Wanna Limo

This 1940 Chrysler Windsor business coupe for sale on Hemmings.com is fun to look at not because it is perfect, but because it is not. With its no reasonable offer refused price singing like the sirens of Capri, who among could resist this apparently mostly rustless parched project? Peering into the project car oracle is an activity at once enjoyable and fraught with peril. From the seller:

Flathead 6, 3-speed on the tree with pullout overdrive, little rust – nothing major, mechanically good, mostly original, wiring will need to be completely redone, however. This car is restorable, and not a parts car, $6,800.

Spending a pile of money on a car requires no special talent. Taking home a project car requires fortitude, money, a vision of a finished car, and more money. Possibly Bondo. While many may look onto this Chrysler only one will end up with the coupe. The question is, what would you do with this Chrysler?

 

You may recall The Prisoner, which aired on CBS in the late 1960s: actor/director/producer/creator/theme-music-writer Patrick McGoohan’s highly allegorical tale concerning the retirement/imprisonment of a spy who knew too much. Though set in a place where motorized transportation was hardly the norm – the village of his capture did have boundaries, after all – two iconic automobiles littered the joint. First was KAR 120C, the BRG/yellow Lotus Seven shown in the opening credits. But Mini Mokes, the little open-bodied trucklet-tourers using Mini mechanicals, were also used as taxis in the series (“local service only”) and were painted white with red and white striped canvas tops, as well as the Village’s ubiquitous Pennyfarthing bicycle image on the hood. Four Mokes are said to have been converted by Wood & Pickett during the summer of 1966, for filming duty. Perhaps you had one as a Dinky toy around that time.

Well, top Prisoner fan website The Unmutual has received news that one of the original Prisoner Mokes, believed to have been owned by someone involved in the production, has been discovered, disheveled but mostly complete and intact, in a barn in Holland. A production error showed a U.K.-registration HLT 709C license plate (rather than a generic “taxi” plate in the series’ trademark Albertus font) in the “Living in Harmony” episode which matches the one on the Moke found in storage. It was largely complete, missing only rear seats, spare tire and cover, front seat covers and interior trim.

 

A few weeks back, we brought you the story of a 1979 Pontiac 10th Anniversary Trans Am that was still at the dealership that had taken delivery of the car when new. The car had never been sold, never been titled, and showed just 6.7 miles on the odometer.

The dealership was Kitterman Motor Company of Corydon, Indiana, which had been family-owned for decades and had remained a small-town dealership for that entire time. After running the story, we received quite a bit of feedback, including a number of responses from residents of the area who remembered the car, many stating that it had been in that showroom as long as they could remember.

Indeed, as more feedback came in, it seemed as though the car was something of a local celebrity, and many responders mentioned daydreaming of cruising the Anniversary model through town with the T-tops out and the stereo cranked, living out their versions of the all-American teenage fantasy.

Sadly, Kitterman Motor Company had come to the end of the road, and its assets were to be sold off at auction, a sale handled by Beckort Auctions and highlighted by the Trans Am. Speculators ran hot and cold, with some feeling that the car, even in perfect condition, wasn’t worth all that much. We looked through our sources and came up with a top condition value of somewhere in the neighborhood of $45,000-$50,000, which took into account the “T/A 6.6″ engine, a Pontiac 400 as opposed to the “6.6-Litre” Olds 403 that was more common; the Pontiac also mandated a four-speed manual in 1979. Our estimate did not, however, account for the extreme originality of this particular car, or the fact that there were so few miles.

In the end, the auction managed to draw $85,000 for the showroom ‘Bird, the high bid coming from an as-yet unnamed buyer who is reportedly a resident of the Hoosier state himself. Perhaps local fans of the T/A will take solace in knowing that the car will being staying in Indiana, and at that price, it’s likely that the car’s condition will be well preserved. For more information on the sale, go to www.beckortauctions.com. You can also see a video of the Trans Am sale, shot by YouTuber jstepro below.

