I spotted an (insert obscure car name here) classic car today! (Archived)

explorerx4

Saw an IS 300 5 door on Sunday, too. Those are pretty rare.
Took my driver's test in a '72 or so what I think was a 4 door AMC Matador.
It was a big AMC sedan.

berri

1 Adam 12, see the man!

explorerx4

I had to think about that, as I remember them driving Plymouth's earlier in the series.

fintail

My dad's car was a moderately equipped Country Sedan. It had a 352, radio, power steering but no power brakes (I think...maybe that was reversed, but I am pretty sure I am right). It wasn't hard to drive, other than the huge size. He found it in the early 90s, owner at that time couldn't get it to run and gave up, parking it outside. Mileage was indicated at something like 33K, which was believable based on interior wear and straight body, but was maybe 133K based on age. It appeared to have been cared for. Body panels had virtually no rust, but the front floors were shot - maybe a drainage problem, my dad patched them. Running problem ended up being a dead coil - once replaced, it fired right up. My dad loved it for some time, even commuting in it, but eventually he got bored, the car was driven less, and then sold on a whim - sold the first day it was offered.

Speaking of the Elite from earlier, here's an amusing slideshow with appropriate music:

http://youtu.be/y6VS6HxM9YU

lemko

They drove 1968-69 Plymouth Belvederes in the first three seasons, then switched to a 1971 Plymouth Satellite, and then a 1972 AMC Matador for the remainder of the series. I recall one AMC-centric episode where they were chasing a 1972 Javelin stolen from a dealer's showroom with their Matador cruiser.

jljac

they were chasing a 1972 Javelin stolen from a dealer's showroom with their Matador cruiser.

I was a military policeman at Camp Drum (now Fort Drum) in the summer of 1974 and we had a 1972 or 73 Matador police car. We liked it because it was the only passenger car we had, the other vehicles were army "Jeeps".

The Matador had manifold powered windshield wipers that would speed or and slow down depending on whether you were accelerating or slowing the vehicle. I thought all the automakers gave up on those in the 1950s, but AMC kept them into the 1970s.

andre1969

1969 Camaro Z-28, 302 CID, 4-speed, Rally Sport package, new rear and clutch, am/fm radio. Only $1300. The catch? The newspaper I found the ad in was a Washington Star (been defunct for years) and the date was August 29, 1975! :P

I was going through an old box that had dishes and stuff packed in it last night, seeing if there was anything worth keeping, and someone in my family had used this paper to wrap the dishes up in.

There's also an ad for the 37 mpg Vega for $2666 (plus $129 freight). 5 year, 60,000 mile engine guarantee!

wevk

http://www.carbuzz.com/news/2012/5/24/Timeless-Photos-of-1930-s-Car-Crashes-in-B- oston-7708971/

fintail

My dad's 60 Ford had vacuum wipers like that...amusing under heavy throttle.

Odd sightings today - same W123 I saw yesterday, BMW E24, Porsche 911/993 with junk tied to the roof.

fintail

The car is the crumple zone. Wooden structures don't crash well.

imidazol97

1960... Didn't the vacuum have a secondary pump as part of the fuel pump to help keep a vacuum during open throttle on cars by then? We had a 60 Ford but I can't recall just when the assist pumps started being used.

bhill2

1960... Didn't the vacuum have a secondary pump as part of the fuel pump to help keep a vacuum during open throttle on cars by then?

There wasn't any on the 1960 Falcon, I know. And in a '60 Falcon (at least with an automatic) your throttle was open a lot!!

fintail

I don't remember anything more mechanical on the car than that it was a 352. I remember the wipers wouldn't stop, but they would slow.

Edit: I do remember the rear end in the car (it was automatic) started making noise about a year after he bought it, so he replaced it with a unit from a 70 Country Squire. I guess that would be a 9" rear end?

omarman

The first pic in that Elite video looks just like my driver's ed car in 1975. And the music had me thinking "Love Hangover." But still I've watched it twice. So far.

imidazol97

In a 1960 brochure..., "all Ford engines have...vacuum-booster pump for more constant windshield wiper action..."

au1994

"they don't make 'em like the used to" and in this case, thats a good thing!

berri

Well, I think that brochure was hyperbole. I can assure you our 60 Ford had very inconsistent wiper speeds and they slowed a bunch when you pushed down on the accelerator. On the flip side, it was a six banger and maybe the last year for the hand choke - that baby started in any weather!

imidazol97

>that brochure was hyperbole. I can assure you our 60 Ford had very inconsistent wiper speeds and they slowed a bunch when you pushed down on the accelerator

Well..., the Falcon brochure also talks about the vacuum-boosting fuel pump.

