Fords forever!

We Whooped the Axis Powers in WW2, and Again When it Counted, 1966

Posted on October 21, 2023 by Barry

In spite of my barbs thrown out at all things Ford, and maybe just needling a committed Ford man, Mike, just a bit, there is the GT40, one of the great cars and programs of all time.

As a committed Chevy/GM man, I did not like Fords, with one exception. Even in my youth I despised the european ways, and Henry Ford took on the Italians that had dominated LeMans. In 1966 the GT40 would finish 1,2, and 3, vanquishing the cars from Maranello. Ford’s gambit was an international effort featuring the great British Sports Car engineer/driver Ken Miles. Of the three Shelby Ford entries that year, there were driver greats Denny Hulme paired with Miles, Americans Dan Gurney and Jerry Grant in another car, and Bruce McLaren and Chris Amon in the 3rd Shelby entry. There were five more non factory GT40’s in the race.

The GT40 would follow up the ’66 race with wins in ’67, ’68, and 1969. The great Ken Miles lost his life testing just a couple months after the 1966 123 race where he was far ahead of the other two, but because Ford played with the finish to have them all finish the same time at the line, and with the Miles car having started further forward, Miles didn’t get the credit for the win.

I just ran across a new to me website and one of the category’s is the GT40, always worth a review.

GT40

2

Vintage iron

Posted on February 8, 2023February 8, 2023 by Mike

Good ol’ American ingenuity, creativity, and know-how.

Arizona Mechanic Builds Own Fleet of Dwarf Cars Out of Old Fridges, Junkyard Scraps—Opens Own Museum

Master tinkerer Ernie Adams had always wanted a race car. But who has money for a race car?

Moreover, living in a little trailer park in Harvard, Nebraska, at the time he had no room to park one.

So, Adams, who has worked in a garage since age 16, satisfied his longing by building his very own antique dwarf car.

Over the years, his hobby would snowball massively. Now 82 and retired, Adams has an entire fleet comprised of some 15 antique dwarf cars—including several race cars—all made by his hand.

No stranger to tinkering in the shop, growing up, Adams lived just a quarter mile from the city dump, which fed his hobby. “That city dump was like a free department store for me,” he told The Epoch Times.

“At that time, they were taking gas washing machine motors off and putting electric on, and they’d throw the old motors in the dump.”

There were old bicycle and wagon parts, too, and he started deconstructing and reconstructing them and then selling his fully-functioning contraptions.

“I didn’t realize I was learning my trade back then,” he said, adding that his learning to build his own vehicles in those days came easy, because “time meant nothing, and there was no money involved.”

Lots of great pictures of this true American artist’s amazing work at the link, including this one.

DwarfRod

You do NOT want to miss any of this one, folks, trust me on that. The interior pic of the 49 Merc—which features an old-school shrunken head dangling from the mirror stanchion, and a CD player in the dash—is worth the click all by itself. And then there’s this:

The mechanic’s dwarf cars can easily handle the highway, zooming at speeds up to 100 miles per hour, while traveling as far as 200 or 300 miles on a tank of gas. They run on Honda motors installed by Adams.

Sure, it’s cozy but not uncomfortable, as Adams drops the floors down low to provide legroom aplenty.

Plus, they’re street legal; Adams, now living in Maricopa, contacted Arizona authorities and had them registered as “homemade” vehicles—as one would register a homemade trailer.

Having participated in dozens upon dozens of antique car competitions across the state and beyond, Adams boasts a wall full of trophies.

What an incredible, all-American story. I hope Adams gets rich as Croesus off of this hobby of his, I really do.

2

Loving the stick

Posted on October 5, 2022October 5, 2022 by Mike

Peters laments the slow passing of the manual tranny at the behest of the Überstadt.

You might think manual transmissions are unwanted, given that few new cars – including a number of high-performance cars, such as the new Corvette – even offer them.

Isn’t that a reflection of the market?

It’s more a reflection of the government – which has, in its usual oily way, imposed a de facto ban on manual transmission by imposing regulations that are harder to comply with if a given car hasn’t got an automatic (and increasingly, a CVT automatic) transmission. Readers of this column already know why that is, but for those not yet hip:

Manuals – being controlled by the driver – cannot be programmed to shift through the gears in a way best matched to passing the tests that grade compliance with government regulations, especially those having to do with mandatory MPG minimums. This is why – if you’ve driven a new or new-ish car with an automatic – you may have noticed the transmission tries to upshift to the next-highest gear sooner than you probably would have if you were controlling the shifts via a manual gearbox. It is why the latest/newest automatics have eight, nine and even ten speeds. The last several of these being “stepped” overdrive gears that are there to cut engine revs as much (and as soon) as possible, so as to eke out an extra 2-3 MPGs on the government’s “fuel efficiency” tests.

On paper.

Out in the real world, those gains are often lost – because out in the real world, upshifting too soon and too deep (into overdrive) results in sluggish acceleration and drivers will compensate for that by pushing down harder on the accelerator pedal, forcing a downshift. This of course results in more fuel being used.

But hey, the car advertises higher gas mileage!

And – of course – the car company has made the government happy.

But manuals still make more people than you might expect happy. The problem is finding a new car that still offers one.

