Still Sweet After All
Kev's article "Hitting the Sweet Spot" was the best that I have read in years. I expected to read an article about how to get your car through the quarter mile as fast as possible, but I was really surprised. This is the reason why my subscriptions have dropped from almost all of the auto mags to only four. You guys have an unfair advantage though since I bought your magazines as a teen and that was 50 years ago.
Boyd G. Wright
Via E-mail
Bursting the Bubble
My subscription is expiring. I guess I'll renew it. But the cover and seven and a half pages devoted to the Orbitron? C'mon!
Bob MacVicar
Downers Grove, IL
Pointing the Bubble
Got the new issue with the Orbitron on the cover and it looks great; however, I noticed looking at older pictures of the car that the rear wheel arches don't fit as snug around the rear slicks after the restoration. The front looks a bit higher, too. It almost looks as if the body isn't sitting on the frame correctly. I guess that's being picky.
Jason S.
Via E-mail
Actually, Jason, Dave Shuten and the crew that restored the Orbitron were very careful not to fix the "mistakes" that were original to the car. Roth built these cars by hand and one side very rarely matched the other.
Holy Hot Rods!
I'm a longtime reader and I just wanted to thank you for the recent articles on Ed Roth's bubbletop kustoms and the Ala Kart! For many years I've been hoping for a revival of the gaudy and absurd creations that were the highlighted "feature" cars of the major car show events of the 1960s. Run-of-the-mill hot rods and kustoms are awesome, but as far as I'm concerned, anything created and built by George Barris, Dean Jefferies, Gene Winfield, Tom Daniels, and Ed Roth for movies or television, feature car shows, and model kits inspired us all to get involved in creating and building our own automotive visions. And the recent '60s-related creations inspired by these automotive legends are fantastic! Personally, I've built and own a 1966 Batmobile replica and a Green Hornet Black Beauty replica, and I've designed my own bubbletop that is in the beginning stages, so hats off and many thanks to Aaron Grote, Dave Shuten, and Beau Boeckmann for jump-starting what I hope will be a return to kustoms that don't blend in with the rest of the crowd! Please continue articles on the 1960s kustoms revival.
Bob Johnson
Via E-mail
Never Ends
Wow, can I relate to your editorial, "Can You Really Have Too Much?" in the March '09 issue. In my quest to build my dream cars, I've added on to my garage-twice. My first acquisition to my "collection" was a '54 Chrysler New Yorker Deluxe four-door. I always wanted an old Hemi to work on, and the price was right at $400. I drove it for a while, but the brakes and suspension were a little scary, so I parked it in the yard until I could find time to work on it. Soon after, I decided to add on to my existing one-car garage so I could put the Chrysler inside. I more than doubled the size of my existing garage by adding a 28x30 addition. To save money, I did all the construction myself, with the help of a few friends whose only compensation were some cold refreshments.
Before I could even complete the addition, I picked up a '48 Plymouth P-15 (business) coupe. This was also a no-brainer deal; $250 worth of gas and eats for a trip to Southern California to remove it from a guy's yard. At about the same time, I inherited a '48 Austin A-40.
I took the body off the Plymouth to begin work on the chassis, as I'm planning to build a street rod from this car. The chassis sits in one half and the body in the other, and now with the Austin also parked inside, that garage was full, so I added a second section to store the various collection of parts that I had began accumulating for my projects.
Also along the way, I began accumulating the various tools I would need, including a bead roller, bending brake, pneumatic planishing hammer, sandblaster, blast cabinet, cut-off tools, die grinders, etc., picking them up as I saw them on sale or requesting them for birthday and Christmas presents. Now that I have the equipment and space, it's just a matter of finding time to work on them. I do what I can on weekends and evenings.
As you said, you have to decide where you want to spend your money and what your priorities are. I have 20 years until I retire; these cars will always be there for me to work on in my spare time, or to really start wrenching on when I retire and have more time.
I also have two daily-drivers in my "collection": a '60 Willys wagon 4x4 and a '78 Impala four-door (another inheritance) that is in excellent condition. Although it may not be considered a real collector car yet, it's 30 years old, which makes it a "classic," right? The New Yorker still sits outside.
Daryl Conley
Truth or Consequences, NM