They slowed down but the vacuum from the fuel pump prevented them from stopping. Stopping is what they did before that with a wide open throttle at low engine speeds. So a slow wiper was an improvement over NO wiper.

fintail

I have to wonder, was it that much more expensive to simply use an electric wiper motor? Seems with the plumbing and a booster pump, etc, this wasn't exactly a cheap and simple system.

imidazol97

I don't recall electric motors on wipers being an alternative in those years.

kyfdx

Even in '72, our Lincoln's power door locks were vacuum, not electric..

tjc78

Even into the early 80s Lincoln still used vacuum for the headlight doors. What a joke, 9 times out 10 they started to leak and would come up after you shut the car down.

My 79 Continental was like that.

bhill2

I can assure you our 60 Ford had very inconsistent wiper speeds and they slowed a bunch when you pushed down on the accelerator. On the flip side, it was a six banger and maybe the last year for the hand choke - that baby started in any weather!

Yes, my '60 Falcon definitely had wipers that slowed down to almost nothing whenever you pushed down hard on the accelerator. This was a problem for two reasons: 1) in that car you had to push down hard on the accelerator any time you wanted it to stop slowing down and 2) I lived in Seattle.

On the other hand, it also had a manual choke, which worked very well in cold weather, primarily because you could control the amount of choke throughout the engine warmup period and could tailor it based on the type of driving you were doing. For instance, if you went onto a road with no stop-and-go you could go almost directly to no choke. If you had to stop and then accelerate you could leave the choke engaged for a little longer to prevent bogging or stalling.

I should mention that I had a '62 Volvo that went a step further; it had not only a manual choke but a little chain below the dashboard that pulled a roller blind up in front of the radiator. Pull it up all the way and a cold engine warmed up fast. If you wanted a little more heat in the car you just needed to leave it part way up. With the roller blind completely down you could drive the car up Mount Everest (well, in my case Mount Rainier) and it wouldn't overheat. It was very clever and provided more control of the engine temperature than I have ever had since.

fintail

Fintails have them, but those cars were in another universe, technology wise, at the time. I know my 66 Galaxie had electric wipers. When was the switchover for mass market cars?

fintail

A few oddities today - nice survivor condition Volvo P1800, 2x decent looking MB W126, Vanagon Syncro, early A8, 90s 300ZX convertible, and of all things, one of these:



Not many can be left.

fintail

That's the basis for the song no doubt - sits well with the car. The grille on that thing makes me laugh ,made up of many smaller grilles. I like the statement that it is "pimped" from the factory.

lemko

My Dad's 1981 T-Bird was also like that. If you wanted to keep them open, like my Dad wanted in the winter to keep them from freezing shut, there was a plastic clip supplied to pinch the vacuum line closed.

tjc78

there was a plastic clip

Yeah Ford got cheap in the later years. The earlier 70s models had a valve in the engine bay you could turn and the covers would open up.

jljac

"they don't make 'em like the used to" and in this case, thats a good thing!

Here is an interesting video of a 1959 Chevy and 2009 Chevy crashing head on. http://www.iihs.org/50th/default.html

I like older cars because they warn you when something is wrong before before they quit entirely and the brakes last longer. With newer cars they work perfecty or not at all. Like Zippo lighters vs Bic disposable lighters.

lemko

Spotted a rough brown 1985 Buick Regal coupe coming out of an apartment complex on Rising Sun Avenue near Tyson and another rough brown and bronze two-tone 1984 Regal at Levick and Bingham in NE Philly.

stickguy

those pictures are scary.

But, it really did not matter that the driver was squished back due to encroachment.. That beast had no seat belts, so he would have been impaled on the column, smashed off the metal dash, or out through the windshield anyway.

andre1969

I remember when that crash video first came out. That fall, at the classic car show in Hershey PA, I paid a little extra attention to the '59 Chevies as opposed to comparable cars, to see how they were constructed.

One thing the '59 Chevy has against it is that wasp-waisted X-frame, which is going to fold up more easily than a ladder or perimeter frame, and give you the added "bonus" of poor side impact protection.

But another thing I noticed, is that under the hood, there didn't seem to be much to a '59 Chevy. Just fenders and wheel wells, but not a whole lot of structural support in there. So in a crash, anything that over-rides the frame would probably strip the car right back to the firewall with little effort.

