Category: Cars

I am a “car guy”… I love old cars.

Lego Geek Cool

a Lego Jaguar E-type.

Ok, this is just … cool.

Other than his mistake about the engine configuration (the V-12 did not appear until 1971, and by then the E-type was a very different car) this is VERY well done. Even though he says it is a V-12, the modelling looks very close to the gorgeous-to-behold XK inline 6… though with the cam covers removed. I love the 3-carb intake and hinged bonnet. I’m impressed!

Here is a rotating version.

OK… it looks like he’s corrected his text now. So I’ll forgive his error.

Check it out though:

Note the details: 3 carbs, spark plug feed down the center of the cam valley, heater box & fan, engine frames, battery, suspension, etc. Very nice!

Compare:

Social events and Sunday drives

I hosted a social event on Saturday. I’m not a social butterfly by any means but I felt the need to do this. I invited everyone I knew within driving distance who owns a Jaguar E-type. I “know” a lot of people via a mailing list/web forum for E-type enthusiasts over on Jag-Lovers.org, but there are many that I’ve never met. Being halfway between Seattle and Vancouver, I just trolled the list for people within driving distance and sent them an invite. I should have checked around a bit as it turned out the Seattle Jag Club was having a meeting that day, so a lot of club folks could not come, but almost half of who I invited DID show up and we had a great time. The weather, which had been typically miserable of late, even cooperated and became mostly clear and sunny, though rather cold. Surprisingly most people took advantage of the sunshine and drove their E-types! We had six E-types in my driveway (and one XJS and one Land Rover… it was a mini ABFM!) We all sat around chatting and I was able to meet a few folks for the first time. You can see pictures of the event here.

The only down-side to hosting such an event is that everyone ELSE got a chance to drive their E-type, unlike me. But we all agreed that we’d do this again sometime soon (after the weather turns) and we’d go for a drive. Inspired, and partially due to the weather Sunday, which was spectacularly clear and bright (though still quite cold!) I grabbed my son Nicholas and went for a drive to document a route for the future event. We drove an hour east from our house up the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River to Darrington, then north to the Sauk-Suiattle River road where it splits from HWY 530. We measured distances and I dictated the driving directions to Nick which we’ll type up and present to the folks who come out on the tour. We didn’t have time to complete the route (I envision a lazy-S shaped route, from our house east to Darrington, north towards Concrete, but stay south of the Skagit River, then down HWY 9 to Arlington, then east along the Pioneer Highway and up to La Conner.) It should be fun. I love to drive up the Stilly Valley, as the scenery is awesome. I actually drove this route a couple of years ago with my son Chris and photographed a few stops along the way.

Above: Nicholas chills out in the E-type under Whitehorse Mountain.

It was very cold, even though I had the Jag’s heater cranked up all the way. Our legs stayed warm, but we stayed pretty chilled out in the wind. Put the top up?? NEVER! Nick had a nice warm hat (you can see it wadded up next to him in one shot) and we both wore coats and gloves. Sunshine demands open car touring. We stopped and took a few photos but most of the trip was route-making and documentation. You can see the photos here. Nick & I will get the route-book done ASAP and then we’ll send out the invites and plan on a great Sunday drive with a bunch of cool old cars.

OK, this is just too cool.

Roger Los (see Roger’s Rusty Heaps in the blogroll) sent this link to the Jag-lovers E-type list:

It is a film taken from the cockpit of a works D-type on a practice lap around Le Mans in 1956. As an added bonus, the narrator is Mike Hawthorn, the Jaguar factory driver who won the race the year before. The ’55 race was marred by a huge accident that killed over 80 spectators, which Hawthorn was slightly involved in. The pit signalling was right before pit lane, and Jaguar signaled Hawthorn in… he braked, a Healey swerved to avoid him, and a Mercedes 300SLR collided with the Healey and somersaulted into the grandstand.

Hawthorn points out where the relocated the signalling to, as well as the location of the tragic accident.

Mercedes withdrew from the race later, and all of racing for several decades shortly afterwards.

I love D-types. I had several toy D-types when I was little and have always been attracted to them (along with Jim Hall Chaparrals.. which I had the privilege to watch in person at Road America when I was a kid!) I have never seen a D-type or XK-SS in the flesh, being driven, until last year when I attended the Colorado Grand (see links on the right), where it seemed I was surrounded by them. Wonderful cars.

A Visit to Wigton.

(note: this post is backdated a bit over a week)

I’m in Colorado on vacation (and marooned in 1990’s technology… using dial-up for the first time in this millennium!) visiting my parents. Took the day off from sliding down hills on sticks to drive down to the flatlands northeast of Denver to finally meet the man who has saved my ass more times than I can count. You see I am a mechanical midget whose greatest skill with a wrench is making musical tones by dropping them on the garage floor, which I have to admit I do quite well. Making wrenches do what they are supposed to do? Well I haven’t quite mastered that yet.

