Ace-Garageguy

Your work on this is, as usual, just beautiful. Always a pleasure to see your builds come together, and always inspiring.

Barney Navarro is widely credited as being the earliest user of the now ubiquitous GMC blower. Navarro built his own line of flathead V8 speed equipment after the war (WW II, for those of you who may be history-challenged). The story goes that in 1948, Kong Jackson (Kong Ignitions, if anyone remembers) showed up at Navarro's place with a GMC 3-71 salvaged from a surplus landing-craft diesel. Navarro built an intake manifold and multiple V-belt drive for it, clearanced the case, raced the setup successfully, and the rest is history. Navarro DID have many and ongoing problems with the drive belts shredding however. The hot-rodding speed community was pretty close-knit in those days, and everybody who was anybody know what the other guys were doing. The continuing V-belt problems Navarro had may have figured heavily in the decision to develop the front-drive setups like Potvin. The pumping-losses inherent in a front-drive setup weren't thought to be as important, back then, as we now know they are either. Look at headers of the late '40s and early '50s, and you'll see that gas-flow wasn't managed as carefully as it is now, because it simply wasn't understood as well. Well into the '70s, some engineers still believed that good porting, clean-short-straight intake manifold passages, and tuned equal-length header primaries just didn't matter on supercharged engines.

Anybody got a shot of the nekkid chassis and front suspension, perchance?

REALLY like the concept here. Road-racing "muscle cars"...YES!!!

You never know. If you read the entire article, it seems she may just still be out there somewhere. Stranger things have happened. Speaking of which, the remains of the Porsche 550 Spyder James Dean died in, 'lost' for decades, are supposedly found. Sortof.

Oh baby !! JW / Gulf colors too. First Porsche I've had a real 'need' for in quite a while.

That's a beauty, for sure. Looks like either a resin body, or the old too-short-at-the-cowl AMT unit modified to the correct height...on the Revell chassis, as already suggested.

Beautiful beautiful beautiful. One of my absolute favorite racing cars.

Man o man. Really looks great!

Interesting indeed. A real cobbled-up engineering job though, apparently intended to save some rear-seat room. The engine location and live rear axle-based IRS are far from ideal, but certainly innovative. That big ol' cast-iron lump of an engine sitting in the tail probably made for some evil handling on trailing-throttle. And once the transfer case was cast and machined, and the 9" rear end was modified into an IRS configuration (including another custom cast housing), it's debatable as to how low the investment in the "low-investment-drivetrain" really was. Just buying-in an existing transaxle, or (horrors) even using the GM Toronado/Eldorado TH-425 unit might have been considerably cheaper and lighter. But it sure would have been fun to be on the team that got paid (and paid well) to build crazy stuff like this for FoMoCo.

Thanks for the informative post, Charlie. Good to know somebody who understands. It's impossible to beat digital for 'snapshots' and business or other 'in-progress' records, but for serious work, I'll probably always prefer film. (I prefer sailboats, too. )

If you want to do a coupe, the AMT kit is a fine old standard that will make a beautiful custom, and even the not-so-good Lindberg clone has been built into outstanding custom models shown on this board. Still the BEST place to start to do a '40 coupe is the Revell kit. It has a well-done full-detail frame with a separate exhaust (unlike the AMT and Lindberg kits), a nice flathead, and more importantly from the topside, separate running board covers (the AMT and Lindberg has them molded in to the fender units). This is an AMT Tudor, heavily hacked into a sectioned and channeled "speedster". It will sit on a Revell chassis, with an old Monogram-derived Lincoln V-12.

And maybe one called "The Cremator" with a big-torque diesel set up to belch black smoke.

Looking very good. I just knew with some care and patience, you could make a nice model from this kit. REALLY like your Cad/Nomad p-shop mashup too.

I've managed to salvage some from cheap gluebomb E-type built-ups, or partial kits. Only prob with the gluebombs is that the rear end may be fused into a solid, unusable lump...but sometimes you get lucky too.

Pretty old tech too. From wikipee: "At first the fusee cord was made of gut, or sometimes wire. Around 1650 chains began to be used, which lasted longer.[6] Gruet of Geneva is widely credited with introducing them in 1664,[2]although the first reference to a fusee chain is around 1540."

Image search "fusee chain" on Google. This is the first hit. Pretty small...lives inside a pocket watch.

Depends on which line of alternate probabilities you happened to wake up on this morning.

Love it! Nice work.

Yeah, but isn't the Matador kinda a rare kit actually? Has it been re-issued? I seem to recall seeing them on ebay for a lot more than $28, but I could be mistaken. As Toner says, I've gotten some truly great deals at the NNL meet here.

That's the plan...comfort, performance, convenience and reliability of a late-model vehicle, but with the old-cruiser style (did I mention keyless entry and pushbutton start ?). The owner has multiple high-end production cars, but is kinda bored with them (though his wife isn't ). Still, with the $250k price on this thing when completed, it's doubtful it will be a daily daily-driver.

Agfa, Fuji, Ilford, Revolog, Efke, Foma...should I go on? I have a friend who's a commercial and 'art' photographer. Still has a wonderful darkroom, still shoots film, also shoots digital. It's not that uncommon for people who learned analog to still use it, and some younger people are getting into it too. Kinda like tube amps and vinyl recordings.

Yeah...and be sure you get a clear title on the spot. Few things are more annoying in life than buying a car, trusting some bozo to "get the paperwork from my ex-wife" or whatever, only to find you're stuck with something that can't be titled and tagged...for YEARS. It happens.

Someone went to a LOT of trouble to design a little car that looks like it's made from metal trash can parts. Still, I think it's kinda cute. I know what it is, but if I tell, I'll have to kill myself.

We're seeing the results of the wholesale rejection of a fact-based, hardware-based, physical-object-based reality; all we have to do is wake up, look around, and connect some cause-and-effect dots. One for instance in the current news: On one hand, we have legislatures that pass bills for increasingly stringent emission-control standards, thinking in their la-la-land way that just passing a law will make something magically happen, all the while having absolutely no clue (because in their clean-hands world, technical knowledge has no value) as to how difficult and costly to achieve or unreasonable the standards may be. On the other hand, we have a major vehicle manufacturer (a manufacturer that has been known since its inception for well-above-average engineering and product quality) who, unable to meet the arbitrary standards set forth (Who knows why? Maybe the computer simulations of emissions-compliance development just aren't good enough?) chooses instead to LIE about it on a massive scale, apparently thinking somehow they magically wouldn't get caught. Both sides pretending, failing to see, understand and act on actual facts, with not much more basis in physical reality than a video game.