Auto Factoids for Week of Sept 30, 2012

Wow…a lot went on this week.

First up is the car that started it all.  Oct 1, 1908 the Ford Model T  went on sale.   Perhaps the only car that is always referred with the word “Model”.  You never hear it called the Ford T (like Ford Focus) or the T (like Mustang).

1908 Model T

Model T Ford – Rag Top

1927 saw the 15 millionth Model T produced and the last.

On the same day 46 years later (1954) Packard and Studebaker merged.  It was debatable was to who the merger would benefit the most.  It is was reported Packard was broke but Studebaker had money troubles as well.  This was not a great partnership.  They attempted to sell the cars separately in the same dealerships.  The Packards were just Studebaker’s President with more chrome. They were unflatteringly called “Packerbakers”.

’56 Studebaker President

57 Packardbaker – You got to love the fins!!!!!

The Packarbaker only lasted 2 years and Packard essentially ceased to exist.

Oct 1, 1974 was the last Imperial  debuted.   The Imperial was at one time its own company.  It was incorporated in to the Chrysler family and then sort of released back as its own brand.

1974 Imperial. The two configuration was the best looking.

Chevy delivered one of the most iconic cars in automotive history on Oct 2. 1959.  That was the day they debuted the Corvair.  It was a huge media blitz with some every innovative sale/marketing demonstrations.  Including running through field and stream.

Any Ralph Nader fans? This is a great car and they came in four door, station wagon and drop top configurations!!!!

On Oct. 4, 1962 Buick debuted it’s Riviera.

Distinct (grill/headlight over-hang) but familiar (Skylark like). I really liked the early Riviera, right up until the boat tail design.

Now I didn’t really want to consider this next historic moment but in my opinion this really isn’t automotive related, except that it did have tires and moved along the ground, but in 1983 on Oct 4 the land speed record was broken.  A British team accomplished with the Thurst SSC and setting the record at 633 mph.  But really it was just a plane with jet engines – minus the wings.

The UK Team’s Thrust SSC. Notes below are from the Wikipedia

The car was driven by Royal Air Force fighter pilot Wing Commander Andy Green in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, United States. It was powered by two afterburning Rolls-Royce Spey turbofan engines, as used in the British version of the F-4 Phantom II jet fighter. The car was 16.5 m (54 ft) long, 3.7 m (12 ft) wide and weighed 10.5 tons (10.7 t), and the twin engines developed a net thrust of 223 kN (50,000 lbf), a power output of 110,000 bhp (82MW),[2] burning around 18 litres per second (4.0 Imperial gallons/s or 4.8 US gallons/s). Transformed into the usual terms for car mileages based on its maximum speed, the fuel consumption was about 5,500 l/100 km or 0.04 mpg U.S.

 

Next up two debuts on the same day 11  years apart.

First 0n Oct 6 1955 the  Lincoln Continental MK II showed up at the Paris Auto show.

Look a bit like a Thunderbird in this pic.

That’s a huge grille!!! Great looking car.

 

Eleven years later in 1966 Cadillac debuted the Eldorado.  Perhaps the most famous Caddy model.

Here it is in a beautiful blue drop top configuration.

 

Thanks for reading.

Tim

 

 

Neil Armstrong Corvette heads toward preservation | Hemmings Blog: Classic and collectible cars and parts

Neil Armstrong Corvette heads toward preservation | Hemmings Blog: Classic and collectible cars and parts.

 

 

Neil Armstrong Corvette heads toward preservation

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Photos by Roger Kallins.

Of the dozens of Corvettes famously linked to the astronauts of the moon-shot Sixties, only a handful of documented Apollo-era astronaut-owned‘Vettes survive, none of them as original as the 1967 Corvette once owned by the late Neil Armstrong. Now, thanks to a new initiative, that Corvette will undergo a preservation effort that will keep it just as Armstrong had it.

One of the many Corvettes that Florida Chevrolet dealer Jim Rathmann sold to those with the Right Stuff, Armstrong’s Marina Blue mid-year coupe emerged from the St. Louis assembly plant on December 9, 1966, and passed into his possession six days later. Equipped with the 390hp 427-cu.in. V-8, a four-speed transmission, air conditioning, power brakes, power windows, tinted windows, transistorized ignition, and the AM-FM radio, the coupe served Armstrong for the next year, until he traded it in at Rathmann Chevrolet for a 1968 Corvette convertible. A day later, a fellow NASA employee bought it, beginning a 44-year stretch of ownership that ended earlier this year when current owner Joe Crosby bought it.