However, with access to smarter people than me, via the Internet (specifically the Jag-Lovers E-type mailing list), I manage to keep my old car running. One of those smarter people is Paul Wigton. I set aside a day of my vacation to meet this man who has offered, free of charge and with endless humor and patience, infinite amounts of advice and counselling concerning the collection of parts and British engineering that I am the caretaker for, the 65E. Paul has been working with, and lived around Jaguars literally since BIRTH, and has forgotten more than I’ll ever know about these cars. He’s also a genuinely nice guy. Like me, he is the caretaker of an E-type that belonged to his parents. In his case the (in)famous “Tweety”… named for an odd noise it makes. I was finally able to hear it first hand, as well as shake the hand that hit the starter button.

Above: Christopher Goolsbee (laughing), Paul Wigton (smirking), and “Tweety” (not rusting).

Above: Click the image and you’ll get a short QuickTime movie of Paul starting up Tweety (and Christopher running away?!) This was taken with my digital camera, not a true video cam, so the quality is not great, BUT you can clearly hear the famous “Tweet” note to the exhaust. Paul says the noise orginates in the head, as his dad removed the exhaust (LOUD!) and it continued tweeting.

Paul gets a lot of crap for having a purple E-type. But now having seen it, the color has actually grown on me. His mom chose the color apparently, and topped it off with a white tuck&roll and purple shag carpet interior (which I’ll … ahem… reserve comment on). The exterior though is interesting. The color has depth and behaves a lot like my OSB car… highlighting the curves and reflecting the colors around it. I’d love to see it: 1. Complete and clean, and 2. Under varying light conditions (sunset, dusk, stormy weather, etc) as I imagine it would really photograph well. As it was, I was under harsh, BRIGHT sunlight on one of those high-plains winter, high-pressure days. Even so, it looked good. So my vote to Paul is: Keep the “Poiple” when it comes time to finish the job.

Above: Yep, it IS Purple. It is dusty and scratched, but under there is a nice color in an odd sort of way.

The car has its original 3.8 engine, with close to 200k on it. Purists will cringe at the Series II cam covers, but hey, whatever works… besides the car is PURPLE! Paul says the ribbed cam covers don’t crack as easy, which I can understand. I like my shiny aluminum ones, but they are a royal pain to keep looking good, that is for sure.

Did I mention it was freezing cold? It was barely above 0° on the Fahrenheit scale, and yet…

Above: Click the image and watch as Wiggy & Tweety zoom off into the … um… gravel road. Note that I was expecting Paul to just back the car into the garage, as he had removed his jacket for some odd reason. Instead he blasts down the road at a full clip, minus a coat, a door, and a windscreen! As you will see snow covered tires don’t grip a cold garage floor very well, as Wiggy had a real hard time getting the car into the right spot on the garage… too much torque! Stay tuned to the end where the affect of all that cold is revealed.

We went inside and spent the next couple of hours warming up with hot cocoa and pleasant conversation. Paul filled me in on the history of his parents’ other famous Jag, the factory works lightweight XK 120, aka the ‘LT2’ or ‘Silverstone.’ The Wigton’s were the last owners until the current one bought it in the 70’s and restored it to factory-new condition. It appeared at the Monterey Historics in 2005 and Paul made a pilgrimage to see it. Here are two old photos of the car on Paul’s wall (in a poor Photoshop montage from two photos I snapped). The one on the left is Stirling Moss autographing the car as his parents look on, and the one on the right is Paul’s mother at the wheel of the LT2.

Big thanks to Wiggy for the hospitality! Big thanks also for keeping my usually morose teenager laughing so hard he almost wet his pants. It was a wonderful, Wiggalicious Day.

More Jaguar Woes

While the wheels are off in Seattle getting new tires mounted, the Jag is 2 feet off the ground out in the barn. Of course, we had to have an earthquake, and a windstorm too! 3.6 tremor last Thursday evening, epicenter Whidbey Island. I called home and Christopher asked me if I felt it, I of course wondered if the car fell off. Thankfully it didn’t. Then on Saturday we had a HUGE windstorm. Knocked out power for us most of the day so I couldn’t work on the car. I finally did get to it on Sunday morning and spent what I hoped would be a pleasant few hours out in the barn…

I figured it was time for some chassis/suspension maintenance. Staring at the left front, I worked my way around the car, doing a lube job, cleanup, etc. The E-type has splined hubs and knock-off wheels, so they need to be lubed too, but I’ll wait for the wheels to come back for that. With the wheels off it is easier to get to the suspension lubrication areas, so that is what I started with. Left front suspension went just fine. Right front had one issue, a torn rubber boot (or “gaiter” in brit-car speak) on my steering tie rod end. It is obvious that whomever installed it did some damage to it with the safety wire. Wear and tear did the rest. I’ve ordered safety wire pliers online and should be able to fix this next weekend. The right rear went well, but a new issue awaited me on my final stop around the car…

Above: a diagram/photograph of my loose hub.

