I think the term you want is estivate. That's when a creature enters an extended period of dormancy during a hot or dry period.  ... View more

As I read I kept thinking: "Yes, yes, yes, BUT... When you first walked into the garage, could you remember what you came in there for?" (What's really sad is when you have to ask yourself that question and you're in the bathroom...) ... View more

Just to get the conversation away from wheels... How about the '69 Mustang Fastback and the '76 Celica GT? Especially from the rear... ... View more

We just returned from a trip to Seattle, Vancouver, BC, Victoria, and then down the Washington and Oregon coast, and found that cash was generally discouraged, if not outright refused. In 10 days, we spent less than $20 in cash. This is the first time I've been to Canada and not returned with at least a few twenty-cent quarters. My advice is take less green and more plastic. 😐 ... View more

Honestly, I found the commercial moving in and of itself, but it certainly didn't give me any reason to consider a Toyota as my next purchase. ... View more

1968 Pontiac GTO convertible. 5 years later when I did a frame-off restoration, I got several cups (!) of rice out of the doors, behind the kick panels, beneath the rear quarter windows, and even in the trunk. And yes, we had stopped and vacuumed it out on the way to the hotel! My buddies always did tend to overdo things... ... View more

Is it a misprint, or did the Shelby GT350R sell for $100K less than it did in 2020? Or am I misunderstanding? ... View more

I had much the same thought. It has always seemed insane to me to make major underhood parts out of plastic, given that we KNOW what happens when they're subjected to heat and the passage of time. On the other hand, my livelihood doesn't depend on people replacing their old cars... ... View more

For me, this is the real core issue. We (and the rest of the world) are insane to go all-in on a technology primarily produced by China. ... View more

I'd like to nominate the second redesign of the Ford Taurus (1996-1999). Electrical systems that made Lucas look reliable and totally unfortunate styling. Why anyone would want to look at a bunch of ovals piled atop each other higgelty-piggelty is beyond me. The only time that vehicle looked appealing was as the top of the crusher descended. ... View more

I like understated, so my favorites are the '67 Pontiac Gran Prix and the similar style on the GTO. I always thought they had a nice frenched custom look. Speaking of the '67 GP, the etched logo on the front window glass was a pretty cool "custom" touch, too. Oh yeah, and the rounded door corners; all classic customizing tricks! ... View more

I have to agree that intermittent electrical problems can be frustrating, especially on newer vehicles. The most frustrating experience I had was with a '97 Mercury Mountaineer. It was Memorial Day, and after putting the flowers on the graves, the vehicle, which had been running perfectly, refused to start.  Some quick shade tree diagnostics determined that it was getting spark, but there was no pressure in the fuel injection rail. The most likely culprit, and the easiest to check without tools, was the fuel pump relay. I swapped it for the neighboring (identical) relay, but no luck. I got a ride home and returned the next day with a truck and trailer. On a whim, I tried to start it, and, what do you know? Fired right up! For the next month, it ran erratically. Sometimes I'd have no problem, sometimes it would cut out momentarily while driving, sometimes it would die and I'd have to sit by the side of the road for a few minutes, sometimes it would fail to start after having been driven a short distance, but NEVER the same problem consistently. All this while I was identifying and testing any component that might affect the fuel delivery. I finally bit the bullet, dropped the tank, and replaced the fuel pump, even though I've never had one of them that ran "some of the time"; they're either fine or dead. Seemed to fix the problem for a month or so, then it came back. Since I had changed out EVERY other sensor, switch, or other component of the fuel system, I replaced the relay I'd checked the first day. Wouldn't you know it? Both that relay and the one next to it functioned only intermittently! Aarrrgg! It gave me another 5 years of trouble-free service until it started draining the battery any time it was parked for more than a couple of days. I still haven't chased that one down because it's such a hassle dealing with the retained power functions - I just bought a new truck! The Mountaineer isn't really worth much, but the engine and transmission still work so well I hate the thought of scrapping it. So, there it sits behind the shop until I make time to fix it or the wife runs out of patience! ... View more

