1956 DeSoto: Artistry In Motion.

When we were growing up in the mid 1960's, my parents struggled at times, especially my dad to make sure we had a roof over our heads, and a decent place to sleep. He felt like that he did not succeed, but in my eyes, my dad succeeded wonderfully. At the time, our family car was a 1950 Chrysler Windsor 4 door sedan, (restored example pic immediately above, cannot enlarge this image) a nondescript, slightly rundown outdated automobile, but it met our needs. He basically would spend Saturday mornings, when he was not working, doing his own repair work on the thing, to keep it safe for us, and also so it would pass the then two times a year Pennsylvania State inspection. It would drive dad nuts trying to get his car to pass, but he would always figure out a way to get it to pass every 6 months back then. My dad, and his brothers, (my uncles) would help each other out, sharing tires, if they drove similar makes to get their cars to pass inspection, as money was tight for everyone on my dad's side of the family.

I don't know how he managed to pull the next trick he did in the summer of 1965, when he showed us this beautiful 1956 DeSoto that was for sale at a Texaco gas station. He showed it to mom, and us kid, and as soon as we saw it, we fell in love with it, as to us, it was like stepping up to a Rolls Royce, from a model T. The old '50 Chrysler was not exactly like riding in the lap of luxury. More like a rolling shanty shack than a car. Imagine our delight, when my dad figured out one of his "creative financing" schemes, to bring the car home. The car was really luxurious. It had full power. Brakes, steering, electric windows, push- button drive, and a power seat. It also had a two speaker, (front and rear) AM radio. My mom liked the push button drive, and the top central mounted clock on the dashboard. We kids like playing with the electric windows. I think once we made my dad mad at us, as we ran his battery down, playing with the windows. Back in the 1950's when a car was equipped with electric windows, the curcuit that they were wired on was always "hot". You did not need to have the car running to work the windows. The logic behind this paid off several times when in the summer, when my dad was sleeping, after working 2nd shift at the RCA plant in Lancaster, he would get home in the car and leave the windows open in the thing, so it would not be so hot to get in, when he went back to work that afternoon. A couple of times, though,while he was sleeping, thunderstorms came up fast, and my mom, or one of us was able rush out, and shut the windows without needing to get the key and turn on the ignition to accessories setting to do so.

This car was such a step up for us. No matter how you looked at it, there were no bad angles in which to view it. Mom even tried to learn to get her driver's licence in that thing, it was that easy for her to drive. But things did not work out, and she did not try to get it after while for reasons I can't say here. It was like riding in the lap of luxury, when we rode in the thing. It was an aqua and white Fireflite "Sportsman" 4 door hardtop. That means when you put all 4 windows down, there was no center post between the front and rear doors, and the side of the window areas was wide open. quite beautiful to look at, and a cool drive on the hottest summer days, before automotive air conditioning became commonplace. It was available back then in this car, originally, but it did not have it as it was terribly expensive, and not very efficient. With the 4 windows all down, and the fresh air intake open on the cowl, in front of the windshield, while moving, the air came out at our feet, under the dash, inthe car, and this kept us plenty cool enough...as long as the car was moving at least at 20 MPH.

My dad, in general, frowned upon taking pictures of just things, when we were kids. But he was proud of this car, and we begged him,at least, me, anyway to take some pictures of it. And he obliged. But only if there were people in the pictures. That was his rule. So, on Easter Sunday of 1966, we took a series of pictures of us with the car. The image at the top of this post is of my dad in front of the car. The one other image of part of the car, by itself was an image of my sister standing in the street beside the car. I just blew up and cropped her out , as to show the side of the car somewhat more clearly. This is this image right below this text.

The image below, here, is us three kids that same day, in front of the car, after getting back from church. I'm the boy in the middle. I'm 8 years old, here.
My love affair for anything 1956 DeSoto has never faded. As time has gone by, it has gotten actually stronger. In 1976, Jo-Han models re-issued their original dealer plastic 1/25 scale promotional model of a 4 door sedan version of this car, and I was finally able to get a model of it, and do it up some what like my dad's car, but these do not have interiors with them. In my eyes, though, it was better than nothing.

