If you’re from the land of 11,000-plus lakes, you know how much amazing stuff is packed in between Canada and Iowa, Wisconsin and the Dakotas. Everyone else learns little by little.

Amazing cars are part of the treasure trove. A friend got me an invite to this private collection, which houses several of the best 1932 Fords on this Big Blue Marble. Among the jaw-droppers is this race car built by the incomparable Harry Miller for equally-well-known-guy Edsel Ford. The car has a saucy history, including subsequent ownership by a wealthy Detroit man who fell in love with a hooker, tried to buy her freedom for $5000, only to lose the money and his life in the transaction. Rumor is the bad men controlling the young woman and others like her cut the man up and spread his pieces around the city. His widow sold the car years later. Unfortunately it was hidden away for so long that all the people who could personally verify it was the Miller-Ford car had passed away when it resurfaced, though magazine articles exist showing Edsel at the wheel of a car identical to this one.

Ford built three of these experimental distributors. One is known to exist. This is it.

It wasn’t just Willys building Jeeps to fight the Axis Powers. Ford put its awesome manufacturing capability into that supply chain too. A few got stamped Ford.

Here’s another little treat: Offy-powered genuine Frank Kurtis midget. This car weighs maybe 800 pounds and has 250 horsepower to throw it around the track. Them’s good numbers–under 4 pounds per horsepower. No crumple zone if you hit something immovable–you’re the crumple zone.

Waste not, want not. Ford even turned the leftover scraps from the wood portion of his car business into charcoal. Henry knew business.

(Real 507 nose.)

I mentioned that the fabrication shop, Vescio’s Customizing and Restorations, is building my friend Bill a “tribute” BMW 507, arguably the company’s most beautiful car. The base vehicle is an MGA, but its front and rear ends will be modified to closely resemble the wonderful late-’50s German roadster.

I love good fabrication! The MG has been completely stripped and now, with lots of photos for reference, Bo Vescio, Ryan Ladda and Mike Jenson are working their magic, cutting, bending, shaping and welding sheet steel to transform an English design into a German one.

This is a fun car and a great project. I’ll keep ya posted.

Here’s another beaut that was out at Hooked on Classics in Watertown–a rail dragster from the late 1950s running a Hilborn fuel-injected DeSoto Hemi mill.

The car looks like it did back in the day. Apparently the fuel injection on this car is so rare someone from the Hilborn factory flew out to have a look at it.

Poking around on the ‘net, I found this cool site showing some really nice vintage dragsters. Check out the beautiful streamlined car near the bottom of the page–apparently scrapped after one run! Too bad. That’d be one of the hottest cars at a show today.

Update:  here’s a closer shot of this car, re: Comments below.

This shifter was a freebie inclusion with a cool 4-speed transmission I scored in the fall at a Wisconsin junkyard. I don’t need it–a vintage Hurst will accompany the gearbox in my car–but it’s a super-rare part, so why leave it rough?

I brought it over to my friend Tom’s engine shop, knocked it apart, wire-wheeled and glass-beaded it, then painted it up to stave off rust.

Then it came home to await a few free minutes for reassembly. It was a cinch to put it together. Now no parts can get lost. Only minor trick was tapping the pins back in, but a brief trial fit made that easy too–they and the holes are tapered, so you need to put the right end of the pin into the correct side of the hole. I also had digital photos to refer to for the gearshift lever pin.

It’ll sit with the gearbox for now…might go up for sale later. I’ll wait until the Hurst shifter is installed on the gearbox, installed in the car, and working fine before I unleash it. As with any rare part, it means more to send it to someone who needs it than to turn a buck.

Somebody out there is going to be restoring a ‘62 or ‘63 Buick Special or Skylark (or converting an automatic) and looking for a 4-speed shifter. That’s where this one belongs.

If you said “Britney Spears,” not only are you wrong, I don’t think you’re taking the quiz very seriously.

The correct answer of course is these little beauties, which Chrysler built 40 years ago to kick the competition’s butt in NASCAR. That’s exactly what the Plymouth Superbird and Dodge Daytona did–so the competition got them banned.

Both belong to my friend Greg Nelsen, and he was kind enough to allow some photographs today for the book I’m working on on unrestored cars. These have both seen a little cleaning up, e.g., paint, but most of the original parts are still there.

