Antique & Classic Cars Blog

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!

A wrecking yard transmission often doesn’t come with the shifter. The ‘63 Buick Special T-10 four-speed I scooped up from a Wisconsin yard did. While I have no immediate plans to use it–Hurst, baby, all the way–letting a rare piece like this sit rusted and seized wasn’t right.

So in she went to meet a few shop friends–wire wheel, glass-bead cabinet, hammer & drift, and hand press.

Disassembly was not easy. Even though this gearbox sat inside a wrecking yard warehouse for maybe 30 years, corrosion seized the pins that move the levers and hold the gear stick to the main shaft. It also locked the shaft in place. Nothing budged…. but this is what shops are for.

It took a hot wrench to get the pin out that grabs individual levers. A good penetrating oil soak, hammer and drift coerced the pin holding the gear stick to let go, and the main shaft, with equal oil dousings, finally listened to a large hand-press’ well articulated arguments concerning shearing force and pounds per square inch.

The wire wheel, with a little glass-beading for tight corners, buzzed off all that grungy, scummy, crud, and we were back to the plain metal pieces GM workers put together 45 years ago. These would not have been painted by the factory but they lie unseen once installed–by anyone who might end up with this piece–and I wanted the nice appearance to stick around and rust to stay away.

Assembly awaits another day, though I won’t wait too long or parts might disappear. (We have cats and batting around small objects provides them the same fun that a good game of pool gives us opposable-thumb types.)

A friend of mine with a ‘62 Buick Skylark called yesterday to say the Coen brothers were filming in Minneapolis this summer and needed cars from the 1960s as background vehicles. He was sending in a shot of his car–good choice Joel and Ethan, if you ever see this site–and suggested I offer my cars.

(Bracket before wire wheel, primer, paint.)

Though mine are too new–the ‘69 MGB GT would pass notice by all but hardcore MG enthusiasts–once the conversation turned to my garage, my buddy had to give me some grief for not having the TR6 done.

(Bracket after wire wheel.)

On that note, here’s the bracket started below, all painted and ready to keep my battery from wandering into the engine cavity on a hard stop. See T.V.–I am working on it! Hope readers are nudging things forward too now that you can hold a wrench outside without the bones in your hand hurting from the cold.

(Bracket after wire wheel, primer, semi-gloss black paint. Good ’nuff.)

Parts gathering for the long-lived, slow-moving TR6 project is mostly complete. The car was short a battery bracket, though, and traveling without one is a bad idea because a loose battery can hop around, short across the terminals and start a fire.

Ebay is a pretty good spot for such odds ‘n’ ends and an original one for ’72 Triumphs turned up for 15 bucks. It wasn’t flawless, but flawless is boring anyway.

When I go back to get the back bumper overrider, which I left with a friend who cut the Bolt from Krypton out with a cutting torch, I’ll use his wire wheel to buzz the rust off this and give it a nice coat of primer and semi-gloss black.

First, though, it needed some straightening. For slightly misshapen flat steel, a few level hammer blows got the job done just fine. I hit directly on the steel since I’m going to repaint it and used a flat block of wood behind for support. (In the photo below, the little flare to the left of the hammer head is a stamping mark.)

One of the mounting rods was also bent. No big deal as these are soft steel. A vise handled that task, used two ways. I clamped it just below the bend and did a little hand straightening that way, then clamped lengthwise to press out most of the rest of the deformation.

A couple small wood blocks, a little observation and some crushing a couple different directions did the job. It isn’t perfect, but I use the can-anyone-see-it? standard and when the answer is no even for myself, it’s OK.

Finally, chasing the threads with a die will make for easy clampdown when the part goes in–soon!

Sustained puddles are beginning to appear outdoors. That means the ancient oracles may be right–the ice and snow may indeed recede, producing a period of milder weather across much of the hemisphere.If this prediction proves true, we can actually use our classic vehicles again! Anybody open the garage door and start up anything interesting lately?  

Rust is the bane of the classic car world. It’s ugly, it’s destructive and left festering long enough, it can gnaw important chassis or steering components to the point where they are no longer strong enough to trust.

