I have a co-worker who from time to time has mentioned his Pontiac project and we’ve ‘bench restored’ a few times. But I’d never actually saw this car , nearly a picture. But thanks to our first real rain here in Southern AZ since last year I think, and the fact that we don’t do our monsoon season any other way than “harsh” my co-worker’s (we’ll call him ‘Mike’…’cause that’s actually his name) neighbor had a tree that suffered enough wind damage it and to be taken down. So Mike had to move the car, parked it behind his daily driver. Got up this morning and decied..heck, I’ll drive it to work.
And that’s how I got the pic of the 1949 Pontiac Silver Streak Delivery Van, all original and get this…..his family is the only owner the beauty every had. His grand father purchased it new. More to come on this one but here are some pics.
1949 Pontiac Delivery Van
Back Side of the '49 Silver Streak Delivery Van Pontiac style.
OK after all these years, after the car was gone. I stopped by the house. I was met by Al, short for Albert, not Alan, as Al informed me.
I told him that I had always wanted to check on the Grande and he informed I was a bit late. He said he didn’t mind answers a few questions.
So I asked Al how got the car and he said he bought it back in 1972 from some guy. “It was a nice car with an automatic.” Of course my next question was what was under the hood and he said ‘nothing’. “Took it out about 10 years ago and parked on the side of the house.” He told me he never got the engine fixed, ” ’cause it ‘cost too much.” He ended up letting the guy that did some work on it keep. “Ya know, it might have been a 302.” He said he didn’t really know want to do with the body and just ended up hanging on to it.
So I asked him where the car end up, hoping it was sent out to be restored. He said there was this guy from Texas that would stop by every now and then and ask if it was for sale. He drives large pick up and always has an empty trailer attached. This same guy that has stopped by a co-worker of mine, who has her son’s 70 Monte Carlo and her daughter’s 1969 Camaro sitting under her car port – waiting for some TLC and try’s to convince her that she should sell them to him. She chases him off each time, but he’ll swing by a few months later.
A couple of weeks ago, Texas dude, stops by Al’s home and Al decided to get the Grande out of the yard and sold the man from Texas.
We talked a bit longer about my 1970 Mustang coupe and I showed him a couple of pics on my phone and then thanked him for his time.
Nicola Romeo is credited with setting the foundation for Italian car maker Alfa Romeo. What a lot of folks don’t know is that Alfa was a car manufacturer before Nicola came around.
Afla stood for Anonima Lombardo Fabbrica Automobili and began production in Milan in 1910. They actually produced French cars (the Darracq) under a license, all hand built.
Darracq 1906
Nicola had an engineering degree from Turin. He first worked with mining equipment and eventual purchased Alfa’s plant in Portello.
His management skills and love of racing helped build this car .company in to a lasting enterprise.
Although, apparently their latest offering to the U.S. market of the Giulia, was not well received, design wise and the parent companies Fiat–Chrysler killed it until 2013.
This one was in the parking lot of the a local auto parts store Checker’s or O’Rielly’s….or….all those mergers are making hard to have common name that everyone can related too (remember when there was just NAPA….can’t find them very often).
1969 Chevelle 454 Restored shell
This 1969 Chevelle was merely as shell…oh but is extremely well done restoration. The paint was excellent (makes ya wonder why it was being dragged round uncovered), the inside of the shell had been as expertly sprayed as the exterior..it was almost a shame to put in the interior in there.
Reproduction gauges and not much in the way of interior yet.
The badge on the car shows that this car housed or will house 454. But however, the 454 didn’t show up on the scene until until 1970 so this must be a retro fit.
You can see the big power plant is missing.
It looks absolutely ready to for dropping that monster engine back in and hitting the strip. Hey I don’t even mind the wheels!!!
Didn’t find the owner (or driver) , part store was crowded.
Of course this isn’t a 1970, I’ll update the data a bit later.
Some 1970 Chevelle facts:
– The 454 was produced between 1970 thru 1976.
– It produced 450 hp configured with 4bbl carb
– It was designated the LS6 with 475 ftlbs of torque and 9.0:1 compression ratio
The majority of the Chevelle’s (approx. 13,000) had V8 in 1970 and approx. 10,000 had 6 cylinders.
So you are out at the mall or grabbing some groceries at the store and you are headed back to your car in the parking lot and you catch something out of the corner of your eye. It’s out of the ordinary, it really shouldn’t be there, especially parked between that 1998 Honda with almost no paint and the huge Cummings Diesel pick up with a bench car seat bungy corded to the tie downs in the bed, but there it is, glowing and out-of-place.