 

Our friend Charles Beesley is back at it with more photos of unusual cars. This time, it’s one we already know, but worth taking another look at: Lou Fageol’s twin-engine Porsche 356, shot in August 1953 at Paine Field in Everett, Washington, during the Seattle Seafair SCCA races. This would be the predecessor of Fageol’s more radical Twin-Porsche, another dual-engined car that Fageol raced in 1954 and 1955. It apparently debuted at the Seafair races and DNF’d with clutch problems there, but Fageol did finish as high as third in subsequent races and campaigned it through 1959 with George Peterson (unless, that is, the record has this car and the Twin-Porsche confused).

 

Any land-speed racing historian worth his salt (get it? salt? haha!) can tell you how organized drag racing evolved out of dry lakes racing, when two or more cars would venture out side-by-side, rather than in turn, as land-speeders do today. In the aftermath of the hotly contested battles for the ultimate land-speed record, Gary Gabelich proposed a return to the side-by-side land-speed race format in an exhibition match with Craig Breedlove on the Bonneville Salt Flats. At the time, Gabelich still held the world land-speed record at 622.407 MPH in the flying mile, and everybody still had reservations about hitting the speed of sound (it wouldn’t be until 1997 – 25 years later – that the first supersonic land-speed run would take place). Mechanix Illustratedoutlined the proposed match race in its November 1972 issue, though in hindsight, the article was likely just a clothed funding pitch for both men’s racing efforts – national attention to the sport had waned, sponsorships were on the decline, and racing was becoming more expensive. We don’t see evidence that the Gabelich-Breedlove side-by-side race ever progressed beyond these drawings, thanks to both the lack of funding and Gabelich’s severe injuries from the drag racing accident mentioned toward the end of the article. Nor do we see evidence that a similar proposed match race between Art Arfons and Billy Meyer, to take place a few years later, ever took place.

 

Inspired by Jim Donnelly’s recent profile of Chrysler turbine pioneer George Huebner in the October 2010 issue of Hemmings Classic Car, Dave Collins thought we’d like to know about a very unique turbine-powered vehicle he personally had some experience with: a 1961 American-LaFrance pumper truck. Dave recalls that it was one of three that American-LaFrance built that year and the only one shipped to the East Coast – specifically, to Mount Vernon, Virginia, where Dave worked at the time as a professional firefighter. Dave thus had the chance to man the wheel of the pumper many times, even once driving it as far as Washington, D.C., to participate in a special display of turbine-powered vehicles. Dave writes:

It is a 1961 900-series American-LaFrance, 1,000 GPM pumper. The engine was made by Boeing Aircraft. It weighed approximately 330 lbs. and gave us approximately 330 blown horsepower. If you note in the picture the clearance between the top of the tire and the front fender opening speaks to how light the engine was. The chrome stack that sorta looks like something off a steamship was the exhaust stack. The engine was rather unique in that it had an air intake at the front axle. There was an intake impeller, then two fireboxes, and then a second impeller. The first and second impellers were directly connected to each other by a single shaft. There was a third impeller inches from the second one, with no direct connection. The burning fuel in the fireboxes turned numbers 1 and 2 impellers. The thrust coming off #2 would turn #3. That 3rd impeller was connected to a gear-reduction box. Connected to the gear-reduction box was a normal flywheel and clutch and five-speed transmission. Since there was no direct connection between #2 and #3 impellers, you could put the transmission in gear, hold the brake, and let the clutch out until you were ready to move, then let your foot off the brake and roll down the road. The gear-reduction box was needed due to the fact that the engine idled at 19 THOUSAND. Top RPM was 39,000. The starter and igniters brought the engine to 10,000 RPM. At that point, incoming fuel was ignited by what was already in there burning. Under normal driving, we came out of the building starting in 5th gear because if you did normal shifting, you lost too many RPM’s between each shift, and therefore using 5th gear got you to top speed quicker. Lower gear starts were more for hills. Sometimes, when starting the engine, you would get a hot start; therefore, flame came out the exhaust stack. Consequently, we had to install asbestos on the ceiling above the pumper. Also, the heat from the exhaust would break the window panes in the door in the wintertime, so we changed the center panes to heat-resistant glass. Engine fuel was kerosene. The apparatus was extremely fun to drive. At the time of purchase, the engine was a $10,000 option.

