Having been there multiple times I’ve see each of these beautiful machines. Hope they are salvageable.
BOWLING GREEN, KY (WAVE) – Eight cars were swallowed by a sinkhole at the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green Wednesday morning, according to the museum’s executive director.
A statement released by the museum said their security company alerted them at 5:45 a.m. that motion detectors were going off in the Skydome area. When officials arrived, they discovered the sinkhole.
Crap!!!
Wendell Strode, the executive director, said the hole is approximately 25 to 30 feet deep and about 40 feet wide. The Bowling Green Fire Department secured the area for the time being.
Strode said the one millionth Corvette, which was donated to the museum by Chevrolet, was among the cars that fell into the sinkhole.
The statement went on to say “it is with heavy hearts that we report that eight Corvettes were affected by this incident.”
Those cars include:
1993 ZR-1 Spyder on loan from General Motors
2009 ZR1 “Blue Devil” on loan from General Motors
Blue Devil
The other six vehicles were owned by the National Corvette Museum including:
1962 Black Corvette
1984 PPG Pace Car
1992 White 1 Millionth Corvette
1 Millionth Corvette
1993 Ruby Red 40th Anniversary Corvette
2001 Mallett Hammer Z06 Corvette
The Hammer
2009 White 1.5 Millionth Corvette
1 and Half Millionth Corvette
No one was injured as no one was in or around the museum at the time of the collapse.
None of the cars affected were on loan from individuals. The museum remains open, but the Skydome section will be closed until further notice.
Strode said structural engineers would assess the stability of the surrounding areas later today.
2014 is the museum’s 20th Anniversary and officials said they “look forward to re-opening the Skydome exhibit area very soon.”
Thanks for reading.
Tim
Sinkhole swallow eight cars in National Corvette Museum: Sinkhole collapses part of domed section of museum; d… http://t.co/bsPByrsnfy
(CNN) — Eight Corvettes fell into a sinkhole that opened up beneath a section of the National Corvette Museum in Kentucky on Wednesday. The sinkhole, about 40 feet wide and about 25 to 30 feet deep, appeared before dawn under the skydome section of …
UPDATED 7:40 AM — It has been confirmed that 8 vehicles were swallowed by a sinkhole at the Sky Dome at the National Corvette Museum. The sinkhole is estimated to be around 40 feet wide and 20-30 feet deep. The Museum is open for the day, although …
UPDATED 7:40 AM — It has been confirmed that 8 vehicles were swallowed by a sinkhole at the Sky Dome at the National Corvette Museum. The sinkhole is estimated to be around 40 feet wide and 20-30 feet deep. The Museum is open for the day, although …
A couple posts back I wrote on my chance meeting with the Maserati – Chrysler TC Club….no it’s fine go back and look…we’ll wait. (Insert whistling sound.) One response mentioned that the Maserati/ Chrysler TC was …”two years late to market.” (Bill February 10, 2014 at 12:00 PM).
That didn’t occur to me about the TC but I had just finished reading an article in Hemmings Motor News the Muscle Car Profile section – 1969 Plymouth Baracuda 383. It was written by Terry McGean.
The article chats about the 383 and the Formula S package. But the article starts out by saying That Chrysler peeps are pretty sure they started the “pony” car craze by revamping the Valiant line of cars to come up with the Baracuda just before Ford released the Mustang. And that is the case but unfortunately the A-body wasn’t up to par with the Mustang and the Camaro in the performance department and both cars left the Valiant platform in the dust or as Terry wrote “…Ford mastered the art of re-skinning an economy model as a sporting coup, or else these cars would have been called ‘Fish cars’…(I’m inserting a chuckle here.)…From there Plymouth seemed to be chasing the Mustang and not long after the Camaro and Firebird twins.”
This ties in to what I thought about when Mother Mopar came out with the Charger. It was a horrible attempt at recapturing the ‘pony’ car era. Ford had already re-invented the Mustang buy then and Chevy gave the C6 Corvette a retro ’60’s style shape and then came the Camaro and still Chrysler didn’t have the answer, until the Challenger. That was nicely done and I love it, but it was still late to the party again.
I thought they might make a hit with the ‘Dodge Dart’, I considered that a pony car of sorts, but instead we got a Dodge Neon.
’65 Cuda
’65 Mustang
’65 Camaro
Thanks for reading.
Tim
Rare 65 Plymouth Baracuda (East Bend ) $4000 http://t.co/yi6ZSjs7Fb http://t.co/qW3XHkYLLY
Make: Plymouth Model: Baracuda Year: 1965 Body Style: Sedan Exterior Color: Red Interior Color: Red Doors: Four Doors Vehicle Condition:… Collectible – Classic Cars Plano.
Spotted this 1965 DeVille outside a local CVS. Nice long 2 door convertible, as god intended Caddy to be configured.
There were about 19k Caddy DeVilles Convertibles produced in 1965. These were all powered by a 429 cid, V8, overhead cam, iron block engine. The bore and stroke were 4.13 x 4.00 with a compression ratio of 10.5:1 and topped with the a Carter 4 bbl (Model 3903S) it produced about 340 hp. That’s not much considering the weight of the car was over 4500 lbs.