That is what these segments will be about. Sometime there will be comments from the owner and sometimes I won’t have a chance to chat with them. There is a fine line between loving cars and stalking. (Standing around while your milk getting warm and your ice cream is leaking out of the hole in the plastic bag, waiting for the owner is on the line. Hey..it only happened once!!!…Come on now!!!..You’ve done it!!!)
Wandering around Southern Arizona wine country, we pulled into the one of the winery’s parking lots and I spied this beauty.
1964 Lincoln Continental Love the shape of the grill.
Yes! Convertible with suicide doors.
I’m on the fence with these wheels, but it’s still great looking.
Some 1964 Lincoln Continental facts:
Sales for that year was 32,969 roughly and approximately only 3,328 convertibles were sold. The other option was a 4 door sedan (no two door coupe? I’ll have to check on that). The vert was sold for $6,938 and the sedan was about $700 less.
Only one engine was available for the Lincoln and that was the 430 with 320 hp. Which was good because the car weighted 5,000 lbs. It was paired up with a 3 speed auto transmission which helped it reach the top speed of 110 m/h.
Longer wheel base was about 2 inches longer then the previous years at 126 inches.
Having grown up working in my Dad’s body shops, was often given the honorable task of taping (masking) off the areas that weren’t going to get sprayed and areas, like windows and mirrors where you don’t want over-spray landing. I learned a few tricks that help speed up the process, but more importantly help ensure a good clean paint job. Removing over-spray is not a fun process.
I’ve tried the machines that merge the paper and the tape, great for straight lines, like the Coca Cola trucks we painted but for tight corners it just doesn’t work.
To save time, which equals a money saver and to get sharp clean lines, outline the areas with thinner tape, 1/4 inch works best. After that use the tape and paper machine and run that along the previously laid tape.
Here’s one more.
I can’t possibly tell you how much a pain it can be to tape off emblems and name plates and it’s never clean. Do yourself a big favor, figure out how they are attached to the sheet metal and purchase replacement them. You know where I’m going… remove the badges and emblems. That is the only way to do it right.
The last tangible evidence of one of Detroit’s iconic brands was rapidly disappearing this week as demolition contractors tore down the last of the DeSoto plant, 50 years after Chrysler Corporation discontinued the car line.
Moreover, the Albert-Kahn-designed DeSoto plant on Wyoming Avenue between McGraw Avenue and Ford Road at the western border of Detroit, was the only automobile assembly plant erected in America during the Great Depression. Chrysler also built a truck plant in the period—but that was it for new auto assembly plants during those tough years.
Until its demise, the DeSoto plant’s huge billboard stood as a nagging competitive symbol above the Ford Freeway (later I-94) that Ford and especially Mercury executives could not help seeing as they headed back and forth from their nearby Dearborn offices to downtown Detroit or their eastside homes.
DeSoto was conceived by Walter P. Chrysler a couple of years after the 1924 introduction of the Chrysler brand, a modernized Maxwell. Walter P, a former Buick executive, had observed the success of Alfred P. Sloan’s reborn General Motors with its array of medium-priced cars based on “step-up” features. So he set out to add to the new Chrysler Corporation a low-priced Plymouth to compete with Ford and Chevrolet and a medium-priced DeSoto, matched against Oldsmobile, Buick and the host of successful independents headed by Hudson, Nash, Studebaker and, well, Dodge.
An early rendering of the sprawling DeSoto plant.
DeSoto would be just a cut below the Chrysler, which already was adding larger engines and other features. In the meantime, New York and Boston bankers were trying to find a buyer for the Dodge Brothers company–acquired from the estate after death of the brothers in 1920–which had a line of cars and light trucks.
Some historians have argued that Chrysler announced the DeSoto to drive down the bankers’ price and willingness to deal for Dodge Brothers. But eminent academic historian Dr. Charles K. Hyde points out in his 2003 “Riding the Roller Coaster” that DeSoto was already in the works before the bankers appeared in Walter P’s crystal ball.
In any event, in the 12 months after the 1929 DeSoto was put on sale in early August 1928, its sales of 81,065 were the greatest for any new model until the 1960 Ford Falcon came along, even better than the 1938-39 first year of Mercury.
DeSoto almost bit the dust in 1934 when it was saddled with Chrysler’s advanced but unpopular Airflow design. Conventional Airstream models, rushed into production, saved both brands.
