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5219

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Everything posted by 5219

  1. Do you suppose that this was a real ad? Hard to believe.
  2. For a car that has been sitting for 5 years, it really looks good. They had the decency to clean it up before they offered it for sale. That is a good sign.
  3. 72010, Bald Knob, Arkansas. his car must have the SW, since it has the tripometer. I have asked him which one he wants, will let you know. Thanks
  4. My brother in law is the Model A owner. I have spoken to him. He needs one mostly for parts to fix his, so it is not as important that it works. The numbers on his are faded out, so the one with better numbers would be appreciated. Please let me know how and where you would like payment for the piece and shipping sent. I will send you his shipping address with the payment. By the way, I have a 1940 LaSalle. Is there anything that you have that I might be interested in? Alan R. Harris (5219)
  5. Does anyone here remember the story about B.J. Auctions and the sale of the 1963 Pontiac navy ambulance that supposedly took JFK's body from the airport to Bethesda Naval Hospital? The car got a ton of publicity. As more information came out, the provenance of the car got murkier and more muddled. The JFK library confirmed that the actual car had been given to them by the Navy after it was removed from service. The library said that the car was in poor condition and that they were not interested in restoring it for exhibit. The library said that they had the car crushed and kept the number plates and a video of the crushing. Following that announcement, BJ went through with the auction. The car supposedly fetched a million dollars. As far as I know, it has never been heard of again. Since then, I have always been very skeptical about that organization.
  6. As far as second chance offers on Ebay, they are what my father would have called a sucker bet. If you are bidding against somebody and give your maximum bid, and that person turns out to be a flake who never intended to buy, why would you be willing to tender your maximum bid once that person walks away? At best, you were bidding against fictional offers. At worst, you were bidding against a shill bidder. Only a fool would want to honor his top bid in that situation. The only fair solution is for the seller to put the item up again and bar the defaulting bidder from bidding.
  7. Back when I used to frequent junkyards, my buddy and I used to like to look for strange items in the cars. We once found a Cadillac hearse with a letter from the funeral director to his employees telling them that there had been complaints and that stealing from the dead would not be tolerated.
  8. Back around 1969, I was in Toronto and remember seeing a junior series late thirties Packard coupe in a gas station. The hubcaps looked like the usual Packard hubcaps except that they said "Packard Canada" on them. Did Packard build cars in Canada before the war? I have always wondered.
  9. Warner Brothers had some kind of a deal with Buick. Think of the one in Casablanca that Claude Raines drove or the Buick wagon Bette Davis drove in Now Voyager or the 1941 Buick convertible that Jack Benny drove in George Washington Slept Here or the 1941 Limited that was in The Man Who Came To Dinner, and a lot of others. Ronald Reagan, I believe owned, a 1939 LaSalle convertible in real life. Late in the forties, he became friendly with a Lincoln dealer named Tuttle. I have seen a promotional photo of Reagan and Jane Wyman posing with a 1949 Lincoln. Jane does not look thrilled to be there, probably because she left him some time in 1948. When he was President, he appointed one of the Tuttle family as Ambassador to Great Britain.
  10. About 15 years ago, there was a 1942 Chrysler Crown Imperial sedan with factory a/c at Das Awkscht Fescht in Macungie, PA. The hood was up and the system looked very similar to the 1940 Packard shown above. It was an unrestored driver quality car. The a/c equipment appeared to be the same age as the rest of the car. When I was a child, we had a neighbor who owned a 1953 Buick Roadmaster with factory air. It was probably a couple of years old at the time. I remember my father telling me years later that the owner complained about ice forming in the trunk sometimes. This would have been one of the ones without a compressor clutch.
  11. I read his autobiography when I was in High School. I also read his book "Seven Came Through", which was about his World War II adventures when his B-17 crashed in the Pacific. He was an amazing man! I don't imagine his books are much read these days. After the end of the Rickenbacker car, he went to work for Cadillac, visiting the dealers and training and upgrading their service facilities. After that, he founded Eastern Airlines.
  12. I know that the Rickenbacker was a very advanced car for its time, but is this an early version of a padded dash?
  13. There is a fellow out there who I read about who restored a 1940 LaSalle woodie wagon. I recall reading that he said he installed overdrive in it. There are only two of these cars that I know of. One is a work in progress and the o/d one has been completed. If you search around, you may be able to find out what he used.
  14. As far as "It belonged to Stalin", it could truthfully be said that EVERY car in the USSR belonged to Comrade Stalin. In the Lenin museum in what is now St. Petersburg, you can see Lenin's 1922 Rolls Royce touring car. This was bought for him out of public funds well after the revolution. I am sure that there were many luxury cars left behind by wealthy people who fled the revolution or were killed by it. Rather than appropriate one of them, Lenin bought himself a new one. Based on this, I would not be surprised if Stalin simply ordered a Packard from somewhere in Europe. The Czar and the royal family had Packards, so they were well known and respected in Russia. The Zis automobiles, if you look at them closely, are rather crude copies of Packard automobiles. There is no way that they were made from Packard tooling.
  15. I don't get to them at all anymore, but back in the seventies, I used to frequent a lot of the junkyards in rural Southern NJ. The most unusual cars I remember seeing included a 1942 Buick Limited limousine with a divider window, a 1954 Eldorado convertible that was horribly rusted and had been picked pretty clean, and a rolled over Nash-Healey roadster with a dash plaque that said "1955 SCCA Certified Race Car". Once, in a South Philadelphia yard on Passyunk Avenue, I discovered a 1940 Oldsmobile six cylinder woodie station wagon that still looked pretty good except that one of the rear doors was missing. Also, in a yard in NW New Jersey, I once found a 1937 or so Terraplane convertible. Going to junkyards in those days was a lot of fun.
  16. I am sure that the insurance industry has precise figures on these losses. That is how they set their premiums.
  17. I don't think that there is a good answer to this question unless the actual temperature of the coolant is known. The gauges, especially after all of these years, are not very precise. The owner's manual for my 1940 LaSalle warns that the gauge may read "Hot" during exceptionally hard driving and that this is not cause for alarm. If you are concerned, you need to measure the temperature of the coolant.
  18. When I was in high school, circa 1966, there was a high end used car dealer in the area that had an identical 1962 Electra limousine for sale. I remember stopping to look at it because it was so unusual. This was in the Southern New Jersey area near Philadelphia. I wonder what the chances are that this is the same car? It looks like the years have been kind to it.
  19. Nice car, but needs to lose the fuzzy dice and cheapo wire wheel covers.
  20. Don't worry. It's not something I would be tempted to do, but it's nice to know that my grandfather didn't imagine this.
  21. I used Aluma-seal in my 2003 Ford Taurus daily driver. The front cover of the engine was leaking coolant. I still had the leak, but my heater core clogged up. Fortunately, the heater started working again after I had it backflushed. I also had the front cover fixed. My grandfather, who began driving around 1920, loved to say that they used to fix radiator leaks by picking up horse manure off the street and putting it in the radiator. If you think about it, the manure has seeds and chewed up vegetable matter in it which would swell up in hot water. It was also free. Of course, our cities today don't have many horse droppings lying around for the taking. Has anybody else here ever heard of this?
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