After a short period of rest, submissions to the Hemmings Nation Flickr pool have picked up again over the last couple weeks, and it’s some nifty stuff. Take, for instance, the photo above from gravlguts, which nicely captures an assortment of spark plugs installed in an old straight eight of some sort. Or his other photos studying a pair of old Land Rovers. Or a good number of detail shots from ryanchirnomas, including one that should look familiar to regular readers of this blog.

Robert ushered in the New Year in the worst way imaginable: Waking up to find his 1956 Nomad hotrod gone. He describes her as:

VIN# VC56S163572. Yellow 1956 CA plate XEJ 873. She’s black and white, with a white roof, 283 yellow eng, 3 spd on the column, bucket seats, black and white interior, front disc brakes, she was perfect for me and I really miss her. PLEASE be on the lookout for her, please let me know if you see her.

It’s a beautiful and distinctive car, even in SoCal, so keep your eyes peeled. If you don’t want your chop shop-running neighbor coming by with a sawed-off 12-gauge, you can leave a message here.

Way back in April, I showed a shot of the FilterMag that we had planned on testing on the HMX’s engine, once I had it running. Took eight months, but whatever.

So the last part of the camshaft break-in process is changing the oil. I figured we could then whack open the old oil filter and see how the FilterMag worked. As you can see, we don’t have one of them fancy oil filter cutters, so Mattar took a hacksaw to it. As you can also see by the faint vertical lines on the inside of the filter’s case, after just half an hour total of oil circulation, the magnet drew out quite a bit of material.

Which was good, because initial startup is the time when there’s likely to be a good amount of little particles left over from the machining process still floating around the engine. So you can bet that magnet went right on to the new filter after the oil change.

We’ll likely get a filter cutting tool before the new filter gets changed out.

Previous HMX posts

When Frank Ruff left his comment on the previous Cadillacamino post, we just had to know what a Caribou conversion was. And see pics, of course. Well, Frank followed through on the pics of his 1978 Caribou-converted Cadillac…

… but Caribou, of Grover City, California, still seems to be a bit of a mystery. According to what little we’ve been able to find on the company, Caribou claimed to have been building Cadillac pickups since 1954, but converted these Coupe de Villes from 1977 to 1986 and sold them through Cadillac dealerships. According to Frank:

They built the El Camino style and station wagon using Cadillac and Lincoln cars. Some used as flower cars for funeral homes. Some were built for celebrities.

I’m thinking somebody needs to perform a thorough survey on coachbuilders of the 1970s to nail down information on who built these conversions and why.

[10] The 10 Best and 10 Worst IT-Related Super Bowl Commercials of All Time (So Far). The compilers of these two lists say “we must admit to a soft spot for monkeys,” which won’t save them from a fusillade of my abuse. The lists are not ranked, precluding an exciting buildup of interest; they can’t keep themselves to ten and include an honorable mention; the article is broken up over six pages for no good reason; and there is only one case in which the commercial itself is included - every other entry just has a textual description. The payoff we get for clicking through this is learning about things like Autobytel.com’s lugubrious advertisement The Pajama Purchase. And, as the one person who bothered to comment on this list has written: “You should post a follow-up article to this: Top 10 worst spelling and grammar mistakes in this article.” (more…)