I am not a big fan of ethanol fuel - but largely because I feel like I am paying more for a fuel with less energy content. With that said, however, I think ethanol mixes get more of a bad rap than they deserve. What I can tell you about ethanol is that it is very good at cleaning deposits from your fuel system and depositing them as a crust ring in your carburetor. This is a fairly limited time affair, and only an issue if you drive your vehicle infrequently as eventually the ethanol will clean everything out an all is fine   Most of what my friend Mr. Google tells me is that ethanol actually has a higher boiling point than gasoline. Your vapor lock issue probably predates the advent of ethanol blended fuel. What I would do in your scenario is look at how your fuel line is routed, and make sure it is not too close to an exhaust pipe, header tube, etc. Other modification-oriented ideas you can try is installing a fuel pump with bypass (some fuel gets sent back to the tank) or install a thick spacer gasket between the carb and the motor. A lot of older engines send exhaust through the bottom of the intake manifold to help cold engines vaporize fuel better. On a warm engine, this can lead to a hot carb and vapor lock. If you are really looking to modify, block that exhaust passage up all together. I have done it on many a car. I seriously doubt if you are going to be driving your classic when it is 14°F out ... View more

I know a lot of people who consider a good tire one with a high mileage rating... that is the completely wrong direction to go if you have even a mild interest in performance and handling. Radio is probably the one item on that list where I need to throw the challenge flag. Even straightforward radio swaps can present challenges. Thinking of that Corvair, it's a simple dash that probably doesn't have a cover on the bottom - so it's an easy swap if someone makes a replacement of the same general dimensions... but I'll bet a stack of hundreds that this was a mono- sound car with a single speaker in the front dead center of the dash, and maybe a second single speaker between the back seats... now you have problems. If that radio has any wattage to it, running power through your 60 year old factory harness is probably not a good call. Take my poor ol' Allante, and you have a 'radio' that is functionally split between two components in two locations, and none of them are a standard DIN size Radio and easy rarely fall in same sentence ... View more

Although not the point of this story, the Bronco II story is part of the slippery slope that killed the car - at least the interesting car. It is unfortunate that folks got injured rolling over in these things, but now you start down the disasterous slope of altering the appearance of vehicles to make them safer... fast-forward 20 or so years and all cars look the same and no-one wants to - or can - break from the mold to make a car that is interesting, but may have safety stats that are an outlier from their peers. The Bronco ii and the Suzuki Sidekick (which appears to have suffered the same fate) were neat cars back in the day. I knew a lot of people who had them, and didn't know anyone who ever got folded, spindled, or mutilated while operating one ... View more

I would consider using a car from NASCAR as a daily driver - if the DOT would let me and all ... View more

When the movie industry ran out of ideas in the mid-2000s, focus shifted from realistic plotlines to dazzling CGI. Throw product placement into the mix, and the stuff characters have around them just becomes static. How many law enforcement agents ride around in brand new Camaros and Chargers - especially while performing low-key surveillance and tailing suspects? ... View more

And this obviously was conceived before the day of the plastic handle bag ... View more

While evidence tends to suggest that more than one of these were built, I really can't see how this can get to, let alone past, the prototype stage without revealing some fairly glaring flaws ... View more

Some of these things don't surprise me. It's a good looking truck that you just can't buy today (new) for any amount of money, these things were beat mercilessly in their normal service lives, and a lot of them rotted horribly. Finding one in good condition is rare and is going to drive high bids ... View more

This isn't a car, but the craziest swap I know of is aircraft radial engines in motorcycles https://www.motorcyclespecs.co.za/model/Custom/aero_bike.htm   ... View more

There was a mid-80s Celica running around my neighborhood years ago with a SBC and a giant bow-tie in the back window ... View more

I think the changing evolution of 'driveable' has had a lot to do with the demise in interest in a lot of this older iron. I'm not that old, and I had a coworker who would drive his Model T to work. Now if your car can't do 80, corner well, and stop on a dime, it's a road hazard... and if it can't be driven, it makes it a lot harder to enjoy ... View more

This car has all of the basic requirements to be collectible. It's not a run of the mill grocery getter, it has distinctive styling (whether you like it or not), and it was not produced in massive numbers On the other hand, based on the comments, it, like my Allante, has its haters and it may have to wait until all of the angry people who are mad that they did away with the original beetle get over it. One way or the other it will be collectible Me personally, I think they look stupid and do not make good use of interior space but hey that's me ... View more

The type of car MG was back in the day just doesn't exist anymore ... View more

My approach was always to have more than one car ... View more

Hey I don't even drive to my cubicle anymore and I still want one ... View more

Then they came out with the 60 Series which wrecked the whole scheme ... View more

1990 Cadillac Allante - the plastic 'tape' used by the power window mechanism - the standard GM stuff is about half an inch thinner   for my 65 Impala - the trunk seal groove and surrounding sheetmetal. For such a rot-worthy location on such a common body, I haven't seen anyone that sells it and I have largely been painstakingly fabricating it from scratch ... View more

as intriguing as the concept is, that article did a lot to help convince me to keep straightening out the curves on my favorite windy road. One - its free, and two, 9 times out of 10 I'm the only one on it (benefits of living in the boondocks). There is not much potential for me getting overconfident because I'm on a closed course and wiping out a vette, two porshes, and a miata. The one question the article didn't answer for me is what happens if you do happen to smash up someone's pretty yellow brand new Vette (and your car too) ... View more

