Friday, March 15, 2019
Thursday, March 14, 2019
I just learned that Burt and friends were 5 years late to making a movie about a Cannonball Run, in 1976 David Carradine made one
1976 1981
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074279/?ref_=nv_sr_3
David Carradine played Coy ‘Cannonball’ Buckman, a professional racing car driver looking to get back on the circuit after a heavy fall from grace. He is not long out of prison and itching to claim the $100K kitty on offer for the winner of the Trans-America Grand Prix, an illegal road race from Los Angeles to New York. He uses a 1970 Trans Am
Which reminds me I posted images in 2015 from the wheel changing scene where he uses a guard rail to get the car off the ground because he either doesn't have a jack, or he doesn't have time to jack it up
https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2015/09/interesting-notion-for-jacking-up-car.html
odd parts on the Ferrari Testarossa, and it's competition, the Lamborghini Countach
the Lambo had a turn indicator stalk from a Morris Morena
The Ferrari had electric window switches from an Austin Montego
So says May and Hammond on this weeks The Grand Tour
The Ferrari had electric window switches from an Austin Montego
So says May and Hammond on this weeks The Grand Tour
the American railroad industry doesn’t use a wind meter on railroad bridges. Why should they? Winds were only 50 mph all day long, from 8am to 330 pm near Logan New Mexico, and blew this train off the rails
https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/timeseries.php?sid=UP363&num=72&banner=gmap&raw=0&w=325
https://twitter.com/NMStatePolice/status/1105895567207460864
http://www.thedrive.com/news/26941/bomb-cyclone-winds-blow-freight-train-off-railroad-bridge-in-new-mexico
The same thing happened in new Orleans in April 2015
https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2015/04/high-winds-between-55-and-70-mph-blow.html
What the actual hell causes this explosion? The bus simply hit a low bridge
Police in Stockholm, Sweden said Sunday that a public bus which exploded was a traffic accident and that no passengers were on the bus at the time of the incident, which is believed to have been caused by a gas tank explosion.
Triumph’s first-ever Grand Prix ‘victory’ in Moto Gp
Triumph’s first-ever factory involvement in grand prix racing could hardly have gone better. The new 765-powered Moto2 race was a thriller, with Lorenzo Baldassarri beating Tom Luthi by three-hundredths of a second, the top five covered by 2.3sec and with no engine problems.
The extra power and torque of the 765cc triple also bettered the race record by 18sec.
“The first thing I noticed with the 765 engine is that you’ve got so much more power off the bottom, so you’ve a much wider working range. You can stop-start the bike – go in slow mid-corner, stand the bike up and get out. Or you can run corner speed and use a different gear, so the engine will make the racing more fun for the riders and it makes the battling closer and better, because different riders can work in different ways.
“With the 600 everyone had to use the same lines and the same gears.”
Triumph never entered a GP team even at the height of its powers in the 1950s and 1960s, because company bosses said racing was a waste of money. The brand’s best GP result was second place to Giacomo Agostini’s MV Agusta triple in the 1969 500cc at Spa-Francorchamps. The rider was factory road tester Percy Tait and the bike was a T100 twin street bike, developed by Tait and legendary engineer Doug Hele.
Tait, Hele and a few others worked on the project in their spare time, keeping the whole thing hidden from management. “It was all done in secret in a half-disused machine shed behind the Experimental shop,” said Tait.
“There was never an official policy to go grand prix racing,” said engineer Norman Hyde, who worked with Hele and Tait. “But Doug had come from Norton where he had worked under Joe Craig, so he was always mega-keen on racing.
“He would do racing work when he wasn’t supposed to, so he tended to be like Nelson putting a telescope to his blind eye: I see no racing bikes.”
In 1969 Tait contested several GPs, turning up at events in Triumph Experimental Department’s tatty Ford Transit, then racing home on Sunday nights to be back at work on Monday mornings.
https://www.motorsportmagazine.com/news/motogp/motogp-mutterings-2019-qatar-grand-prix-part-3
Did you know that Moto GP has asymmetrical tires for tracks that are mostly left hand turns?
unless you race at particular circuits and are so good that you’re at the extreme limits of your tire, there’s absolutely no need for you to ever make use of an asymmetrical motorcycle tire. Nevertheless it’s an interesting piece of tire technology and shows just how far the elite riders push the limits of their machines.