What about Barbara Feldon's '65 GTO ad? ... View more

I'll second that! Although I admit it wasn't until the Google age that I realized the line was: "Two cool shorts sittin' side by side." Played through my 8-track, I was sure they were singing "sharks", which didn't make much sense, but then, I'd even never heard of the SoCal slang term "short", referring to a hot rod... ... View more

Aside from cracking, using chrome plated standard sockets with an impact driver can cause the plating to split and/or flake off. This is not only unsightly, the layer of nickel & chrome left partially attached can have a razor sharp edge. ... View more

Have you considered placing pieces of plywood under your jack stands when you want to use them on blacktop? ... View more

OK, your story reminded me of another one that's honestly more embarrassing than aggravating. It was the same '68 GTO convertible that I over-revved and exploded the clutch in, but a few years later after a frame off restoration. I got into a really ugly argument with the wife over something stupidly trivial (Which always seem to be the worst ones!) and I stormed out of the house, hopped in the Goat, laid a patch in reverse backing out of the driveway, and really nailed it taking off down the road. The cloud of smoke was impressively large and thick. Just as I'm ready to slam into second, there's a bang from the rear and it rolls to a stop without even a whimper. I realized that I still had the parking brake on and, with the non-posi rear, the driver's side rear tire had been half dragging while the passenger side had been spinning like mad. I'd shattered all four spider gears. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But the worst part was having to go back into the house and face my wife! ... View more

It's fine or coarse, not 'course'. ... View more

Packard 56 electrical connectors, as I work on a lot of 50s - 70s GM projects. Also Molex electrical connectors and heat shrink sleeving. ... View more

