Just A Car Guy
Cool things with wheels since 2006
Thursday, April 25, 2024
nose boop! Thanks John S!
I was just told about a great trick used during the OPEC oil crisis gas rations times, when gas stations would only fill you up if you had less than a 1/4 tank....
one guy with a dual tank truck installed a resistor in the fuel tank level indicator wiring behind the dash, and when he went to a gas station, would flip a hidden switch, so it would show the attendant on the gas gauge that barely any fuel was in the truck... then fuel up one of the tanks, or top off them both, tank the truck home, siphon the gas out to a holding tank (like the 5 hundred gallon natural gas tanks many houses had) and then take the truck to different gas station to refill.
Many gas stations only would allow vehicles with license plates that had some even or odd number in the sequence to fill up on certain days. Hey, I wasn't old enough to go to school! I don't know the many methods for only allowing a very few people to get gas, but, I do remember waiting in the non air conditioned car for 15-30 minutes every time mom had to gas up in 1974-75ish. I even remember the station she went to. I was 3 or 4. It was next to the laundromat she went to... it's ridiculous what your brain holds onto and makes available... never the answers to the trigonometry test in high school... nope.
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
there are some cool new inventions that I haven't seen at SEMA... this is a remote controlled sun shade that mounts to the roof rack rails
it takes something nice to pull your Ferrari to the races... and owning a Buick dealership in San Fran in the early 60s, was all it took to afford it
the Brand X at Lions... thanks Larry W! (not what you sent, I know, but, really cool and gleaned from that video) This was a combo of Kurtis, AK miller, a junkyard Corvette chassis, and Dougs headers
nabbed the NHRA quarter-mile speed record in the BM/Sp class at 131.95 mph,
and the NHRA half-mile record at 151.51 mph.
It was subsequently sold to Doug Thorley of header fame who campaigned it Modified Sports classes.
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/corvette-hot-rods-picture-thread.545759/page-331
Once there was a time when drag racers could build anything that wasn't mentioned in the rules... then Vance Hunt pissed off the rule makers, and they made a new rule: "If it does not say you CAN do it, you CAN'T"
I decided in 1962 to run the AA class. I got a fuel go-cart engine from a friend, adapted it to the front of my 392 Hemi, and sat down with a rulebook to make it legal. I covered it up with a blanket so as not to cause a problem until qualifying started.
We made the first round of qualifying and my driver JL Payne ran a very good pass with both engines. We pulled back into the pits and in about six or eight minutes, Tice showed up and he was so mad. He said, "Take it OFF." I told him that his own tech people said it met every rule in the book. He said, "If you run "IT," your car will RED LIGHT!"
I took the engine off and won the race that year. This is one of my deals that worked out OK. I won the race and got my point across. After that, we didn't have to race a bunch of also-ran cars after the real race to get the money.
Early the next season, Tice brought me the new rulebook and told me that it was written for me -- on each page it said, "If it does not say you can do it, you can't."
https://www.draglist.com/stories/SOD%20Feb%202002/SOD-022102.htm
I had a record number of hits (people stopping by the blog) the last two days. No idea why
On Monday there were 59,800, and yesterday 84,500. But nothing really shows why, and I wasn't flooded with comments from new people.
It's rare, but about once a year in my email I see something thrilling, and similar to this "subject line" that I just had today: "My Great Uncle was the Top Turret Gunner on the B-25 Tondelayo"
in reference to the B-25 Tondelayo post https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2023/07/whoa-i-just-learned-today-that-mikes.html my great uncle was Staff Sergeant John (Jack) Murphy, who was the top turret gunner on the Tondelayo. He had some hair raising stories about his time serving in the South Pacific.
The co-pilot was shooting out his window with a .45 pistol since he had nothing else to do. He was hit in the stomach. Fortunately, the Tondelayo made it to a small fighter strip on Kiriwina Island that was too small for bombers or transport aircraft except in an emergency. Even more fortunate for the co-pilot was a C-47 transport aircraft full of doctors and medical staff had made an emergency landing there earlier, which probably saved his life since they were able to operate immediately."
I just had an idea for a race car team name
Walter Mitty's Race Team
In the same humorous was that Steve McQueen used the fake name Harvey Mushman when registering for motorcycle races
but have you seen the unusual circular rollercoaster that was at Coney Island in 1918?
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
wow, is that a Stratos used a clothing store prop?
