whaddayaknow, somebody actually did build the Speedball Special

Thanks to Geoff Hacker for pointing this one out to us. Many moons ago, we linked to a Mechanix Illustrated article with plans for the “MI Speedball Special,” a wooden-bodied, motorcycle-engined sports car, and wondered if anybody actually followed through with those plans. It turns out that at least one person did, and the St. Louis Car Museum now has it for sale over on their website. According to their description, a West Coast boat builder constructed it in 1959 using a 1952...

24/11/2008

Woulda, coulda, shou- yeah, it’s better I didn’t

I don’t think my CJ/YJ/TJ Jeep phase is over. It’s just on hiatus for a variety of reasons that you or anyone else could care less about. Meanwhile Dan carries the Rubicon-proven, built-in-Toledo torch around Hemmings HQ (which by the way had nothing to do with the fire we had in our break room recently) and I still kick tires whenever I see a Jeep for sale. One of the more interesting kicking sessions came last year at the Bennington swap meet where this ’53 Willys CJ-3B, complete with...

14/11/2008

Woulda, coulda, shou… yeah, it’s better I didn’t

I don’t think my CJ/YJ/TJ Jeep phase is over. It’s just on hiatus for a variety of reasons that you or anyone else could care less about. Meanwhile Dan carries the Rubicon-proven, built-in-Toledo torch around Hemmings HQ (which by the way had nothing to do with the fire we had in our break room recently) and I still kick tires whenever I see a Jeep for sale. One of the more interesting kicking sessions came last year at the Bennington swap meet where this ’53 Willys CJ-3B, complete with...

14/11/2008

Wedgie gets new shoes

Apologies to Geoff Hacker for cribbing the title of the post from his email to me, but how can you not want to say wedgie? Wedgie wedgie wedgie wedgie. There, I got it out of my system. Actually, Wedgie’s actually a circa 1975 Urbacar, and Geoff’s proudly showing off the new wheels and tires for it, which Geoff said measure 145 R10 68T. If the Urbacar looks slightly like those build-it-yourself kits you’d see advertised in the back of magazines in the 1970s, that’s...

14/11/2008

Wind it up

You may have already noticed that at Hemmings, we think Jeeps are way cool, everything from the early Bantam prototypes to the Grand Wagoneers that you still see in great numbers in, mostly, Texas. Because I spotted Matt Litwin doing culls from the thousands of photos (literally) that we shot at this spring’s AutoFair in Charlotte, I decided to grab some action, too. Here’s something I grabbed in the car corral, although I can’t recall if it was actually for sale or simply...

03/11/2008

Wednesday stumper: Not a T

We’re finishing up a Model T Centennial issue of Hemmings Classic Car this week, and among the images we were using was one from the Library of Congress, which they described as a “row of completed “Tin Lizzies” or Model T’s come off the Ford assembly line.” Except, upon further reflection, it isn’t. Now, we’re not sure what the cars are. We’re leaning toward a GM product and I’d originally thought Cadillac based on the cowl lamps,...

17/09/2008

Wednesday stumper: your trophy child

This photo commemorates an event 100 years ago…which Cadillac executive is this, and why is he being awarded? The question is a hint, and there’s more in the large photo.

11/09/2008

Wayne Cherry to bring the Equus to Glenmoor

Recently heard from David Schultz, HCC columnist and executive director of the Glenmoor Gathering, who informed me that Wayne Cherry, the retired chief of design at GM, will appear at this year’s Glenmoor as the grand marshal of the event and will bring along the last concept car he designed while head of GM styling in Europe, the 1978 Vauxhall Equus two-seat roadster, which Cherry has held on to for the last 30 years. According to David: The car was an elegant but simple two-seater...

26/08/2008

with kidneys of steel, two guys tackle cross-country Jeep trek

Why is it that people decide to make cross-country runs in some of the most brutal, uncomfortable vehicles around? Maybe it’s the challenge. Or maybe we just don’t pay attention to the folks who make the trip in Imperials or Cadillacs. Paul and Evan, a couple Virginia-based flatfender Jeep guys, decided they’d take on the challenge, but they’d throw in a twist. They both started the restoration of their flatties in December of last year with the goal of turning their...

06/08/2008

Where oh where did that Keeton go?

The real question is actually, “Where did all the Keetons go?” When I ran a two-part series on the Car-Nation in Classic Car this spring, it didn’t ask more questions than it answered, but there were a few loose ends—like what happened to the Keetons? The Car-Nation cyclecar was built by the American Voiturette Company, which also adsorbed Forrest Keeton’s company when he ran out of money in 1913. Voiturette went belly-up about nine months later, but while at least five little Car-Nations...

21/07/2008

what was that about little cars at the Hemmings cruise-ins?

So was the small-car showing at the first Hemmings cruise-in two weeks ago just a blip on the radar? Perhaps: Last night’s turnout included just the regular number of vintage Beetles and British cars, though we did see a remarkably nice 1965 Midget that Richard Delorey drove up from Clifton Park, New York, more than an hour distant. We did note a few more motorcycles than usual, including the above 1969 Enfield, parked between a 1940s Indian and a 1980s Honda. We also noted more, well,...

30/05/2008

What was once scrap metal…

A swap meet is like an open invitation for you to get into trouble. My understanding wife has, over the years, has not only accepted the fact that I AM going to be coming home with something, but will actually accompany me whenever possible. I suspect it’s to ensure that my purchases are small enough to fit in the trunk rather than an open trailer, so far. If you’re a regular reader of Hemmings Motor News, then no doubt you’ve read our coverage of the Zephyrhills event back in...