And in 1936, DeSoto essentially became “America’s taxicab” for a decade and a half with a mammoth sale of Skyline (opening roof) models for New York City. That no doubt helped finance the new plant, announced in 1936 and completed in 1938. Although all four (or five if you count the on-and-off Imperial) Chrysler Corp. cars could be ordered in long-wheelbase models that made roomy taxis, DeSoto was the notable cab for New York, Washington and Los Angeles until the early 1950s. (The independent Checker with its Chevrolet components “owned” the Chicago taxi fleet.)
All that remains of the DeSoto plant, which was designed by Albert Kahn, who also designed the vast Ford Rouge assembly complex.
After negotiating acquisition of Dodge in the summer of 1928, Walter P found himself with one too many medium-priced brands. His main objectives in Dodge were its truck line and manufacturing facilities at Dodge Main in Hamtramck, so the corporate line-up had to be rationalized. What resulted was three dealer networks: Chrysler-Plymouth, DeSoto-Plymouth and Dodge-Plymouth. This helped Plymouth compete handily with Ford and Chevy, and slotted DeSoto as a step-up from Dodge in the medium price field.
This stood Chrysler Corporation in good stead in the rush to supply pent-up demand for new cars after World War II.
I fondly remember my father’s shiny new 1948 gunmetal-grey DeSoto Custom four-door sedan with soft green interior trim. The listed price, not including such options as radio, heater, shiny wheel covers and white-sidewall tires, was $1,892. Also optional at $121 was the two-pedal “Fluid Drive with Tip Toe shift,” and it became the first automatic (well, really, semi-automatic) transmission car I drove.
You pushed the clutch pedal down to engage the transmission and after that, needed the clutch only to, say, go from reverse to forward or vice versa. Upshifting from “low” to “high” was accomplished by lifting your foot off the accelerator pedal briefly.
There was a push button starter button in the lower center of the instrument panel, next to the key slot for the ignition lock. Unlike manual transmission cars, this DeSoto (and Chryslers) had no “first” position; the “H” pattern instead was like an upside down lower-case “h.” In those days, all American passenger cars had column-mounted shifters.
However, as a high schooler, I soon discovered—or learned from my peers—that the DeSoto could be started in gear without pushing in the clutch, and that if you put the transmission lever in the bottom upper, or “second” position, it engaged a sort of extra low gear which provided startling (for the time) acceleration from a dead stop. Then you could upshift by lifting your foot briefly off the accelerator. Despite a modest 236.6-cid, 109-hp flathead Six, it flew, surprising many an ambitious amateur street drag-racer thinking he was facing off against a slush-o-matic Fluid Drive. This was all well and good for my reputation until the family doctor spotted me challenging a Terraplane and ratted me out to my father, ending in my clipped wings.
So I have a soft spot in my heart for DeSoto, though I never owned one.
The 1948 DeSoto owned by author Mike Davis’ father.
DeSoto’s best sales year was 1953, when new registrations totaled 122,342, or 2.13% of the US market. Ultimately it became another victim of the intense sales battle between Ford and General Motors in the mid 1950s. Buick 1955 sales actually edged out Plymouth for Number Three position. 1952’s DeSoto Firedome hemi V-8 and 1957’s Forward Look briefly boosted DeSoto fortunes but sales declined rapidly through 1958 (a slump year for the industry) and 1959 until DeSoto’s final 1960 tally of a mere 23,063 cars. Edsel had folded its short life in November 1959 right after its 1960 models went on sale.
Chrysler management had read the smoke signals and decided to pull the plug on DeSoto. This involved ending both the DeSoto-Plymouth and Dodge-Plymouth franchises, dualing Plymouth only with Chrysler, and reconstituting bottom series Dodges as low-priced competitors to Ford, Chevy and — Plymouth.
Over its 32 years in the marketplace, more than 2,000,000 DeSotos had been produced, a big number considering the modest size of the American auto market of the time. The last DeSoto built, on December 30, 1960, was a $3,100 1961 Adventurer two-door hardtop with 361-cid, 265-hp V8 and a 122-inch wheelbase.
But that was also the year the Big Three introduced their new compacts—Falcon, Corvair and Valiant, and the previously well-ordered domestic auto market was never the same again.
And now the newly cleared 29-acre one-time DeSoto plant site is on sale for a measly $2,150,000. Complete with rail siding and a view of I-94, once known as the Detroit Industrial Highway. Such a deal.
