Ebert on Studebaker: Thumbs Up

Thanks for the shout-out in the Chigaco Sun-Times, Bob. If you want another Golden Hawk, we’ll be happy to point you in the direction of a good Chicago-area mechanic who does know what he’s doing (he’ll tell you that it was supercharged, not turbocharged, by the way). It’s as though he had a Hemmings Classic Car column. Read: Roger Ebert’s Journal: I’ve got the sweetest set of wheels in town.

19/12/2008

elliptical wheels - innovative leap forward, or crackpot idea?

So we all have spent some time going over the Google-LIFE image archive by now, yes? If so, we might have come across the above unusual contraption, described as an “elliptical wheel Jeep,” in a photo taken by Bernard Hoffman in December 1950. And it probably made us quite uncomfortable: Who would put elliptical wheels on a Jeep, and why? Frustratingly, the photos are presented without captions, and I don’t have piles of old LIFE magazines and the time to flip through them...

17/12/2008

Elamites gots dubs!

Okay, truth be told, they’re almost 36 inches in diameter, far exceeding in size anything you’ll see outside of a SEMA booth, but when it comes to ancient wheeled vehicle history, you can’t go much further back than these bronze chariot wheels that Bonhams intends to auction off at their next antiquities sale October 15 at the New Bond Street saleroom in London. According to the Bonhams press release: Bonhams is selling a set of chariot wheels that last rolled around an...

03/10/2008

Eddie’s back in business after Ike; likes MREs

Eddie’s R/W/B Hornet SC/360 As Hurricane Ike pounded Texas and we started hearing the reports of damage to the Houston area, our thoughts turned to Eddie Stakes of planethoustonAMX.com, a friend of ours both here on the blog and in our magazines. Fortunately, Eddie and his family survived Ike with nary a scratch, as he recently informed us: Our electricity came on at 5:21pm this afternoon, and after 12 days, quite a ride. There are 1 in 4 Houstonians without power with Centerpoint still...

27/09/2008

Ensign in Quincy, a copper mining jeep-thing

Dan Pagel, one of Fitzgerald’s buddies, sent along some photos of this jeep-like vehicle he spotted in the weeds behind the Quincy copper mine in Hancock, Michigan, now a tourist spot in which you can take guided tours of the mines. We’re guessing it’s some sort of purpose-built vehicle, possibly for entering the mines for personnel and equipment transport, but we don’t know for sure because we’ve never seen anything like it. Full-floater axles indicates some...

22/07/2008

exclusive shots from the set of Fast and the Furious 5: The Al Capone Days

Virgil Drake of Lancaster, California, sent us these photos with some cryptic Post-It notes attached to them. Both, it appears, were in the midst of repaints for their roles in upcoming movies, though whether both are set to appear int he same movie he didn’t say. The first, a circa 1929 Hudson Super Six four-door [...]

23/02/2008

Edsel Ford?s hot rod - of course there?s no pre-auction estimate

Suffice it to say, anybody interested in buying the Bob Gregoire Gregorie-designed, ex-Edsel Ford, ex-Bill Warner one-of-a-kind 1934 Continental Series II Speedster at RM’s upcoming Amelia Island auction won’t have the challenge of bidding against me. Not that I wouldn’t love to own it, more because RM elected not to attach a pre-auction estimate in [...]

21/02/2008

Excelsior Executioner

If you’ve never read the autobiography of Indianapolis 500 and STP legend Andy Granatelli, “They Call Me Mister 500,” you’ve sadly missed a riotous good read, which includes some tragicomic retellings of big Andy’s formative years in Chicago. One of the tales involves an early motorized exploit during the Depression years aboard a used Henderson [...]

15/01/2008

Early alternative fuel vehicle?

Images courtesy Shorpy.com I was browsing last week on Shorpy (www.shorpy.com) looking at vintage photographs of just about anything under the sun when I came across these two images of Custer cars. The Custer car was an early alternative fuel car and you can see from the pictures that it looked as if it came from [...]

18/12/2007

Engine Swap Wednesday

Maybe–almost certainly–it’s because of his Supra LeMans (LeSupra, now) project, but Ralf Becker’s gone engine swap crazy, with a Lada-RB26DETT (Nissan Skyline GT-R); 1955 Chevy-Rolls Royce Merlin V12; and Chevrolet Camaro-Toyota Supra MK IV all featured on Chromjewelen (literally, “Chrome Jewels”). Oh it looks so wrong, but it feels so right…We’re actually going to feature the [...]

22/08/2007

El Diablo Ranchero stickero

Saw this one at last Thursday’s Hemmings car show. Photo came out a little fuzzy but you get the idea. Found this one at last week’s cruise-in on the drivers side fender of a really great-looking ‘56 Plymouth Savoy, hence the 230-cubic-inch reference. I could not find anything on the ‘net about whether this is an [...]

16/08/2007