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DustyMojave

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    Richard Parcells

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  1. I've always (as a guy who grew up involved in sports car racing and rallying in the late 50s into the 70s) far preferred the appearance of the TR3A and B over the narrow grilled TR2 and 3. In about 1958 or 59 my family took my uncle out shopping for a car as he was recently out of the Marine Corps. One car he nearly bought was a light blue TR2. He wound up buying a more sedate American sedan. He spent far more time haggling over the TR2 than the whole time actually buying the other car. In the early 70s, at the SCCA road races in SoCal I was Tech Inspector before the races, Wreck Impounds and helped the Emergency Crew during the races, then Rules Enforcement post race doing teardowns and inspection to ensure rule compliance. A guy I considered a friend, Dr. Sturm, a Dentist, was racing his TR3A at Riverside Raceway in SCCA events. So I was near the exit end of the Pit Row when I watched Doc come around in a close dice with some others. Then approaching Turn 2, he was one of 3 cars that went off into the dirt. He hit a rain rut about 2' deep and 4' wide from some recent monsoon rains (yeah, it DOES rain in Southern California, just not near as often as back east). The car flipped in an endo. and landed on its nose. His roll bar with rear braces held. But the frame and body of the car folded just in front of the roll bar. Squished Doc fatally. After that us Tech Inspectors in our region pushed for unofficial roll bar rule advising other racers to brace their roll bars forward of the main hoop to prevent that sort of failure. SCCA did not change the rule, so it was unofficial and we couldn't ban any racers who didn't want to go along. But many local racers were convinced and changed their roll bar structures accordingly. If you look at AMT's kit of the 289 Cobra from 1964, it includes a roll bar with a forward brace and no rearward. Also found in other renditions of that tooling including the Sunny "427" version recently sold under the Revell brand (not really a depiction of a 427 Cobra, as it has the same chassis and engine as the 289 kits it's based on - just has the oval nose and big fenders of the 427). This represents Shelby's "factory" roll bar of the time. It's not as good as a full roll cage, nor as good as a full width roll bar with forward braces on both sides. But it was pretty good. I watched Steve McCaslin endo his 427 Cobra in the same area as Doc Sturm about a year later with a roll bar as depicted in the AMT kit. Turned the car into a wadded up piece of aluminum foil. But Steve was fine. Revell's kits of the 427 Cobra from their own tooling have a rear brace and no forward brace.
  2. In 73 -75 I was attending college days and working full time nights at a gas station in Sherman Oaks on Sepulveda near Ventura Blvd. Lots of the Mulholland racers would stop in and meet, BS, Bench Race or sometimes do a last minute check of their cars in our station before heading up to one end of the section of Mulholland Drive that was used for street racing. Corvettes, Ferraris, Porsches, Cobra kit cars, etc. Mostly substantially modified. Like Gerald Hall's beautiful gray metallic 914 with really wide Halibrand wheels and matching fenders that for some reason I remember better than most of the rest. Since I was an SCCA Tech Inspector I understood their talk and they understood me, so we had some pretty good conversations. At the time I was looking to buy a VW Bug and was asking everybody who came in with one if they were interested in selling. I wound up buying a 65 Bug that way. One of those I asked was a young guy who lived in the neighborhood who had a 68 Bug with a 2180cc with dual 48IDA Weber carbs, lowered ride height, extra stout sway bar, 13 x 8 rims with BFG T/A tires mounted to '67 5 lug drum brakes. He declined to sell at the time. Then after I bought a 65 and built a Baja Bug out of it with an 1835cc with a single Weber carb, the guy told me his Bug was for sale for $1500, less than I had just spent on the engine for my Baja, not to mention the gear box that cost as much, body work, wheels and tires, roll bar, etc. Then a week later, he stopped in and told me he had a buyer for the car but was waiting for the cash. Then a couple nights later I was working and there were several Mulholland racers in the station talking about the one guy none of them could beat. Then the guy with the Bug rolled in to the other side of the station for some gas. The guys I was talking to all pointed and said that was the guy they were talking about. All these exotic high dollar radical cars, and they were telling me the car they couldn't beat was a VW Bug! Amazing! Of course, Mulholland Drive is a very tight twisty narrow road with few long straights to favor the high horsepower cars or those with aerodynamic advantages. More of a slalom course. A 125cc shifter go kart would probably smoke them all. So the Bug was pretty good for that. But still?!?! Yeah, the movie was very corny and cheesy. A few cool cars in it though.
  3. Back in the 60s I was pretty fond of the Hands mags. I know that some were intended for racing only and were cast magnesium. Some were intended and sold for use on the street and were cast in aluminum. I'm not sure who actually cast the ones that were sold as "Dan Gurney" wheels in the late 60s/early 70s. I've mostly encountered them on VW Bugs in the 4-lug 15" x 5" version. I may still have some of the ones from my original issue 63 Vette kits. Although those models were destroyed in the Sylmar earthquake of '71.