29/05/2008

Where’s the beef?

Right under the hood, actually, and we’re talking USDA Prime strip steak here. The guy in the apron and chef’s hat is Emil Onzo, of Milton, New York, which is outside Saratoga Springs. What you’re looking at here is not an engine fire, but what Emil simply calls a “carbecue.” He used to be an auto tech before surviving nearly fatal respiratory problems - a consequence of volunteering to deliver relief supplies at Ground Zero following 9/11 - and then switching to...

13/05/2008

we found the big brother to Fitzgerald’s Honda

We recently partnered up with the folks over at CR4, the Engineer’s Place, for some content sharing. It seems engineers like to discuss old cars - who knew? For all you regulars here, you won’t see much of a change other than some new names in the comments for each post. And I think some of these guys are all right. For example, Warren Wilson, who runs one of the blogs at CR4, posted photos of the resto process for his Honda CA160 motorcycle. If you’re thinking, “Hey,...

29/04/2008

world’s oldest Rambler dealer now a rescue mission

It seems our recent post about former AMC dealerships has knocked loose a few memories among our readers, as witnessed by the excellent comments on that post. Reader Paul Bellefeuille shared the post with his friend Al Brodie in Tennessee, and Al was able to provide an update on the Knoxville Motor Company, touted in the postcard above (nabbed from Eddie Stakes’ site) as the world’s oldest Rambler dealer. I drove by the address 413 North Gay Street and here’s what I found....

29/04/2008

would you like some hybrid gas-electric engine technology with your milk delivery, ma’am?

On the heels of the mystery bus from Kansas that we posted about the other day came word from Phil DeSanto about a pair of similarly styled Walker Dynamotive delivery trucks that he found languishing in the NATMUS Museum in Auburn, Indiana. Chicago-based Walker built electric delivery trucks from 1906 to 1942, but apparently also built hybrid these little-known gas-electric drive delivery vans in the late 1930s. While looking around amongst donated vehicles on the lower level, I spotted a...

25/04/2008

when my hair was black…

Research into 1950s fiberglass cars, both kit and independent production, sorely lacks. There’s a little bit on the Kellison, a little bit on the LaDawri, and not much beyond. Thus, we can understand why Stephen O’Brien doesn’t know much about the fiberglass-bodied car in the above picture, even though he owned it for a brief time in the mid-1950s. In the 1955-56 time frame, when my hair was black and I was an instructor pilot at Williams AFB in Phoenix Arizona, I saw a very...

22/04/2008

Where was Burt Lancaster?

This is the kind of stuff that gave Atlantic City a bad name more than mobbed-up casino unions and a debauchery-based economy ever could. At the not-long-ago G. Potter King auctions, we spotted this mess in the optimistically named Car Salon. Nowhere on it was an identifying producer’s badge - maybe the principals went into the Witness Protection Program - but clearly, it’s a conversion based on a 1970s Corvette intended to evoke the kind of faded Gatsby glory that A.C. once...

17/04/2008

what I saw at Daytona - tether cars and a mystery car

Take a few days off around here and you spend the next week catching up. Weekend before last I spent a day hoofing around the infield at Daytona for the spring swap and show. Not a bad event, though certainly not a huge event. I did, however, come across this small table of tether cars (tethered cars, for you linguistic detail-oriented types), including a Dooling Frog (or, at least, a Dooling Frod lookalike) and assorted parts. No price tags, though, and no vendor to interrogate. And then...

07/04/2008

what a way to open the drag racing season

We curse the weather constantly here in New England and try to wiggle in at least a few days of racing during the summer month, but we can at least be glad we’re not trying to race in the U.K. According to Eurodragster.com and Roger Gorringe’s photos, the season opener at Santa Pod, one of [...]

25/03/2008

Which is faster?

Okay, a simple question: If Batman and Robin and the Duke boys had a race, who would win? The Batmobile and the General Lee — replicas, not the originals — went head-to-head at the Barrett-Jackson auction this month out in Scottsdale, and when the dust had settled, the winner of the dollars-and-cents race was clear: Dodge, [...]

24/01/2008

where did all the streamlined beer trucks go?

1941 Dodge COE The other day, I mentioned Donald F. Wood’s American Beer Trucks, a book from 1999, and alluded to my disappointment with it. I had missed it when it first came out, and didn’t decide that I had to have it until just recently, so thanks to the book-finding efforts of Jim Donnelly, I [...]

24/11/2007

who needs Clydesdales?

From that far-off land of California, our West Coast editor, Jeff Koch, sent us the following pictures and the briefest of explanations. Apparently, while shooting a Datsun for Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car, Koch met a fella named Alexander Ramirez “quite by chance” and discovered that Alex owns and appears to be in the process of [...]

21/11/2007

what?s in a name? more on the Packard resurrection

After receiving word that the Packard Motor Car Company’s for sale, I wondered what exactly the Packard name was doing since 1958. Who owned it, what were they doing with it, that sort of thing. Turns out, for almost 20 years, nobody owned it. Roy Gullickson, the president of the Packard Motor Car Company, filled [...]

03/10/2007

Wheels Through Time Museum

A few of the board track racers displayed at Wheels Through Time museum. Had a chance to spend a few hours at this museum in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, while on vacation. One of the best motorcycle museums I have been to, and I have been to quite a few. The owner, Dale Walksler, was running [...]

25/09/2007

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