I was headed back from the auto parts store this weekend and took a route I rarely every drive; while passing a local auto body shop I spied a peculiar shape among the rows of modern appliances and quickly reversed to take a closer look.
This is a Porsche 356, and even though I could see down to the ground between the rocker panels, there’s obviously no engine, and every panel is covered in bondo, rust, and regret, this shell is probably worth $30K as it sits. Double that if whoever owns it has the engine stored away somewhere.
I think vintage Porsche pricing has come down a bit in the last decade, but air-cooled examples like this are still worth a mortgage, if you have the money for it.
This is the newest video in the Project Slowflake series. Publishing this one means I’m finally caught up, almost three weeks after we shot the last footage…!
Today’s ASMR: watching this guy drop the chassis out of a Karmann Ghia, disassemble the whole thing, cut out and weld new metal in, and re-assemble. No gratuitous talking, minimal music, and a lot of the tedious stuff sped up. I think I learned more about how an air-cooled VW was made in 20 minutes than I thought was possible.
I saw a great reel on the Autopian’s Instagram feed about a beautiful harlequin Series II Land Rover spotted on its way back from Monterey Car Week the other day and immediately mashed the LIKE button. They got so much response from it, they followed up and got the full story, which is even better.
I’ve got a ton of open tabs in two different browser windows right now, so that’s my sign to offload them here. In no particular order, here are a few:
- An excellent writeup on Hagerty about car alternators, and the differences between one, two, three, and four-wire versions. This explains a lot about the three-wire alternator in the Travelall and the one-wire in the Scout.
- With the passage of the Big Stupid Bill in Congress, all incentive credits for EVs are now gone. Which means that $40,000 EV will now be north of $47,500. Not that I was ready to buy an EV, but this will change the math for millions of people and fuck up the EV market for years.
- This is a really good video by a guy tuning his carburetor to run better; there’s a lot of basic knowledge that’s just good to absorb for future use.
On my way down to Southern Maryland last weekend, I saw the shape of a semi-familiar vehicle out of the corner of my eye but didn’t have time to stop and check it out. On my way back north, I pulled over to give it a better look, and found a very rare 4×4 here in the states: a first-generation Nissan Patrol. These were only sold in the states from 1962-69, so this example is a unicorn. It’s in excellent shape: the sheet metal looked good, and the interior was clean.
I can’t say that I’m a huge fan of the color, but it is unique, and could very well be period-correct.
It’s always great to see an antique 4×4 on the road.
Over on Curbside Classic I wrote a Cars of A Lifetime entry/comparison on our two Honda CR-Vs. It took a while (I don’t know why I hadn’t written one back in 2018 when I did the bulk of the series) but it was fun to compare and contrast the two. We love Luna (the new one) so far, and the OG-V has over 170,000 miles on the clock. I hope to get another 50,000 out of it.
In high school, I was fascinated by the movie Road Warrior when it was shown—heavily edited—on TV. I bought a VHS copy and studied the cars and the stunts and imagined what I would do if I was in an apocalyptic wasteland. I settled on riding a motorcycle and traveling solo as my plan, and wrote my own stories about adventures avoiding gangs of bandits on the open road. The lure of post-apocalyptic scenarios has always been fascinating, even as I got older and learned just how bleak and unrealistic that world would be.
History professor and writer Bret Devereaux examines the real-world logistics and strategy behind Road Warrior-style mobile warfare: how realistic is it to have an army of gas-hungry, excessively customized vehicles manned by soldiers armed with bladed weapons? Because he’s a real-life professor, he goes into the nuts and bolts of the supply chain required to move such an army, and how (quite correctly) armies like this need a base of operations to work from. Refining gas, manufacturing bullets and growing crops doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and in order to raid other settlements at this scale you have to have a giant, vulnerable settlement of your own.
His analysis: huge war rigs are inefficient and vulnerable. Motorcycles are too small and don’t carry enough (I disagree). His answer, not surprisingly: Toyota Hilux. He looks at the various messy regional wars in Africa and the Middle East and points out that the Technical is the economical, dependable, and easily repairable common denominator across all regions. He posted the story five days ago and it generated a long and interesting comment thread, which is just as fascinating as the article.
I miss the old Web for stuff like this—20 years ago, conversations like this were everywhere.
(Via Metafilter)
When I was in second and third grade, my friends and I were obsessed with Smokey and the Bandit, the Dukes of Hazzard, and CHiPs. We spent all our free time drawing pictures of cars and trucks—Convoy was a big deal too, but I was too young to see it. The other day I stumbled across this drawing I did back then, and figured I’d share it here.
#80 reflects an obsession with all of the things I thought a fast car needed, although it clearly has the aerodynamics of a brick: a square coupe body sporting a giant blower on the engine, a NASCAR style window barrier (ABC’s Wide World of Sports featured a lot of stock car racing back then), side pipes, a rear brake scoop, a moonroof, louvers on the rear window, and a gigantic wing on the rear deck. And, lots of stickers in the rear window, for speed.
#53 is more sedate. A blower on the hood and side pipes hint at a juiced up motor, but this car would suffer from instability at speed with that tall, flat front grille and no spoiler. Both cars sport CB whips, which were also an obsession in the late ’70’s.
It took me a couple of minutes to realize these two cars are lined up at a dragstrip—the vertical structure at the left is the light tree, the staging crew seem happy to be working, and are professionally dressed. I suspect I drew #80 and handed the drawing to one of my friends to add #53.
I’m glad my Mom saved these glimpses of what 8-year-old Bill was thinking about back then.