In contrast, the Fords and Plymouths seemed a lot more substantial under the hood.

In the end, if the driver was unbelted, it's probably a moot point, since you'd still get impaled on something or thrown through the windshield even if the car didn't crumple up as bad. But from the way that Chevy crumpled, it looked like the driver would probably be dead even if the car had seatbelts installed. I wonder, if aftermarket belts were installed, if a '59 Ford or Plymouth driver would've stood a better chance of surviving?

Mr_Shiftright

I think most 50s/60s American cars were pretty much just slammed together any old which way. They may look pretty but I wouldn't trust the bolts and welds with my life, if I could avoid it.

bhill2

In the end, if the driver was unbelted, it's probably a moot point, since you'd still get impaled on something or thrown through the windshield even if the car didn't crumple up as bad.

I remember a scary advisory article from the pre-seatbelt days on how to survive an accident. It recommended, if a crash was inevitable, that you lie down on the seat. Presumably this was to avoid being impaled by the steering column, going through the windshield, or bouncing off the sharper parts of that stylish dashboard. It would presumably also distribute the impact with whatever your body did end up bouncing off of. In any case, it was an unattractive scenario.

andre1969

In a twisted sort of way, it does make sense. Usually the area down in the footwell is the sturdiest part of the car. I've read that if you have an infant in the car, and no car seat, the safest place to put the kid is down in the passenger side footwell.

Back in those days, one of the biggest safety "features" was how far from the front of the car the steering box was mounted. GM tended to put it ahead of the front axle, so it wouldn't take much of a frontal impact for the whole steering column to get driven back into the passenger cabin. I don't know where the earlier Mopars had it, but on my '57 DeSoto, it's actually mounted back pretty far...either on top of the front axle or slightly behind...can't remember which. So presumably, it would take a harder impact inflicting more damage to shove the column back.

Scary thing is, even on some of my newer GM cars, like my '67 Catalina and '85 Silverado, it seems like they went out of their way to mount that steering box as far forward as possible. At least by this time, the cars had collapsible steering columns and steering wheels that were a bit more impact-friendly. Still, I imagine a hard enough hit will still shove the steering column back into the passenger cabin.

When I was younger, I used to think those big old cars were still fairly safe, because they had all that size and bulk. And compared to a lot of the cars that were on the road when I first started driving in '86, they probably were. I'm sure my 4000 lb DeSoto would hold up fairly well compared to a 2800 lb Cutlass Ciera.

But nowadays, even midsized cars are pushing 4,000 lb and up, and suddenly, something the size of my DeSoto or Catalina that "only" weighs 4,000 lb seems kinda flimsy. I imagine if built to today's standards, safety levels, and standard equipment levels, something the size of my DeSoto or Catalina would probably weigh around 5,000 lb.

stickguy

that just goes to show, thin sheet metal is not all that heavy, and exactly how much dead empty space there is in a car that size.

lemko

Could they roll the sheetmetal any thinner than they did on the 1959 Chevrolet?

andre1969

Could they roll the sheetmetal any thinner than they did on the 1959 Chevrolet?

Somebody actually wrote that, in a letter to Consumer Reports back in the day. And, as the 60's, 70's, and 80's would prove, the answer would be a resounding YES!

Sometimes though, it's not just the thickness of the sheetmetal, but also how well that sheetmetal is braced up and supported. On my '57 DeSoto, for instance, there's very little bracing under the hood. So while the sheetmetal feels fairly thick, I could probably open the hood, grab it by both ends, and twist it back and forth if I really wanted to. Every newer car I've ever owned, however, has had much better bracing under the hood.

stickguy

some of those older cars are really long, but they stretched the nose so there was a good foot of open space between the nose and engine. Air is light! same with some of the extended rear ends. Lots of dead air space there too.

andre1969

That's what Mopar did in 1957. They had three basic wheelbases: 118" for Plymouth sedans and coupes, 122" for DeSoto Firesweeps, Dodges, and Plymouth wagons, and 126" for the bigger DeSotos and Chryslers. Imperial was completely separate, on a 129" wb, and didn't share very much with the other cars.

Anyway, for the 122" wb, they moved the rear axle back 4", giving a longer decklid and trunk. The passenger cabin was the same size inside. And while the trunk was longer, that extra length was ahead of the hump over the axle, and not really useful unless you were carrying a long, thin object.

To make the 126" wb, they added it all ahead of the cowl, which gave a longer hood and more graceful lines but again, no more interior space. The longer wheelbase cars would ride better, so there was some advantage there. And, in theory at least, the further back from the front of the car that the passenger cabin is, the safer it is.

