Title: Classic Cars and Classic Owners Source:
Eric Peters Autos URL Source:[None] Published:Jun 17, 2019 Author:Eric Post Date:2019-06-17 05:46:32 by Deckard Ping List:*Cars and Automotive*Subscribe to *Cars and Automotive* Keywords:None Views:1727 Comments:14
Who remembers when cars and driving were fun, before government ruined them?
Are old cars for old people?
It seems to be so if you go by what one typically sees at an old car show. The owners are mostly at least as old as their cars and most of them are more than 40 years old, which is roughly the line of demarcation between modern cars those with computers and those without them, which were last made in the very early 80s.
The owners of pre-computer (and now classic) cars are now classics themselves. They are into classic cars because they grew up with them and remember what cars used to be like before Uncle ruined them.
And ruined driving which used to be fun, too.
People who are in their 20s and 30s today have no memory of what it used to be like. Most have never been in a car with a carburetor and without air bags. They are as unfamiliar with cars that dont parent them as they are with not being asked for ID and compelled to allow a government goon to evaluate the heft of their genitals prior to getting on an airplane.
Flying used to be fun, too.
It isnt anymore. It is something to be dealt with and gotten over with as quickly as possible.
Similarly, cars are just appliances to most in their 20s and 30s and driving isnt fun for anyone because of the endless pestering and constant threat of over-the-top sanctions for trivial offense against arbitrary statutes.
Try to imagine being a 17-year-old kid today and having to deal with zero tolerance policies with regard to alcohol something which most teens still regard as fun. The slightest whiff of beer and there goes your license.
Imagine being 20 and no longer a kid, really. Possibly, working full-time. That same whiff costs you not just your license but also your job.
It makes driving not much fun since you cant go anywhere fun or do much thats fun. Unless youre a nun and they arent supposed to have fun.
This is all on purpose, it should be understood. The process has been gradual, but always with the end in sight which has always been to alienate people from cars and driving them in order to get them to surrender willingly, if unknowingly their personal mobility.
It has been done under the guise of emissions control at first and then (in tandem) saaaaaaaaaaafety. Finally, in the name of throttling a bogeyman who doesnt exist catastrophic, unnatural climate change but which the modern medicine men of the media have confected into a kind of looming Huitzilopochtli who must be appeased else the world will end.
The result of all this is anodyne cars as well as people no longer interested in cars.
Cars with computers are forbidding things compared with the mechanical things most over-40s today grew up with yesterday.
Especially to a 14 or 15-year-old, which is about the age people used to form emotional bonds with cars because they (used to) begin working on them around that time. Which they had to, usually, because the cars most kids that age had access to back in the 80s and before were old jalopies like classic Beetles, for instance they bought with their summer lawn-mowing and winter snow-shoveling money in anticipation of getting their learners permit at 15 and change and their full license (and adult privileges) at 16.
Todays kids dont get adult privileges until they are practically adults and the cars available to them are mostly almost-used-up computer-controlled cars, which arent tinker-friendly in the way an old Beetle or similar relic was.
Raise the Beetles hood and there it is, the engine. All of it. Mechanical components you can see and touch and take apart to see how they work and so understand how they work. It was the same, basically, for all cars made before the early Eighties.
Software is harder to see harder to take apart and understand. Or care about. It is not the same thing, even if you do understand it, to read a code as opposed to physically taking apart a carburetor and replacing a bad accelerator pump or leaky float.
Theres not much charm in pulling a defective electric whatever-it-is, throwing it away and plugging in a new electric whatever-it-is.
People arent attached to their smartphones, either.
So long as it works and so long as its the latest thing then its cool. But when it stops working and is no longer the latest thing, it gets thrown away. How many people still have the phone they had five years ago? How many people still have the same car they had 30 years ago?
People didnt used to throw away their cars.
They kept them, they fixed them and they handed them down to their kids (or sold them to some kid) for them to fix. Some fixed them to better-than-new and held onto them until they became classic cars.
By which time, the kid who owned it had become one himself.
Got a question about cars or anything else? Click on the ask Eric link and send em in!
Just scored a Knudsen finned aluminum high compression head and 3 carb intake for my original 6 cylinder flathead 1951 Ford business coupe. Got it in the mail today.
Took me over 3 years to find one,and got lucky and found the most desirable one.
Yeah,it was pricey. So what? Priced any new cars or trucks lately?
In fact,I should get PAID to drive around in it so people who have never heard the sound of a cammed up high performance flathead 6 through dual straight pipes with glasspacks. It might change a few lives.
Hell,I should be getting PAID to drive it around as a public service.
Was going to post a old photo of the biz coupe,but forgot how.
The 1959 Cadillac Coupe DeVille built today - what would it look like? In this video, I'll re-design the Cadillac Coupe DeVille and turn it into a Coupe DeVille of today.
And, at 6:22 minutes in you show us a 1961 Coupe...but tells us this is a 1960. What a mess!
I think he was narrating as he was designing, stopping to explain at that point of his "redesign" the resemblance to the /61 Caddy.
All you did was re-design the '59...to look like a '60!
Remember what this guy told us what he was trying to do: Maintain the '59 Caddy styling cues from the back-end and yuge fins so it was still recognizable as a '59. But yes, you're right -- the "redesign" does resemble the '61.
(I owned a '59 and a '63, but the '60 caddies, to me, had the best lines)
You may be right. It's proportions combined the best of '59 with the early 60s without being garish. Q: Which Caddy was the bigger thrill of owning, and why?
Which Caddy was the bigger thrill of owning, and why?
The '63 was my daily driver off-and-on for 10 years. I had just become a Christian and needed a car to get out of NYC. Saw the Caddy on the back edge of a junkyard and bought it for couple hundred...friends pleading with me NOT to get it. My first year as a Christian was focused on the Bible and that car. Drove it all over the country hitting every junkyard I could find.
The '59 was given to me. The old man who gave me the car had turned down huge offers over a forty year period. I happened to be at his yard looking for parts for the '63 and I think I said "Hey, I'd like to have that '59" (I didn't even like '59's) Couple of days later he towed it to my parent's house. (only connection we could figure...my dad had treated his cows back in the early 1960's). The motor was locked so I never drove it. Had it for a year and sold it to pay for Bible school.
Tell you what though...sneakypete, if I recall correctly from one of his comments, has my dream car ...a '34 Ford pickup.
That '63 was beddy goot to you. Lasted ten years? (Or maybe the Lord helped ;-) You've been a Christian for a long time.
Did you still wind up using the '59 parts for the '63? If your dad helped the owner with his cows and you were commuting to NYC, sounds as though you grew up near suburban dairy farms at the time. Nice gesture from the old man.
'34 Ford pick up is a classic. Hard for me to choose just one favorite; I'd either go with a '60 T-Bird or '63 Riviera.
I bought a gangsta-mobile -- a '39 Chevy Master back in 1980 that was towed from Wyoming. Some window were shot up, but other than that hardly any rust. Soon picked up a stock tranny and various other parts from Bloomfield CT and was going to redo it entirely stock... Never did it, too much work. It wound up as a phase.
was going to redo it entirely stock... Never did it, too much work.
Came to know Christ in 1986 through a drunk bass player (I was a photographer in NYC...did work in the music industry).
The "59 Caddy and my family are, thankfully, from another region of the country entirely. Sold the '59 complete. The parts I needed didn't interchange.
Too bad about that '39 Chevy Master. That's a good looking car. Seems like there is a trend now to not overwork a restoration. Get it running. Make some improvements...perhaps in suspension and brakes but leave the patina, etc. as original.
Anyway, Liberator, how about you. How long have you been a Christian? That's of great interest to me.