Yesterday was an exciting day. I landed an interview about my book that will be aired on a podcast. It’s yet another effort into marketing and gaining exposure. This was related to the website and podcast of Rob Kibbe on The Muscle Car Place. Rob started a podcast a few years ago and turned his passion for muscle cars into a career. He’s been able to fully transition out office/cubicle life to something that he loves. As they say, if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.

Rob was very easy to talk to and a great guy and we talked about show car judging. It was a really fun conversation but still a bit stressful. Not knowing exactly what to expect and  an awareness in the back of my mind that I’m promoting my book and want to “get it right”. Though the interview isn’t live, I wanted to be as clear as I could. Of course, after the call was over, there were a number of things I thought of that I should have said or points I wanted to make. Oh well, what’s done is done and I’ll keep moving forward.

The main point I didn’t make was that the book isn’t only about preparing for the judge’s scrutiny. It’s about maximizing the vehicle you have in the best way possible. Also that you should have fun with your car and not live for the trophy. In any case, the podcast will “air” sometime in May. Once I have a firm date, I’ll post it here.

Podcasts

For those of you who may not know, a podcast is simply an audio recording much like a radio show. Anyone on the Internet can create one and post it for all to hear. There are podcasts on practically any topic you could possibly want to hear. I’ve taken to listening to them while I’m out in the shop working on my car. Some of the podcasts are actual radio shows that are simply recorded for later use.

The term podcast is related to the Apple Ipod where you can download the audio files onto your device and listen to them at your leisure. It’s more general now in that you can download them on any mp3 player device or smartphone. I use my iPhone and download a number of shows that are automotive related. This is what I listen to in no particular order except for the first, since I was interviewed there.

• The Muscle Car Place
• Car Talk
• Hot Rod Magazine Radio
• Rod and Custom Radio
• Street Rodder Radio

There’s a theme here. In any case, they’re fun to listen to while I’m turning wrenches.

Shop Stereo

This is the stereo in my shop. It’s not much to look at but it works well enough (4 speakers strategically placed around the building) and really, it’s a workshop, not a studio.

I’ve seen plenty of workshops that are much like mine in that they have a stereo for work-time listening that is old but functional. The key part of using a stereo like this for podcasts is that it should have RCA input jacks. These would traditionally be used for connecting a cassette deck, turntable or CD player to the unit. In this case, the external unit would be your MP3 player device. There are many on the market and some are not that expensive but they give the ability to store all your music and download and play podcasts.

The next component you’ll need is the headphone to RCA adapter cable like the one pictured below. They’re probably less than $5-10. I leave mine connected and hanging from the stereo all the time. When I want to play some music or one of my shows, I connect the headphone jack to my phone and play.

It’s a pretty simple way of using your old shop stereo technology to take advantage of modern day media. Now all you need to do is download and install iTunes to manage your music and download all the podcasts you can handle.

To step back in time a bit, I had a number of reasons for working on a project like this. The idea came to me when I was finalizing another book. That one had been interesting for a while but wasn’t near as fun or as close to my passions as this one. I was judging at the Portland Rod & Custom show and started realizing that many if not most of the cars there didn’t have a good understanding of what the judges are looking for or how to present their vehicle in the best way possible. And thus, the idea was born. The primary reason for writing the book was to help the show participants as well as those who might be intimidated by their first entry.

The secondary reason was that writing about cars and related topics is pretty fun. I get to talk about cars and help people with the experience I’ve gained over the years. It’s much more fun to write/talk about cars and the cool stuff people do with them than some obscure programming language that’s only interesting to a very small population of computer nerds (myself included).

The last reason was monetary. I thought it would be a project that would have interest by a large percentage of the automotive/hot rodding community and minimally help pay for restoring my Challenger. The larger goal, which is much more nebulous and less defined, would be to change my career so I can live what I’ve been telling my boys. That if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.

In any case, getting back to the book. About a month ago I got an unexpected call from a freelance writer for Auto Round-Up magazine. I sent them a review copy quite a while back. He wanted to let me know that he’d loved the book and written a review in the upcoming issue and wanted to send me an advance copy. Wow, that was cool! In the same week, I received an email from Dan Miller saying that he’d read my book and loved it. Dan is a nationally renowned career coach and author as well as a car guy. Double Wow!

