Friday, March 18, 2016

the GTO vacuum operated exhaust cutouts


The VOE, which was available only on the 1970 GTO, concept was simple: Baffles in the mufflers could be controlled via a cable under the dashboard

It's claimed that John DeLorean originally had wanted the system to open the mufflers, advance the timing, and open the Ram Air flaps, but the production item was nowhere near as complicated.

The VOE was made famous by this GTO commercial that ran during the Super Bowl.



 Supposedly, the option was only available with the standard 400/350 motor and possibly the optional 455/360; none of the Ram Air motors were available with VOE due to the radical cam and, hence, lack of vacuum.

In the commercial, you can see the bracket is also shared with the Ram Air cable, but chances are this car (which also appeared in the dealer brochure) was a cobbled-up pre-production vehicle. All told, 212 hardtops and 21 convertibles were built with this option before it was cancelled in February.


the advertising for this was enough to get people interested, but GM killed it fast. 

http://www.examiner.com/article/1970-gto-with-vacuum-operated-exhaust

the last pinstripping on a car Von Dutch did, is either Bob Langdon's Ranchero or John Harvey's 36 coupe. He was doing motorcycles, that's what he preferred at that time of his life


Von Dutch told Bob that he was done with pinstriping, but some persistance, and some gifts, and Von Dutch went at it on this 57 Ranchero, in 1988. He died in 1989...

Why this appears no where online, I have no idea. It's in the Oct 2008 Car Kulture Deluxe, but not on their website.


it's also mentioned in  Von Dutch: The Art, the Myth, the Legend By Pat Ganahl



Happy 10th Anniversary Hagerty's magazine!


I was just doing some spring cleaning, and came across my stack of Hagerty's magazine... and realized it's now 10 years since ol Vol 1 number 1 was sent out.
 It had
2 features
 23 pages,
 and 4 contributors, Beverly Rae Kimes, Keith Martin, Winston Goodfellow, and Mike Mueller. Editor was Ted West.

You can still subscribe, or read the whole issues online

https://www.hagerty.com/articles-videos/magazine

Ideas frequently submitted to Ford, so quit it, they don't want anymore :

• Dual fuel filler doors (one on each side of the vehicle), or in a specific location on all models (such as the rear of the vehicle)
• Built in car jack assemblies for easier changing of tires, or working beneath the vehicle
• Infrastructure ideas requiring electrified roadways (will need government sponsored effort)
• Cars that do not use gasoline/diesel. Cars that use air/water to extend range (HHO, Brown's Gas, electrolysis, windmills, turbines, magnets on wheels/driveshaft, and solar)
• Exterior indicator lights to notify others that occupants are not wearing their seatbelts
• Disable cell phones and texting while driving
• Transition windshields / window screens for sun and/or element barrier
• Brake light changes to alert other drivers (intensity, flashing, location, color); these are regulated by law
• Occupant detection systems – children / pets left alone in the vehicle

http://corporate.ford.com/content/dam/corporate/en/innovation/Innovation_Frequently_Submitted.pdf

Didn't Ford lose the lawsuit about the intermittent windshield wiper?

In November, 1962, Bob Kearns was driving his Ford Galaxie through the streets of Detroit when it started to rain lightly. Kearns turned the wipers on low. In those days, even the most advanced wipers had just two settings, one for steady rain and one for heavy rain; in a mizzling rain, they screeched back and forth across the glass, mesmerizing the driver, and occasionally causing accidents. In October, Kearns decided that the time had come to demonstrate his invention to a car manufacturer. He chose Ford, because it had supplied him with some wiper motors to experiment on and because “to me Ford was always the greatest.”

Finally, Roger Shipman, a Ford supervisor, announced to Kearns that he had “won the wiper competition.” He told Kearns that his wiper would be used on the 1969 Mercury line. Kearns was given the prototype of a windshield-wiper motor to commemorate the occasion. The other engineers welcomed him aboard Ford’s wiper team. Then, according to Kearns, Shipman asked him to show his wiper control to the rest of the team. Wipers were a safety item, Shipman explained, and the law required disclosure of all the engineering before Ford could give Kearns a contract. This sounded reasonable to Kearns, so he explained to the Ford engineers exactly how his intermittent wiper worked.

