My son and I are spending long hours stripping paint off old motorcycle parts with Eastwood's Dekote stripper. I think I mentioned earlier that we bought seven little, early '60s Hondas in "basket case" condition.

When I see a fender or tank with old paint or old Bondo, I tell my son use the stripper to take the paint off and then wire brush the Bondo off. He says, "But dad, we have another fender and tank on the red bike over there; we can just replace those junky ones with the red ones."

Not in my book. I don't replace something I can fix with just a little extra work. I paid for seven bikes. One was just a frame. So there are six to build, but only five have the right engine. So my goal is to make FIVE good bikes out of the one frame and the six complete bikes. That will give us one bike for me, one for my son Jesse and three to hopefully sell and get our money back (or even make a little).

If I save every part, I can build five bikes. If I toss parts that need a little work, I can only build four bikes. That extra bike will pay for a lot of the parts we need.

We may have different perspectives, but I'm financing this project. It's true that Jesse is going to "work off" one bike and the parts he needs, but I still bought the bikes. So I think my "old-fashioned" way is going to win.

What do you think?

Thursday, June 11, 2009 11:59:15 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [1]

A few weeks ago I bought a new vehicle. Instead of purchasing an owner's manual and shop manual for it, I saw an advertisement for a CD that has both of those publications, plus sales catalogs, magazine articles, ads and even an entire parts manual. For $15 or so, the CD seems to have everything. However, it is just not as easy to find a particular tidbit of information as it is with a old-fashioned printed manual. I think the CD will come in handy, but I still want to find original manuals that only require flipping a few pages to be just where you want to be.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 4:49:06 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

If you're like me, sometimes you buy something for your hobby shop and don't use it for a few months or even a year. Awhile ago -- make that a long time ago -- I stopped at the Eastwood Company (www.eastwood.com) in Pottstown, Pa., and I left with a container of pinkish-purplish stuff called Dekote. The man at Eastwood said it would take off paint pretty good.

Well this pinkish purplish stuff sat on the shelf for months. This is partly because I procrastinate a lot and partly because it is hard to do a lot of projects during the winter, here in Wisconsin. So, in any case, I never had paint to strip until this week.

All of a sudden I have a lot of parts that need paint stripped off them. This is because my son and I bought seven early-1960s Honda "Baby Dream" motorcycles last week. Seven basket cases that is. We hope to get four or five good bikes out of this. But all seven need to be stripped of their old paint.

So we finally opened the container of Dekote and (though this may be hard to believe) it really works. After just a few nights in the shop, we have nearly all of the paint off the first two old bikes. And one of them had four coats of paint on it. Wow! We think we can take paint off of four bikes with just the one container. That makes the cost of total paint removal about $11 per bike. Not bad!

Not to mention that the Dekote probably would have worked even better a year ago! 

Sunday, June 07, 2009 4:22:09 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Now that the sunny weather is here, I am enjoying driving my MG TF. It is not a restored car, but I still have a lot of fun driving it to shows. People are amazed to see one of these "fat fendered" MGs the way they looked 50 years ago and with bugs on the windshield. The car has a rebuilt engine. It runs good and everything works. It is as much or more fun than a restored one and I am not after trophies. I just enjoy low-cost, wind-in-the-face driving, speaking of which, you can too.

All over the country, there are enthusiasts like Shane Hanke, who buy "driver" condition imported sports cars and fix them up to make good road cars that can add to your summer driving experiences. Shane and his counterparts have a knack for finding inexpensive cars, making them good drivers and "flipping" them for a modest profit. With cars like these, you don't spend a fortune and you don't win trophies, but you get to do some exciting driving on nice, sunny days. Shane and others like him make their cars run good and look good, without spending five figures to restore them. So you get a fun ride without the worry of protecting a high-dollar show car. And most of the cars they resell are newer than my MG, which makes them more user-friendly and driveable.

You can check out Shane's inventory at www.shanes-british-classics.com. Despite the name of his business, he also plays with Italian and German cars. And if he doesn't have something you want, he'll even link you to other cars and other sellers. 

Sunday, May 31, 2009 2:56:25 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Now that the sunny weather is here, I am enjoying driving my MG TF. It is not a restored car, but I still have a lot of fun driving it to shows. People are amazed to see one of these "fat fendered" MGs the way they looked 50 years ago and with bugs on the windshield. The car has a rebuilt engine. It runs good and everything works. It is as much or more fun than a restored one and I am not after trophies. I just enjoy low-cost, wind-in-the-face driving, speaking of which, you can too.

All over the country, there are enthusiasts like Shane Hanke, who buy "driver" condition imported sports cars and fix them up to make good road cars that can add to your summer driving experiences. Shane and his counterparts have a knack for finding inexpensive cars, making them good drivers and "flipping" them for a modest profit. With cars like these, you don't spend a fortune and you don't win trophies, but you get to do some exciting driving on nice, sunny days. Shane and others like him make their cars run good and look good, without spending five figures to restore them. So you get a fun ride without the worry of protecting a high-dollar show car. And most of the cars they resell are newer than my MG, which makes them more user-friendly and driveable.

