Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Whether the favor accorded right turns is perceived by the left-handed community as another in a string of indignities, I can’t say. But until lawmakers decide to make the two directions equal, right turns have priority. On a two-way road, the approaching car turning right has the right-of-way.

Unless there is a left-turn arrow, there is no left-of-way. Why? Because the left turner must cross in front of on-coming traffic, a potentially risky maneuver.

Many Twin Cities drivers assert the Wrong-of-Way, turning left along with right turners coming from the other direction. This is routine at places where a one-way road turns off a two-way one, like Park Avenue north or Portland Avenue south in Minneapolis at its junctions with any two-way cross street.

Left turners wade out into the left-most lane, assuming that the right turner will steer tight and stay right. But it’s not a foolproof prediction. The right turner may need to go left at the very next intersection or be heading to an address on the left side of the road. That driver needs to watch the road and parked cars and shouldn’t have to watch left turners barging into the way.

It’s clear why people do this–they’re in a rush, like we all seem to be–and they conclude that there’s plenty of room for them to sneak out too. Yet it’s still dangerous because it contradicts rule-abiding drivers’ expectations. Someone who lives here may anticipate left-turners plunging ahead, but what of the many visitors in rental cars or in from outlying areas for sporting events?

One bad habit breeds another. Because I don’t like to be crowded by a car not yielding the right-of-way to my turn, my inclination is to not signal, forcing the approach driver to stay put for fear I’ll drive straight into him or her.

Get lax with one rule and you start bending more of them. Pretty soon driving becomes a free-for-all and becomes more work than pleasure.

“No, we don’t have ‘the Mach 5′ (whatever that is).”

The man at J.C. Penney’s didn’t actually say this each time my younger brother, Kirk, and I approached, but we all knew the drill. We wanted that car and the expansive toy counter over which this man presided was the ordained place for it to be. The wall behind him supported a huge glass case bearing hundreds of wonderful Corgi cars. If the Mach 5 were going to appear anywhere within a grade-schooler’s world, this was the spot.

My mother took us to this place, the immense King of Prussia mall (once largest in the U.S.), every 4 to 6 weeks for a haircut. That Penney’s hadn’t had the Mach 5 last time meant nothing. It should have arrived since, and if it hadn’t, then why hadn’t it?

Corgi the crafter of dreams, the answerer of prayers. Two cars pushed the human imagination to its greatest heights–the original Batmobile and the Mach 5. Kirk and I already had the large and small Corgi Batmobiles–and they were devastatingly cool. Now we wanted the Mach 5 and no prior rejection, no matter how frequent, was going to dampen our efforts.

For the better part of ten years my brother and I trekked from Sal’s Barber Shop to the J.C. Penney toy counter to execute our warrant, but our quarry never showed. From lack of rights or some terrible BBC oversight keeping Speed Racer off British television, Corgi did not make a Mach 5. And every haircut ended in disappointment.

When I was a teenager old enough to drive, my friend Todd and I went to Franklin Toy and Novelty Company at about Third and Walnut in downtown Philadelphia. There, at last, I did find a Mach 5. It was made by a Japanese company, appropriately, and fit in the palm of the hand–bigger than a Hot Wheels but smaller than the large Corgis. The price was $60, a lot of money to a kid in the early ’80s.

By that time, I had other things on my mind and I let it go–with, I admit now, accumulating regret.

The car shown here is a larger Ertl version that a friend from England gave me as a gift when my wife I visited early in this century. Britain is finally on board. Because my wife loves Speed Racer too, it sat in her office downtown for many years. Now it’s home and I just had to pull it off its stand and snap a few pictures.

Even to a middle-aged man, there is still perfection in these lines. I didn’t see the recent and widely panned movie, which may have tainted modern car fans unfamiliar with the Trans-Lux cartoon. Old-school fans will remember it only as shown here, and here.

Go, Speed Racer. Go!

[An earlier post on this car got lost due to a technical glitch.]

On a visit to Bo Vescio’s shop last year, I spied a Muntz Jet mostly torn down with a fresh coat of white paint. The engine and interior were out, trim off. It was just a freshly sprayed body on a rolling chassis. They’re rare cars.  The Muntz Registry puts total production at about 200, while Sports Car Market’s analysis projects from the somewhat erratic chassis numbering a figure closer to twice that. The book I had as a kid listed a figure between those two.

I’ve seen Muntz Jets in car books for 30 years. The story is interesting–TV manufacturer turns auto manufacturer with a car based on a Frank Kurtis design that Muntz charges 1.5 times the price of a Cadillac for. Yet the black and white hand drawings in The American Sports Car, a book my mother got me when I was in about 9th grade, didn’t do the car justice.

Fully restored in three dimensions, the Muntz Jet is a delightful, playful car to behold. TV hustler, Earl “Madman” Muntz, went out of his way to make the car unique by his own efforts and buyers’. He would go to great lengths to give customers the colors, fabrics, look and feel they wanted. (He called it a “sports car,” but with its massive Lincoln flathead V-8 and automatic-only gearbox, it wouldn’t fit our modern conceptions of that term.) Early engines were OHV Cadillac V-8s.

