LF: Classic Cars and Classic Owners

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*
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Views: 2151
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 don’t 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 isn’t 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 isn’t 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 can’t go anywhere fun or do much that’s fun. Unless you’re a nun – and they aren’t 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 doesn’t 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.

Today’s kids don’t get adult privileges until they are practically adults – and the cars available to them are mostly almost-used-up computer-controlled cars, which aren’t tinker-friendly in the way an old Beetle or similar relic was.

Raise the Beetle’s 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.

There’s not much charm in pulling a defective electric whatever-it-is, throwing it away and plugging in a new electric whatever-it-is.

People aren’t attached to their smartphones, either.

So long as it works – and so long as it’s the latest thing – then it’s “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 didn’t 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.

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.

He later dropped a small block V8 into it, and totaled it. To say that the steering was "loose" would be an understatement.

He should have left the OHV Chevy straight 6 in it and shown a little class. Every 3rd grade graduate runs a 350 V-8 Chevy. Monkee see,monkee do.

His dad had modified the stock exhaust manifold at the muffler shop by cutting out a square in the bottom and welding in a block off plate in the center, then cutting a round hole in the other side and welding an exhaust flange on it and welding the square back in place.

Twice pipes with glaspacks out the sides, in front of the rear wheels. They had timed gates at the boat launch ramp at Channel Islands Harbor (Port Hueneme/Oxnard). 50 cents for cars with like 10 seconds before the arm came down, and another entrance for rigs with boat trailers $1.50 ,that gave you about 30 seconds to make it through.

I'd drop the coins in the car entrance one, and Jack would goose the '36 chev and boat through in less than 10 seconds. Great fun.