A big drawback was maintenance. If we had a problem, we had to fly a Boeing mechanic in to do the repairs and put him up in a motel. For one trip, he decided to stay in our bunk-room, and naturally, it turned out to be a busy time, and we ran all night, so he didn’t get any sleep.

San Francisco’s pumper was basically the same as this one. Seattle had theirs in a Tiller ladder-truck.

This was kept in service for about 10 years, but not all of that as a turbine. The fuel control governor went out on it probably in 1966-’67. The cost would have been $3,000 at that time to replace it. The fuel control governor was basically a carburetor, but needless to say, more complicated. Engine maintenance was starting to be cost-prohibitive, especially with having to fly in a mechanic from Boeing each time. When the turbine was removed, a Continental inline six-cylinder was its replacement. The turbine was sold to a racer in California. Eventually, the pumper ended up at our academy as a training piece for the recruits before being sold at auction.

Thanks, Dave!

UPDATE (24.September 2010): Dave also sent us this simplified drawing of the turbine that he sketched to give us a better idea of what was powering the fire engine.

 

In the year and a half since we first got a glimpse of the Pinto Air Freight Crosley mini-semi (if “semi” is the prefix for half, then would this be a quarter-truck?), we’ve learned that it was built in the 1950s by John Giordano Sr. and Biagio R. Pinto; that it resided in a junkyard in Middlesex, New Jersey, when the photos were taken; and that it’s not for sale (drat!!). We also were sent this video showing the Crosley more in depth, including the Chevrolet four-cylinder engine that had been swapped in for the Crosley ‘banger.

Also since then, Tony Pearson sent us the photo at the top of this post, showing the Crosley in happier times.

I think know I need to build one of these some day. Powered, of course, by a Crosley V-8.

UPDATE (1.October 2010): Tony informed us the photo above was taken around 1973 at the Pinto Trucking Service corporate office in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania.

 

Hemmings has readers in Australia who are clearly well versed in what U.S. car enthusiasts are up to.

Meanwhile, I’m woefully ignorant about Australian cars, with the exception of the two (I know of) that have been sold here: the 2008-2009 Pontiac G8, aka Holden VE Commodore, and the 2004-2006 Pontiac GTO, aka the Holden Monaro coupe.

I recently received a press release from Sotheby’s Australia, written in uh, Australianese (Australianish?): “Sotheby’s Australia is pleased to present a special exhibition from November 12-15 of a select group of important collectors’ motor cars by public tender,” (Translation: Sotheby’s Australia is conducting a collector-car auction November 12-15.) I thought it might be a chance to teach myself something.

Sure enough, one of the consignments is a 1987 Brock VL Director, which Sotheby’s tells me is “arguably, the most exciting and sought-after car ever built in Australia.”

Prior to the G8 and the GTO, I would’ve thought that owning the most exciting and sought-after car built in Australia would be like being the skinniest kid at fat camp or the tallest of the Seven Dwarfs. But now I know better. And this Director sure has an interesting story to tell.

The Brock VL Director was a product of Holden Dealer Team Special Vehicles, a successful venture founded by Australian auto racing legend, the late Peter Geoffrey Brock. HDT built modified high-performance versions of Holden street cars and sold them through special Holden dealers similar to the way Carroll Shelby sold Shelby G.T. 350s and 500s in the 1960s.

The Director should’ve been Brock’s crowning achievement, equipped to take on Europe’s best sedans with the buyer’s choice of a 4.9- or 5.6-liter V-8; T-5 manual or GM four-speed automatic; Corvette disc brakes; 16×8 Momo or Simmons wheels; Recaro seats; a Momo steering wheel; optional independent rear suspension and a 21-piece body cladding kit that screamed, “I’m from the 1980s!” louder than a Men At Work concert shirt.