While I’ve been out in the shop working on my car, I’ve taken to listening to automotive podcasts which has been pretty fun. I’m now working on getting some review copies into the hands of the hosts of those shows in anticipation of an interview. One of those guys who’s very well known probably lives within 15min of my house. Maybe I can lure him into dropping by the shop to see what I’ve been working on. Here’s hoping.

40+ year old cars can have a lot of gunk built up in those hard to reach places. Many many washes of missed detail work really shows up when you’ve cleaned and polished nearby areas. Take this backup lense for instance. I’ve polished around all the letters but you can see the grunge left behind where even a finger won’t fit. The inside of the letters may only be a bit over 1/8″ which a cotton swab might only fit.

The letters look like they were installed through pre-drilled holes into the lense and then melted on the back side for a permanent installation. I thought about attempting to remove them but I didn’t want to break the original pieces and have to replace them. So I went for the detail route. I’m going to have to clean these letters eventually when it’s on the car so why not now?

I ordered a package of Mothers detail brushes. They seem a bit softer than a tooth brush with longer bristles that are designed to get into tight places without damaging any material.

You can see that it looks like the bristles were pre-worn sort of like new-old jeans. In this case, it looks to make the brush a bit softer and safer. I’m not convinced I will want to use these brushes around emblems and on paint. I think I’ll keep looking for another product for that.

I started by applying some quick-detail spray on an individual letter to loosen up the dirt.

I then scrubbed to remove the dirt. This was done a couple times per letter to fully get the dirt off the lense.

I couldn’t really get a towel into the tight spot so a blast of air did the trick.

You can see the big difference between the ‘O’ on the left and the ‘D’ on the right.

Now that all the letters are cleaned up and the lense polished again, it’s time for re-assembly. All the letters took a vast improvement over their original condition.

Here it is re-assembled into the freshly polished/painted trim and reflector.

Doesn’t it look good installed? It’s been too long since those lights have been on that body. I’m really happy how they turned out.

The brushes worked pretty well and I’ll probably use them some more but I’m not going to trust them to paint yet. There’s a couple of detail brushes available from Griot’s Garage that I still want to try.

I was finished with cleaning up and re-assembling my tail lights and noticed the attaching nuts didn’t look so good. I could run each of them on the wire wheel to clean them up but that would take a while. I recently got my blasting cabinet up and working and thought that would be a better and faster choice. I’ll talk more about that adventure later. The next problem was how to do the deed without losing the nuts in the media.

I looked around the shop for something relatively durable that I could put the nuts in. I didn’t really want to hold them in my hand and risk damaging the gloves. This is what I found. It’s a little magnetic tray that is intended for holding your various hardware while working on the car. I don’t think I’ve actually ever used it. I saw it hanging as a fixture on the side of my roll-away and knew that was the right tool.

The best part of it is that it’s magnetic. I was able to easily clean all the nuts without them flying all over the inside of the cabinet. As you can see, they turned out pretty good.

I think this image might have been a bit too geeky and for that, I apologize. I usually like clever uses of visuals and comments but they’re only good if they make sense. I guess it’s sort of like reading a customized license plate and having no idea what the message was intended to be.

Not only was this geeky, it was a combination of geeky references that seemed to go well together but may have fallen flat. First, we’ll take the image. It’s a Tatra T87 which was made by the Czechoslovakia manufacturer Tatra. They made cars from 1918-1992 though I had no idea it was that late until I looked it up. The T87 was built from 1936-1950 and I chose this particular image because of the rear shark fin that makes this car more identifiable as a Tatra. Tatra made very high quality vehicles that had incredible performance for their time. They were equipped with a rear mounted V8 engine that was air cooled.

As the story goes, Hitler had loved riding in these cars and said it was the car for his roads (or something to that effect). The most notable piece of history is that Ferdinand Porsche said that he had occasionally looked over the shoulder of the designer of the Tatra. It seems that he looked over the shoulder quite a lot since VW and Porsche became well known for air-cooled rear-engined vehicles. This was so much the case that a lawsuit was settled out of court by VW where Tatra was suing for infringement of their designs. It’s fairly clear that the VW and Porsche designs came from the Tatra. The name of the Tatra designer was Hans Ledwinka. This is the first clue.

