Random Car Pics (all mine)

Some decently high resolution pics of some of the fun car projects I'll be working on eventually:

1948 American Lafrance 700-series pumper truck. This is going to be my tow truck for taking cars to and from shows, some day.


1970 Opel Kadett 1.1L sedan. No idea what I'm going to do with this one, though not ruling out jacking it 18" in the air on a pair of Suzuki Samurai axles.


1975 Opel 1900 (Ascona) Sportwagon. This one's getting a Manta nose and probably panel sides, still on the fence about the drivetrain.

The Mopar connection

While I was burning through imported cars faster than shoes in High School the one constant around the farm was an old Dodge truck. Seldom the same Dodge truck, as my dad was going through them faster even than I was with cars, but there was always at least one truck around to do those farm things that need to be done. As a general rule Dad stuck to the '61-'71 Sweptline vintage of trucks, but once in a while we would move up to one of the '72-'82 body-style for a while.

We ran the gambit with these trucks: long and short bed, standard, club, and crew cabs, step-sides or not, the entire line of engines and transmissions. Dad tended to gravitate to short-box, step-side trucks whereas I tended to prefer long beds myself. Almost universally the trucks belonged to my Dad, but there were a couple that he never drove that were for the most part "my" trucks. This was way back before the Cummins motors were put in Dodge trucks too, back when the 360 was the biggest motor they had available after the government bailout, back when it was not even a tiny bit cool to be driving a Dodge.

The history with the Dodge trucks goes way back, well before I got my own first car. At 11 Dad and I towed home one particular '60's short box truck with some weird modifications. Seems the previous owner had swapped in a Dart rear axle for the taller, more highway oriented gearing, but it was really too narrow for the truck. Besides looking a bit funny, wheels all tucked in and such, the tires would rub the inner edges of the fender wells if you put any sort of load in the back. Looking back the axle must have been a Chrysler 8 3/4, which would have been a pretty hard to come by axle for a Dart, worth some $ now, but then all I knew was that it didn't work right in the truck and that Dad wanted to swap the truck axle back lamented losing the gear ratio from the Dart axle which he actually preferred.

At the time Dad was working an evening shift, 3-11:30 pm or so, and I hardly ever saw him while in school. The truck he was actually driving at the time was a '69 Crew-cab Camper Special with a short box, one that I had helped him swap motors on years before and which I currently now own the cab from some 20 years later. At the time it was not particularly reliable, though I forget the specifics. After one weekend of wrenching on the driver truck just to keep it going, listening to Dad bemoan how he wished the other truck was running, I decided it was time to do something about it.

I proceeded to remove the Dart axle from underneath the back of that truck. Turns out the truck axle I was putting back in was also a Chrysler 8 3/4, but everyone had told Dad that the trucks used coarse and the Darts used fine splines on the axles so the differentials couldn't be swapped. (It might have been the other way around, it was well over 20 years ago after-all.) Once they were both out, though, it's a pretty simple matter to swap spider gears, and with a manual around I was able to check clearances and bolt it all back together just the way Dad wished it had been done. It went back together and to the best of my knowledge the rear end was never an issue again with that truck.

That was one of the very first major operations I did on an automobile by myself. Since then I've swapped out scores of axles, more motors and transmissions than I could begin to count, and done pretty much everything that can be done to a car. It was that differential, that Mopar differential, that started the snowball rolling though. I still have a soft spot for the old Dodges, and have my own Crew-cab Camper Special, but at least now they're sort of cool.


(My father still owns this truck, in 1994 I drove it from SD to Houston, TX towing a trailer to fetch a car and had not a single bit of trouble. It doesn't look like much, but I could hop in it tomorrow and drive it anywhere.)

Heart strings

During the first half of my Junior year of High School I was holding down three jobs while attending High School full time. At the time the law stipulated that a minor was not allowed to work more than 25 hours a week while still in school, but since the different jobs never talked to each other they could all maintain plausible deniability. I started my day around 5am with a paper route, @110 papers on weekdays, 135 on Sunday, probably 35 blocks or so. This was finished up by 7am, so I could go to work at the kitchen in the Middle School, initially doing their stockroom chores, then basic food prep once I got things in the stockroom running smoothly. After school I would put in another 30-45 minutes at the High School kitchen cleaning and mopping, basic dishes and such. By 5pm I would be over at one of the local supermarkets working in their bakery/deli/cafe until it closed up at 9pm.