Style and flair ooze from the car. Muntz’s symbol was a pirate figure in red long johns–bold and unembarrassed–set into the steering and road wheels. The split vee-shaped windshield evokes a speedboat, while the bevy of Stewart Warner gauges has an aeronautic feel.  There is even a cooler–for sodas, iced tea, lemonade…–under the arm rests in the back seat. Faux alligator upholstery and top add a Hollywood feel showman Muntz, married 7 times, came to project.

This is an American dreamboat born of inspiration and innovation. What a cool car to restore and treasure  to honor the many visionaries who threw a hat into the car-maker’s ring.

Values are in the $50,000-$100,000 range, with the most unusual (i.e., celebrity owned or customized) models bringing highest dollars.

We motorheads have long seen the graceful curves and striking lines designers pen into cars as art. Sometimes the lines are so alluring, the rest of the art world takes notice too.

Fans of the glorious Tatra will be pleased to know the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has included one the Czech-built, air-cooled, single-finned, suicide-doored, rear-engined eye morsels among its exhibit of exceptional modernist works.

For the motor-fluent, we drink in such details even in a roomful of exceptional automobiles. But nothing calls home beautiful form in a car like setting it on its own among other alluringly crafted artworks.

The musuem’s Tatra T87 has a sweeping aerodynamic body that calls the eye back and forth along its length. In an era when the needs inside the car–for headroom and luggage room and crush zone and visibility–often set baselines for the outside design, it’s fun to see a car that looks like it was born on an artist’s canvas and carried to three dimensions by loving sculptors.

If you’ve never seen a Tatra and enjoy modernist art, get over to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and check out this spotless example. The museum is free and there is much else to delight you among the many floors and walls.

How many decades has it been that you turn on a TV show or watch a movie with a car in it and they’ve got a stickshift foley track (sound added after shooting) paired with an automatic transmission car?

Does anybody who pays even a little bit of attention to the way cars sound not know the distinctive break and drop in engine note that comes from clutching and shifting versus the UHHHH-uhhhhh slipdown of an autobox shifting on its own?

 Guess the field of producers and editors doesn’t attract a lot of car guys and gals. Or the foley effects the studios have been reaching for are 30-40 years old (since few people driving the cop cars, taxis & family sedans we hear these sounds in is driving a stick).

Case in point, Supernatural, a cool show with a bitchin’ black ‘67 Impala 4-door. Kudos to them for choosing it and great engine sound. But it’s singing through a stickshift. And Dean and Sam are driving a column shift autobox Chevy. Not saying it’s a bad show. Far from it. Ain’t no stickshift car, though….  

What to see while you’re taking your classic for its last few cruises includes more than this year’s incredible leaf display. It’s also Halloween and some people throw down big for the dress-odd holiday. This house south of 46th Street on Chicago Avenue South boasts a phenomenal display every year, from a dragon bursting through the upper story, to a skeleton-crewed ghost ship, to this year’s diabolical giant jack o’lantern.

If Halloween brings nothing more to mind than the cost of candy and fears some youth might fling a roll of TP over one of your trees, drive by this place and see what creative minds can do to boost kids’–and parents’– fun on a cool holiday.

If debates, baseball and bank bailouts have had you living in your own head, get out of there–and out of the office–awhile and take in the leaves.

These photos snapped in front of my house don’t do them justice. This has to be one of the best falls we’ve had in years. The maple trees especially are like a freeze-frame of some splendid top-shelf Chinese firework, erupting in green, yellow and red.

A pair of sunglasses with amber lenses magnify the effect. Wow. Makes you glad to be alive and to live in a state with such beautiful natural sights.

It’s Friday and your boss wants you to relax so you’ll be mentally prepared for the weekend, the essential re-charging days that allow you to be so productive Monday through Thursday when the real money is made.

Here’s a little quiz for ya.

For each of the following cars, identify whether the engine is in the front, the rear or the middle, whether it is air or liquid cooled, and whether the front or rear wheels are driven. (No internet searches before answering :^) )

1. Ferrari 308
2. VW Beetle (”old” version)
3. Cord
4. Chevrolet Corvair
5. Tatra
6. Renault 2CV
7. Tucker
8. Olds Toronado
9. Jensen FF
10. Morgan V-Twin

Answers at the bottom, here. (If you comment, please put it by the answers so readers don’t see them up here.)

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.

My British coupe has been a nice car, treating me far better than Lucas jokes imply.

There was this problem with the rearview mirror, however. It hangs on a stalk–and it attaches to the windshield with a suction cup. As pliable parts will do over the decades, the suction cup got brittle, cracked and ceased to hold.

Major British parts supplier Moss lists this mirror N/A. Roadster factory doesn’t seem to have it. For a minute it looked like it was going to take a major hunt–serious Googling, eBay, MG clubs. But hold on! The car doesn’t need the last in-the-box NOS B GT rearview mirror to be frenzy-bid to a hundred bucks on eBay. It just needs a mirror that doesn’t move like a pendulum or G-force indicator.

The mirror itself is fine. Reflects stuff behind the car and everything. All that’s wrong is that the little suction cup is dead. Well, shoot! What American-raised kid doesn’t know where to find a suction cup?

The new Dollar store at 46th and Nicollet answered the call for–you guessed it–a buck. Phew! If toy guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have steady mirrors.