In the years between when I started playing with cars and when I got a wife, I spent a significant number of hours scouring wrecking yards and cruising back lanes. This would be in the late 70s - early 80s, when muscle cars were commonly viewed as old junk with terrible mileage. I picked up a number of deals, but a few still stand out in my memory.   A friend and I walked into a junkyard and spotted a '67 Plymouth Barracuda fastback that hadn't yet been hauled back to the stacks. At a quick glance it was straight and rust-free, though the light blue metallic paint was dull, and seemed pretty complete. Even though at the time I was heavily into Pontiacs, it was one of those cars I had always wanted. I walked into the office and started dickering with owner while my buddy was fiddling under the hood. The junkyard guy told me that the owner, the proverbial little old lady, had had it towed in just a few hours before and he hadn't had a chance to look it over yet. He asked for $150, I countered with $125. He agreed and as he was filling out the bill of sale my buddy started it up and drove it up to the office. Apparently, the only thing wrong with it was a loose battery cable. I had to fix one of the rear window regulators and reinstall the original radio, which I found under the seat, but otherwise it gave me faithful service for several years until some dolt ran a stop sign and T-boned it, crushing the passenger side almost completely from the leading edge of the door to the back bumper.   Another junkyard find was a '65 Buick Skylark Gran Sport. The 401 nailhead was frozen and it had the usual GM A-body rust through at the bottom of both quarter panels, but it was a 4-speed car with power windows, driver's seat, and antenna, as well as air conditioning! The red exterior was heavily oxidized, but the white and black interior looked perfect. After some haggling, I paid $250 (cash only!) and towed it home. I pulled the motor and took it into my favorite speed & machine shop and the owner offered instead to sell me a freshly machined, but unassembled, '65 425 nailhead, along with new bearings, gasket kit, oil pump, timing set, and an Isky cam/lifters/springs set. Oh, and he'd throw in a rebuilt TH-400 transmission with a shift kit. Seems his son had been racing a '65 Riviera on the local dirt tracks and had planned a rebuild during the off season, but it took so long to get the cam kit from Iskenderian that he moved to a '66 Chevelle and left all the parts in the back of the shop. I got it all for another $250 - again, cash in hand. The capper in this project was when I was doing another junkyard dive and spotted a '66 Buick Electra 225 and popped the hood to find it had the 425 with the dress-up kit. Cast aluminum finned valve covers with the BUICK script on the sides, chromed dual-inlet air cleaner, and multiple chromed brackets and bolts. Being a '66, it had the spread bore manifold to fit Rochester's newly-introduced Quadrajet carburetor, which, unfortunately, had been removed. I got the intake and dress-up kit for $25. I thought about it afterwards and went back the next week to pull the motor and transmission, just for spare parts, but the car had gone to the crusher. Oh well. I fixed the rust and repainted the Gran Sport and put it all back together with the dressed up 425 with an 850 cfm Carter Thermo-Quad, and it was one of the torquiest muscle cars I ever owned. In first gear (BW cast iron T-10 with 2:54 low and 3:42 gears in the rear) at idle(!) you could let out the clutch gently from a dead stop and it would just trundle on down the road.  With a little bit of practice with the throttle and clutch, you could also start off in 4th. I taught my future wife to drive a stick shift in that car and she loved it. I eventually sold it to some kid who had more of his daddy's money than he did good sense, and he promptly wrapped in around a telephone pole.   Lastly: while cruising through farm country, I spotted a '64 Pontiac Le Mans Sport Coupe (post) with 4 flat tires sitting at the back of a long driveway. It was brown with thoroughly dead paint but no rust through, and the brown interior was in excellent condition with bucket seats, automatic shifter in the console, uncracked "wood grain" rallye steering wheel, 90-degree tach in the dash, and vacuum gauge in a pod on the console - all pretty rare options. The current owner, son of the original, was more than happy to let me haul it off for $50, but he wanted to pull the radio (original AM) to put on his tractor(!). I offered $25 cash and a brand new, in the box, AM/FM cassette stereo with a couple of marine speakers. He and I shook hands, each thinking he'd gotten a killer deal, which is the platonic ideal of a good transaction. After I got it home and got it running, I noticed the block code (XB) was for a '65 regular fuel 2-bbl 389. It hadn't even dawned on me that the intake was the 65-&-later bolt pattern, rather than the '61-'64 style. I went back to visit with the former owner and he told me the original 326 had thrown a rod out the side of the block in the first year of ownership and his father persuaded the dealership to upgrade the warranty replacement with a 389, since he was using the Le Mans to tow their camp trailer and(!) a small boat. Crazy people.  I swapped on an old aluminum Edelbrock P4B manifold with a '65 Carter AFB and a pair of long tube headers capped off by by a pair of straight-thru glass packs, and changed the 2-speed TH300 for a TH350 with a 6-cylinder torque converter - all spare parts I had lying around. It ran like a scalded cat. If I recall correctly, it went away in a massive 3-way swap (that included a '65 GTO with a '63 Tempest four cylinder mated to its original Muncie 4-speed, a warehouse full of odd parts, a pair of '68 GTO projects, and a couple of promised body & paint jobs) when I married and went back to college to finish up my degree. Priorities, man. ... View more

Wonderful song, but hardly obscure. My favorite lyric is: /Tires spitting gravel/ /I commit my weekly crime/ When I first heard it, it seemed impossibly dystopian. Now I'm afraid I may live to see "the motor laws" enacted. ... View more

FWIW, for many of us, the term roadster describes a single seat vehicle without side glass. Consequently, there's little point to installing, much less repairing, the A/C. What the author is driving is more properly a cabriolet or a convertible. I guess this really depends on whether or not you think of something built in 1999 as an "old" car. Just a different point of view. 🙂 ... View more

Hey MarveH - All joking aside, working with a buddy is the best way I know to keep your projects on track. It's easy to come up with a reason not to go out to the garage/shop when it's just you, but, just like going to the gym, it's harder when you have to call your friend and make some lame excuse. It's also nice to have an audience for your jokes, or your profanity when something breaks or disappears into the depths of the engine compartment. Plus, you might learn some new stuff. ... View more