  4. But they were unreliable and the NASCAR engine as well as the Super Stock engine (not the same engines) were not available to the public and even the racers who got them were not allowed to open them up at all. Thus they were not production engines. Whereas the Ford 427 any Joe Schmoe could go to a Ford dealer and order one and they were in the cars sold from the showroom floor in sufficient quantity to qualify for the rules. The Chevy Mark IV 427 wasn't sold to the public until the '67 year model. In Super Stock classes, Mopar's 426 Max Wedge engine and car were common enough that my older brother had an early 64 Wedge engine car (they got Hemis in early 1964/late 64 year model) that he raced in 67-68 until a crash destroyed it. And it ran 11.27 @ 127mph on its last run even though it was crashing into the opposite guard rail then hit by the competitor, both while in the lights. So it was going 127mph while spinning 270° and backing into the guard rail. Still as it came from the factory with cheater slicks on the steel rear wheels and the 2 into 1 single exhaust still hanging underneath. So, close to 2 seconds quicker than the so-called "Hemi Destroyer" Chevy. Which is no quicker than my old co-worker's 65 Mustang 2+2 with a 289 with dual quads and tubular headers with no traction bars that ran 13.1 through the mufflers as he drove it to work. About the same as that touted for this killer Chevy with aluminum bodywork and bumpers and factory cheater 427 engine.
  5. In the late 60s and early 70s, Steve McQueen was a regular at SoCal sports car races where I was a teenager working as a Tech Inspector, Wreck Impounds and corner flagman. He raced a Porsche 910 Spyder for a few years. I Tech Inspected his car several times during that period. Quite a highly competent driver in an area full of others. Steve sometimes showed up at the track driving his VW Bug convertible with a Ford 351 V8 in the back seat. IIRC, That was donated to the Chafee College Automotive Engineering Program upon his death. Interesting connection since that college was founded by the father of Jim Chafee, a guy who was still racing his C/Modified Devin bodied Chevy V8 powered creation painted pink and black and known as the Pink Elephant on the course the same time as Steve with his Porsche. Jim knew his car was no match against McLarens and Lolas and the other then modern cars, but he got kicks out of it. Steve was, unlike some of the celebrities who showed up around the SoCal road races, a pleasant guy. Fun to talk to. Never there to "show off". Just enjoying the sport and deeply involved in it. Like a few others, including Dick Smothers and Jim Garner. I too raced desert motorcycles, later, after Steve had passed away, but encountered quite a few who had known him. I also worked as a Tech Inspector and later racer myself in desert offroad car racing where Steve had raced the famous Baja Boot. Again, he was thought of well there too. To build that pickup, you could use the frame and part of the bed from the 79 Ford Ford F100 4x4 Camper Special kit that has recently been on the market with Firestone markings. John Wayne's 68 F100 in the same color has just been restored and given away with proceeds to the John Wayne Cancer Research Foundation.
  6. OK. American Halibrand wheels with center lock wheels use pins like smooth shank lug studs attached to the hub flange that stays in place on the car instead of splines. The pins pass through the wheel and the pressure plate (which is often part of the wheel). Americans DID use spline drives for wire wheels back in the 1930s. The car my dad used for a daily driver when he met mom was a Singer 9 with spline drive knockoff wheels. My brother still has dad's copper knockoff hammer. And the 1st pair of race cars I ever worked on had spline drive knockoff wheels. It was a matched pair of Lotus 11s with beautiful polished aluminum bodies. While my dad re-wired the crappy wiring job with positive ground and sketchy Lucas electricals, my job was to use my little 4-year old fingers to clean the brand new but filthy dirty English wire wheels. Why they would ship a brand new race car with so much attention to making the bodywork look great, then throw filthy, muddy, grimy wheels on it I still don't understand. I didn't know these MGs used centerlock hubs. But I suppose that wire wheels with knockoffs were an option on the production units. So not a leap for them to be approved for FIA racing. All the ones I saw using aluminum or mag wheels used lug studs for US sprint racing because under SCCA rules, if you used centerlocks, then you had to use wire wheels that went with centerlocks on the production car.
  7. Nice model. I AM curious though, as to why this is in the Road Racing and others area when it's a drag race car. ?? Not throwing a Karen fit, just curious.
  8. The rear valence on an early Mustang is a separate piece of sheet metal from the rear body panel and the rear corners above the bumper are cast zinc pieces. The valence should be overlapping the body rear panel as it is bolted onto it. The shapes in the body rear panel could readily be made of .020 styrene sheet. Glued in place, then the left tapered down to practically zero, while the right side is left standing out proud, but both sides should be molded to the back panel with white glue or something similar that will fill without requiring further grinding and shaping.
