Category: Cars

I am a “car guy”… I love old cars.

Adventures in Engrish

The pre-Christmas freeze broke a few pipes in our barn (despite me turning off the water, and draining them beforehand!) and also claimed my handy digital scale. I use it for weighing the catalyst for my BioDiesel production, which has to be measured down to the gram. Variations between various recipes based on waste oil acidity are pretty minor so it is important that I use the right amounts, or I could end up making a giant vat of soapy gunk instead of fuel. Been there, done that, don’t want to go back.

Obviously the scale had some water in it, likely condensation, as things froze hard. Since things have thawed I started up fuel production again, only to find my scale inoperable. It just beeped and the display presented me with gibberish. I did what any motivated tinkerer would do:

  • I swapped in new batteries.
  • I took it apart, cleaned and reassembled.
  • And, when it continued to beep and display gibberish I hurled it violently against the wall.

While it was satisfying to watch it disintegrate into component parts and splintered plastic bits, it doesn’t help me get any closer to weighing Potassium Hydroxide 200-some grams at a time.

Last weekend I went into town to try and find a suitable replacement scale at the hardware store and farmers co-op. No such luck. They had an analog ones, and hanging ones, but no table-top digital models. I grabbed an analog one as I had a batch in-process and thankfully the recipe was very simple (80/80 1kg/200g) so the analog one did the trick but rarely do recipes work out to nice even numbers. I hopped on Amazon.com and snagged a digital scale. It arrived this week and so far has worked great. It is of course of Chinese orgin, like so many consumer products today, and the manual inserted in the box is … interesting to say the least.

I’m usually one of those guys that reads the manual of every thing I buy to use. One of the joys of buying a new car is sitting in the front seat and reading the owner’s manual cover to cover. (Good thing I rarely buy a new car!) This “RTFM” thing comes from years of working in Information Technology I guess.

It is a good thing that a scale’s operation is fairly straightforward, because this manual is absolutely no help in understanding the operational procedures!

It will back to zero.

Feel free to call out your favorite parts in the comments!

SIA Flashback “It’s a Car! It’s a Motorcycle! It’s Bi-Autogo!

One of the earliest “Car Photo of the Day” shots I posted here (before I even started calling it that) featured the Scipps-Booth Bi-Autogo, which I had seen stuffed in a corner of the Owls Head Transportation Museum in Maine. This bizarro machine from the early days of the last century amazes me. Photographs do not do it justice.

I noted that Hemmings has it on their blog today with reprints of a Special Interest Autos article from 1981 written by the nephew of the man who built it. Worth a read:

Hemmings Auto Blogs » Blog Archive » SIA Flashback – It’s a Car! It’s a Motorcycle! It’s Bi-Autogo!.

Car Photo of the Day: Still Life with M-16

As many of you know, I’m not a big fan of car shows. It all boils down to the fact that to me the natural habitat of an automobile is on the road. Static displays detract from the object’s purpose. Overlay the static display with judging, and all sorts of unrelated to cars – but ingrained in human behavior shenanigans ensue.

One such set of shenanigans are cutesy decorations. Those bizarro “leaning kid” dolls lie atop this pile, followed closely by Elvis mannequins, and drive-in trays with plastic burgers on them. Restoration photo books are one thing, as they are at least directly related to what you are looking at, as are period-correct materials about the history of the machine. Lying somewhere between these two extremes is captured above. This display is in a weird grey area between “period correct accessories” and “too cute” (if you could call it that!) I saw this vehicle at the only car show I regularly attend, which is the one put on every June by my little home town of Arlington, WA. I feel like it is important to “show the colors” so to speak and bring my car if I can. Militaria is always sort of an oddball category anyway, and the guys that collect these machines are a tad wacky. The car show organizers never have a judging category for them, so they end up pooled with other oddball (meaning not STOCK OR HOT-ROD DOMESTIC VEHICLES FROM 1925 THROUGH 1975… they always manage to squeeze 20 judging categories out of THAT group!) machines … such as imports, and race cars, and other miscellanea lumped into a giant pot called “Specialty Cars.” Of course guys with 69 Camaros and C2 Corvettes also throw themselves into “Specialty Cars” because they feel like they have a better chance of winning there… go figure. See what I mean about shenanigans?

Anyway the poor Jeep and armored car guys don’t have a hope in hell of winning anything so they usually just congregate in small, camouflaged groups and look a little PTSD’ed. This particular year though this one guy made a run at success with a full-blown Vietnam Era accessory display. If he’d pulled off a hovering Huey squadron he may have won Best of Show, but I think he struck out with just a toy M-16.

Car Photo of the Day: The Bugatti in the Living Room

The Bugatti in the Living Room.

Inspired by the Bugatti Cententaire post on Phillipe Picavet’s blog today, especially the well-loved and smothered-in-patina pre-war Grand Prix Bug, I present the (in)famous “Bugatti in the Living Room” from Marrowstone Island, Washington. We visited the home of a noted car collector on Marrowstone as part of the 2008 Classic Motorcar Rally and he indeed does have a Bugatti parked in his living room. To say the least the man fits the term “eccentric” quite well. His home is literally built around his collection which includes many notable Jaguars and some amazing pre-war machinery.

Like the Bug that Phillipe presented, this one also can never be called “over-restored”. But unlike the car in Belgium, it does not get used as Ettore intended.

Car Photo of the Day: Red on Red

Red is one of those love/hate colors on cars. Often the red is applied much like lipstick on a pig, earning the epithet “Resale Red”.

Of course red is also the traditional color of Italian race cars, so it is (all too) often associated with exotica such as Ferrari. Proven here by the Testarossa in the background. I would much rather see Ferraris in other colors, and in fact the prettiest ones I have ever seen have always been something other than red. Of course the fact that despite a vast spectrum available, the vast majority of Ferraris ARE red makes choosing a beauty standing out among the sea of rosso corsa pretty easy.

If you’ll pardon the pun, my primary objection to red on cars is that the color is actually quite flat and rarely has any depth or subtlety. Compare two cars, one painted red, and the other say in a metallic maroon or silver, and the car will likely look SO much better in the latter colors. It is because of the primary color nature of flatness (shared with whites, non-glossy blacks, yellows, and blues) that makes for both the appeal, and the dislike of red on cars. To each his own I guess.