motor mount

Progress is sometimes slow at Wolfgang, but it is progress. I’m pleased to announce the completion of another new book, Advanced Pinstripe Art.

As you can see, we also have the new web site up and running, with only a few bugs, most of which have been fixed by now. The overhaul includes a Tech Page, which is currently dedicated to a series of articles about brakes. A relatively large number of readers have signed up for our electronic newsletter, and I’d like to thank those people for trusting us. I’ve said it before, we don’t “share” information with anyone, period. Anyone who signs up will get occasional updates on new Wolfgang books and special prices on certain items.

New Products
Advanced Pinstripe Art is just a little late (some things never change). The book uses our “Advanced Art” format, like the recent Tattoo book, to bring you the work of eleven well-known pinstripe artists as they stripe everything from a set of flames to an old Ford dashboard. The only difference between this book and some other similar books, is the captions, most of which were written by the artists. So you get to learn exactly why Lenni Schwartz uses a particular brush and how Nick Pastura masks off part of the artwork as he works. From my perspective, some books are more fun and rewarding than others. The Advanced Art books are among my favorites. I enjoy the contact with the artists, the idea of letting them tell the story directly to the reader, and the process of creating the intense, colorful images.

A New Category
We’ve added a new category, or page, to our revised web site. The new category is called Bonneville Diary, and includes copy and photos submitted by Buck Lovell. The 2006 season was especially exciting at Bonneville and Buck’s little missive, complete with great photos, captures a lot of the energy present on the salt this year. Thanks to Buck for sending the material in, we hope everyone enjoys an insider’s look at Bonneville.

Personal projects – The continuing oil pan saga
Winter is just about here, complete with snow flurries this morning, which means it’s time to shift gears from riding bikes to fixing stuff in the garage on cold winter nights. Like everything else around here progress in the garage is slow. Because the oil pan I had painted didn’t fit (you might recall that I didn’t discover this fact until after I had the pan in question repaired, sandblasted and painted) I took the remains of the original pan and had Neal Letourneau fabricate the missing section. Wiser now, I checked the fitment before I took the new/old pan up Bruce Bush at Wizard Paint for some red House of Kolor urethane.

Bare naked bottom
When I built the car about a hundred years ago, I simply took the engine and tranny of the old rusty 1958 Imperial, and dropped the whole assembly between the frame rails of the Henry J. Somehow we made motor mounts and welded up a drive shaft and got the car to motor down the road – after a fashion. When we pulled the engine and tranny out of the old Chrysler, we used a come-along, because they’re cheaper than true chain hoists and cherry pickers were hard to come by at the time. Everything worked fine as we lifted the motor and transmission one click at a time and gradually rolled the car backwards out of the garage.

The trouble came when we tried to lower 1100 pounds of mostly cast iron onto the garage floor. The upper end of the come-along was attached to a four-inch pipe with another three inch pipe inside. The two pipes were “telescoped” apart to reach from one sill plate to the other in Mom and Dad’s old (and I mean old) garage in south Minneapolis.

The engine and tranny were so heavy, we couldn’t just take the load off the ratchet gently and lower everything one tooth at a time. No, we had to kind of jump up and pull down on the come-along handle with everything we had. At the time (unlike today) there probably wasn’t anyone in the garage who weighed more than about 95 pounds. In this way we were able to unload the come-along enough that it did drop down one tooth. But there was nothing gentle about the process. The motor and transmission would come up slightly, and then drop about three or four inches. As the come-along mechanism came to rest on the next tooth, the cable and the pipe running across above our heads would start this up and down oscillation that I thought sure would bring the entire garage down on our heads. It’s amazing the shit you get away with when you’re young and foolish.

10 Ton tranny
I suppose, anyone putting that old car together all these years later would discard that heavy old cast iron transmission. But hey, I’d rather spend the money on a set of wheels or maybe more tin work. So the old Torqueflite stays, operated by the old push-button gear selector. With a new front and rear seal, recently installed, and a new shift cable, the old beast (should) be as good as new.

Stay tuned.