Someone's store decorator had one hell of a big budget!
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10225496847548284&set=a.1617402035143
the government felt it needed new helicopters to transport the Pres off the yard... so it blew 5 billion tax dollars, without checking to see it the expensive waste of dollars new choppers could do the job. They can't.
this is nuts, a 65 Merc made into an RV... the Great Dale House Car is a car/camper conversion built of Denver, Colorado in the 1960’s. Estimates say there are a dozen of them still on the road today.
a 2009 Solstice... damn, I didn't even know a 350 would fit in that engine bay! well, a 364cu in with 355 hp and 384 torque
I bet that rockets with the LS6 engine... shame it's not a stick shift though.
Wow, a Local Motors Rally Fighter is up for sale... I've never seen one sell used! At 31 k miles and 80k... it's not priced to move
the federal Department of Justice issued a warning to the NYPD to stop illegally parking police cruisers on sidewalks... for a good reason, but not as simple as "be professional, stop breaking the parking laws, you mooks!" Instead, it's quite legal... the federal law about the sidewalks must be clear for wheelchairs! Huh! I like that!
This has almost nothing to do with wheels, it's the claw they'll be using to hoist debris out of the Port of Baltimore. But it is construction, and I do cover that.
A 200-ton salvage grab arrived in Sparrows Point over the weekend to clear wreckage from the bottom of the Patapsco River. The Dutch-made hydraulic grab has four independent claws that together can lift more than 1,000 tons. (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
A massive hydraulic grab arrived in Baltimore over the weekend as officials planned a Thursday opening of the deepest alternate channel yet for vessels to travel through the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
Officials plan to open the 35-foot channel for only a few days to let deeper-draft ships through. Traffic won’t be let through next week as crews enter the next stage of operations, which will involve lifting steel off of the cargo ship that struck the Key Bridge last month as well as using the grab to clear debris from the Baltimore harbor’s 50-foot shipping channel.
In response to the vessel owners’ petition filed in U.S. District Court this month seeking to limit their liability...
The Welch Motor Car Company was the first American car company to introduce an overhead cam shaft. (thank you Gary!)
thank you Jon T for telling me about the memorial to an Army biplane that went down in 1922, on the Airplane Monument Trail in the Cuyamaca Forest, high up on the way to The Japacha Ridge.
Rockwell Field’s base commander, thirty-six-year-old Major Henry “Hap” Arnold had personally instructed Lieutenant Webber to turn his aircraft around and head back to Rockwell Field if conditions prevented him from flying over the mountains, due to the the rugged mountain and desert route between San Diego and Fort Huachuca, where no fewer than nine military aviators had reportedly vanished without a trace
Reaction from Army headquarters in Washington was swift. The war department issued instructions that “the search for Colonel Marshall and Lieutenant Webber be [conducted] with every facility at the command of the government in an effort to clear up as rapidly as possible the mystery surrounding the fate of the two officers.”16 Army Chief of Staff, General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing personally ordered that other air units be made available.
in 1934 civil engineer Charles Carter stumbled upon the monument while surveying the park’s boundaries. Carter then notified the unit leader of a Civilian Conservation Corps construction camp at Green Valley Falls. One of these construction projects involved the development of , the Japacha Ridge Trail, led from the newly built Green Valley Falls Picnic Area to the Airplane Wreck Monument site. Completed in the summer of 1934, the one and one-half mile “Airplane Monument Trail” hugged the southeastern spur of Japacha Peak before leading up and over “Airplane Ridge,” where it continued northward to the West Mesa Trail junction. At this point it descended northward down to a point overlooking the Japacha Creek where Webber and Marshall had perished. The CCC crews, which at times consisted of segregated African American workers, cleared brush, moved and split large boulders, widened and leveled the trail, and built at least three stone ramparts along the way.
Thirty-four years later, on March 12, 1968, California State Parks again chose to improve the Airplane Crash Monument, which had become a popular hiking destination. Park maintenance workers broke up the concrete slab, exhumed and mounted the Liberty V-12 engine on a new, stone rubble and concrete platform, and placed the bronze memorial plaque on the low platform’s east-facing side.
it was untouched by the October 26-29, 2003 Cedar Firestorm along with hundreds of other archaeological and historic artifacts. Spreading at a rate of 6,000 acres per hour in its first 36 hours, the fire incinerated Cuyamaca State Park.