My mother bought an FX-16 new back in the day, and I always thought about getting one for nostalgia purposes... but good luck finding one ... View more

DeLorean did well when he was an idea man with corporate bean-counters to keep him reined in. As soon as he went on his own, he tried to put all of his great ideas into one car all at once, with little to no insight into what the consumer was actually looking for. Although that twin turbo motor would have probably addressed one of the major issues with the car, it is unlikely that it would have saved the company ... View more

It's not the coveted '86 with the DeLorean motor, but something about flying out to Washington and winging it back to the east coast in a 200K mile **bleep** really would like this car ... View more

I would love to see the artist conceptual rendering of where they stashed those two turbos and the intercooler ... View more

Poor car. That thing was made to go really really fast, and it will be lucky to tick off 100 miles driving across auction blocks ... View more

Maybe for some of those examples, but I doubt if the EuroScort is particularly hard to get parts for ... View more

I almost bought one with an SBC years ago. Apparently it is a fairly straightforward conversion since they already have THM transmissions ... View more

It's nice to see auction coverage of approachable car sales ... View more

My neighbor had a 67 GTO - beautiful car, but he spent way too much time and money restoring it, and it came out so nice that he was afraid to drive it and eventually sold it - something I always keep in mind with my projects... I want them nice, but not too nice ... View more

Aw, come on - it adds a little adventure to commenting ... View more

I never understood in a world of 7.5 billion and growing why we would be developing an autonomous anything ... View more

any consideration to turning it off in the interim? we aren't exactly a rowdy bunch ... View more

very unfortunate bleep there - moral is sometimes a good bull*bleep* story has a life of its own ... View more

There was a story going around the interwebs that Mr. (Fred) Rogers was a former sniper in the military, and he did the children's **bleep** there ... View more

So my private messaging isn't working right or I'm not smart enough to use it... but broad strokes are older than dirt Dell (a hot rod in its day) running Win 10 and Edge browser ... View more

the auto-moderator also appears to be altering content - my original post was 2 and a half sentences of witty prose ... View more

confirmed ... View more

I have found that a spray bottle of water works better than having an extinguisher around (which I do anyway), but you can wet things down before hot work and put out small fires without making a powdery mess out of your garage ... View more

I found that hyphenating words like s-h-o-r-t works - s-h-o-r-t is apparently on the bleep list ... View more

so the word above that keeps getting replaced with **bleep** is s-h-o-r-t ... View more

apparently 5h0rt is being replaced by **bleep** ... View more

**bleep** ... View more

I got about 2 and a half sentences replaced by **bleep** for some reason - pretty sure I used my used my company manners. Long story **bleep**, for 45K, I would go with new ... View more

Leaving money out of the equation, the original Z cars are attractive cars, and have always hovered on the fringes of my want list. What has kept them there are reports from owners that they are a little light on squirrels under the hood and are not the best handling cars. Tack on a 45-60K price tag... and nope The newest Zs capture some of the lines of the originals, but they are watered down in all of the places you expect newer cars to water down the lines - no chrome, **bleep** cars ... View more

Step 1 - Don't go That has been my technique my entire adult life, but I doubt it works well for everyone Now for full disclosure, I did buy one used car at a dealership, but it entirely matched my specifications, I test-drove it, went home and did some research on the car, then came back later and made the purchase ... View more

It is a beautiful car, but it is further evidence that the collector car market (the high end of it anyway) is completely out to lunch. We are talking about paying for a car a healthy chunk of the price of a car factory ... View more

With the way things are going, I imagine EVs will surpass combustion engines in inefficiency and dinosaur consumption before the charging station even shows up at your local fuel stop ... View more

My neighbor has a 3-pedal Diesel Rabbit that doesn't even need to have a battery (once you get it started). Even though it is all of 40-odd horsepower, I enjoy driving that car any chance I get. That machine is as analog as it gets ... View more

Beating up on automakers for the state of modern cars is fun, but it is about as pointless as complaining about the weather or the price of gas Start with the Kindergartenworld culture (everything has to be perfectly safe, and if 6 out of 1,762,354 units of a product fail, that is grounds for a multi-million dollar class action suit) which has resulted in an over-regulated over-optimized car that leaves no room for originality, add to that formula the fact that 90+% of the good ideas have already been taken - which is why I have to add beaver teeth to a BMW to 'freshen it up', and top it all off with 'we have to save the world with low/zero carbon car options' (at least in appearance, I'm sure that Hummer will consume as many dinosaurs as my big block vette, and by the way, let's ignore the 7.5 billion and growing problem), and there really isn't much room to pull anything interesting off with a new car design. The fact that they do every once in a while is a credit to the industry ... View more

I think smaller headlights would probably made a significant appearance improvement ... View more

I always thought rear lights should differentiate between accelerating, cruising, decelerating, and braking. Just being able to tell when the cars in front of you are letting off of the gas could probably significantly improve reaction time for an upstream event ... View more