Crosby, a Corvette restorer from Merritt Island, Florida, actually first got wind of the Corvette in the summer of 1979, when the second owner still had it on the road. “My brother and I both talked about buying it,” Crosby said. “At the time we didn’t know it had something to do with Neil Armstrong, we just knew that it was a big-block car with its original engine. All the Corvettes I’ve restored have had their original engines. But I had two other Corvettes I was working on at the time, so I passed.”

Regardless, he kept in touch with the second owner, calling him about once a year to chat and see if the Corvette was still for sale. At one point over the years the second owner revealed that Armstrong originally owned the Corvette, but the answer always remained no. In the meantime, the second owner moved the Corvette into a heated and air-conditioned garage and put it up on jackstands with the intentions of turning it into a family project. He modified it with fender flares, as was the fashion of the time, but got no farther with it.

Even up to late 2011, the second owner refused to sell, but then one day in late February he called Crosby and asked him if he still wanted to buy it. “It took me about five minutes to get the trailer ready to pick it up,” Crosby said. After getting it home, his initial assessment showed the Corvette to be in largely original condition, apart from the flares, thanks to its 31-year hibernation and the 38,000 miles on the odometer. “The rubber fuel hoses were like potato chips, dry and crumbling, but the gas tank was clean and shiny, and the spare tire had never been out of its carrier.” With careful pre-lubrication and some new lengths of fuel hose, the 427 actually fired up for Crosby. The water pump and mufflers had at some point been replaced, but for an experienced Corvette restorer like Crosby, finding date-coded replacements took little effort. Finding four NOS fenders, however, proved a challenge. “I took a six-week safari around the country to find four GM fenders,” he said. “I paid a fortune for them all, but I could not bring myself to get reproduction fenders if the real ones were still out there.”

As for authenticating the Corvette as Armstrong’s, Rathmann did keep files on all of his astronaut cars, but subsequent owners of the dealership destroyed those records. Still, Armstrong’s name appears on the Protect-O-Plate, and Crosby convinced Jack Legere, a friend of his who works at NASA, to show Armstrong Crosby’s photos of the Corvette during one of Armstrong’s periodic visits to Florida. “He immediately recalled it and grinned ear to ear,” Crosby said. “He didn’t have time then to check it out in person, and we all know what happened next.” Armstrong died in late August at the age of 82.

Up until this summer, Crosby intended to subject the Corvette to a full restoration, as he had with all of his other Corvettes, but then mid-year expert David Burroughs, a champion of original and preserved cars, convinced him to call preservationist Eric Gill of nearby Port Orange, Florida. Like Burroughs, Gill prefers preservation over restoration, particularly when it comes to cars with provenance, such as the Neil Armstrong Corvette. “Preservation is the cutting edge in the hobby right now,” Gill said. “The term is deceptive because some people think it just means sitting on the car, but we’re actually developing protocols for retaining the history of a car, as opposed to wiping away all that history in a restoration. A historically significant car is only as interesting as the people who gave it that history.”

After several conversations between Crosby and Gill, the two put together a team – including restorer/preservationist Allan Scheffling, videographer Chris Hoch, photographer Roger Kallins, and Legere – that will carefully document the Corvette as it sits now and identify steps to take in the coupe’s preservation. “I’m calling this a reactive preservation, which means that we have to react to a situation that exists that is inappropriate to the historical integrity of the car, in this case the fender flares,” Gill said. “We want to take it back to the condition it was in when Neil Armstrong traded it in.”

The hardest part of the preservation, Gill said, will be replacing the flares with sections of unflared fenders and then distressing the new paint over the replaced sections to harmonize with the existing paint. “We won’t be replacing the full fenders, which will inflate the number of hours we’ll have in the car, but will also give us the opportunity to disturb as little of the original paint as possible. We hope to do it in such a way that you can’t tell even though you know it’s been replaced.”

Crosby has since come around to Gill’s line of thinking, at least for this car. “Once you restore a car, you can’t ever go back to the way it was,” Crosby said. “Some people might see it as a beat-up old car, but people like us see that if you undo all that, it’s no longer Neil Armstrong’s car. This isn’t a car, it’s a piece of history, and the chance of having just one car like this is just astronomical.”

Due to the detailed nature of the process that Gill and his team have outlined, they have no set timeline, but they plan to post more information to their website, RecaptureThePast.com, and provide Hemmings Daily with updates to the preservation as it proceeds.

