Hemmings Loses a Friend

Justus Taylor (right) passed away on Saturday, January 3, 2008. Justus was one of those self-motivated Yankee geniuses that could’ve easily been an engineer, but was just as satisfied living in a one-room cabin, living on the few bucks he made making sandals. He raced BMW motorcycles competitively, he flew airplanes and was just a general enthusiast about everthing he was interested in. Managing Editor Nancy Bianco remembers him as being “larger than life.” In Justus’s...

07/01/2009

Happy New Year - here’s a planter made from a discarded Volkswagen

Sometimes, in the dead of winter, when the snow drifts up against the house, the wind howls loud as a freight train and the furnace is going through heating oil as if OPEC didn’t exist, you wish for sunnier days when the blooms in your Beetle-turned-flower-bed explode with color and the sun hangs in the sky like a baseball at the apex of a home run. Okay, so I was going through old photos the other day and thought I’d share this one from a few years back, taken outside Gary...

01/01/2009

Hemmings Speedster more updates

Well, we THOUGHT it was ready to race. Our speedster will not sit idly by this winter awaiting racing season. Master mechanic and Hemmings Motor News columnist Jim Howe discovered a few things that will need to be attended to before any serious racing is done next year. We pulled the wheels to send to Coker Tire for new rubber and found a few issues with the front axle. Judging from the diameter and length of the king pins, we determined the front axle to be from a 1937-’41 passenger...

17/12/2008

hast thou no shame? shoe company pilfers art car design

Photo via wardrobeoxygen.com So apparently the retailer Marshalls thought it’d be a great idea to create an art car in the shape of a stiletto to drum up attention for some shoe-shopping website they’re launching. Painted red, of course, to drum up attention. How this slipped under our radar, we don’t know: It appears Marshalls started the art car publicity campaign in September of last year and took it across the country over the last year-plus; it was spotted in D.C. and...

15/12/2008

HMX - it’s a coverup; interior progress

So I thought I’d get this one last shot of the entire Dynamat-covered interior of the HMX before I started covering it up. Even did the doors. Can’t see it, but I popped a layer on the underside of the roof as well. And then laid down some Dynaliner. Didn’t order a ton of Dynaliner, so I only really put it on the floors, and I mixed it up a bit, with 1/2-inch Dynaliner from the firewall to the rear seat and 1/4-inch Dynaliner from the rear seat back to the tailpanel. I...

08/12/2008

HMX - Ground control! Dynamat install, part 2

My fingers are slowly turning into hamburger. I shouldn’t be trusted with scissors and razor blades in the first place, but when you cut Dynamat, you’re left with a very sharp edge that’ll slice ya if you’re not careful. Oh, and if you really want this stuff to stick - especially to irregularly shaped areas or areas that aren’t perfectly smooth - you have to heat it to the point where you’re burning your fingertips every time you’re applying a...

28/11/2008

Hidden Collection

For nearly 50 years, old, unwanted cars, and some trucks, were being stashed away on a farm in upstate New York, in the hope of one day opening an automotive museum. The current owner, who is the grandson of the original collector, recently gave me a tour of the place, and allowed me to take these photos. Inside the dry building resides lots of noteworthy cars, all of which are in need of some form of restoration but none of which are rot boxes. There’s talk of possibly putting some or all of...

25/11/2008

HCCR, episode 12: We’re back! Report from SEMA, roundtable on collector car prices

Yes, we took a hiatus from Hemmings Collector Car Radio, our in-house podcast, over the summer and most of the fall as things got busy in the office. We wanted to make sure we were presenting the best collector car magazines on the planet before we spent some time in front of the microphones. But the good news is that the hiatus wasn’t permanent, and we’ve put together Hemmings Collector Car Radio episode 12 for your listening pleasure. In this episode, we discuss the current state...

20/11/2008

Hemmings Speedster revisited

Driver’s side bracket already starting to break Both of the taillight brackets on the speedster were made of flimsy sheetmetal, and with the suspension system as it is and the type of driving it will be doing, we realized these brackets weren’t going to cut the mustard for long. Browsing through our Model A parts catalog, we found some heavy-duty cast iron pedestals that fit the “teacup-style” taillight assemblies. These brackets (Ford #A14372B) were used on...

20/11/2008

HMX - Dynamat install

If you’ve read any car enthusiast magazine in the last decade, you know about Dynamat and you’ve seen one or two or a dozen tech stories on how to install it. The company has some good PR folk, first popularizing it among the bass-thumping crowd, then pitching it to the rest of us car nuts. Doesn’t hurt that ol’ Chip Foose has lent his visage to it as well. So I’m giving it a shot. So with a new star bit, I continued the interior removal that I started last time...

19/11/2008

HMX - interior gutting, seat belts strike back

Made some time the other day to start yanking the old, faded, ripped, stained and generally abused diaper-brown carpet from the AMX. Yes, it was that crummy, but I wanted to wait until after I was sure it ran and drove well and it was in the garage for the winter before I started to tear into it. Ideally, I’d have liked to paint the whole car first, but this has never been an “ideally” project to begin with, right? Made some decent progress on the back half. You Southwest...

12/11/2008

Hemmings Speedster update - skip-tracking

As I mentioned previously, the speedster had a few issues that needed taking care of before race season. The biggest concern was the ignition coil. Jim Menneto said the car seemed to have a skip when he was test-driving it so we started poking around. We thought at first it might be because of the three butt connectors within a foot of each other on the distributor lead wire, but determined that even though they were pretty cobby-looking, they were all still tight and electrons were still...

