CarPort

John Katz passes this Reo tow truck each time he returns home from Baltimore. It sits beside the northbound lane of I-83 between York and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Athough it will take centuries for it to rust to dust – Reo, after all, was the “World’s Toughest Truck,” according to its manufacturer – John would like….
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The cars headlining the CarPort are seldom elegant. That in itself is reason to take a breather from the rusty and underloved cars you usually see here and indulge in a full week of elegance. There’s no better example of elegance than this Siata 208S spider. “Elegant,” to engineers, means no more complicated than necessary….
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Philip Worthington Foster was born 95 years ago today. Never what you’d call a “car guy,” he was endowed with that inventive cleverness we call “Yankee ingenuity.” Mark Twain’s hero in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court describes it best: “…if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent….
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Remember the van daze of the 1970s? Every young dude had to have a van, a van that made a statement. Add shag carpet, a water bed and you were ready for sex, drugs and rock and roll. It started with the flower children of the sixties and their psychedelic VW microbuses. In 1961, however,….
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Lee Miller has a soft spot for Humbers. The owner of a 1961 two-tone grey over red leather Super Snipe while on duty in Britain with the US Air Force in the 1970s, he’s kept an eye out for them ever since. Familiar to him was a 1964 model that sat for ten years, unmoved,….
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This is the time when apple blossoms usually come to the CarPort’s home town. The blossoms in turn remind me that 25 years ago this week we purchased our new, seventeen-year-old Ford Falcon station wagon. I had flirted with the car, a 1963 Rangoon Red Deluxe four-door wagon, at Spring Carlisle, but without cash in….
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Wayne Graefen’s been out carousing again. This time he’s come up with a bull-nosed beauty not far from his Texas hacienda. When I was young there were lots of these cab-over-engine trucks around, “Cab Overs” we called them, or sometimes “COE;” some people called them “cab forward,” but I never did. Now they’re a figment….
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The snow has melted in Southern Connecticut; the frost is out of the ground and we’re finally able to do our spring plowing. My trusty tractor, with which I prepare my modest vegetable garden, has magneto ignition, a two-speed planetary transmission and its oil level is checked with a petcock. “Aha!” you say. “It must….
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From time to time, my daughter Harriet and I go to Volkswagen shows. She’s restoring her grandmother’s 1965 Beetle, and we like to see what other people are doing. It’s also an opportunity to buy parts (although, truth to tell, you could build a complete VeeDub almost from scratch out of parts bought on the….
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On Thursday last, the production lines at MG Rover Group‘s automobile factory in Longbridge, on the southwest side of Birmingham, England, came to a halt. Stocks of parts were drying up as suppliers demanded cash on delivery. Rover’s fortunes since assimilation into the star-crossed British Leyland empire in 1967 have been on a roller coaster,….
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