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Announcing the Muscle Car Interior Restoration Guide

Автор: DarrenFerris | четверг, 3 сентября 2009 г.

It’s been difficult keeping this under my hat for so long, but now that I have it in my hands, I can announce my first book for CarTech, the Muscle Car Interior Restoration Guide, chock full of tech on how to do just about everything from lay new carpet to install a convertible top.

Why write about interior restoration? It’s an aspect of restoration that many car guys avoid, thinking it’s some sort of black art, so they tend to leave their interiors raggedy and half-done (admit it, somebody you know uses or has used a Vise-Grip as a window crank). But the reality is that it’s not that hard to do your own interior, and it’s just as rewarding to re-cover your seats or hang a new headliner as it is to rebuild an engine.

Oh, and I took a no-sew approach to everything in the book, so no need to go out and buy a sewing machine to complete any of the tasks shown in it. Also, a little hint: Even though the book’s focused on muscle cars, a lot of it applies to cars of other eras as well.

Official release date for the book is September 1, and you can order it directly through CarTech.

If you buy the book and decide fix up your car’s interior, send us some pics!

Another pic of the Schenck streamliner surfaces

Автор: DarrenFerris | суббота, 15 августа 2009 г.

Ralph Schenck streamliner

Longtime blog readers will recognize the car in the above photo as the Ralph Schenck streamliner, which I profiled back in December 2006. It’s a unique car that doesn’t garner as much attention as some other early dry lakes racers, but like those other early dry lakes racers, Strother MacMinn turned his camera on it and grabbed this photo of the streamliner at the January 1948 Hot Rod Exposition at the Los Angeles Armory.

Only thing is, Strother never developed the film before he died in January 1998. That task was left to Robert Ames, who bought several cansiters of undeveloped film from Strother’s estate a year later and who compiled some of the best of those photos in the book he and Ken Gross recently released, “Hot Rods and Custom Cars – Los Angeles and the Dry Lakes: The Early Years.” The placard in the photo reads “Heinrich & Seaton / Competition Streamliners / Mercury engine,” and the ‘liner still wears the nose Ralph Schenck put on it (rather than the tube-grille nose Heinrich and Seaton put on it, shown in the earlier post), so we now know Heinrich and Seaton made their modifications in 1948, either before or during the race season.

Robert and Ken’s book is full of amazing, rarely-seen photos like this, but they printed a very limited run of 1,000, so if you’re interested, order your copy sooner rather than later.

The Manifolds of ‘08

Автор: DarrenFerris | воскресенье, 19 июля 2009 г.

P. S. Tice’s story in the January 8, 1908, Horseless Age isn’t one that you’d think would make great reading: On Multi-Cylinder Inlet Manifolds is four-and-a-half pages of Edwardian fluid dynamics, and after the first couple of paragraphs I drifted off. But the illustrations were unexpectedly like a desert flower opening. Scroll up and down for best effect.

On Multi-Cylinder Inlet Manifolds 1