10/11/2008

Hemmings Speedster sees a few new changes

New company lettering and hood emblems have been added. As Dan mentioned earlier, Hemmings’ newest addition, the 1932 Ford speedster, has been raced before and doesn’t need a whole lot done to it mechanically. But since it has arrived, the race decals from earlier events have been removed and new gold lettering has been added. The hood panels also lacked the emblems that were removed at some point before the car got here. We identified what was there by the outline of the emblem...

06/11/2008

Hey Corvette folks… What would you do?

This dreams-do-come-true story appeared in the Hemmings Motor News e-mailbag recently. Here’s the unmolested account directly from the Hemmings true believer who sent it in… “What’s better than a barn find? How about, preserved under a Ponderosa Pine tree! The second owner of this early ‘54 Vette drove this car to a friend’s house to have the seats reupholstered and took them out, set an old wooden Pepsi pop bottle case in place of the driver’s seat and drove it home and parked it...

31/10/2008

HMX - headliner time

Now that the AMX is running and driving, I might wanna start to consider making it look good. After all, Jack Carroll showed me just how good this car will look when it’s done, so I might as well make the real thing live up to the hype. I’m still undecided on how exactly I want to approach the paint and body work (either do it myself, or be lazy and have a shop do it), but I have a complete black AMX interior that I definitely can start to install myself. Only thing that I...

24/10/2008

HMX - hoodpins add that certain delinquent flavor to the car, wouldn’t you agree?

Other projects around the house have nabbed time away from the AMX the last few weeks, but I did manage to get the AMX out and drive it around a bit over the weekend before dumping some Sta-Bil into the tank and sticking it in the garage for the winter. Also finally decided it was time to put the hood back on, which meant I had to address the issue of latching it. You see, the stock hood release cable for AMCs of this era sucked. The plastic handle always snapped off in your hand, leaving you...

14/10/2008

Horrified fascination: Mustangcycle

It’s called Schadenfreude, the guilty pleasure of seeing something awful. It’s why we gawk at car wrecks, or laugh at a football to the groin. It’s what we get when we look at Autofix’s Australian ‘67 Mustang Trike. Not many details offered, or necessary, really, beyond that “The custom made front end houses a 289 cubic inch Windsor V8 backed by a C4 auto transmission with a 9 inch diff out the back.” Rear window graphics suggest its known as...

04/10/2008

Hazzard rule No. 346: a CJ-7 cannot be the General Lee

Seriously. Associate editor Mark McCourt attended the Bud Ward auction down in Little Rock, Arkansas, this past weekend and came across this CJ-7 done up in our favorite orange paint scheme. “I think they were a bit confused…” Mark said. Indeed. If you love the Dukes enough to pay homage to them through your vehicle, and you own a CJ, wouldn’t it make more sense to clone Daisy’s Dixie? Of course, it is rather attractive in that color. BTW, according to Bud Ward,...

02/10/2008

HMX - finally, a VSS that works

So I thought I had the whole Vehicle Speed Sensor thing figured out a year ago. Turns out, after actually driving the car, that I was wrong. The 1987-1990 Cherokee/Wrangler VSS doesn’t send the proper signal for the 1991-1995 Chrysler fuel injection system that I’m using. Which meant the engine wanted to stall at every stop sign unless I very carefully eased my foot off the gas. So I needed another VSS that provides the correct signal as well as a mechanical output for the...

29/09/2008

Hot GRANADA Action

The weekend’s almost here–time to play with toy cars. Northern Lite: Treat Me Better via Macdroitwich

12/09/2008

Have you REALLY tried to save gas?

Things kind of come around again after a while, don’t they? From University of North Texas Digital Library. Where they should know a thing or two about gas.

05/09/2008

Holden celebrates 60 years of unique Australian vehicles; Americans: “What?”

Holden 48-215, the first Australian-produced Holden automobile While GM pretty much snoozes through its own centennial, it’s also given very little play to another rather important anniversary this year: the 60th of the Holden 48-215. Most Americans pay little attention to the modest car, based on a discarded post-war Chevrolet design, but to Australians and New Zealanders, the 48-215 marked the (relative) independence of their own automotive industry. Holden, of course, has been around...

02/09/2008

Heather’s dirty little secret

She didn’t know how to drive a car with a manual transmission until Saturday, when we went behind the local Wal-Mart for some lessons. She picked it up astoundingly quick, however, enough to the point where she drove the Midget in to work this afternoon. I don’t think I’ll get to drive it much now. Of course, now I want a tiny convertible to putt around in. Darn this ADD of mine.

25/08/2008

HMX - an incredible gift from a talented artist

Longtime HCC readers may recall Jack Carroll’s 1939 La Salle coupe from the March 2005 issue. Stunning car, and a great owner, so it was my pleasure to photograph the car (longtime Hemmings Motor News readers may recall that it graced the cover and illustrated a Buyer’s Guide in the July 2006 issue of that magazine). While a capable restorer, Jack’s just as talented an artist. He spent several years designing interiors for AMC, then later founded Carroll Design. Now...

25/08/2008

Hot Wheels 40th anniversary tour gets underway today

To celebrate 40 years of 99-cent die-cast cars that immediately smacked into other 99-cent die-cast cars once freed from their packages, Hot Wheels is hitting the road on a cross-country tour, starting today. The road trip begins at the El Segundo, California, headquarters of the toy company, stops in Bonneville on Thursday (Hot Wheels is sponsoring Speedweek this year), then lands in Speed, Kansas; Indianapolis; and Detroit before hitting the final destination of Watkins Glen on September...

19/08/2008

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