I love two vertical headlight look on most cars.
Still sporting fins. The back of this car is just as impressive as the front and that’s not always the case.
Love a two door DeVille
This one is a daily driver and could use some freshening but it is a fine automobile.
2/10/1942 Pontiac stops producing cars for World War II
Eventually all the U.S. car manufacturers halted production, but many turned to creating something else for the war. What did Pontiac make for the war effort?
Pontiac began making an anti-aircraft gun for the U.S. Navy in its sheet metal plant and produced Bofors automatic field guns for the U.S. Army.
Swedish Designed Bofors
Pontiac also supplied front axles for the M-5 tanks built by Cadillac and air-launched torpedoes for the U.S. Navy.
Air Launched
M5 Tank by Cadillac and parts by Pontiac
2/11/1932 – Ford develops it’s new V8
It as developed from 1926 to 1932 and was known as the ‘fatty’. Compared to the straight 6’s and the straight 8’s it was. It was a flat head V8, the first of its kind. Economically produced and was first installed and sold in the Ford Model 18 but the car was referred to as the “Ford V8”
Beautiful!!!
I love the look of these sedans. (Quit hacking them up!!!)
You pony car guys should really appreciate this innovation or else your Mustangs and Camaros would be a lot longer up front!!
2/12/1908 – New York to Paris Auto Race
The race was won by George Schuster driving the Thomas Flyer.
Car that won the first New York to Paris race
2/15/1929 – Graham Hill, British race car driver was born in London. He raced with Lotus, BRM, Brabham, and Hill
racing teams. Graham didn’t pass his drivers test until he was 24 years old. He died when he a plain he as flying crashed in England.
2/15/1944 – SCCA (Sports Car Club of America) was formed – I am card holding member. It’s a great experience
So not unlike many restoration projects I’ve worked on, something often pops up that makes you have to set some part of the work aside and tackle some unexpected. That’s about the same with writing as frequently as I do, multiple articles all nicely lined up and a couple fillers nearly ready to go. Then BAM!!! Up pops a car show or a I read something I want to react too. As it is with this piece.
I wish I could just write all day, every day, but I have a “paying” IT job which is a 7 days a week job and manage to squeeze out all the normal life stuff including ‘honey do’ list as long as I am tall.
So while tackling one of those tasks this past weekend, I happened upon a small cluster of cars at end of the a very large parking lot that normally adjacent to a COSTCO. At first glance it looked like a group of a flock of Chrysler Lebarons. But I was wrong, well sort of.
Mindful that I have frozen seafood and burgers sitting in back of my wife’s Lexus (it has a bit more cargo room than my C6), I planned on just saying hi a grabbing a couple of shots, but you know how car people are!!!
I asked if I could take a few shots with my Android phone and a couple of the guys said sure. Then a guy approached me and I said “Hi.” I told him I had thought it was a local LeBaron club when I first saw the cars. Well the gentleman was Mr. Hemi Anderson, TC America Tech expert in all things TC. Hemi let me know that although they were similar in appearance the underpinnings were different – different wheel base and all. He assured me that the TC was the original design and that Chrysler came up with the Lebaron as cheap alternative. His TC had about 11K miles and he drives it only on long drives – like this one (he hales from just outside of Vegas) or his annual Florida drive. He was a wealth of knowledge and I wished I didn’t have a car full of groceries to get home or I could have spend a few hours going over every car with him.
Here’s a few shots:
Those Wheels are similar to the ‘plastic hub caps” that are on my son’s Lebaron.
There were a total of 8 cars and waiting for more to show up.
I do like the wheels…I think they’d look good on my son’s Lebaron.
Removable Hardtop with ‘Opera’ window.
You can find this car club at http://www.chryslertcbymaseraticlub.com/.
In my opinion the real watering down of the brand occurred in the 80’s under the ownership of de Tomaso, with the launch of Biturbo (and all the models based off of it) and the Chrysler TC by Maserati. TrollHater 5pts. Its possible. Look at how watered …
2/4/1913- Perlman patents the demountable tire rim
(Few years later – Feb 24, 1925 Lewis K. McClellan got a patent for his improvements.)
from http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/05/dayintech_0521/:
Back in the earliest days of the automobile, radiators were brass, headlamps had wicks, cars were made as much of wood as metal, and wheels and tires were a single unit. The tires were solid rubber, and the wheels were wooden hub-and-spoke setups not unlike what you’d find on a horse-drawn wagon. Each one was affixed to the car by a single nut, and they were, for all engineering purposes, treated as a single unit.
The tires were about the width of a business card and provided roughly the same level of grip. On the upside, they were pretty darn tough. But, like everything else on a car, they would eventually wear out. At that point, you had to replace the tire and the wheel, even if the wheel was just fine.
Perlman knew there had to be a better way, and he found it.
His demountable tires (patent No. 1,052,270) worked pretty much like the ones on your car right now. A bead — that’s the inner rim of the tire — held the tire against a groove machined into the wheel. The friction of shallow notches kept the tire from rotating on the wheel, though some early applications used a cumbersome screw-clamp system.