The driver’s side rear wheel hub is just a wee bit loose in along the fore/aft axis. Now that I think of it, the car has almost always made a “clunk” noise when moving from forward to reverse, or vise versa. Now I know where it came from. I always thought it was from a wheel/hub issue, now I know it is just a hub issue. This is new territory for me as beyond lubrication I haven’t dealt much with hubs. I don’t recall this much wiggle last time I had the wheels off, so it must be getting worse. I posted this to the Jag-Lovers E-type forum and consensus is that either it needs more shims, and/or the bearings inside the hub (at the bottom fulcrum, not on the axle) are shot. Wonderful.

The irony here is that I discovered the wiggle after I’d lubed up the bearings in the hub and the lower fulcrum. You can see the white lithium grease still hanging off the zerk at the bottom of the hub. I grabbed the spline to steady myself as I stood up and heard/felt the “clunk.” I then started investigating further. In hindsight I could never get the hub to “clunk” with the wheels on due to the weight. I’m just not strong enough to move that much steel, aluminum, rubber, etc around… but just the hub? “Clunk!”

So now I’ll tear it apart to fix the hub and have to RE-grease it again.

Note to Josh: If you clean just a little bit at a time when you have the chance, it all stays pretty clean. I can’t imagine cleaning the entire car, but a wheel well? Sure. A bunch of little jobs add up to one big one. 🙂

Tetris with/on wheels

I love the video game Tetris, the old Russian puzzle game based on blocks of four. When I worked at Nintendo back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and 16/32/64-bit systems were still over the horizon, one of the benefits of my job was sitting at my desk playing with the (yet unreleased) GameBoy. The only GamePakâ„¢ I had was Tetris, but that is all I needed or wanted. Whenever I got on the phone I’d pick up the GameBoy and start stacking bricks. I still do that today, but usually with the “Breakout”-style games on my Treo or iPod. The game takes away my lizard-brain need to fidget with something while my mammalian brain can concentrate on talking. If you call me at work, and the conversation goes for more than a couple of minutes, I’m smashing bricks on my Treo, almost guaranteed. Weird I know, but that is how I work. I should write some discourse sometime about fidgety behaviors, but not today.

Today I played Tetris in real time with two complete tire/wheel or tire sets of FOUR each… that is FOUR Dayton 6″ stainless steel wire wheels, with some old worn Pirelli p4000 super touring tires mounted. FOUR new Pirelli p4000 super touring tires (wrapped in pairs for added Tetris difficulty!) THREE empty 5 gallon buckets (for my home-brew Diesel rig) and ONE 5 gallon Diesel can. Plus myself, my two bags, and extra set of shoes. All this I stacked into my 2002 Volkswagen Jetta TDi for a run into Seattle. I dropped the wheels and tires off at Foster’s Wheel Service for mounting. All the Seattle Jag club folks I talked to suggested Fosters, so there I went. (Actually I did get a suggestion for a place down in Kent, but that is a bit of a drive for me coming down from Arlington!) I dropped off my wheels and one of my signed copies of the KZOK Classic Car Calendar for them.

Amazingly, it all came out a lot faster than it went in, but before I left I took some photos of the FOUR by THREE configuration in the car (Any hard core Tetris player would know why I didn’t dare stack another set of FOUR things in there!:

It may be a boring looking, Teutonically efficient (52 MPG on veggie oil), dull little car, but those Germans do design it to be very useful. Gotta admire that to some degree. There is no way I could have squeezed that load into a Toyota or Honda of equivalent size.

I agree with Paul Wigton’s dad in that life is too short to drive a boring car, which is why I have the Jag. But you will note that I don’t drive it to work more than once or twice a year. 😉

Vintage Car Events Compared

Trevor asked:
I found your blog through your Colorado 1000 event. I really liked the photos. They did the job very well. I’d like to make the 2006 event and would like to make that the goal for my car. I’ve contacted them about regestering, so we’ll see as I think they only have space for 75 cars. Did you get in right away or did you have to wait for space? Are you going in 2006?

Look forward to any thoughts on it. Thanks, Trevor

So here I’ll take a moment to do a personal comparative of the various events I’ve been lucky enough to participate in, and share what I have heard about other events. This is just my opinion, and the opinion of others, expressed to me, so remember everyone will experience these things differently.

First of all though, I was invited to the Grand as a co-driver, so I have no real idea how easy or hard it is to get in (though I have some guesses…) My car is not old enough to go on that event, so I hadn’t thought about going. For me it was a “consolation prize” for missing another event due to the Jaguar’s engine troubles.