In and around 2002, the Danbury Mint anounced that it was going to release a black and gold Adventurer hardtop in die cast 1/24 scale. Needless to say, I was thrilled that anyone would do such a high quality super detailed model of any 1956 DeSoto. So as soon as it bacame available, I bought it. It is a beautiful model, but what I really wanted was a Fireflite hardtop.
In around 2005, they released a limited edition Fireflite Sportsman 2 door hardtop in the plum and lavender color you see on this model in these images. It was limited to a 5000 model run, then it was discontinued. Money was a little tight for my wife and me at the time, and I missed it, because when I finally got the money together, Danbury had sold out of the thing.
Finally, this past December of 2011, I was able to snag one of these on the second market from an internet forum friend for the original 2005 issue price. This model really captures the true essence of the timeless beauty of this automobile. Danbury really did their homework on this model, as everything on this model is perfect as I remember it. Even though this model is of a 2 door coupe. My dad's car was a 4 door hardtop. Whether it is a 2 door hardtop, like this model, or a 4 door hardtop, like my dad's car was, both models were referred to as "Sportsman" models, as this was DeSoto's publicity term for the pillarless "hardtop" design. In my eyes, though, all 1956 DeSoto's were and are beautiful pieces of rolling art. And, yeah, it's got a Hemi!!
As I said, there are no bad viewing angles of this car!
And now, Danbury Mint, you can make me ecstatic. Please do this car in aqua and white as a tribute to my 77 year old dad.
Jim.

My 1978 Monte Carlo ; A Retrospective.

Here is a car that I owned for almost a whole generation. It had everything. Great looks, good handling as well as performance. I owned this car from August 26, 1988 until this past Friday, December 23, 2011. I had to basically get rid of it as we really did not have anymore outdoor storage space for it, as my kids are getting their driver's licenses,and I need more room for their cars. I basically was forced to sell it for scrap, even though I did not want to, as it has been sitting outside for so long, it was beginning to return to the Earth from which it came. When I bought it, it had 64,000 miles on it. When the 305-2 BBL carburater V-8 engine blew in the beginning of 1998, it had 166,000 miles on it. That's 102,000 miles I put on the thing in about the 9-1/2 years I drove it. It was the most reliable car I drove up to that point.

In 1989, we used this car on our honeymoon up to Mystic, Connecticut, about a 1200 mile round trip. The car performed flawlessly.

As the car would age, I did have things repaired on it as they wore out, but the car basically kept on "plugging" away! In 1990, I had new rocker panels, inner and outer welded into the car. In 1993, the engine got a new timing chain and gears. Around 1996 or 1997, I fabricated new quarter panel bottom ends , in between the rear wheel openings and back bumper. By the end of 1997, I noticed the rear bumper was begining to droop on the thing. Here, the rear frame rails were all but totally rotted away, from behind the rear axle mounts, to the back bumper. The body mounts were bad, too. So my mechanic sent the car to a welding shop, and they fabricated new rear frame rails, new rear body mounts, as well as new mounts for the gas tank. This made the understructure of the car good as new, and kept me from scrapping the car right then and there.

Then one month after I had the car inspected and back on the road, on the first day of work of the new year, 1998, the camshaft let go in the thing, basically destroying the engine. After all the work I put in the thing, I was heartbroken. Needless to say, I had to find a replacement car for it quick, and I found a maroon 1984 LTD Crown Victoria electronic fuel injected sedan. You, know the kind of car that the police used as interceptors. That's another story, though.
Here is one of the first good pictures I took of the car in 1990, after I replaced the vinyl mylar chrome coated bumper strips.

These two pictures were taken at the Lancaster, PA Airport, also in 1990.
This picture here, with my wife in the car was taken in 1992, on our newly purchased home lot, before we built on it. We were there that day to see how far the well drillers got in drilling our well. Three years after our place was built, we had our first child. I needed a car with more doors, so I bought, and fixed up a 1980 Chevy Malibu Classic station wagon, and I left the Monte sit for two years. After those two years the rear frame went bad on this wagon to the point where it could not be repaired, because the frame on it had rotted out all the way back to the rear doors, threatening the stability of the whole rear axle assembly. The only way to save that car would have been to get a whole new frame for it, and that would have cost more to do than the car was worth, so it was scrapped in the end of '97. That is why I tried to revive the Monte Carlo. But a month later, the engine destroyed itself.

After the engine let go in 1998, I was bound and determined to keep this car, and replace the engine in the thing, when I got the money to do so. I stored the car , outdoors on our property in the meantime.

In 2002, we added an addition to our house so that my son could have his own room. Because of all the construction that was going on, I needed to move the car off property for safe storage. My mother in law offered free garage space at her farmette that she was still living at, even though all my brother in laws married, and had moved out.

