Today I ran an errand at lunch, went down to a chemical supply place in Auburn to pick up some KOH for my homebrew fuel. It was a gorgeous summer day here in the Seattle area. On the way I saw a Ferrari, a Model A Ford, A Bentley, a Maserati Quattroporto, a Lotus Elise, a Lotus Esprit, and this car you see above… just sitting on the side of the road with a for-sale sign in the window. I didn’t look that closely at it, but if you want to have a guess at what it is, feel free. I guess I have a way of stumbling into unusual cars for sale on the side of the road!
On my way home i stopped at John’s in Snohomish and grabbed seven 5 gallon buckets of WVO. Last weekend I found myself short of oil just as the time came to calibrate the processor. Go figure. I plan on giving John as much BioDiesel as he wants from my output in exchange for WVO.
I also had a Jaguar XK 140 OTS pass me going southbound on SR9 as I was heading north. The weather is PERFECT for classic car outings and my steering rack is still on its way to Illinois for a rebuild! Sigh. Maybe next weekend.
Looks like a 1960 Rambler American, with a flathead 6-cylinder engine that had a disturbing prediliction to cracking aforesaid flat head at the coolant outlet. It had all of the technological sophistication of a stone axe: viz trunnions in the front suspension rather than ball joints. It took a greater-than-normal pressure on the grease gun to force lubricant into the threads of the pivots of the front suspension. If you didn’t get your grease job at an American Motors dealer, you probably didn’t really get lubricated. So, your trunnions wore out, the front wheels got sloppy/floppy, and you had to rebuild the front suspension. The rebuild kit replaced the threaded pivots with sleeve bearings, so a conventional grease gun could lubricate them.
Mine was powder blue, and was dubbed “The Blue Beast”. It had “three on the tree”, with an unsynchronized first gear. I learned how to double-clutch down-shift into first driving that poor car. I had wanted to get an Austin-Healy, but my parents thought that this was a more “sensible” choice. So, I drove like it was an Austin-Healy!
An elderly neighbor has the wagon version of that, in two-tone brown, for sale in his front yard. Has been out there, off and on, for a couple of years.
Yep, it’s a Rambler.
Well Rog, here is your chance to relive those glory years!
If I were you though, I’d get the Healy. 😉