Michigan landscape company owner Gow Litzenburger has 36 vintage trucks in his fleet, including models from the 1930s, which have helped his landscaping business stand out in a crowded field.
Litzenburger started the company after college in 1985 with a 1939 Chevy 1-ton that he had bought from a friend and restored in his high school’s auto shop class.
The fleet, comprised mostly of GMC and Chevy trucks, includes a 1934 Chevy 1-ton stake bed, 1946 Chevy 1-ton utility, 1949 Chevy 1 ½-ton, 1953 Mack Model A 1-ton, 1960 Chevy 1-ton utility, 1966 Chevy 3/4-ton, and 1972 2-ton stake. Trucks from the 1980s and 1990s made the cut, too.
Litzenburger, 51, said his loyalty to Chevy and GMC can be traced back to the 1939 Chevy truck that he rebuilt in high school. The truck is still in use.
The business closed after 31 years, because Litzenburger hired 48 seasonal laborers from Mexico, and only a dozen locals for year round. Hiring seasonal labor from Mexico also meant higher profits. However, when federal H-2B work visas went from 2 weeks to 10 weeks to get processed, Litzenburger no longer was able to stay on schedule
Paul Mendelsohn, vice president of governmental relations with the National Association of Landscape Professionals trade group, said that landscaping makes the largest use of H-2B guest workers of any U.S. industry
http://aludecor.info/litzenburger-landscape.html
https://www.totallandscapecare.com/landscaping-blog/vintage-landscaping-fleet/
https://www.petoskeynews.com/news/business/litzenburger-landscape-to-close/article_05f2bbea-14ad-5c0c-a02a-3d2fe56346ec.html
https://www.toolsofthetrade.net/trucks-equipment/trucks/an-awesome-fleet-of-vintage-work-trucks_o
https://www.petoskeynews.com/news/business/vintage-truck-fleet-helps-boost-landscaping-firm-s-visibility/article_c3e470f0-8a2f-11e5-b642-7b8587a764fd.html
Elvis in a hot rod, John Athan’s ’29 Roadster. The movie was 1957 "Loving You"
John Athan’s famed 1929 roadster, was one of the first cars to employ the time-honored solution of mounting a Model A body atop 1932 Ford rails.
As a teenager in 1937, John bought the body for $7 and the Deuce frame for $5.50. He began building the car, but didn’t finish it until after he returned home from military duty during World War II.
While Deuce rails would come into common use, John’s roadster featured numerous touches that made it one of a kind. The windshield glass is the rear window from a 1939 Chrysler with the surround and posts being cast and machined by John in his machine shop.
Athan happened to live near an outfit – Pacific Auto Rental – that supplied cars as props for Hollywood movies, which led to the Elvis movie gig.
Athan was rather nonchalant about his car’s notoriety, too, years ago telling me: “I didn’t know who Elvis Presley was [at the time].” Athan said that, following brief instructions on how to drive the roadster, Presley did all right behind the wheel. “He could get around in that car,”
The car itself is a thing of A-V8 wonder, sporting its 59AB engine in front of a ’39 Ford transmission that leads to a ’39 Mercury rear-end packed with 3.54:1 gears, all hung within the classic ’32 Ford frame rails. This was all cutting-edge technology when the car was completed in 1940. And shortly after the car rolled onto the street, Athan pointed it to El Mirage for the Road Rebels’ dry lake meet where the car posted a top speed of 108.5 MPH.
And if you’re wondering about the Elvis Car’s odd-shaped windshield, here’s the skinny: The glass originated as the rear window for a 1939 Chrysler. Athan liked its contour, so he popped the glass out of the sedan’s molding and then fabricated a frame of his own. Pure hot rod funk.
http://www.ckdeluxe.com/hot-rod-milestones/
the damage sustained by a prized muscle car that was aboard the container ship Rena. The 1972 Holden Monaro GTS, the pride and joy of ex-pat Troy Levien, was in one of around 2000 containers that were aboard the ship when it hit the Astrolabe Reef off the coast of Tauranga in October 2011.
Troy later reported in June 2012... "Sad news I'm afraid. I have just seen a pic of my monaro and its not good, the container has collapsed on top of the roof of the car and its been underwater, so you were right its a total loss. Worse still is I have no insurance due to a communication mix up....can this get any worse..."
http://antipodeanmariner.blogspot.com/2012/05/wheres-monaro.html
https://www.facebook.com/thestorybehindthecar/posts/1720754294874153
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