Running on 5 cylinders, bless its "heart", the car ran good enough, albeit horribly the 5 mile drive to her place, under its own power. It put out a vapor "contrail" like a jet plane does like you would not have believe. It got there. That was the last time I drove it. I was able to keep it at her place until 2009, when she had to auction off her place, and all her stuff, because she had to move to an assisted living community, as she was getting well into her mid seventies, and having some memory problems. So I had to have the car "rollbacked" back here to my place.
This is where it spent the remainder of it's days, rusting away, and sinking into the earth. I was never able to get it repaired. The money, when I got some extra, always had to go somewhere else. Kids braces, our newer cars needed repair, property maintenance repairs, etc. Sadly for me I was never able to ressurect this car.
In the above picture, which I took last year, 2010, you can see that I removed the header panel ornament, and all the car's emblems to keep them from getting stolen. I also removed the hubcaps, (wheelcovers). A couple of years before that , I removed the vinyl top, and it's surrounding trim pieces because the vinyl on the roof had deteriorated to the point where all it was doing was trapping water between the vinyl and the metal roof, making it rust faster than the rest of the car. So to keep it from totally rotting through, I removed it, and put the trim pieces in the car's trunk.
Back to 1991. Around this time, I found an original issue MPC promotional model of the car already painted up in the "Camel Metallic" brown that my car was painted. So I tore this model apart, and detail painted it up to make the exterior look exactly like my car. Because I still had the car in great shape, the real one, that is, I was able to get the exterior of this thing to looking really close to the way my actual car looked. The only difference is this scale model came with the optional enclosed full wheelcovers, where my actual car has the " Open finned" wheelcovers to simulate that this is an alloy wheel, but it was actually just a hubcap over a regular stamped steel 14" wheel.
The MPC models did not come with hood ornaments, so I made one out of pieces of scrap chrome plated plastic "flash", shaped as needed with an X-acto knife, touched up the edges with silver paint, and glued it onto the header panel of the model.
The whitewall stripes were painted on the tires, which I believe I got from another model car kit, because the original MPC blackwall tires that came with it were to scale much too tall, and fat.

The red taillight lenses were removed from the model, as well, and I hand painted the silver frames, as well as the white backup lights on them, then after the rest of the body was done, I re-installed them back on the model. Sidemarker lights were also painted on by hand, both the amber on the front chrome headlight/parking/sidemarker assembly pieces, and the red back quarter panel markers, as well.
The vinyl top mouldings were made from some very narrow cut pieces of lightweight posterboard strips, then glued in the appropriate places for the Landau top, then all the area, including the moulding was painted with the same flat beige paint that I used on the interior as well. The door side impact mouldings were made in the same way. The moulding that separates the vinyl area from the painted area that runs over the top of the roof was painted silver as on the actual car.
The wide lower body bright mouldings were simulated using aluminum tape cut to fit, on the model.
The outside mirrors came from a 1980 MPC "Class Action" 1980 Monte Carlo kit. Could not find a paint to match the metallic brown exactly, so I just used a gloss brown paint on them.
The body was clear coated, and buffed before I applied any trim, or trim paint.
Some overhead shots of this reworked MPC promo.
Even though this does not have near the in depth technical detail as the recently released Trumpeter kit, it is still possible to detail out these MPC promo's very nicely.
Here, you can see the detail silver paint work I did to the back end of this model to make it more realistic looking.
Dashboard and steering wheel shot. Although you cannot see it in any of these images, my car had a bench seat in it whereas this model has bucket seats with a center console, and automatic floor shifter. My actual car had a very nice beige cloth interior in it. When I got rid of the car, the seats were STILL in supple, and PERFECT shape, I might add.

In my eyes, the styling of the third generation Monte Carlo was the best it ever got, even though the original factory build quality of the body, and substructures of the car were crappy. I still wanted a scale model to remember it by, and I have it in this little 1/25 scale model!

Jim.

Some bikes that I rebuilt/restored recently, part II

Here is actually the first bike that I rebuilt/restored, or more correctly, customized, as well as rebuilt in the last year. I did this one before I did the blue one. It is "restomized"(custom restoration), if you will. This is a bike that started out it's life in 1961 as a Schwinn Mark IV Jaguar 3 speed. It is an original Radiant Green bike, that I had to do a total repaint on the frame, as the original green paint was too badly scratched to save, so I had to entirely strip all the original paint off the frame, and redo it with another spray can match job that I found that matches the Radiant green candy metallic paint perfectly on the tank and chainguard, which basically, I was able to save, and just touch up. I finished, basically doing this bike in July of 2010. I was not able to get, and restore a nicer seat for the thing until December of that year. That is why some pictures of the bike show it with a darker, much more weathered seat than the other pictures do. The brighter green 1962 two rivet seat is the one that I have on the bike, now.

