Better believe it - them Canucks aren’t as innocent as they seem. First, they build the awesomest four-wheeled military conveyance this side of the Unimog, the CMP, and now we see even more Canadian military kung fu.
Kit Foster sent along two additions to our military March campaign. First, above, the Iltis, a Volkswagen design built […]
Okay, it’s a little late in coming, but I hereby declare this month to be military March. Or at least this week.
Tom Wilson, of the Davis Registry, after perusing the military vehicles category, emailed to remind me that we hadn’t yet mentioned the Davis military vehicle, serial 494X1, that he and friends are restoring up […]
Old hovercrafts seem to be all the rage on teh Intarnet lately, with the guy from Finkbuilt posting several scans of the latest 1960 designs. One design he didn’t include was the Chrysler VZ-6 “flying jeep.”
The VZ series of hovercrafts were part of a military initiative started in 1957 to replace the jeep with something […]
It’s no big secret that Raymond Loewy gave Albrecht Graf von Goertz his big break when Loewy arranged for his job at the Studebaker design studio. As the story goes, Goertz used that position to establish his own business in the 1950s, through which he met Max Hoffman and eventually came to design the BMW […]
Well, I suppose it’s possible, given enough money and enough desire. After all, Bugatti arose from the dead recently, Stutz has had its various incarnations and Duesenberg is allegedly on its way back. But alas, the reincarnated Delahaye was just a well-rendered concept sketch by a fella named Chris for the 2005 SFIC Bright Design […]
Unlike most yards nowadays, Texas Exports doesn’t seem intent on crushing what they don’t sell, though they have closed their yard to the public. Nevertheless, they are liquidating, and now’s the time to pick up one of their cars for a project. I’m thinking the ‘54 Chevy pickup would be a good replacement for my […]
Every now and then, you just gotta go back to the dealer intros for a fresh perspective on an old car. Like it or not, 1970s cars will continue to rise in popularity over the next several years as more people entering the old car hobby find that they can’t afford the 1950s and 1960s […]
As I’ve noted before, despite all the cool things people made back in the early 20th century - cool enough to get them into national magazines - it frustrates the heck out of us nowadays to never read any sorts of details. For instance, “a Chicago mechanic” built this unnamed car “from spare auto and […]
What’s more fun than a sunny day, a few inches of fresh snow, an iced-over lake and a bunch of Model T snowmobiles? How about doing donuts on said lake with one of the said Ts? About a dozen of the snowmobiles showing up for the annual Model T Snowmobile Club meet at Lake George […]
Came across this mystery model in the collection of radio-guy, also known as Steve Erenberg. According to the description on Steve’s website, it’s a hand-made 1953 Packard design model with metal details. Nothing else.
From my quick research, I couldn’t come up with any production model that followed, nor could I come up with any full-scale […]
I’ve been looking for this photo for months, and it finally surfaced just recently. To tell the truth, I had absolutely no good reason to be looking for it save to post it here, and after discovering the Beast, it just seemed natural that this would turn up. Back in ‘05, just after LaChance started […]
And you thought Leno’s car was the first to use a tank engine. Back in the late 1960s in Ol’ Blighty, Merlin engine expert Paul Jameson decides to drop a massive Meteor V-12 Centurion tank engine into a car. Finding a suitable existing car wasn’t really feasible, so he built one around the engine instead […]
While visiting with David Greenlees over in Brattleboro, Vermont, yesterday for an article in an upcoming issue of Hemmings Classic Car, Lentinello and I couldn’t stop slobbering over the cool toys in Greenlees’s shop. Aside from the Locomobile he’s building for himself and the Simplex and Mercer customer cars, he had this Indian motorcycle in […]
Received word that All-American Metals in Bertram, Texas, will soon start crushing its inventory of old cars. If it seems like we’ve heard about a lot of these lately (northern Connecticut; Sturbridge, Massachusetts; Columbia, South Carolina), it’s because we have. Developers across the country are constantly expanding out away from urban areas, into the natural […]
Henry Ford was many things to many people, but the thing I most admire about him (besides his great baseball swing, apparently) was his straightforwardness. Would you see anything like the picture above today? Would you ever see Tom LaSorda or Rick Wagoner taking an axe to their products to demonstrate the product’s resiliency?
Sixty-five years […]
Every now and then, I’m reminded that there’s more to old cars than the old cars themselves. It’s easy to forget the human interest stories that accompany the cars in light of high-horsepower engines, screaming paint jobs and limited production numbers. Every time I need a reminder, I think about Mel Valentine’s AMX.
To our Hemmings […]
The Nova snowmobile and the Metro-Sled were no mere flukes. Decades before, Model T owners in the Snow Belt of North America, convinced their Ts could do anything, including milking the cows and animal husbandry, converted their rides into sleds. Fortunately, they had assistance from a kit developed by Virgil D. White, of West Ossipee, […]
In researching Zora Arkus-Duntov for an upcoming article in Hemmings Muscle Machines, I kept coming across references to his correspondences to GM brass, both before his employment at Chevrolet and during. I figured there were so many references to these materials because they’re relatively widespread, and I did indeed find two of Zora’s letters at […]
Walking the rows in the Orange Field at Hershey, this pile of parts that at one point constituted a 1932 Ford caught my eye. “Remember - God Hates a Coward” the seller wrote on the masking tape on the upper door frame. The other bit of masking tape carried the price: $1,900 for all. I […]
This one’s been floating around for more than a year, but with the Nova snowmobile and the snowed-in cars that we’ve featured recently, I couldn’t go without posting the Metro-Sled, as its unnamed builder christened it. He took a 1957 Nash Metropolitan, added a rear-mounted 1998 Yamaha three-cylinder 700 SRX snowmobile engine, twin Polaris tracks […]