About five months later, Kearns was dismissed. He was told that Ford did not want his wiper system after all—that the other engineers had designed their own.

1969, Ford came out with a new, electronic intermittent windshield wiper, the first in the industry. It used a transistor, a resistor, and a capacitor in the same configuration that Kearns had designed. It cost Ford about ten dollars to make, and it sold for thirty-seven dollars. At first, Ford offered the intermittent wiper as a stand-alone option, and it sold slowly. Then Ford packaged it with another gadget—the remote-control side mirror, which was one of Ford’s most popular options—and wiper sales took off. In 1974, General Motors began putting the intermittent wiper on its cars, and in 1977 it appeared on Chryslers. Saab, Honda, Volvo, Rolls-Royce, and Mercedes, among others, soon followed. By 1989, Ford alone had sold 20.6 million cars with the intermittent wiper, and made a profit that has been calculated at five hundred and fifty-seven million dollars.

n Kearns filed suit against the Ford Motor Company, in 1978, Ford did what corporations usually do in patent cases: it began stalling, in the hope that Kearns would lose heart or run out of money. Patent cases are richly endowed with opportunities for stalling. The heart of Ford’s defense was that Kearns’ patents were invalid, because according to the Doctrine of Nonobviousness his intermittent wiper was not an invention at all.

The Ford case came to trial in January, 1990—twelve years after it was filed. Most of Kearns’ patents had expired by then. The waters of progress had closed over his head. Judge Avern Cohn divided the trial into two parts: one to determine whether Kearns’ patents were valid and infringed, and, if they were, one to determine how much Ford should pay for infringing them.

The first trial lasted three weeks, and the jury deliberated for another week. It found that Kearns’ patents were valid and that Ford had infringed them. Ford, concerned about the size of the award that a jury in Wayne County might give Kearns, offered to settle the case for thirty million dollars. Kearns, against everyone’s advice, turned the money down. “To accept money from Ford would have been like admitting it was O.K. for them to do what they did,” he said. So there was a second trial, and the second trial awarded Kearns $5.2 million, or about thirty cents a wiper plus interest.

a little more than three decades after his good idea came to him, Kearns will go to trial in a suit he has brought against General Motors. Kearns, who is sixty-five years old, has already defeated Ford and Chrysler in court, and he stands to collect more than twenty million dollars from them for infringing his patents on the intermittent windshield wiper.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/01/11/the-flash-of-genius
http://www.autonews.com/article/20081002/ZZZ_SPECIAL/810029938/delayed-wiper-inventor-wins-suit-against-ford
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/

What had me reading about this? Well, I stumbled across Ford's "we won't touch your invention with a 10 foot pole" webpage, and I immediately realized - BULLSHIT!

http://corporate.ford.com/innovation/innovation-ideas-submission.html

Ford does not accept the following types of submissions:
• Confidential information of any type
• Product styling or design Protecting Ford Motor Company

"Just as Ford expects others to respect our intellectual property rights, we are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others."

http://corporate.ford.com/content/dam/corporate/en/innovation/Innovation_Frequently_Submitted.pdf

update on the round the world in a Model T


The Regters began their epic journey in the summer of 2012.
http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2015/01/dirk-and-trudys-round-world-tour-in.html  The husband and wife team covered 14,000 miles in 180 days during the first leg of the drive, which took them from  the Netherlands to Cape Town in South Africa.

In 2013 the couple conquered the U.S. and Canada, crossing 22 states during their 17,000-mile, 180-day road trip. They only had one flat tire and one broken alternator.

 In 2014 they ticked off another 16,000 miles through South America in a further 180 days.

So far, the intrepid couple have driven almost 50,000 miles visiting and supporting various projects run by the international children’s aid organisation SOS – Children’s Villages.

