Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Happy 50th anniversary to Crutchfield! One owner for all 50 years, Bill Crutchfield founded the company in his mother's basement, and created the first car audio mail order catalog!


Only a handful of companies have remained in business for 50 years. An even smaller number remain under the same ownership for this length of time. And a tiny, tiny subset remains under the same ownership and management for 50 years. That makes Crutchfield an exceedingly rare company.




Bill Crutchfield founded the Crutchfield company, based out of his mother's basement, and created the first car audio mail order catalog in 1974!





seriously how damn cool is it to see the 1974 catalog?!!! !!!








But, compare that to 1975







https://catalog.crutchfield.com/SpringSummer-1975/22

In 1950, at 8 years old, he built a radio using the recently invented transistor, only slightly larger than a pencil’s eraser. It replaced a much larger vacuum tube. Transistors represented a huge breakthrough in electronics.

An iPhone 15 Pro has 19 billion transistors. 

At 13, he built what might have been the first stereo system in Virginia. It was 1955, and was two sets of speakers connected to two separate mono hi-fi amplifiers connected to a two-channel tape head mounted to an old office reel-to-reel tape recorder. Since this was before stereo records and FM stereo broadcasts, the only available content was from a handful of prerecorded tapes. One was a demo tape which provided soundtracks of trains and airplanes going from left to right. 

At 15, he formed a tiny, one-person business of installing newly available stereo equipment in homes throughout the greater Charlottesville community, and ran that little business throughout high school and college.

After graduating from the University of Virginia, he joined the U.S. Air Force officer training program, achieved the rank of Captain, and eventually commanded a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile crew. 

After he got out of the military, he started restoring old 356 Porsches as a sideline venture and realized that cars would be sell better after installing modern (for the time) car stereos in them.

Since no local store knew anything about these new aftermarket products, he looked in car and stereo magazines to find the mail order retailers of car stereos. Finding that none existed, he started Crutchfield in March 1974 and became the first car stereo mail order retailer!



With only a thousand dollars and an old Porsche, he didn't have enough to get a business started, but he knew a bank president with an old Porsche, and pitched him the idea, and got a 25k loan!  Back when, it was more based on proving yourself, then proving you had a credit score. 

The 1975 catalog was a step toward the modern era, as it showed how to upgrade the car stereo system, and compared radios... and won over readers! One traded the artwork for the cover for a car stereo! 

Ever since the 3rd catalog in 1975, a core competitive advantage of Crutchfield has been the wealth of information. In 1989, they started the laborious process of researching vehicles to accumulate what is surely the world’s most complete database of vehicle fit information.

Through the end of 2023, Crutchfield has researched 18,798 different vehicles. When you account for different versions of the same vehicle (2-door and 4-door cars, regular cab and crew cab pickups, etc.), this information forms a database that covers more than 37,000 specific vehicles. It is the backbone of the Vehicle Selector feature found on their website and ensures that their customers purchase car stereo products which perfectly fit their vehicles.


Awesome story, but GREAT look at the full line of 1974/75 car radios, 8 track players, AND cassette players! 
And I got this posted just minutes before the year 2024 expired, so, technically, I got this posted just in time! 

Awwww! But how did they convince the cat to enjoy a car ride?

 https://dailytimewaster.blogspot.com/2024/12/ahhhh-warmth-and-vibrations-whiskers-is.html

I'm sure I must have posted about some Camaros having been built with bench seats, but I never heard of Z 28s being built with them... WHY? WTH would make someone choose to get a bench seat instead of buckets in a sports car?!


1 of only 3 known to exist with the Strato Bench Seat option



The Z/28 was starting to show its age after a dozen years, so it went in for new paint along with a full restoration. 

However, in 1981 the owner bought his own Chevy/Buick dealership and became bogged down in business, so the project sat, stripped of paint. 