But there was one feature that Holden didn’t like about the Director, and that was Brock’s DB Energy Polarizer. The Energy Polarizer, Brock claimed, was a device that would align the car’s molecules and mysteriously improve its handling, allow it to run on low-grade fuel, and so on. Apparently, Holden wasn’t convinced of all this, and tried to prevent Brock from selling the car, saying they wanted more time to test the Director.

Brock went ahead and unveiled the car anyway, against Holden’s wishes, and Holden pulled all of its support, ending Brock’s factory-backed racing efforts and perhaps his chances of becoming a world-class tuner. Without Holden, Brock went on to build only nine Directors.

 

When Dan spotted a resilient wheel at Hershey recently, it was a real treat for me, because I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of these pre-war wheels with their own suspension; I even wrote a brief history of themin Hemmings earlier this year. After considerable research, I came to the conclusion that the idea originated with one Joseph H. Hardwick of Cleveland, Tennessee, who filed what appeared to be the first patent (#990,649) for a spring wheel in 1910.

But the fall 2010 newsletter of the Horseless Carriage Foundation has blown that notion right out of the water. The issue, with period content drawn from 1907 for the fall theme, quotes from the January 16, 1907,Horseless Age:

VOORHEES RUBBER MANUFACTURING COMPANY,
Bostwick Avenue, Jersey City, N. J., show materials for making rubber tires. At this stand is shown the new Pullwin Wheel, tires for which are made by the Voorhees Company. This wheel is something of a novelty; it is the invention of Herbert S. Pullwin, and put on the market by the Pullwin Wheel Company, of Meriden, Conn. The wheel is of rather small diameter, with a steel rim of channel section, sides extending out. A floating rim of channel section, whose sides extend in and of such a diameter as to slide over the wheel proper, takes the road shocks. Between these two rims are some twenty-eight nests of spiral springs, the small spring within the large to take the slight shocks before engaging the large spring.

And sure enough, there it is, an even earlier take on the resilient wheel.

With Pullwin’s name to work with, I found a slightly earlier mention of his invention in the October 25, 1906,The Automobile, with these disheartening words:

The idea of using spring wheels to give resiliency necessary to carry an automobile comfortably over rough roads, instead of using pneumatic tires, has occurred to many  inventors, and many different applications have been patented, but great difficulty has been experienced in practical work.

Are you kidding me? These were a common idea in ’06? Why did I find nothing in my patent and literature searches last time? Now I was beginning to wonder if they predated the pneumatic tire itself, which started to become common in automobiles in 1903 or 1904.

The description continues:

One of the latest of these, and one that the manufacturers state to be thoroughly practical and to have been well tried out in actual road work, is the H. S. Pullman patent spring wheel, built by the Pullwin Wheel Company, of 37 Colony Street, Meriden, Conn. The accompanying illustrations show the construction of this ingenious wheel quite clearly.

The ordinary wood wheel has a steel rim, and over this there is a steel channel or rim which is normally held in a position concentric with the fixed rim by spiral springs, but which is permitted to move against the springs when the weight of the car is resting on the wheel. Driving stresses are transmitted through four steel studs which project through the rim of the wheel and carry hardened steel rolls which engage with crossbars on the inner side of the outer rim. The effect of the whole arrangement is that of an inner wheel separated by springs from an outer wheel. A rubber cushion covers the outer rim or tire and this can be renewed with ease when it becomes worn. The springs used are of specially tempered steel wire and are exceedingly durable. They are copper plated and enameled to prevent rusting and are scientifically proportioned to their work. As a practical test, some of these springs were compressed and extended to their full capacity 1,500,000 times, the manufacturers state, without perceptible decrease in their efficiency.

Anyway, back I went to my studies, and discovered I’d committed one of a researcher’s cardinal sins: Once I had what I thought was a cutoff date, I truncated my investigations, and stopped looking earlier than 1910. It turns out I was off by at least a century.

In America, I was quickly able to go back another 25 years. While the notion of using spring wheels for carriages, bicycles and trains had apparently been kicking around for years, (Englishman) Thomas Lake Aveling’s 1886 US patent 342,314 for a “Wheel for Road-Engines,” appears to be the ancestor of what I think of as the “modern” automobile resilient wheel in America.

