Progress
I've been right in the middle of one of our busiest travel seasons and, although I've been seeing lots of great country and cars while on the road, it makes it hard to make much progress on the little things I need to be doing at home to get a few projects closer to completion.
In the continuing saga of trying to get my '32 roadster back in cruising condition, I have once again yanked the engine and trans out because it not only needs a cam swap (its current way-too-big solid lifter one left it with no bottom-end torque), the throwout bearing needed replacing. I had a really good idea that the cam was going to be a bit of a problem when it was installed, but I succumbed to the typical hot rodder thinking of bigger might just be better. The throwout bearing was another story-it was new and started making noise right from the start. Now that it has a few hundred miles on it, it's still making more noise than it should. What really annoys me is the fact that I have to pull the front sheetmetal and engine/trans to get at it-something I wasn't looking forward to.
The icing on the cake was when I returned to the shop I purchased the throwout bearing from, the business owner informed me that he had changed suppliers because he started getting some bad ones. He then proceeded to sell me a new one at full retail without even a "sorry about that." So by the time you're reading this, I hope to be back in the driver seat with the wind in my hair.
The little bit of time I haven't been on the road or working on the '32 has left me no time to get anything done on the '47 sedan or '56 Victoria I told you about in the October issue. I've been thinking a lot about what I want to do with the '47 to get it road-trip worthy. So far it's all pretty simple and straightforward using bolt-on parts. The more I think about the '56, the more I think I need to turn my attention to other priorities and find it a good home. Of course this would be the smartest thing to do, but if I always did what was best I might have other hobbies.
In magazine progress news, we're still planning on making the ending point for Tom's Fun Run '06 the L.A. Roadsters' Exhibition and Swap Meet on Father's Day Weekend. Rick Love at Vintage Air is busy planning a route and some interesting stops to make between San Antonio and Pomona. Looks like we also may have Art Morrison Enterprises leading a leg out of the Northwest from Fife, Washington, which should be a picturesque cruise down the West Coast. We're also looking into having a leg leave from the Goodguy's Indy show the weekend before.
Other tying-up-loose-ends news, back in the May '05 issue we showed you the R&C staff's dream cars and asked for your submissions. The one we liked the best was sent to illustrator extraordinaire Thom Taylor, who is busy putting pen to paper to bring the vision to life. It took longer than I hoped to get this done because we had to go through hundreds of submissions from our readers. Narrowing it down to just one was no easy task. We'll show you Thom's finished work really soon and then pass it on to the lucky recipient who will hopefully turn his concept into a reality.