Atomic Batteries to Power....

The orginal Batmobile from 60's TV series staring Adam West is the best TV  hero car of all time! My brother and I always mused that when we became older and struck it rich, our first conquest would be to purchase one of the orginal Batmobuiles (like Mark Wahlberg's character in Rockstar).

Well, it turns out that Batmobile #1 owned by legendary car customizer George Barris will cross the auction block on January 19, 2013!  The car will be auctioned by Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale.  I'm not a fan of what Barrett-Jackson did to our hobby.  I remember watching the earliest televised auctions on Speedvision and being disgusted by the inflated prices.  Barrett-Jackson made our beloved works of art nothing more than investments for guys with big egos and bigger wallets.  As a result, every local idiot with a pre-1973 anything for sale automatically upped their prices 10 fold.....but I'll blast that phenomenon at a later date....back to the Batmobile.

The orginal George Barris creation was derived from the 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car.   Upon its success molds were made fromt he orginal and threre fibreglass replicas were made for promotional use.  By the way, the orginal car was powered by a big block Ford 390!  Here is a great link to more specs. In the meantime, I have a little more than a month to win the lottery or inherit a fortune.

The College Years

After high school I headed off to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York.  RPI is made for people like me.  No fluff courses like literature or gym, but a state of the art education based on science and technology coupled with access to things like machine shops and wind tunnels to put your classroom studies to the test.

I quickly made friends with a kid who had a lifted GMC Jimmy in the parking lot.  This friendship yielded a slew of stories about getting stuck in mud and ultimately rolling the truck over on one of our many an off-road excursions. I'm sure I'll give a detailed account at a later date but here is just a taste of what we used to be up to:

While at RPI I became involved with the Formula SAE race car team. I even became involved with the Formula Electric race car team which was a full sized open wheel race car with an electric power plant.
I also ended up running the Rensselaer Student Auto Shop and the Rensselaer Sports Car Association while at school.  The Auto Shop was a student run organization that operated a shop facility for RPI students.  The idea was there was a fully equipped four bay garage on campus that any student could come to and use to perform their own work.  This was a tremendous asset to have on campus and was ultimately where all us like-minded car guys found each other.   At its peak, we had some serious iron (for a bunch of kids) being worked on in that shop.

The Sports Car Association was basically the same group of guys but we organized and held autocross races on campus and road rallies in the area.  We would get some cool hardware showing up for our races. Plus we'd get some of our recently graduated friends showing up with company rental cars!

 

I still can't believe the school supported both of these organizations.

What was your first car?

A question that resonates with every car guy....especially if the answer isn't embarrassing.  My first car was a 1969 Mustang coupe I found in town for $1300.

I didn't even have my license yet but I knew I wanted to buy my first project car. I worked all summer painting a catholic school and started stashing away the cash. I also started combing the local newspaper for potential targets. Do you remember buying cars from the paper? Before the internet, we had a local publication called the Bargain News that came out every Thursday that would be loaded with special interest vehicles. The trick was getting your hands on a copy as early on Thursday as possible and start calling the sellers to set up times to view the prospects. By Sunday, the listing was useless, because everyone you called would promptly reply that the car had been sold. The other way to find a car to buy was simply driving around. My brother would take me all around town looking for gems sitting on lawns or in driveways with their little 'For Sale' signs on them.

I found my car in a driveway parked under a cherry tree on the other side of town. The sad thing is that, at the time, $1300 was all I could afford, and the papers were chocked full nice cars in the $3500 range.  I remember seeing desirable cars like GTO's and Mach 1's for sale in that range. There was even a real Shelby GT 350 for sale for an unthinkable $6500.

My Mustang was a plain old '69 coupe.  Mechanically it was sound, the interior was good (with the exception of a ripped headliner) but the body was tired. The paint was dull, it had some rust spots and was missing a few trim pieces.

It had a 302 with a 2V carb, C4 automatic transmission, power steering, and horrible manual drum brakes (on all four wheels). I spent about a year or so going through the car. Luckily, Mustangs Unlimited was about 35 minutes away from my house. Once I had the mechanicals sorted my father actually stepped up to the plate and took it to a body shop and had it resprayed the original Acapulco Blue. Then I got my license and I was off. I drove this car everyday (rain, sleet or snow) to school and work. Eventually I slapped a swap meet Edlebrock intake and 4 barrel Holley on it. My brother then surprised me with Headman headers and a set of wheels from American Racing (so long hubcaps).

The car took a change in direction when I left for college.  No longer needing a daily driver my brother arranged to buy a stout 351W/C4 combination from a gearhead buddy of his.  The engine was great. It had an aggressive solid cam and lifters. Trick Flow aluminum heads, MSD ignition, and a high stall torque converter.  Once we got this thing running it was just silly. Way too much power for the stock 8" rear.   It didn't stop me from taking it to Lebanon Valley Dragway and doing a one-legger down the first half of the strip.

The last real iteration of this car was the addition of a Ford 9" read with a Traction Lock and 3:50 gears.  After college I wanted to address the remaining issues with the car.  Namely, I wanted to update the brakes, suspension and repair the rusty from frame rails. I also wanted to install a manual transmission (while away at college I learned that automatics are a sin).   At this time, the front suspension kits from  Total Control Products were becoming popular and that's what I wanted. While researching and sourcing parts for this work I came across an amazing deal on a '67 Mercury Cougar.