But that’s the colonies. Starting from first principles, I easily pushed the date back to 1827, when the Society of Engineers (London) published a treatise On Elastic Railway Wheels in their 1865 Journal, and mentioned in passing,

The idea of an elastic wheel is by no means new. Patent office records show that with the first notion of propelling carriages by the adhesion of the wheels on which they rested; men sought to increase that adhesion by enlarging the surface in contact with the ground, either by using a very broad wheel, or by adopting certain expedients which would permit the wheel to depart slightly from a true circular shape, and become more or less oval. The walls of this room would hardly afford space for the illustration of these schemes. I have, therefore, confined myself to the illustration of those only which are in practical every-day use, and I shall merely glance at the past history of the elastic wheel theory at present. James Neville, a clever London engineer, appears to have been the first person to take out a patent for the introduction of elasticity into wheels. This patent is dated January 13th, 1827, for an improved steam carriage for running on common roads. The driving tyres are to be made from 5 in. to 6 in. wide. When the carnage is intended to ascend very steep hills, elastic steel plates, about 18 in. long, and the same width as the tyre, are to be attached to the peripheries of the driving wheels. These plates are to be made rough on the under surface by means of projecting steel screw heads, and they are to be affixed at one end to the tyre by counter-sunk screws, so that when not compressed they will form tangents to the circumference of the wheel. The elasticity of these plates will enable them, says the patentee, to assume the circular form of the wheel when leaving the ground, while their extended surface will prevent the wheels from slipping.

At this point I felt I was getting back toward the ancestor of all self-propelled road vehicles, the 1769 Cugnot steam tractor. With no earliest date in sight, I started to get a little closer still, back to a difficult-to-follow argument in the pages of an 1825 issue The Repertory of Patent Inventions, where it appears one Rev. Moses Isaacs has been issued a patent “for improvements in machinery, which, when kept in motion by any suitable power or weight, is applicable to obviate concession by means of preventing counteraction, and by which the friction is converted into a useful power for propelling carriages on land, vessels on water, and giving motion to machinery,” a patent which included a spring wheel. Unfortunately for the good Reverend, there was an even earlier, 1809 patent “some of which the Reverend Patentee has borrowed after the fashion of the Jews towards the Egyptians, and others by no means correspond to the intelligible part of the title.”

That referred to an item belonging to J.W.J. Boswell, who described a

…Spring wheel [which] would possess the very singular property of preventing all loss of momentum from common obstacles and ruts; for when the rim struck an obstacle, the re-action, instead of destroying part of the momentum of the carriage, would only cause the spring spokes to bend towards it; and when the axle was past the obstacle, the recoil of this bending, which would then take place, would add as much to the velocity of the carriage as the bending before took from it.

Now I was getting down to the bitter end. John Whitney Boswell’s invention is described in a monograph entitled Observations on Wheel Carriages, Beads, and the Draught of Horses; Investigations of the Mechanical Modes of Action of the Horse, and of the Size and Breadth of Wheels ; and Descriptions of Three new Species of Wheels, contrived to facilitate Draught, and to preserve the Roads: with some Remarks on Axles and Boxes, and an Account of a proposed Improvement in Harness in The Repertory of Arts, Manufactures, and Agriculture, 1810. “The third species of Wheels which will be now described, occurred to me many years ago,” Boswell wrote, dishearteningly. (Species two was the dually, by the way.)

It is designed so as to add the advantages of springs, before explained, to the wheel; and this union produces benefits which springs and wheels placed separate could never effect, however skillfully constructed. The two other new constructions for wheels just described, are calculated for great loads, and of course for slow draught; but the spring wheel is designed for swift motion, for which it will be shewn to have peculiar advantages.