During 2016 and 2017 they plan to continue through New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, and India, crossing the Himalayas to China, through Mongolia and back to the Netherlands via Central Europe.



http://www.at.ford.com/news/cn/Pages/Around_the_World_in_a_Ford_Model_T.aspx

Thursday, March 17, 2016

the cool art on the covers of the Bridgehampton sports car racing programs in the late fifties was by a famous comic book artist named Robert Powell


Bob Powell is one of the "Top 100 Best Comic Book Artists" well known for Mars Attacks!, Capt America, Dare Devil, The Human Torch, the Shadow, and loads of zombies, ghouls, and suspense comics




Bob Powell (nĂ© Stanley Robert Pawlowski; October 2, 1916 – December 1967) was known for his work during the 1930-40s Golden Age of comic books as part of the Eisner and Iger studio, including on the features "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle" and "Mr. Mystic", he also did the pencil art for the famous bubble gum trading card series Mars Attacks. He officially changed his name to S. Robert Powell in 1943.

Later, after Will Eisner split off to form his own studio, Powell pitched in to co-write the premiere of "Blackhawk," created by Eisner and Cuidera, in Military Comics #1 (Aug. 1941). Powell remained uncredited until Eisner and Cuidera, in a 1999 panel, discussed his contribution.

During his career, Bob Powell worked under a large amount of pseudonyms, like Arthur Dean, Bob Stanley, Stanley Charlot, Bud Ernest, Buck Stanley, S. T. Anley, Major Ralston and Powell Roberts.

After the war, Powell started working for himself, drawing for several publishers in cooperation with several assistants, including Howard Nostrand and Angelo Torres. He contributed to Street and Smith (Shadow Comics), Magazine Enterprises (Strong Man), Harvey Comics (Man in Black, Adventures in 3-D) and Marvel ('Daredevil', 'Giant-Man', 'Hulk' and 'Human Torch').




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Powell
http://www.amazon.com/Bob-Powells-Complete-Jet-Powers/dp/1616557648
http://www.comicartfans.com/comic-artists/bob_powell.asp
https://www.bookdepository.com/Bob-Powells-Terror-2-Craig-Yoe/9781613770672
http://www.comics.org/search/advanced/process/?target=cover&method=icontains&logic=True&keywords&order1=date&order2=series&pencils=bob+powell
https://www.lambiek.net/artists/p/powell_bob.htm
https://www.pinterest.com/manthing/bob-powell/
https://www.pinterest.com/wconrrr/powell-bob-1916-1967cd1938/
https://www.lewiswaynegallery.com/bob-powell-terry-the-pirates-6-complete-5-page-story-orig-art-tommy-tween-p-13485.html


Here's the odd thing though, this artist wasn't the same Bob Powell race car owner of the Victress S1A, as that was a guy on the west coast, and he died in 1955, at age 25

This Bob I've been posting about though... was a sports car owner, racer, and director of Bridgehampton. Member of the Long Island Antique Car Club and the SCCA.  He had a Siata, Jeep, 1920 Model T, 1909 Hupmobile, 55 T-Bird, and a Stingray

In WW2 he went officer in the Air Corps, trained in Milwaukee, then taught Navigation as an instructor in San Antonio, and was discharged in '45 in Idaho 

The "Mr. Luckey" Top Fuel dragster ended up being not so lucky for owner Ray Luckey. It never ran in this configuration, with this livery, or even in this country.


 It seems the dragster was not Ray's at all but rather his son's. Ray owned a Chrysler dealership in Terrell and gave the used-car portion of the enterprise to his son, who quickly started sending large checks to engine builder Ed Pink for a state-of-the-art, no-holds-barred, 225ci Top Fueler.

 Besides the all-star triumvirate of Ed Pink, Don Long, and Tom Hanna behind the build, the car was painted by Cerney and lettered by Tom Kelley, who tied the finishing bow on the potent package.

Once the elder Luckey saw the used-car portion of his dealership bleeding red ink, he had it audited, whereupon the $35,000 in checks to Pink became the obvious dollar drain. Pink got the call to sell off the complete package—including the trick enclosed trailer—and after paying everyone involved, to send what was left to Luckey Chrysler post haste.

About this same time, Mr. "Soapy Sales" Larry Huff was in quick need of a new fueler for a batch of match races Down Under in Australia. A deal was struck and soon Huff sent the slingshot by boat to the land of stickybeaks and screamers with "Soapy Sales" in place of "Mr. Luckey" lettering on the nose and a 392 Hemi in place of the 426, fulfilling his roo racing obligations with the fashionable fueler.

http://www.hotrod.com/features/history/1601-the-not-so-lucky-mr-luckey-top-fuel-dragster/