Dom Romney

 

 

Bandwagen

Vintage Volkswagens & Photography
September 28, 2012

Dom Romney


Dom Romney is an internationally award winning automotive and motor sport photographer working out of London, England. At only seventeen Dom started as work as a press photographer before decided to set up his own business – Dom Romney Photography was born in the spring of 2010, and has grown quickly in to a brand with clients across the globe.

Working solely with editorial and commercial clients, Dom’s high contrast vibrant work has already won him numerous awards and recognition from his peers. Along with his success as a photographer, Dom also provides lectures at the world renowned Citylit centre in london, teaching on a mix of techniques and technologies.

Dom writes “I got the call from Fast Car magazine to shoot this awesome aircooled for their wild card section, however to do justice to its American barn-find heritage, it needed to be shot in barn! Typical English barns are normally of concrete and corrugated steel construction, a far cry from the traditional timber barns you get in the States and hardly a nice photographic backdrop. After locating a plausible wooden barn in middle england (a task that was harder than you’d expect) we set about shooting it. To add to the vintage, weathered feel and to give the image the same feel as that satin, suede patina, we processed the images with some warm muted textures which I think really make the feature. Here is a small selection of my favourite images from the shoot.”

You can view more of Dom’s photography at domromney.com

 

What does a Harley and a 1938 Buick have in common?

The answer is nothing (other than being American made) normally.

However this Harley is owned by one of my co-workers.  It’s a beautiful bike with some unique features.

See  if you can pick out the features.  They easily discernible in these pics.

Drop me a note with what you see.

 

 

Thanks for reading.

Tim

Tucson Cars and Coffee

 

DSC_6365 EDIT RS

Tucson Cars & Coffee July 2012

We were lucky enough to have a cloudy morning for this month’s Cars and Coffee. The diffused light that the clouds provide makes my job really easy! Enjoy the photos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15 Jul This entry was written by Otis, posted on July 15, 2012 at 13:49, filed under Automotive, Photography and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. View EXIF Data

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Engine Line-up 1952 Desoto

Up until 1952 the only engine available was the L6 cylinder and it again was the main power plant for the ’52 production year.

This engine for 1952 was an iron block with a bore and stroke of 3.438X4.50 with a compression ratio of 7.0:1.  With 5 main bearing and topped with a Stromberg 380359 or 380349 or a Carter E9AI it produced 116 hp.   This was pretty much the same for all the L6’s but bore and stroked changed through the life of the company as well the number of main bearings (most numbering four) and the  displacement fluctuated between 236.7 and 250.6 CID. The engine disappeared from Desoto line-up in 1954.

L6 Engine

But the really big deal for the 1952 Desoto was the addition of what would become one of the most famous engines every produced.  It was the spherical segment combustion chambered engine, the  Desoto Hemi V-8.

It was an overhead value hemispherical combustion chambered iron block.  It displayed 276.1 cid and it’s bore and stroke was 3.626×3.344 inches and a compression ratio of 7.0:1.  It had hydraulic lifters and five main bearings.  Topped with a Carter 2bb (models 884S, 884SA and 884SC it produced 160 hp.  The Firedome V8s were the same but used the Carter models 908S,909S and the 910S.

A restored 52_DeSoto Firedome (museum photo)

1952 4 door Desoto

Thanks for reading.

Tim

Auto Factoids for week of Sept. 16

Some famous and infamous events this week occurred this week in automobile history.

General Motors incorporated 9/16/1908 – I often think that GM was started with Chevy, but in fact GM was a holding company for Buick in 1908.  Shortly after incorporation Oldsmobile was added and the following year (1909) Cadillac, Cartercar, Elmore, Ewing, and Oakland (would become Pontiac) were purchased and added to the company.

Speaking of Buick, on Sept. 17 in 1854 David Buick was born in Scotland.  He didn’t start out building car but engines to sell for farm equipment and then for cars and then developed his business to build both engines and cars in 1902.  He  developed the  “Valve-in-Head” overhead valve engine.

Now for the infamous – Sept. 19th 1970, Ford introduced the Ford Pinto.  We all know the story of the lack of safety surrounding the gas tank and the less than stellar calculated approach to not wanting to spend the $$ to make is safe.

1970 Pinto

Finally this week on Sept. 21, 1895 Duryea Motor Wagon Company was founded. 

The Duryea brothers entered their horseless carriage in many shows and races. The Duryea Motor Wagon carriage won the first prize in the first ever American automobile .  The wagon was produced in 1893 and had a 1 cylinder engine and 4 HP.

Thanks for reading.

Tim

1958 Ford Ranch Wagon Yard Art : Suspension Stripped and Frame Is Bare

Yard Art : Suspension Stripped & Frame Is Bare.