You can check out Shane's inventory at www.shanes-british-classics.com. Despite the name of his business, he also plays with Italian and German cars. And if he doesn't have something you want, he'll even link you to other cars and other sellers. 

Saturday, May 30, 2009 2:57:09 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

   When you go to a car show, I guarantee that you're going to windup with flyers for other events. Either you'll pick them up at a table near the entrance or there will be a big pile of them on the seat of your car. You'll take them home and probably never look at them again. If you do run across one, it will be weeks after the show date and it usually be a show that you would have liked going to.

   Flyers are a cheap way of advertising an event, but like my girlfriend Linda said last week, "The trouble is they all look the same; there's nothing exciting about them." I had never thought about that before, but she is probably right. Although they come in different colors, there's nothing about most of these flyers that "grabs" you and makes you want to read them.

   Most flyers are in small print trying to tell you everything about the show, from the basic Where? and When? down to listing each class there will be. (That last information can actually keep people away, if another show on the same date has classes that favor their type of car).

   Often a flyer is the only advertising a show gets and that seems short sighted. I generally use the free Old Cars Weekly calendar of events as my show planning guide. So if a show doesn't advertise itself in OCW, I probably won't get there, even if I have their flyer in my flyer pile.

Saturday, May 30, 2009 12:13:53 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

According to what I've been seeing on TV and reading in newspapers, we have a situation where the folks in Washington are pushing as hard as they can for the end of the gasoline-powered automobile.

Things are changing so fast and so much taxpayer money is being thrown at making such changes, that it may not be too long before gas stations are a thing of the past. (I used to think that my Exxon-Mobile stock was my nest egg, but now I worry that it might be worthless very soon.)

They will probably send all of us and our gas-guzzling jalopies to Radiator Springs (the fictional town that the Interstate bypassed in the CARS cartoon movie). When we get there, we wil park our '32 Fords and '55 Chevys and Hemi 'Cudas forever and just sit around talking about how things used to be in the "good old days" when gas stations existed.

The strange thing is that, if all this comes through, we may find the collector prices rising on some of the very old cars that people rarely exhibit at car shows these days. So hold on to that Milburn Electric and that Stanley Steamer. If Washington has its way, non-gas-powered cars may be the only collectible cars still around. (Of course, we'll have to figure how to make a mileage tax meter work properly in a Doble steamer.) 

Saturday, May 30, 2009 4:06:34 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Yesterday I got to be "knight rider." Well, actually, I got to go for a ride in a 1925 Willys-Knight. The Upper Mississippi Valley chapter of the Willys Overland Knight Registry (WOKR) had a three-day meet in our area and I caught up with the hobbyists at their host hotel.

What really amazed me was the GPS in the car. I wondered how the owner got it to operate in a 1925 car. He said he ran it off an RV battery he bought for $10. The GPS did a good job of showing him each road he came to and gave him an accurate read out on how fast he was going.

It was really pretty cool. 

Sunday, May 24, 2009 5:53:42 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

Speaking of brake light switches (which I was doing last time) my MG friends tell me that the screw-in type brake light switches that auto parts stores sell today have a habit of failing in old cars after just a few rides. It seems they can't handle the 3 amps the brake lights on old cars generate. The MG experts said the heavy-duty switches sold by Ron Francis Wiring of Chester, Pa., (www.ronfrancis.com) are the way to go. These switches can handle the load and last a long time.

Also, according to Larry Kennedy, of the Hudson Essex Terraplane Historical Society, if you use silicone brake fluid in your old car you may want to try a Harley-Davidson brake light switch, which is designed to work problem free with silicone brake systems.

Saturday, May 23, 2009 3:06:14 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]

A couple of weeks ago the signal lights and brake lights on my MG TF stopped working completely. By going to an MG newsgroup, we determined the problem was probably in the electrical relay under the hood. We removed it, cleaned it up and adjusted the contacts. We installed a new brake lamp switch from NAPA and a new flasher. The car tested out perfect -- with the headlights off.

Last night we took a pretty long ride in the car. The brake lights were still working and the rear signal lights worked fine. But the front turn signals didn't work properly with the headlights on. They were kind of "surging" a bit when we put the switch on, but not really blinking. However, with the headlights off, they worked properly again.

Most people might have expected a "short" in the wiring or blamed the problem on Lucas electricals. British car owners love to laugh about "Lucas: Prince of Darkness"

But Lucas had nothing to do with this problem. The solution was very simple. The parking light/directional light bulbs were in the light housing sockets upside down. With the headlights off, the wrong filament was doing the blinking and could handle the load. With the headlights on, it could not handle the load, so the blinking action was slow and weak.

As soon as we flipped the bulbs over, all of the lights worked fine. We also noticed that the green indicator light on the dashboard was working stronger, too.

So don't blame Lucas for all electrical problems. By and large, the old prince does a pretty good job.

Thursday, May 21, 2009 5:14:13 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [0]