As we start a new year, thoughts turn to making the next 12 months more productive and rewarding than the last 12 months. One way to do this is to make New Year’s resolutions and then work to make them come true. Resolving to do something is one thing and actually getting it...
We know that people were collecting old cars by 1925, which was the year that the American automobile industry recognized (incorrectly) as its 25th anniversary. Most early car collectors were automobile dealers who took in old cars on trade and realized that they had historical significance. However, there was no formal “old-car hobby”...
A day after we did a blog on Chrysler dream cars we received a call from dream car collector Joe Bortz of Chicago. Joe had just called to chat about this and that, but we wanted to ask him a question. In a certain antique auto parts catalog there is a side-bar story...
What do you do with a barn find after it’s been found? That’s the question many restorers ask when they bring a car out of lengthy storage and start working on it. Do you tear into it and fix everything all at once or do you gently give it just what it needs?...
Today we were blasting a bellhousing for my son’s 1949 Studebaker Commander Starlight coupe. It was a greasy piece of iron and it took most of the day to remove all the caked on grease and get it looking good. Before we had a media blasting cabinet, we thought that blasting parts would...
The latest British-built car to come into Gunner’s Great Garage (www.gunnersgreatgarage.com) is a 1968 Triumph TR250 roadster. As you can tell, this is a car that was “driven hard and put away wet.” It was last licensed in Illinois in the 1980s. The owner kept the car all those years, pushing it from...
Your blogger is a sucker. It is so hard to pass up an interesting item like a collection of Chrysler in-house employee magazines from the late 1940s and early 1950s. There were about 25 copies of Chrysler Motors Magazine and The Chrysler Magazine in this collection and one was a special issue of...
Joe Sharpnack originally purchased his 1966 Pontiac Superior 9-passnger Embassy limousine with the idea of taking the engine out and using it in another car. Then the late Jon Sawruk – a product engineer who was also Pontiac Motor Division’s Official Historian — talked to Joe at a car show and told him...
The other night we realized that 2015 will be the 60th year of the ’55 Chevy so we decided to write an article honoring six generations of the first of the “Tri-Five” Chevys. After gathering facts about ’55 Chevy history, we started looking through the 560 photo files on our desktop computer for...
If you work on old cars there’s a good chance you have made a tool or two in your lifetime. We recently ran into the need for a tool to remove the chrome collar from a heater control knob on a 1948 Mopar model. The chrome knob was affixed to the D-shaped stem...
