Down for the Count?

You have probably already seen the footage; 8 priceless cars dropping into a sinkhole. The article is from The Truth About Cars; it isn't only the post or the footage, it is also the comments.

The Internet is a  super tool, but so are some of the people on it. But I mean that in the nicest possible way. (Where is that sarcasm font when you need it?)

Part of the problem is language. Some people fail to draft their comments in an understandable way; others cannot comprehend and interpret simple English and yet a third set willfully fails to understand- to be contrary, to start an argument, or just because.

In the world of automotive aficionados there are several schools. In this country the debate between Ford and Chevy goes back almost 100 years. Back to when Chevy came out with the overhead valve 'Stovebolt' 6; a design they just retired a dozen years ago, and the Model T Ford. Both both Chevy and Ford fans agree Dodge is a big step behind the two of them. And then there is the American Cars versus Foreign cars; American and European versus Asian Cars. They sometimes remind me of high school rivalries- intense, but in the end meaningless.

Some of those rivalries show up in the comments; The inexplicable sadness from the Corvette guys; the unsympathetic remarks from the Ford and Doge folks. The dedicated humanist- THEIR ONLY CARS GET OVER IT.

Me? I'm with you fellers.

There were some one of a kind, priceless cars damaged when this sinkhole opened up. Milestone cars. There will be, and can be, only 1 Millionth Corvette. You can't replace it, you can't reproduce it. But you CAN repair it.

The Museum is in Bowling Green Kentucky, right across the street from the factory where they have been building these cars for 30 years. I don't think any detail will be so arcane or expensive that it can't be reproduced by the company that built these cars originally.

One commenter compared these cars to the Mona Lisa, negatively. His comment was that these were mass-produced items; easily copied. Unlike the Mona Lisa. I'm sorry to laugh in his face, but I am forced to. I can go to the internet right now and down load a copy of the Mona Lisa.

See? Easy.

No, it is not 500 years old, painted on a wooden panel or priceless. Well, it was sort of priceless; it was free.

But it has been mass produced. Yes, there is only one original, and the ownership of the original means something. I also seem to recall that old Mona here has had some work done in the last 500 years. She ain't exactly 'all original', if you know what I mean.

And in the end none of these 8 Corvettes will be either.

So maybe they do have more in common with the Mona Lisa than is viable at first blush.

Watched Any Good Home Improvement TV Lately?

Something I noticed the other day was that although the cable channels like DIY and HGTV still air shows like Property Ladder and Flip This House, they aren't making any new episodes. Basically because there is no more money to be made in short term housing investment, as a rule.

Instead, what they showing as the new Get Rich Quick scheme shows? Have you seen the one with the two guys and a truck who roam the country grubbing around in old barns and dingy basements looking for semi-buried treasure?

What about the one (or two or three) about the guys who buy abandoned storage sheds and seem to make a fortune digging through cardboard boxes?

Or how about the one where folks bring their old junk to the pawn shop to try and make a few bucks?

Do you see the pattern here?

Instead of investing in junk houses to make a quick buck, now you invest in REAL junk to make a quick buck.

I don't doubt folks can do it, I just doubt any Joe off the street can walk into a barn full of junk, identify the diamond in the rough, buy it cheap enough to make a few bucks, and then find the buyer the current owner couldn't.

Take the guys on American Pickers. PLEASE! I love the show, hate the guys. I don't know whether it is their accents, their attitudes or the way they interact with each other, but I tend to watch AP in spite of the guys, not because of them. That being said, I completely respect the knowledge they have acquired over years of doing this kind of work. And not just in one or two areas of expertise, but several. They are passionate about the items, but dispassionate enough to assess both realistic value to a final consumer and to themselves in a purchase price.

And that is where I have my problem with these kind of shows. How many of us can separate ourselves from the things we are passionate about enough to be realistic about their real value?

As Shakespeare said it: 'Therein lies the rub'. I can see folks who will think they do what these ignorant guys on TV do, and spend a lot of time losing a fortune. Just because they are completely enamored with early 21st Century rustic pottery doesn't mean its worth a cart load to every body (or anybody) else.

Just like these same folks saw a show once on flipping a house that suddenly made them experts in the real estate market- just before the crash.

The problem is these shows don't show the years of bad decisions and self education that goes into making money off of junk. The learning, often the hard way, about what it costs to restore or rehab, or even properly clean an item. They tend to short change the hard work that goes into getting rich quick and easy.

I guess that is the problem I have with these types of shows in general. They minimize the work, and only show the glory. Which I can kind of understand.

Hard work doesn't make for good TV, does it?

Cars I Have Been Loosely Acquainted With II

After the experience with the Pierce Arrow Dad and I kept looking through the Trading Post. One Saturday we saw a 1949 Packard Series 22 Limousine. The price? ‘First $100 takes it’.

We drove out to Amelia to a small garage and a fenced lot out back. The Packard had been stored in the lot about 3 years previously by a ‘former’ friend of the garage owner and he wanted it gone. This picture looks pretty close to the way we saw it, but it doesn’t give you the size of this thing. Add about 2 feet to a Chevy Suburban and that is close.

The car itself was a good buy for $100. The bottom half of the engine was in the trunk and the driver’s side floor was gone from the center of the car to the door.