Fortunately to reach homologation as “stock” production cars, Chrysler had to build over 2,000 of them. While some were destroyed on the track and elsewhere, and more than a few fakes have been built, these two genuine cars survived.

Just as they were built to do, these cars hunker down the faster you go. Riding in one is FUN.

Several years ago, a man read an article I wrote for the paper talking about the 215 V8 engine going in my TR6. He had the same engine in his ‘62 Skylark and was looking to have it rebuilt. He needed a rebuilder and, since they usually don’t pull the engine for you, some help on that preliminary chore.

Have engine hoist, will travel. I said I’d pull the motor for him and recommended Adelmann Engine, which rebuilt my 215. Conceptually, removing an engine from this era is not hard, but there was some grease involved. When I got home I looked like I’d spent the day on the Exxon Valdez cleanup.

Rebuild and resto turned out nice, but there were two imperfections still dogging owner Tom Veilleux. One was a tendency for the engine to get hot when it stood for too long on a summer day. The other was the grille, which had gotten cracked somewhere along the way and was crooked to boot.

I had an extra six-blade fan to replace the stock four-blade item and Tom had picked up a nice stock grille at Sonny’s Auto Salvage to swap out his broken one.

So we drained and pulled the radiator, unbolted the four-blade fan, and swapped in the six. The blades on his original piece were longer, so there’s some question how much more air the six-blader will move. We concluded that a shroud would be a big help. I also noticed that the gap of 2 inches from the blades to the radiator was too much. At about an inch, he’d get better cooling. A spacer would correct that and I have a 7/8 inch one that would be about right. Unfortunately it was on my garage shelf.

The car won’t be on the road quite yet, though, so the spacer can go in shortly.

Straightening the grille proved more time consuming. It’s a three-piece item–the wide center, with a two-headlight piece on each end. The Sonny’s center and driver’s-side headlight pieces looked best but we reused Tom’s passenger-side headlight piece because the headlight bucket was very rusty on the replacement.

(Gaps were worse than this–this is after a little fiddling.)

The driver’s-side headlights were low, while the other side nearly touched the top of the grille cavity. Loosening and repositioning with the stock holes wasn’t enough. I kept out the bolts, positioned the grille in a spot where Tom, viewing from the front of the car some ten paces out, was happy, then marked with a Sharpie the additional sheetmetal surrounding each mounting hole that needed to be removed to allow it to bolt up straight.

In his 46 years with the car, Tom doesn’t remember the grille being crooked. Somehow during the recent body restoration, things got out of kilter. But no problem–we got things squared up and bolted down.

The final touch was to adjust the rubber stops on which the hood rests. These were threaded in too far, allowing the hood to rest too low. We backed each one out until Tom was happy with where it sat. (Sharp, well-informed eyes will notice that the front radiator mount has been bent out on its back piece, which now projects over the fan when it should sneak in front of it parallel to the grille. This suggests that someone may have run into fan interference and bent it out of the way. Perhaps they removed an important spacer at the same time to create too big a gap for proper cooling.)

All the minor adjusting pushed this job out to five hours, but the car looks a lot better and when the sun is shining and you’re out cruising, that’s important peace of mind.

Some readers ante’d up with suggestions on bumpers that might be suitable swaps for a BMW507’s (since a friend is building a 507 body). Here’s the round-up so far:

Genuine 507 article:

1965 Mustang (suggested by Gary):

1950 Ford (offered by Dave G):

Late 1960s MGB (my thought):

If anybody else wants to test your parts/classics/junkyard memory, please post your thoughts!

It’s certainly possible to custom make a bumper in steel and have it chromed. Sleuthing can be more fun though.

Anybody got any suggestions on a donor car for a BMW 507 bumper?  (See this post for the point of this query.)

OK, it’s in place. My friend Bill is going to build what there are too few to buy without spending a very, very large sum–a beautiful German sports car manufactured for only a few years during that styling breakthrough-period in the late 1950s.

The car is the BMW 507. While its performance would be tame by today’s standards, the car’s looks have few peers. Problem is only about 250 were made. Most of these still exist, but are locked away in collections. I saw one for sale for $235,000, already sold. Bill says his research turned up average prices in the $400,000 range.