He needed space at the dealership, so the car was put into what he thought would be safe storage in Belaire, Ohio, where the Camaro sat from 1981 to 1998. Sadly, the owner of the storage fell on hard times, and at some point around the mid-1990s the building was broken into and the car’s original 302, 4-speed, wheels, and cowl plenum intake were all stolen!

despite looking like a 1950s-era sports racing car, it’s actually a relatively new vehicle with a lightweight fiberglass body, carrying La Carrera Panamericana livery.

https://silodrome.com/formosa-236-cm-roadster/



https://silodrome.com/formosa-236-cm-roadster/

Fact

 

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=993918392766185&set=gm.2097499194044007&idorvanity=259565571170721

the Duster was nearly branded with the WB Tasmanian Devil character, following the success of the Road Runner, inexpensively licensing that character from WB. But no agreement was achieved, and the car’s name instead referenced the Taz “dust devils”

 https://silodrome.com/plymouth-duster-car/

Keep in mind that the Super Bee was a Dodge/Mopar invention for much the same reason, once Chrysler realized how much better the Road Runner was selling, they began the sticker thing, as far as I know... with the 67 Road Runner 

This 4×4 1954 IH was specially ordered by the Army Corps of Engineers for the Chief Engineers of the Minuteman Missile System in South Dakota. Just five were made, and three are known to survive.


The Minuteman Missile Program required vehicles like the R140 for accessing remote silo sites during the Cold War. With its full bus-style “Woody” body, seating for six, and ample cargo space, this truck played a key role in supporting the construction and maintenance of the missile system.

There's something I like about watching bulldozing and plowing, and mowing... maybe's it's all linked to the result of passing over rough material and making it smooth? I dunno. But plowing snow has an additional factor, it looks like the plow is pushing water




and it's so damn much faster action than bulldozing

as the Statler Brothers sang in 1972, "do you remember those?"


a simple sheet of speed parts, the good stuff, and the prices

HA! Just because people use words we are familiar with, doesn't mean that we are talking about the same thing

 

Monday, December 30, 2024

Colorado officials reached an agreement announced this week allowing Union Pacific Railroad to continue to lease the Moffat Tunnel, the highest railroad tunnel in the United States.







A press release from Colorado Gov. Jared Polis gave limited details on what the agreement will entail, but it said Union Pacific will access the tunnel in exchange for state access to Union Pacific tracks for passenger rail.

“This is a big step forward in making Mountain Rail from Denver to Craig a reality,” Polis said in a statement. “Passenger Rail on this corridor will relieve traffic to one of Colorado’s iconic mountain communities and provide safe, reliable, affordable transportation options for tourists and skiers as well as workers traveling along the corridor. This historic agreement is an important step to protect continuous freight operations and finally deliver on the promise of passenger rail to Coloradans and I thank Union Pacific for its partnership.”

Sky-Hi News reported that Colorado can use Union Pacific’s tracks for up to three round trips per day in addition to existing routes run by federal passenger rail operator Amtrak. The Granby outlet said Union Pacific will allow the state to run passenger rail on its tracks between Denver and Craig in exchange for the lease on the tunnel.

John Putnam, a senior adviser for the Colorado Department of Transportation who led negotiations on the Moffat Tunnel, said the agreement allows the state to connect people and freight on the Western Slope and Front Range, which is what the state built the tunnel for 100 years ago.

geomagnetic super storms affected GPS signals all around the world, and affected the GPS signals that tractors rely on to automatically steer in straight lines,

Back in May, Earth was hit by five consecutive coronal mass ejections (CMEs) within a matter of two days. 

While the geomagnetic super storms that these CMEs triggered gave us quite a light show—plastering beautiful auroras in the night sky—they also caught farmers off guard.

these reports show just how much solar weather can impact farmers.

huh!

 

https://www.facebook.com/OptimisticOrPessimistic

a lot of people question the value of art, especially public art. But, I instead put the issue down to a case by case basis, some public art is obviously a waste of money, and paint. Also OBVIOUSLY, there is a LOT of good public art, but mostly it's low dollar amateur stuff that is the best, NOT the ego driven "artists"

 

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1051248487046574&set=a.625084949662932

These are pretty cool... but 35 bucks for the regular size. Well... just FYI, interesting, but expensive. Like everything else in the automotive world, right?



 https://clutchgear.com/collections/mugs

December's banners, where I tried to post a LOT of snowy scenes (those are hard to come by every year, so it's now just a December banner feature)