues, prices are holding.

RM attracted record bidders and made over $18 million; Russo and Steele moved $17 million; Kruse saw $4.6 million in action, Gooding $32 million, and Barrett-Jackson had sales of $60 million (according to SCM).

The fact that something in the economy is posting good numbers is encouraging–though it probably means the $10,000 genuine Cobra many of us daydream about…ain’t happening.

It’s no news flash that cell phones cause accidents. Why? Because they’re distracting. In fact, there even more distracting than they need to be–a lot more.

By 2009 most of us have had a few cell phones. While this device, like virtually all modern technology, is pitched as a time saver, a life simplifier, the truth of those descriptions curiously diminishes over time. Computer software follows the same path.

How? Pointless complification (the process of making something more complicated under the pretense of making it easier to use). Word processing software took this path in the 1990s. Every time you learned how to use one program, its manufacturer would release some new version. The original one had 10 features you never used; the new version had 50. And so here you are at your job trying to grow better and more efficient at it, yet your employer keeps handing you software every six months that makes you relearn everything you knew how to do, wading through new menus and features you didn’t use before and that now take even more time and effort to get out of the way–features that would start changing the capitalization or spelling of words on you or throwing in formatting you didn’t want or need. So you’d have to learn how to undo these invasive time-wasters.

Cell phones now do the same thing. Mine claimed freedom last week, leaping from its belt hook as I ran for the bus and disappearing forever into an untraceable lost-and-found, under a car tire or into someone else’s care until they realized I’d canceled the service and chucked it.

The new one looks nice but is twice as hard to use. Like the word-processing software of old, it now does uncountable things I don’t want or need. It’s a phone. The obvious things I want from it are a phone book to save numbers, a ringtones menu so I can set it to one I can stand, and immediate access to ringer volume and vibrate as to hear it or not annoy others, as necessary, and for libraries or movies when it needs to make no sound at all.

These functions are buried beneath uncountable–unfathomable–others. Who would have thought 20 years ago that a time would come when you’d need an instruction manual to figure out your telephone? It’s de-progress, a great leap forward into the past.

And lots of people are trying to handle it from the driver’s seat. No wonder accidents rise. You’re trying to make a quick call from a “modern convenience” but some dope has made your telephone more complicated than your taxes.

Back in the ’70s and ’80s there were cars everybody wanted to have–Camaro, Firebird, Mustang, Corvette, Charger, Challenger…. And then there were the cars that young people time actually did own, Gremlin, Pinto, Vega.

My wife’s family had Pintos when she was young, and so did one of my best friends growing up. His mom had a wagon, he had a coupe. Pinto was like the Beetle for non-import buyers. (We had a ’73 Beetle.)

Vega was a little more stylish, but like the Pinto, it didn’t make much of a statement with four-cylinder power other than, “no, I don’t want to race.”

Interestingly both of these cars—particularly the Vega—found a second more impressive life fitted with V8s. Swapping in a smallblock is so common with the Vega it’s hard to find one with its original engine. Seems most of the ones that survived got hopped up, many for use at the drag strip.

There 302 Pinto was also a popular hot rod of the time and a swap my friend Mark always wanted to make. Unfortunately his car got waterlogged during a torrential downpour at the Holland tunnel in New York City and he had to scrap it—water in the cylinders, whole lousy flood deal.

Rarest of the three, though equally unassuming, was AMC’s Gremlin, which sported 6-cylinder power, and actually had a V8 option from new beginning in ’72. I saw my first Gremlin as a gradeschooler and really liked the gas cap with its little namesake design. As years passed and I continued to check out Gremlins, the gas cap was often missing—maybe other kids who liked them weren’t hesitant to swipe one for themselves.

While nostalgia is a powerful force in car values, this modest trio hasn’t done much in the appreciation department. eBay has examples of all three for under two grand. If someone had fond memories of these models and wanted to a do a restoration by him- or herself, they wouldn’t be a bad place to start. A person could learn mechanicals, body work and painting and no matter how much you messed up any of it, it wouldn’t be a big loss in value—and any replacement parts would be cheap. (As would a replacement car.)