Spending that kinda money was not in the cards. But this is the 21st Century. Anybody who watched Monster Garage knows that fabricators can build just about anything. Jesse James built a flying Panoz Esperante sports car!

So why not build a 507? There are talkers and doers. My friend is a doer’s doer. Truth be told, he didn’t want a half-century old 507. That would be neat, of course, but he wants a car that looks like that yet can be driven any day, anywhere.

Hot rod time! Using 507 and hot rod in the same sentence may seem strange but that’s exactly the concept, for what is a hot rod but an old car fixed up with newer parts to perform better?

Bill got hold of Vescio’s Customization and Fabrication and the game was afoot. You need a starting point and Bo Vescio keyed in on the MGA. His shop restored a rough one for a customer so he and his crew know the car well.

The game plan is to keep much of the MGA’s middle section–doors, passenger compartment, cowl, windshield, as well as the rear portion of the fenders and the forward portion of the quarter panels. Fore and aft of the wheel wells, the sheet metal will have to be changed. Likewise, the hood (or bonnet, since it’s an MGA piece) will change and of course the nose and tail. The front shut line is similar but the MGA bonnet says narrow, while the 507 one fans wide to give access to the wider V8 configuration engine.

Most of the bodywork will be metal. The Vescio’s crew can fabricate the required pieces. (I saw a pre-war fender Ryan Ladda made from flat sheet with an English wheel and other tricks and it was amazing. Dead on for contour before a lick of filler was on it.)

As with home renovation, there will be innumerable choices to be made along the way; the plan’s nuances will likely shift many times. For example, what under hood? Initial prospects are Chevy V6 or V8 or 5-liter Ford.

A starting-candidate MGA is fitted with wire wheels. This style may stay but who knows…. Regardless of particulars it should be a fun project. I’ll keep everyone posted, ’cause I like it.

It’s never wise to count Minnesota’s winter out, but…. seems most of the big blizzards are behind us. If you have a classic car, you’re now doubt scheming of those first long drives of the season.

Before you fire it up and head for Red Wing or Duluth, here are a few checks worth performing to make sure things go well.

1. Check the fluids. In our joy over the return of fun-car weather, it’s easy to sit down, press the pedals and turn the key. Pop the hood first. A slow leak in the clutch or brake system might have drained them over the winter. Just because the pedal shows resistance on the first push doesn’t mean the system isn’t low.

2. Air up those tires. Tires lose about a pound a month, average, and underinflation isn’t always easy to spot by sight. Proper inflation will reduce excess heat and extend the tires’ life.

3. Charge your battery. If you own a classic car, you probably own a battery charger. Boy is it annoying when a classic starts up, fills us full of summer-cruise dreams, then refuses to start when the sun is setting and you’re 30 miles from your house.

4. Check the wipers and wiper blades. In a perfect world rain and your classic car will seldom meet. When they do, the issue of where that water is going and how much acid is in it is a lot less important than seeing formidable and immovable objects ahead. If you don’t do it during a pre-season car wash–covered car?–spray a little water on the windshield and hit the wipers. They should clear the glass as well as your daily driver’s do.

5. With a friend’s help, check the headlights, turn signals and–most importantly–the brake lights! Older wiring connections are not as secure and weather-tight as modern ones. Things loosen up, corrode, get scummy and fail to work. The bulbs and lenses on an older car can be pretty dim by modern standards. At the very least, you want them to work. If the light is too dim to see well, look into new lenses, a modern headlight conversion, or adding a middle brake light.

6. Puddle check. Look under the car for telltale pools of coolant, brake or clutch fluid, or gear oil. Do this before you move the car. The location of any puddle or spot will provide good evidence of its source.

7. Check those belts. A broken fan or alternator (generator) belt can leave you stranded or overheat your classic’s engine. Check for proper play and make sure the belt is still strong and pliable without excess wear.

8. Fill ‘er up. Gas gauges can get a little fussy on older cars. That half tank it’s promising might be two gallons instead. Also, evaporation has been at work over the long (long, long, long) winter. If your gauge isn’t solid as Sears, reset the trip odometer with each tankful and use that as a backup miles-to-empty reminder.

See ya on the road!