But the seats- including the two fold down jump seats- were perfect. All of the glass was there and rolled up and down as smooth as silk, including the window that divided the back seat from the front. The body wasn’t beat real bad, considering it was in a small yard and surrounded by other cars.

That was the problem. The guy who owned the lot didn’t own the car. A buddy had asked to part it there for a ‘week or two’ 3 years earlier and he hadn’t heard from the guy in almost 2 years. It was being sold without a title which added another level of problems putting it back on the road.

Dad and I talked it over for a few minutes and let the guy know we would call him later that afternoon. On the 45 minute ride home we listed the good points and the bad points on the beast. One topic that came up was how many of them were there?

This is pre-(common)internet. Luckily I had purchased a book that listed the production figures on most US cars from about 1900 to about 1975. As soon as I got home I looked it up.

In 1949 Packard made 7 of these limousines.

We called the guy about an hour after we had left his shop.

He had already sold the Packard.

We had come that close to owning one of only 7. And here are pictures of two of them.

Cars I Have Been Loosely Aquainted With

I ran across this at Jay Leno's Garage today, and it got me thinking about a couple of collector cars that might just have slipped through my fingers.

One summer my Dad decided he wanted to restore a car, so he and I started looking through the Trading Post (an old paper that advertised all sorts of things) for something interesting.

One we ran into was a 1933 Pierce Arrow sedan for $1000. This was back in probably 1990 or so, and fully restored this car was worth around $50,000. We called the owner and the story got even better. Her father-in-law had bought the car new and drove it from Chicago to Cincinnati in 1963 when he came to live with her and her husband. He parked the car in their driveway (in a rather upscale part of town) and never touched it again. Father-in-law died in 1970 and the car was still right where he left it. Her husband had recently taken ill, and she was basically selling off all his stuff.

Pierce Arrow was a well known car 70 years ago, and I think their last year of production was 1935 or so. They were a luxury car- you could buy maybe 10 Model-A Fords for the cost of one Pierce Arrow- and owning one in ’33 would be akin to having a top of the line Mercedes today.

We took a chance and went to see it. The car was complete down to the wing nut on the air cleaner. The tires even still had air in them. The roof was made of leather, over top of wooden bows, even though the sides were metal. Car manufacturers hadn’t yet figured out how to make a solid metal roof that didn’t ‘drum’, or flex, as the car ran down the road. And this is where the trouble started.

Cars of this vintage were almost a wood body wrapped in steel. Sometime in the 30 years between when the car was parked and when we went to look at it the roof had started to leak. And thirty years of water had ruined all of the wood. The wood that framed the roof, doors, body, floor and seats was gone. The paint was faded on most of the car to a mottled blue, and the chrome was dull and pitted.

One bright spot was the front end. A bush had grown up over the grill, headlights and fenders. These parts looked like brand new. If they had thrown a tarp over this thing in 1963 it would have been a $20,000 car.

As it was, it wasn’t worth the $1000 she was asking.

We thanked her for her time and kept looking.

And kept regretting our decision. That car would have been an immense amount of work, but would probably been worth it.

I Sometimes Think I Need Another Hobby

I have quite a few books. Basically, because I never throw anything away, and to me books are unchangeable history. A later edition may say different things about a given situation than an earlier edition, but nobody can change what the first edition said. That’s why I collect old encyclopedias. They usually have facts that are unfiltered by events between then and now that will change the importance given to them.

Like if you read an item in an encyclopedia from 1940 about Germany and Hitler that is not completely evil. The editors may revise the article later on, but they cannot claim they knew Hitler evil from the beginning; you have it in black and white that they did not. Unlike electronic media that can change as soon as the original becomes a liability.

I also have all of my college textbooks. Don’t ask me why. I didn’t read them back then, and certainly have no intention of reading them now. I guess I keep them because they look impressive on the shelf. Most of them are completely useless, and totally worthless, even on the used book market. But I paid for them, and I am not throwing all that money away.

I also have a collection of old Westerns. Cloth covered pulp editions; the paper backs of the 1940’s & 50’s. They were my Grandmother’s on my Mom’s side and I have read them all at least once. Back in January of 1978, when we were snowed in for a month I basically read one a day. My Dad always said if you read the first page and the last page of a Western, you had the whole story. That’s basically true, but you would miss the poker playin’; hoss thievin’; gun fightin’ and rancher’s daughter kidnappin’ in the middle.

I get my books a lot of places. Garage and yard sales; flea markets, friends of the library sales, and I even buy one or two new every so often. Or I get them as gifts. Some I think were given to me as a joke, but I still kept them. They only eat shelf space, and that’s fairly cheap.

I was going somewhere with this I thought…

Oh yeah. My collecting methods mean I have a rather eclectic collection. I have some 5th grade reading textbooks; biographies, fiction and research texts. I have a whole collection of old paperback almanacs. Why? I don’t know. I just never threw them out I guess. I have books on psychology, architecture and electrical engineering. The history of cars and the history of man. I even have a couple of books I bought in grade school.

And I have read almost all of them. There was one I got in a box of books called Alligator that I never finished; it just got too weird. But other than that I think I’ve finished them all; including the encyclopedias. And the dictionaries.

Well, at least the ones by Jeff Foxworthy.