  9. This kit was 1st produced by AMT, introduced in late '63 as I got one of these and a Parnelli Jones Watson Offy race winner model for Christmas that year along with a new TV in our brand new house. My brother had recently gotten out of the hospital after getting bitten by a rattlesnake on my birthday. It was a memorable Christmas for me. It was re-issued by AMT a few times. I later got one of these kits with a poster for the inaugural Indy car race at Michigan International Speedway although that should have been a Lotus 38, not a 29. This version this one is built from was re-issued many years later as a triple kit under the MPC name after AMT merged with MPC. I have a couple of that version too. The early ones I built back in the 60s were destroyed along with many other models in a major earthquake in 1971. I also have the IMC Lotus 38. I have long believed that this AMT/MPC Lotus 29 kit was mastered by the same guy who mastered the MPC kit of the Lotus Turbine Indy car of 1968, and the IMC Ford GT kits of the 60s. They all have the same Ford pushrod and DOHC engines with the same gearbox. Virtually identical pieces. And the Lotuses have a similar too narrow and straight sided windscreen. The tires were always too tall for the Lotus. Better suited to the Watson-Offy, although too tall and narrow for that too. The kit is mostly pretty fair in accuracy and can be built to look pretty good. Certainly NOT a Model Factory Hiro kit. But with an original kit price as printed on the box of $1.50, one can hardly expect MFH quality. I came back to edit because I just remembered that my 2nd kit (the MIS one) I built with a poseable steering. I cut the steering rack from the front upper control arms and replaced it with a piece of aluminum tube rack housing with a wire rack. I dechromed and painted some parts for that one too. The exhaust trumpets were paint brush ferrules. The tires came from another source that I can't remember now but were far closer to "correct" for the car. I think it was a cheap toy car and I cut the wheels out to put the tires on the kit Halibrand front wheels and Dunlop rears. That one I did with the #93 Dan Gurney markings.
  10. Anybody have any input on why 8 lugs on the wheels? 1-ton truck hubs? Otherwise it looks very cool and I do remember pics of it at Sebring.
  11. Nice collection of vintage NASCAR racers. Back in about 1970, my grandfather re-painted his 1960 F100. A previous owner had a camper on it and the seal at the back window and other places was worn through the original paint. He mixed his own paint using stuff like oil based porch paint. Mixed it to his own choice of color (tan with a white roof). Then he applied the paint with a brush. His father in law had been a painter for Oldsmobile before he came to LA in 1904 and had later taught grampa how to do it. No sanding between coats. When he sold the truck in about 1990, it was still bright and shiny, even though it had never been parked indoors. So I know painting with a brush CAN be done. Not that I would be able to do a decent job of it, even though I know basically what needs to be done. My congratulations to you.
  12. Back in the day I owned a 76 small window Pinto and a 77 big window hatchback ("The Incredible Flying Pinto"). When driving, I preferred the big window and the hatchback was handy. External looks wide. I always preferred the look of the small window. I suppose I should explain that nickname for the '77, since I wrote it out. This one Christmas, my wife and I were supposed to go visit with my inlaws and then with my family down in the San Fernando Valley, about 75-80 miles away. We left the house with me driving and our 1 year old son in his car seat in back. We got about 4 miles from the house where we were passing some onion fields. The car ahead of us went to turn off on a farm road. So I went to step on the brake pedal, but the brake pedal in those with an automatic is quite wide. Too big for the space available. My right foot hit the back side of the brake pedal and pushed it up toward me. The clip that kept the pedal from coming toward me broke and the pedal got caught in my shoe laces. So my right foot was stuck under the pedal and can't apply the brakes. So I grabbed the hand brake and pulled, but it didn't do much. So I took evasive action to the right into the shoulder. The other driver saw me coming and did the same. So I scraped along the side of the other car and that sent me head on toward a berm around the field. Hit that and launched the car in the air. Landed 75 feet out in the plowed field (my buddy and I later measured the marks in the dirt) and bounced to a stop with the rear tires dragging. The front digging into the dirt smashed the bottom of the radiator and rendered it undriveable. The other folks were nice and gave me a ride to our house so I could get my pickup and car trailer to haul it home. No real damage to people or either car otherwise. Broke a glass baking dish of food we were taking for our late Christmas dinner.......
  13. Looks like my mom in pictures from those days. My folks met at a sports car road race at Palm Springs. Dad was a long time Dry Lakes racer, hot rodder and track roadster driver type of guy who also was involved in Road Racing. When they met, mom was 5'7, 115lbs, early 20s and brunette and attended dry lakes races and looked similar to this young lady. I think I'm gonna save this picture. If mom hadn't passed away at 90 years in 21, I'd show it to her to see if she knew the woman.
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