I'll get into the details of the Cougar in a later post, but for all intensive purposes the Cougar was too great a temptation.  It was an original big block car with a 4 speed manual and TCP suspension already installed for less money that if I bought the parts for my Mustang.  I pulled the trigger on the Cougar and the Mustang moved to the back burner.

I still have my '69 Mustang (but the engine and tranny combo were sold). For that matter, I still have the '67 Cougar. The current plan is to install a more mild engine/tranny combo in the Mustang and make it a nice streetable driver. This plan is partially the suggestion of my wife who claims I 'ruined' the car she loved with that stupid motor and transmission!

So, for now, it sits in my garage waiting for the time (and money) to get it back on the road.  The cool thing is that my sons have taken a liking to my cars. My eldest son Joshua (age 7) has called dibs on the Cougar and my youngest Luke (age 4) has adopted the Mustang as his own....so he periodically reminds me that we have to fix it and get it back on the road....soon enough.

First Victim

When I was about 9 or 10 my brother bought a gnarly 1970 Ford F100. Big lifted pickups (as well as mullets) were in vogue at his vocational high school, so much so that his high school yearbook had class notable categories such as "Best Car" and "Best Truck." The truck was a beast. It was a F100 shortbed that was lifted and sitting on 38 inch tires. It had a 460 big block, 4 speed tranny and smoke stack exhaust. My father hated that thing! This was officially my (and my brothers) first step into gearheadedness.

My brother did everything to that truck! He pulled the body off and sanded and painted the frame due to the recommendation of a crazy neighbor. He changed the wheel/tire combination a bunch of times. He upgraded the axles. He even managed to swap the engine 3 or 4 times....the kicker is it never left our driveway!

I learned allot from this truck such as:

Lesson 1 - It sucks to be a car guy in Connecticut without a garage.

SoCal may be the heart of the car culture. But I'll always consider those guys soft and spoiled until they experience working on your car outdoors in subfreezing temps. Nothing builds character like laying on your back under a car in the cold and having frigid fuel run down your arms into your sleeves as you reach up and work on fuel lines.

Lesson 2 - Cheap tools don't fair well against 30 year old bolts.

Even though my father was not a car guy, we were lucky in that he was a general contractor and had a wide variety of tools in the garage. The problem was they were all crap. Add to the equation my brother's only approach for dealing with stuck or fused parts was to just push or pull harder made for interesting lessons in physics. Bending a cheap screw driver when using it as a pry bar is no big deal. But I never knew wrenches could bend and sockets could strech like they were made out of play-dough. We (especially my brother) destroyed everything. As I became older and purchased my own tools I learned to appreciate higher quality tools (or at least tools with warranties). Runs to Sears to exchange our battered Craftsman hand tools became a annual tradition.

Lesson 3 - Cutting torches and welders are cool.

As we got further into the project my bother acquired more specialized tools. We eventual obtained an arc welder that would provide hours of fun, but that absolute highlight was an oxy acetylene cutting torch outfit. Who knew you could slice through steel as you instantly liquified it?

　

Lesson 4 - Poor planning and lack of funds can doom a project.

My brother was 16. As a result, he also only had the income and intelligence of a 16 year old. These two factors ultimately led to the truck never reaching the street. Resources and planning will continually creep up in shaping my future projects.

Where do car guys come from?

My name is Joe and I’m a car-a-holic.  I’m like many other ‘gearheads’ (‘petrolheads’ in Europe) who is absolutely obsessed with anything shiny, loud and fast (hence the name).  My goal is to document my adventure through life as an automotive enthusiast. At first, I will share about my experiences up till this point in life and hopefully share what is currently unfolding with my obsession.

My first order of business is discussing where car guys come from.  What never ceases to amaze me is that when I meet car guys we can talk for hours (much to the chagrin of my wife). The bond isn't our shared jargon, it’s more, it’s that we appreciate the same things about our hobby (it’s actually a lifestyle).  What is even more interesting is when you learn that, other then the passion for all things mechanical, you can have nothing else in common.  How do you come from completely different social and/or economic backgrounds and still end up in the same place?   

So how did I get to be the way I am? All I know is by 4 years old I had the bug. I loved anything related to cars and planes.

Most kids first exposure to the car culture is via toys, the most common being Matchbox and Hot Wheels die cast cars. At 4, I adored my Fiat 131 Abarth Matchbox car in Alitalia racing livery (I’m also Italian) and did severe damage to the finish on my mother’s precious coffee table turning lap after lap with it. 

But I also remember being absolutely infatuated with the fact that my godfather's Chevy Monte Carlo had TWO exhaust pipes coming out the rear valence.  I remember the exhilaration of going along with my teenage cousin as he blasted around in his Opel Manta.

By age 5 I was drawing/designing fighter planes and jets at a prolific rate, which eventually translated into pursuing engineering in college.

You may think I inherited my obsession from my father, but the fact of the matter is he was (and still is) the antithesis of a car guy. He actually hated our (my older brother and I) infatuation with cars.  He never took a hands-on approach to maintaining his own vehicles (let alone building them) and never understood why we would modify something that was already working. The only reason he tolerated it was he viewed us wasting our teenage years wrenching away in the driveway as a better (and safer) alternative to what our peers were up to. 

So where do car guys come from? I can't speak for everyone, but I’m pretty sure I was born this way.