The main story about this bike is that I wanted a Mark IV Jaguar that has 5 speed derailleur gearing, but Schwinn never built such a bike from the factory back in the day. So, using the drivetrain parts from a 1965 Schwinn Collegiate 5 speed, I was able to figure out how to lace up the 5 speed axle hub to the fatter middleweight wheel rims, and put a derailleur with shifter on the bike to make it work. It took alot of tweaking and know how to make this kind of gearing to work on a bike like this. Usually, these bikes either came as coaster brake bikes, or as 3 speed models. No 5 speed option was offered on this model.

The premise was to make the bicycle look like that Schwinn DID build it, complete with the special decal 5 speed designation decal graphics that I custom made for the bike. As you saw on one of my first posts that I did, Schwinn did make a 5 speed middleweight bike in 1961-1962, and you saw that in that post, that I restored one of these in 2003. That bike , of course is the limited run 5 speed Schwinn Corvette. I think I did that post in September of 2009. The only difference in between the Corvette, and the Jaguar, was the big frame tank, and the added rear rack, which makes this bike a very beautiful fully dressed bike, to use a touring motorcycle term, if you will. The added derailleur gearing makes this heavy bike a little more responsive on the pedals, as the low gear is actually lower than the three speed hub's low gear is, making it easier to pedal up hill on this bike. Because of the tank, the shifter that is on the top bar of the 5 speed Corvette had to be replaced with a shifter that mounts on the handlebar stem, so that it is out of the way of the tank. This lets the fully enclosed shifter cable free to run down the down tube, over the crank housing, and back to the derailleur, without anything getting in the way on its placing there, on the bottom of the frame. This is the only custom bike that I will probably ever build, as this is the only bike I wanted from Schwinn, that they never built in this configuration. Pretty much everything else about this bike is 100% factory, and period correct as to how Schwinn built this bike in 1961. New for 1960 and 1961 was the new Delta made "Roadlighter" ball headlight, which replaced the Italian made "CEV"headlights of 1959, and prior to that. So the headlightI have on this bike is correct for this era, also, according to the Schwinn literature of the day. Here are the images, of this "restomized" bike. The top picture is an image my daughter took of me with this bike back on May 28th of this year,(2011).

Jim.

Some bikes that I rebuilt/restored recently

It has been a while since I did any kind of posts pertaining to my old bike hobby in which I indulge so much time in. In the last two years, I have rebuilt one bike, and have rebuilt/ customized/ repainted another one. They are both the same model Schwinn bicycle, but two different years.

I just finished basically restoring a Radiant Blue Schwinn 1959 Mark IV Jaguar, back to factory specifications. This is a factory equipped Sturmy-Archer 3 speed internal gearing hub, with thumb shifter bike with hand brakes. It entailed a partial repaint of the frame, and a total stripping, and repainting of the horn tank, and chainguard. The bike was totally ripped down. All the parts were totally cleaned one part at a time, and the bad parts were replaced as needed with period correct parts that I got over friends on old bike forums, eBay, and bicycle swap meets. It involved getting replacement decals for the tank and chainguard, as well as pinstriping for the tank. Banging dents out of the original stainless steel fenders is always fun,(not!) It also involved using a 1958 parts bike to get some of the sorely needed parts that are not being reproduced, and I had to find nice original parts for, such as these correct bolt through bow pedals. Unique to 1959 are these Italian made "CEV" brand headlights. These are the most difficult items to find in any condition, let alone in this nice of shape, without paying through the nose for it. I found this one for five bucks in a headlight grab box bin at a bicycle swap meet last year in Trexlertown. Correct style rear reflector is a reproduction piece that Schwinn, themselves reissued in 2003. I was able to find an automotive touch up spray can paint that was an absolute match for this candy blue metallic paint.You cannot tell the difference where the new paint stops on the frame, and where the original paint starts, it blends in that nice! This is a very beautiful, fully functional "new" 1959 bike again! It has all new cables, with aftermarket period correct blue and white cable wrap, as well as correct reproduction Schwinn Westwind whitewall tires, like these bikes were equipped with when new.

Here are images of the blue 1959 bike.

Jim.