I'm sure it was done to this car, but not mentioned, but I'd add changing to a quicker ratio steering box. I would also note that many of these suggestions are fairly simple to implement if you're working on a mid-60's or later vehicle, but can be much more involved if you have something older. As an example, most pre-60's domestic vehicles were built with the steering box and column as a single component, with the shaft being one long steel rod pinned to the sector gear at one end and splined through the steering wheel at the other. Changing to a faster or power-assisted box is therefore not a trivial exercise. ... View more

The '71-'76 Pontiac honeycomb wheels aren't actually aluminum. They're molded urethane (think GTO's "Endura" bumper) over a steel core and they're HEAVY! The manufacturing term was polycast, and in 15x7 they weighed about 30 lbs. each. At least some of the other GM divisions offered styled wheels made the same way through the 70's. Chevrolet had the turbine style and a couple of others, and Buick had a really ugly one with square blocks rather than spokes on the Regal.   The confusion may be because the snowflake wheels Pontiac offered after the honeycombs were aluminum. And the aftermarket currently offers the Pontiac honeycomb wheels in true cast aluminum, in modern sizes. ... View more

I was taking my elderly mother to visit her cousin in my recently acquired '68 GTO convertible and in the course of conversation, she asked me what "synchromesh" meant. I replied that it meant you could put the transmission into any gear without double clutching or matching the engine RPMs. And then proceeded to demonstrate. We were coming down out of a canyon and were going about 60. I pushed in the clutch and downshifted the transmission into third, then second, and all was fine. As I attempted to shift from second down to first, there was some resistance, but I persevered, and when it finally went into gear, I was rewarded with a loud bang from under the hood. The clutch would no longer engage. We were well over a hundred miles away from home, so I hitched a ride to the nearest gas station (this was in the pre-cellphone era) aand called AAA to have it towed to our destination. I borrowed some tools and disassembled it in her driveway. When I removed the bell housing I got a face full of dust and debris. The clutch disc had disintegrated, leaving only the hub and a few bits of the marcel. Needless to say, I felt like a complete idiot. To add insult to injury, when the tow truck driver clamped the steering wheel in place so he could tow from the rear axle, he bent the OE rallye steering wheel, breaking one of the spokes away from the hub. And wasn't that a treat to find a replacement! ... View more

While I agree that omitting the '55-'57 Nomad, the skylited Buick Sport Wagon of '64-'69 and its sister, the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser of '64-'72, and Volvo's 1800 series, I'm surprised there's been no mention of the '64-'65 Chevelle 2-door wagon.  ... View more

I was really hoping for at least a passing reference to Carl Edvard Johansson. Gauge blocks, or "Jo blocks", are critical to precision machining. At least, if you want your precision parts to interchange with parts made on a different machine... ... View more

In the late seventies and early eighties, SJs were a relatively cheap source for mechanical upgrades for earlier GTOs.  The front disc brakes, the engines & transmissions, and the rear axles (Chevy 12 bolts on SJs) all fit the earlier cars. My favorite was a '65 Tempest with patina, a ragged bench seat, and all the original grease left on the '70 455, as well as the '65 air cleaner, suitably modified for the quadra-jet. It looked like grandma's hand-me-down and ran like a scalded cat. I parted out a half-dozen or so. In retrospect, I feel kinda bad. Tons of fun at the time, though. I still have a '69 dashboard and automatic console I had intended to swap into a GTO, but l never got around to it... ... View more

Forget about the Leslie Special - I always wanted the Hannibal 8!  Growing up, "Push the button, Max!" was a common phrase in my house. ... View more

It was much easier to realize that teenage fantasy in the back seat of a Dart or Valiant than it was in the back of a Nova or a Mustang. (When is the last time you actually sat in the back seat of a Mach 1?) The early fastback Barracudas were even better - with the fold-down rear seat and all that glass to look up at the stars through...   I can still fit comfortably in the back of a Dart Swinger. That's not true of many of the cars my friends and I drove when we were teens and interested in back seat gymnastics. ... View more