But surface rust is rust you can beat. This slip yoke was bolted to the back of a 45-year-old Borg Warner T10 that sat on a wrecking yard’s shelf in want of a buyer (a lucky buyer!) for decades. It looked rough–in other words, perfect for my favorite rust removing tools, a bench grinder with wire wheel and a glass-bead cabinet.

The wire wheel buzzes off rust with aplomb, leaving a polished shine on this steel casting.

It’s a wheel though, and while careful angling can get its rust-scrubbing bristles into some nooks, others are too tight for a large spinning disk to reach into.

That’s where the glass-bead cabinet shines (figuratively). In fact, it leaves a satin finish, but its gritty blasts can reach tight gaps and corners and blow rust into the ether.

These two shop bulwarks and about ten minutes’ effort brought a piece rough enough you might throw it in the scrap bin back to like-new condition. Now that’s just fun.

Owed my friend Tom a hand for helping me rebuild an old T10 four-speed, so I went out to his shop to assist with a clutch-swap on his S10 pickup.Naturally, I brought the Triumph bumper with the bolt from Krypton to see what Tom made of it.He had a drill story too–a cheap bit that “back twisted” in its own metal drilling encounter. “I felt something give,” he said, “but it didn’t feel like a broken bit.”

In a lifetime of shop work, Tom had never seen this–neither have I.

Remember the last time you saw a Nash Snowmopolitan? Was it the late ’60s when the kids were little and Dick and Nona had one up at their winter cabin? Or maybe it was on TV–one of the last episodes of Arcticman, caped hero of the Northland.

If the vehicle looks familiar, it’s because builders Tommy Huttunen and Steve Anderson did a fine job of merging snowmobile parts into a cute little road car. Huttunen always thought a Metropolitan’s front end looked like a snow vehicle, so a rusty one sitting in a back yard got his wheels turning.

The lower half was too rotted to restore but Huttunen’s an experienced mechanic, Anderson is a skilled welder and fabricator and some other friends have a snowmobile salvage place. It all fit together… with two years’ work. A Yamaha 700 triple provides the juice–probably twice what the stock Nash had.

As cool looking as this rig is, once it was all together and out on the Alaska snowfields–the builders live in Anchorage–Huttunen decided the most drama to be had from this hybrid was a spectacular crash. Wrecking it or himself was not among his plans. He put it up on eBay and some fan of … whatever you’d call this thing … snapped it up.

The post below mentions some curious photo problems at a recent hot-rod-shop shoot. Here’s one that turned out. While the car is important–a rare Muntz Jet–it’s the reflection that matters here. See how clear the broom, lights, trash can and puddle are, and how straight? (The broom curves because the body side does.)

That’s what a high-quality paint job looks like and it comes from lots and lots and lots of block sanding–never with your fingers. After all the prep work that goes into the car before this stage, it’s easy to find yourself tired by this point. But the good shops sand on. As Stefan Gesterkamp, the pro who painted Jay Leno’s one-of-a-kind carbon fiber EcoJet show car, puts it: the devil’s in the detail. Yeah it is.

Aware of the hardcopy Locals in Motion pieces Jim Bohen and I do on the local car scene, Bo Vescio invited me up to Rogers to check out his shop, Vescios Customizing and Restoration. When time permits, pro photographer Tom Witta from the paper will join me on a shoot, but this time I didn’t give him enough notice.

My 10 megapixel Olympus Stylus digital is a smart little machine and usually up to the task. This shoot was an exception. There are lots of cool projects underway here that I hoped to show everyone. Yet the camera started seeing spots. A first guess for why was a dirty lens (or lens filter).

But the spots moved, changing size, number, and position in the frame. I cleaned the lens (filter–it’s not removable) to little avail. The spots still appeared randomly, typically in shots that involved a dim foreground with a bright light in the background.

This is a restoration shop, so there is sanding dust in the air. Still, the behavior is hard to explain through either floating particles or something in a fixed position on the lens. Too bad, because there was a cool ‘68 Charger in the works that we wanted to pair up beside a new one for a contrast shot. None of those photos was spot (or rather spot off)–though a couple in the 50 or so taken look half decent in small size.

Lots of smart people peruse these posts. Anybody had a similar experience?

Fortunately, there’s a dog on the premises and adding a nice dog always helps a photograph…. ‘Course the crew’s a photogenic lot too–where’s Monster Garage, Minnesota edition?