The only downside was the tire-and-wheel assembly had to be balanced to prevent vibrations and ensure a smooth ride, but that wasn’t a big problem. Today no one thinks twice about it (except when they forget to get it done).
Perlman’s invention led to the adoption of pneumatic (inflated) tires, which provide much better performance. It also allowed automobile owners to choose their own wheels, which is one of the most common ways of customizing one’s ride.
From the U.S. Patent Office
From the U.S. Patent Office
2/5/1925 Ethyl Lead gas goes on sale
100% Leaded!!!
2/5/1970 AMC buys Kaiser Jeep
Now every knows AMC and that the Jeep went from there to become an part of Chrysler and now is technically part of Fiat, but not too many people, outside of Jeep collectors where it was before that time. Kaiser Jeep was created out of a merger between Kaiser-Frazer car builders and Willy’s Overland company. Willy’s Jeep was famous for the jeeps built to support WW II. Willy’s also made cars, but both companies (Willy’s and K/F) stopped making passenger cars in 1955 and continued to manufacture Jeeps, including the famous Jeep Wagoneer – the first soccer Mom vehicle, and the CJ, under the name Willy Motors. In 1963 they changed the name to Kaiser Jeep Corporation. After the AMC purchase the company Jeep Corporation was formed as a subsidiary of AMC.
2/5/1846 – The founder of Dunlop tires birthday – John Boyd Dunlop – Dreghorn, England
2/6/1951 – Kaiser introduces it’s Silver Dragon
The Silver Dragon or Dragon was a option package on what was actually just the Kaiser Manhattan. It had vinyl upholstery that simulated alligator and Kaiser was afraid that customers were shy away from the cars thinking actual alligator was used so they called it Dragon skin and the model was tag as “Dragon”.
Produced from 1951-1953
1953 Kaiser
2/7/1942 – U.S. Government “requests” (orders) auto makers to switch to wartime production and stop building cars.
2/7/1958 – The car world is introduced to the 600 Automatic Transmission – Dutch DAF
The first continuously variable transmission (automatic) developed by the Dutch car manufacturer DAF (although one was used in England circa 1923 – guess it wasn’t a big hit back then). DAF produced some ‘cute’ cars:
The 600
The car that made the automatic transmission popular.
1964, but in an era of cheap gasoline many motorists preferred a V-8. Thus, when GM found itself with more sixes than it needed, it sold the Buick V-6 rights and tooling to the Kaiser-Jeep Corp. in 1967. K-F named it the “Dauntless 225” and used it in …
“My goal was to build an expedition vehicle. I had been shopping for a truck to design and build for sustained off-road travel,” says Kevin Mackie of Milpitas, California. The story of how he ended up buying and building this ’69 Kaiser M715 began with …
Attention Australia, please just give us a moment here. We know that you are the undisputed brake stand and burnout kings of the planet. We’re not going to argue with you. Instead, we want to share this fine tire-shredding clip produced by the folks at …
That’s because Tesla (TSLA) has made a big leap in Consumer Reports’ latest brand perception survey. The electric carmaker is now the fifth best-perceived brand among American car owners, jumping from 11th last year. More traditional — and well known …
I have a bunch of other posts ready to publish..ok…fine but they are started…including Auto Factoids, The Bridgestone project, a couple of Drive By/Parking Lot Spot pieces but just had to stop and type a bit about Hess Trucks.
I recently got the latest issue of Hemmings Motor News and flipping through it I saw this article on Hess Gas Stations and the promotional toys they sell.
If you are from the North East you will have seen the Hess stations.
I remember these stations as a kid, always seemed bright and clean. I also remember getting the Hess trucks as gifts. We weren’t well off so they were usually a Christmas gift and I think we mainly got them from one set of grand parents. I remember playing with them inside and outside and they didn’t last very long and we never considered saving them.
This is the first model my father sent my son.
When my son was born my father began sending one every Christmas to him. He loved getting them and would play with them a bit, but that was about the time computers and gaming consoles became common place and began taking the place of playing, as we did when we were young. For 14 years my Dad would sent one every year. We still have all of them, even the 1982 pictured above (which is actually two years older than my son) original boxes and all. My son would play with them a bit and then we’d remove the batteries and put them back in box. They are all nicely packet and in the attic, ready for my son to pass on to his son/daughter.
They come in many different models – tankers, flat beds, 18 wheelers, police and others, and apparently are only available around Christmas time. I didn’t realize that until I read the Hemming article, that explains why I got them for Christmas gifts and my son as well.
Hess started the tradition in 1964. The article further state that Hess is dropping out of the gas station business (Remember when they were called ‘filling stations’ or ‘service stations’?) and will concentrate only on refining but the good news is they will keep the convenient stores and folks will be able to purchase the trucks at those location every holiday season. Oh yeah….they are available online WWW.HESSTOYTRUCK.COM .
Do you have a Hess Toy Truck collection? Drop us a note.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
Just saw a Hess gas station wow taking me all the way back to my childhood .. Hess trucks for days thanks gramma !