The spring wheel is represented in Fig. 14. Each of its spokes is formed of a single elastic plate of steel, of the usual temper for coach springs, bent into a segment of a circle, greater or less as jt is intended to be more or less stiff. These spring spokes are to be arranged at the nave alternately in separated rings, so as to form the combination called double dishing: to shew which, two of them, the nave, and part of the felloe, are represented at Fig. 15; besides which, one of them is drawn separate, to exhibit the cross piece at the top by which it is to be fastened to the nave. These cross pieces are to be rounded and to lie in grooves cut across the nave; two rings driven over their ends at the opposite sides of the nave will keep them on tight; and these rings may be drawn together by screw bolts for more security; the spring spokes may be also fastened more firmly in the save by the part which projects beyond, the cross piece being driven into it and wedged, if it should not be thought that the binding this would occasion would make them liable to break short close to the nave; their other extremities may be rivetted or screwed to the inside of the fellies, placing a piece of thick sole-leather between them and the fellies, if any noise is apprehended from their motion, which last was the only inconvenience that an eminent coach manufacturer, to whom I mentioned the plan, could think of to object to it, and which seems to be fully obviated, by thus making one end of each spring rest on leather, while the other is sustained by a large surface of wood at the nave.

The man liked his commas. Fig. 14 describes almost perfectly the wheel for Model Ts from the Teens that Dan saw at Hershey.

How many years earlier it was that the idea first appeared to Boswell, a contributor to Nicholson’s Journal and associated with Trinity College (Dublin), I can’t say. It is worth nothing that Nicholson’s, a leading philosophical (science) journal, was read by many of the brightest minds of the day – aerodynamic studies therein were part of the Wright brothers’ curriculum. I have no evidence one way or another that he ever mentioned the spring wheel in Nicholson’s, but Boswell was recognized as an inventor and innovator (he did some original work on steam engines).  His ideas would have been disseminated and taken seriously, and he even touched on the aesthetics of the spring wheel: “The appearance of the spring-wheel would also be in its favour, as the forms of its spokes are conformable to those curves which the best judges have preferred for beauty of effect.”

Could he have been the inventor? After pushing the date back a further 101 years, the trail has really run cold, this time and I’m not prepared to say no. But I’m not prepared to say yes, either.

Inventors have never given up on the idea (see Michelin’s Tweels) and new patents are filed regularly. I’m not the only one having trouble finding all the prior art, either: patent (7,810,533) was issued on October 12, 2010, for an “internal wheel suspension and shock absorbing system,” wherein the inventor, Dave L. Wichem of St. Louis, says, “Initially, as early as 1908, inventors addressed how to suspend a wheel internally with springs in various configurations, generally radially, to cushion the wheels against road impacts in early automobiles and casters.”

Sorry Dave – you’ll learn. The damn things probably go back to Rome.

 

Recently, a brief discussion in the HMN editorial bullpen touched on that social networking nuisance, Facebook, and our various curmudgeonly opinions of it: “In MY day, we networked the old-fashioned way with faxes, chatrooms and e-mail….”

Needless to say, none of us have seen the movie, and frankly, the only reason I joined Facebook was so that I could send off-road racing legend Malcolm Smith a friend request and hopefully get back a message reading: “You and Malcolm Smith are now friends.”

I got this pathetic idea from a guy on an online dirt bike forum who friended the great Mr. Smith, and then proudly shared his virtual friendship notification with the rest of us losers.

Creepy I know, but Malcolm Smith and I are now Facebook friends, and if I died tomorrow, it would be mostly okay. (I still haven’t owned a Husqvarna enduro bike or ridden on the Baja peninsula.)

This man crush can be traced directly back to the copy of Bruce Brown’s documentary, On Any Sunday, rented approximately 957 times from the local video store while I was in junior high and the owner of a 1975 Yamaha MX 100 exactly like this one.

On Any Sunday focuses on much more than Malcolm, but the man’s otherworldly displays of finesse aboard an ordinary Husqvarna steal the show again and again.

If you haven’t seen OAS (some guy named Steve McQueen is in it too), you can watch it for free and in its entirety online at Hulu.com.

Getting back to Facebook, if you have an account, you too can become one of Malcolm’s 2,870-plus friends, or check out this album of Husqvarna Heroes (Hey, Husqvarna! Why aren’t there a few dozen photos of Dick Burleson posted?).