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To my understanding vintage sports car events began here in the US about 20 years ago. The first two were the California Mille, and the Colorado Grand. Both did their best to emulate what the founders thought were the best qualities of the European events (such as the Mille Millia in Italy), such as the running of significant old cars, without the risks involved in racing them. Both the Grand and the Mille are therefore “tours”. They cover some distance every day, and stay in nice hotels with (usually) good food. The price tags for these events are steep.

The Grand and Mille also have become a magnet for the most exclusive of cars. First, the field is limited to pre-1960 machines. Then, like I said in my diary of the Colorado Grand, here was a place where stunning and rare machinery such as a 300sl, or a Ferrari 250 GT are “pedestrian”… where else will you see actual pre-war Alfas or Le Mans pedigreed sports cars out for a 1000 mile drive?? The event managers do their best to focus on the unique, and I suspect that only by having been a “regular” event attendee would you be able to bring something as “pedestrian” as a production Healey or Jaguar. I haven’t been on the California Mille yet. I found the Colorado Grand to be enjoyable, but being a first-timer myself I didn’t really get to know too many folks. Those that I did get to know were great, but I have to admit I felt a bit outside the “clique” of people who have been doing the Grand for 10 or 15 years. I’ve heard good things about the California Mille, and I have gone on three other Martin Swig organized events (The Cannonball Classic, the La Carrera Nevada, & the Mille Autunno… which I’ll cover later.) The only thing bad I’ve heard about the Mille is roads and weather. Otherwise an auto tour of Northern California sounds like fun.

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The natural evolution of the vintage sports car event beyond the above, then went in two directions. One towards a more competitive event, the other towards a less expensive event.

Rich Taylor’s Vintage Rallies events are the former. Like the famous tours they are not cheap, but they add spice to the event by adding some mild competition. It is basic – very basic – Time/Speed/Distance rallying. Rich also frequently arranges speed events at racetracks… everything from cones, to road courses, to ovals, to dragstrips. He’s even thrown in some Karting on occasion! This, in my opinion makes it a LOT more enjoyable. The TSD is easy enough that you can take it easy, or make it a real competition. Everything that you find on a tour is there, but the competition angle adds a lot of fun to it. The people on Rich’s events are great folks as well. We’ve met some wonderful people there.

If you only could do ONE vintage sports car event, I’d suggest doing one of Rich Taylor’s. He does an amazing job, and I’ve never failed to have a blast doing one.

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The other events I have heard of, but yet to participate in, are the so-called “rat rallies”. These are barely-organized, low-cost, no-frills, cheap-motel, tours. They seem most common in California, but I suspect they can be found anywhere there is a critical mass of old car owners. I’ve been invited to a couple, and will get down there for one some day… but so far I’ve either been too busy at work, or the car has been broken at the time. Maybe 2006?

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speaking of broken cars…
There is another tour, close to home, that I signed up for last year, that I had to withdraw from. The Going To The Sun Rally in Montana. I was really jazzed about this one, and REALLY wanted to go when the whole engine fiasco happened with the E-type. I had exchanged a bunch of emails with the event organizers, and they sounded like great guys. The route looked wonderful. But fate intervened. I re-applied for next year and can’t wait to go. Trevor, if you can get in that one we could caravan over to Montana and back, adding some more adventure to it!

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As I mentioned above, Martin Swig puts on several events a year, not all of them big production tours. They range from the low-key “anti-football run” (being held tomorrow morning), to the California Mille. I noticed that he’s listing two of the larger “rat rallies” on his site now too. I did the Mille Autunno in 2004 and had a great time. The roads and people were great. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, especially since it is a west coast event.

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There are others out there. The Copperstate 1000 is in Arizona. I have heard it is a very social event, with a very friendly crowd attending. I’ve never been on it. I have heard of another one, in Utah(?), called the “Red Rocks Rally” (?) that is supposed to be nice too.

On the more competitive end of the scale there is the Targa Newfoundland, and Brock Yates “One Lap of America”… I wouldn’t mind having a go at either of those, but I doubt my car is up to them!

I imagine there are many more that I haven’t heard of.

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Overall, you can’t go wrong with any of these. The roads and cars are amazing, and the people fun. The only limiters are time and budget. Like I said before, if you could only do ONE, I’d pick a Rich Taylor/Vintage Rallies event. That little bit of competition makes it so much more fun in my mind. Especially if your co-driver is another “car guy”… if you bring along the wife/gf/mistress/SO/whatever, you might want to pick a more social event… unless she’s REALLY cool about car stuff.

Hope that answers your question Trevor. Thanks for asking. Even if we don’t meet up at one of these events, we’ll have to get together for a drive sometime!