I think a '57 Plymouth coupe or sedan is only around 205" long, whereas my DeSoto is around 218". So, in addition to the 8" of wheelbase, there's another 5" unaccounted for. The DeSoto's bumper/grille combination juts out a bit, and the front-end is slightly vee-shaped, so that might account for some of it.

Incidentally, when DeSoto came out with the Firesweep, intended to be a smaller, cheaper car that reached into Dodge and Pontiac territory, it ended up being not all that much smaller. Dodges were 214" long and the "real" DeSotos were 218". However, the DeSoto bumper/grille didn't mate up very well do the Dodge front-end clip they used, and it jutted out enough that the car ended up being 216" long.

Believe it or not, the cheapest DeSotos ended up being a bit longer than the Buick Super/Riviera that year! And about the same length overall as the 4-door Cadillacs.

GM did the same trick. While a '57 Chevy was on a 115" wb, Pontiacs, using the same A-body, were on either a 122 or 124". GM's B-body was 122" for the Buick Special/Century and the two Olds 88 series, but they stuck another 4" up front to make the Ninety-Eight that year.

'57 was actually one of the few years that Ford, Mercury, and Lincoln all used their own, unique bodies. However, Ford offered two lineups, on a 116" wb for the cheaper cars and all wagons, and 118" for the nicer Fairlanes. Oddly, the 116" wb cars had more room inside!

fintail

Was cleaning out some old files and found this pic I took several years ago. I was apparently stuck in some kind of Bermuda Triangle for weird cars. I am in a blue fintail, not exactly an everyday sight, and parked on the same street is a Citroen wagon, GTO convertible, and VW 411/412. What were the odds?

tjc78

That wagon is so ugly, that it's actually cool. :shades:

stickguy

Probably a slightly better chance if it was 1972, but even then, long odds of finding that quartet together.

scscars

I always liked those Citroen wagons with the sloping nose and the boxy rear. It's not supposed to work, but it does. The GTO in the background looks pretty nice. The VW 412 was weird in the 70's and it's just as weird now. Well, as they said in Rocky Horror, "Lets do the Time Warp Again!"

berri

I'm like you, I like those Citroens because they are so quirky. We actually had a chemist down the block that had a sedan version when I was growing up. He was kind of an unique individual as well, but he gave me a ride in it. Besides the odd shifter, it actually was very comfortable and rode nicely. At the other end of the block a guy had a TR-3, actually somewhat common in those days around Chicago. Your [non-permissible content removed] dragged on the ground, so it felt like it was really moving - fun car. Today I was looking at the latest Hemmings. There was a maroon 49 Buick woody that sold for $83K. I had to laugh because as a kid no one really wanted a woody back in those days - too much maintenance hassle. You could buy them cheap and a carpenter up the street had one quite similar to that auction wagon. He used it as his work car and would give us a ride to school on cold, snowy days. Given its weight, it plowed right through! He drove that thing into the 60's and then finally sold it for something like a C note. Replaced it with a 59 Chevy wagon, another rather unpopular at the time vehicle that he got cheap off a used car lot. I knew his daughter from class and she said he missed the old Buick. He also collected and restored old time stereos because back then it was a "cheap" hobby. How things change over the years huh!

berri

IIRC those VW 412's didn't really last all that long in the marketplace. I had heard that they were not very reliable, but I don't really know? I think they also had a bit odd looking wagon version.

berri

You do see a lot of unique old cars in the Pacific NW. I'm guessing they don't salt the black ice during the winter? Another place I seem to see a lot of unusual old cars is San Francisco, but not so much in LA - maybe too image consious in southern CA!

stickguy

my grandmother had a 412 (AT) wagon back in the 70s. I took my driver's test on it. I hated that car with a passion. Horrid to drive, and frankly evil.

I never understood how a rear engine car could have steering that heavy. And man, was it slow.

at least hers didn't catch fire like so many seemed to.

fintail

Very little chemical treatment of the roads, and not a lot of sun either (especially this year) - good weather for cars. Really, this is probably the best place to find used or old cars. I notice in GA/FL and in the northeast, cars age a lot quicker.

stickguy

in the east, in the old days the idea was to head from NY/NJ down to middle to lower north Carolina and pick up the rust free cars there and bring them back. Usually cheap. Not any more I imagine though. But if you wanted a '60s Chevelle that wasn't a rust buck in the 80s, you weren't finding it up in NY!