Why is all this important, and how does it relate to cars? At the start of the school year I was driving a 1972 VW Super Beetle, but as the weather turned it got replaced with a fully loaded 1981 Ford Granada on loan from my Dad. Later the Granada made way for a 1974 AMC Matador, one of my favorite cars to drive to this day but terrible on fuel, then eventually to the pinnacle of that year, a 1973 Opel Manta.

This Opel was significant because I was only the second owner of the car. It belonged to a local guy who had taken it apart to restore it and had somehow never finished up the work. During the years post dis assembly the poor guy divorced his wife and when she kicked him out he didn't have room to take the car with him. The wife worked with me at the High School and after a couple months it somehow got brought up in conversation and the car was given to me, as in free. Thinking back, it was my very first free car.

This particular woman had a daughter a couple years behind me in school, and truth be told I liked the mother so much I always sort of hoped the daughter and I would hit it off, but we never really managed to revolve into the same circle. I would work with this woman again a few years later at another job, and she would work with my Mother for a while after that, and there was certainly the potential for a close knit couple of families, but it never really blossomed. For the time being, though, we were friends, the mother and I, and she gave me a free car at the ripe old age of 16.

Now the car had been partially disassembled, but it was in remarkably good shape. Hardly a speck of rust to be found, paint still shiny and glossy, just no interior and non-running because, well, it had been partially disassembled. I managed to wire it up enough to get it running again, and my parent's gave me a new muffler installed by the local muffler shop for my birthday that year. (It was a $28 muffler, and another $25 to install with some pipe, total was $53 I didn't have for whatever reason.) I installed a pair of bucket seats from a car that happened to be sitting around the farm, and not much else, and started driving it into the second semester of the school year.

That semester I dropped the paper route and went down to part time at school so I could attend college part time as well. While taking four classes at the High school I was also taking two at the local University because at the time my school didn't offer AP classes. I remember getting and paying my first college tuition bill, $45 a credit hour plus another $48 or so an hour in fees and misc. Over $900 out of pocket, cash money, for a 16-year old, back when minimum wage was barely $3 an hour. In reflection, those #s work out as a bit frightening: Figure I was taking home after taxes and SS about $1.85 an hour, that's almost 500 hours of work spent on college classes by a teenager. I'm so much lazier now.

Now parking at the University was then and continues to be now a terrible chore. One class was in the middle of the day, so I had to get to the college, park, get to class, attend the hour of class, get back to the car, then get back to the high school all in under 140 minutes. As college students are wont to do, sometimes this meant I had to get creative with where I parked, and one fine spring day it bit me squarely in the bottom.

I had parked behind the main business building on campus, which had a single lane driveway out to the street. To the left of the driveway were two "motorcycle only" parking spaces then one "compact car only" space to ensure that there would be visibility for cars leaving the driveway. On this particular day there was a pickup and a full-sized van parked in the motorcycle spots, and I couldn't see around them. I waited, impatiently, for an opening, then goosed the little Rallye out into traffic. Unfortunately the gap I was shooting into was already occupied, by my insurance agent's secretary.

The Opel crumbled like a trooper, water pump skewering the radiator, lower valance piercing the oil filter, fender collapsing in on the tire. The poor little guy bled all his fluids out right there on the asphalt. We had been together for less than four months, this car and I, and it was all over. It would stay parked out at the farm for the next 6 years, until at my ex-wife's insistence it was sent to the scrap yard. It still had the new muffler on it when it was crushed, not really new anymore, but still very new to me.

Now I have another Manta, new to me just a month ago, that's the same color, and about the same year. This one's a bit fancier, with a factory sunroof and cloth interior, but when I look at it it looks the same to me. I hope it fares better than it's heart-sake.

Because I can

Besides cars the other love in my life is my small fleet of furry love: my cats. The three that had been eating all my food and kicking me out of my own bed are here in the only picture I have of them all together. The old fellow of the group, my grey tiger-stripe named Lump, was recently moved back to my parent's house in SD so Mom would have someone to cuddle up with on the couch leaving me with just Murrey and Patty.

Sadly, after a couple months of happy purring at Mom's, Lump's health took a turn for the worst and he's passed on. Now he'll be missed by two house-holds.

Opel 1900 Ascona

Some first-look pictures of the 1900 Ascona sedan.