Doesn’t much matter, I suppose. We’ll all soon be burning to death in the auto-igniting EVs we’ve been forced into, if Big Mommy goobermint has its way with us. Which, y’know, it will. Not that I’m exactly all in on the old stick-shifts, mind, now that I’m minus one (1) clutching leg and all. For me, it’s become a binary solution set: auto-trans, or stay the hell at home.

6

It all makes sense now

Posted on May 8, 2022May 8, 2022 by SteveF

Venezuela’s downfall began with the large-scale purchase of Ford products. Sad, but they should have known better.

(Hi, Mike!)

3

The cure

Posted on September 29, 2021September 29, 2021 by Mike

When liberty is the disease.

If it is accepted that GM – if any company – can make employment conditional upon submitting to a “vaccination” it will have set the precedent for requiring employees to submit to medical procedures, generally.

If the justification is accepted for mandatory submission to “vaccinations” then the justification has already been accepted for mandatory submission to health checkups, psychiatric evaluations, the mandatory answering of probing questions into one’s personal affairs – as any such thing can be asserted by control freaks to present a potential risk to the “health” of employees and thus, GM – any employer – is entitled to know and to impose whatever it decides to be necessary as regards such things.

As the condition of being allowed to work.

It will no longer be – ask your doctor. It will be – go see the doctor. And – do as the doctor says. Period.

Take whatever meds he says you must take. Submit to any procedure he says is “necessary.” Answer all of his questions. These to inevitably include questions regarding whether you own any firearms – which the same Leftists pushing the Jab also have already defined as a matter of…“public health.”

Else find another job.

People are fools if they do not grasp this.

They were fools for not grasping – decades ago – that submitting to pee tests as a condition of employment would inevitably lead to this.

Many years ago, when I was running an air-freight pickup and delivery route for Airborne Express, a state-mandated drug test was implemented for all drivers, regardless of whether they had a CDL or not. I strenuously objected, and flatly told my boss Eric—somewhat of a conservatarian, he was, with whom I enjoyed many a political discussion over the years I worked for him—that I would NOT be taking one, that I would quit first. He knew me well enough by then to know I meant it, and would do it; thankfully, he also valued me highly enough as an employee to just quietly let the matter slide so I could continue working for him.

That unofficial, almost certainly unlawful arrangement between me and the bossman stood until I got my CDL so as to graduate to the big trucks, with nary a word spoken about it by anybody. I never gave any thought to the whole affair as an omen of darker days to come. Looking around me today, I suppose I should have. In a very personal sense, you could say a pattern had been established, a precedent set.

If GM and the other companies making the Jab a job requirement are not backed down. Because if not, expect the Jab to become universally required – by all employers. Even the self-employed won’t be safe – because these Freaks will proceed to make any financial transaction conditional on Proof of Jab. Banks won’t deal with you – which means you won’t be able to receive payments or make them, except via cash – which you can also expect the Freaks to try to outlaw, too.

Their intent is not to treat you. It is to cure you of any semblance of personal liberty – to make choices for yourself – that may still enjoy. For you to have one choice: Compliance – with everything.

Or have (and own) nothing.

Oh, there’s always another choice, a workaround waiting to be discovered. Might be difficult, might be dangerous. It might be purchasable only at a terrible price. It might even be life-altering, radically and permanently so. But I assure you, it’s always there.

Do not expect the government – this government, at any rate – to do the backing down. It will double down, using the risible argument that “private companies” have the right to impose such indecencies. It is risible, in part, because corporations like GM are “private” to the same degree that you are a “customer” of the DMV’s. Corporations are by definition government-created entities, favored by government with special status that limits their liability, including liability for damages caused by the corporation.

As for example the corporations using the government to force people to roll up their sleeves, who used the government to shield them from liability for the crippling injuries and deaths their products cause – while making billions in extorted profits in the process.

The Superstate will indeed double down, and keep right on doing so, until it too is “backed down,” to borrow Eric’s turn of phrase for GM up there. Unfortunately for us, backing down FederalGovCo will entail more effort, more difficulty, more uncertainty, and more risk—like, orders of magnitude more. Plus, the penalty for failure is pretty severe. On the other hand, though, submitting without even making an attempt is the worst of all.

Once upon a time, there was baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet.

Wouldn’t it be great if those times make a comeback?

They can. All it will take is enough of us to say No.

GM isn’t the only car company. There are other car companies that haven’t become the adjuncts of the coercive state, which together seek to reduce us to a status worse than that of the cows in the field.

We are not their livestock.

Let’s make that clear to them.

Better make it clear to FederalGovCo first. If we can pull off a win there, we can always settle up with GM later on. And if we can’t, we’re gonna have much more pressing concerns than GM anyhow.

5

Category: Fords forever!

We Whooped the Axis Powers in WW2, and Again When it Counted, 1966

Vintage iron

Loving the stick

It all makes sense now

The cure

CF Search

Login, RSS, &c

CF Archives

Categories

2A/Mostly Guns

Alt-American

Big Dogs

Essayists

Mil

Nuttin’ But News

Odds Bodkins

Overseas/Non-US

Portals

Pure Bloggery

REAL Journalism

The Funny Pages

Comments policy

CF Glossary

Subscribe to CF!

Shameless begging

Correspondence

Allied territory

Notable Quotes

RSS feed