Next we have the slogan. This is related to the original 1977 movie Star Wars. We first meet Han Solo in that movie in the bar where another unfortunate bounty hunter is killed by Han’s blaster. If you view any current DVD, the bounty hunter attempted to draw on Han and Solo came out on top. There is a fair amount of evidence that in the original theatrical version of the movie, Han simply killed the bounty hunter outright. Thus comes the online debate and accusations of revisionist history to put Solo in a better light. I don’t particularly care what really happened but this is the situation that generated the fairly well known (among certain communities) phrase “Han Shot First”. I also chose the font since it is somewhat reminiscent of Porsche lettering.

With these two bits of information, it’s not too much of a stretch to see the humor. Unfortunately if it needs to be explained, it may not have been that good in the first place. Oh well, I still like it and my kids thought it was funny after the explanation. Maybe I’ll make a tee-shirt with it someday.

I was working with my father-in-law a couple years ago and he was doing some detailing on his intake manifold. I watched his technique and I was amazed. It was amazing partly because what he did made so much sense and partly because I felt so dumb that the technique never occurred to me. In case there may be others out there that haven’t done this, I’ll continue to explain.

His engine is a blue-green color and there was some missing paint and discoloration on the manifold near the carburetor. The engine had originally been detailed and painted while on a stand prior to installation. My assumption was that he’d need to tape off or remove the components that shouldn’t be sprayed.

He told me that it was much easier than that and he’d been doing this since he was building models as a kid. Spray the proper color paint into the lid or any other appropriate container and use a brush to paint it on the needed areas. Well duh, that makes sense. The color matches perfectly and there’s no taping required.

I’ve been doing this since. I recently installed my steering column and though all the components had been painted separately, the installation caused a few nicks/scratches. A little spray, a few brush strokes, and the problem areas disappear.

Of course there will be times when the touch-up won’t be appropriate and you will need to tape off when the brush strokes would be obvious on an otherwise sprayed component. In that case, you’ll know what to do.

I just finished rebuilding and installing my steering column based on a photo procedure that he put together a number of years ago. I’ll post my process sometime later. Today we’ve got a few videos that Cody has put together about repairing dents and scratches in stainless trim and polishing it to a mirror finish.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Yeah, yeah, it’s been a long time. The end of summer came far too fast and I had too many (non-car related) projects to complete. It’s really easy for me to get out of the writing habit and it didn’t take long to start focusing on other things and not want to start at all. The thought of picking of the pen (so to speak) wasn’t that interesting for a while but a new year has started and I feel like I’m gaining some momentum.

The biggest change around here since we last met is that I’ve set a hard deadline of getting the Challenger back on the road this year. I was talking with my wonderful wife about my self-imposed pressure of completing the car. It’s a project that I’ve wanted to work on with my sons and then enjoy in the summer cruising to shows, to the beach, or to ice cream. My sons are getting older and in a flash won’t be at home anymore. I’ve been working hard on my book and any other project that would allow me to scrape funds together to get back on the road. I was working so hard and was so focused that it had almost become a nuisance when the family got in the way. All of this focus was in anticipation of spending some fun times with my family. That’s not a healthy way to think.

It was pretty clear that the budget wouldn’t really allow a reasonable time frame if I stayed on the same path. Now this is when my wonderful wife asked me how much it would cost to finish. I took the question as one of curiosity when she really was thinking as the visionary she is. I came up with a ball-park number and she asked “what if we took it from retirement?”. Oh, the humanity. How could we do something like that? That’s the untouchable money. So we talked about it many more times. I came up with a more accurate budget and we eventually decided to pull the trigger.

To be clear, this isn’t the best financial maneuver and it wasn’t even on my list of possibilities but there’s a lot to learn for two boys when building a car and this is that important, at least to me. When I made the call to my account manager, I explained what we had planned and felt a little embarrassed by what we were about to do. His first words were “I totally understand, you’ve got to live life.”

So there we are and that was another reason I had stopped writing, I started ordering parts. Oh man, that’s fun. I love stuff showing up all the time. Now I’m making some serious headway in turning the car from a painted steel shell into a real vehicle.

By the way, the deadline is the week following labor day. That’s for the Cruise to the End of the World in Long Beach WA. I’d really like to have it before then but that’s the hard date. We’ll see how productive I can be.

Next up, finish steering column assembly.

Image Source

I love this story. I hope I’m still able to change oil and spark plugs at 101. I guess that would mean I have at least another whole life to live from now and I’m only a couple years older than my car. Such a beautiful car and so well maintained. Get out there and enjoy the cars for what they’re made to do… Drive.