Time Flies....

Pretty good weekend....

Started out working friday afternoon in the garage and house... I bought this place full of stuff.. And the people that owned it before were heavily involved in antique race cars...so its been a slow process of going through things deciding whats good and whats bad and then organizing all of the racing artifacts. Gave up working around dark...headed out, had some ice cream then started reading through a binder of articles I found in the house... but heavy eyelids seemed to get the best of me...

Saturday morning 7am, off to my parents to load up some Model-T parts that I've wanted to haul over to my garage. Decided to stop at a car show on the way, at the Hershey AACA museum. Walked over the the vendor area first and found a few books I didn't have (hard for me to pass up a new/old book).. Walked through the show, eventually meeting up with a friend and his dad with his '23 T touring that they recently finished...Seeing his car made it more exciting to be dealing with my own T parts again... even if it is just to move them around... We walked through the cars for a while.. nice eclectic mix....then I hit the road to get some work done.

Got to the house a bit before my girlfriend, Heidi who had to work... so I made some mini frozen taco's for us... boy are they ever good!.. Then we got to work.... She was chipping tiles off the bathroom walls while I was emptying out the bedroom... A few hours later I got a call that a friend was stopping by with a model-A industrial engine to see if I was interested in it.. apparently from a welder. This sat outside in New Jersey for years but suprizingly the crank turned over free as could be along with the distributor which means the cam was turning alright and likely all valves moving... So I bought it! Wasn't too pricey or anything, I just don't really need any more "stuff" right now(Can't believe I typed that)... Industrial engines like this apparently had a very heavy flywheel! Imagine a model-A flywheel without the clutch recess... haven't taken it off yet, but it must be 100lbs!

Back to work in the house till about 8pm then hit the road for Heidi's house. Steak and corn on the grill..Never made corn on the grill before... came out great! Relaxed a bit flipping through the new books, then hit the hay....

Sunday morning 5:30am, up with the sun and off to work for a few hours...finished cleaning out the master bedroom and its now ready for scrubbing, paint wood floor finishing, etc. Sorted through some photo albums and folders of photos... trying to organize all of the things around the place... or atleast get a grasp on whats there... Fooled with the new A motor a bit before I left...seems to be a B distributor and with the plugs out does look like the valves move! Back to Heidi's
around noon to get ready to head to Latimore for the Latimore Valley Fair.

My parents picked us up...Little Ceasers $5 "Hot and Ready" pizza on the way... you really can't beat this... its a decent sized pizza for $5... ready when you walk in the door... fed all 4 of us easily.

Arrived at Latimore for the final day of the Fair.. If you've never been to the Latimore fairgrounds... you really should make a point to stop. They restored a racetrack that last ran in '39 or '40 and also the "Eastern Museum of Motor Racing" www.emmr.org. The fair is a family event... from crafts to tractors to kids games to racecars... hey have something for everyone to enjoy.

We started out watching the cars run on the track for a while. Ran into some friends. Met a few news ones... even got a demonstration from an older guy about the workings of an Offy with a cut apart block he had laying in his truck..

After a flower buying frenzy by the girls... we went to see the museum. They recently put a huge addition on the building and it was now done enough to have some cars in it and they had it pretty filled up!

Strolled around for a while and eventually hit the road... Stopped at Cracker Barrell on the way back... won't go there again! Food was fair... service wasn't...

Stopped at McDonald's for hot fudge sundae's(best $1 you can spend) and back to relax...

All in all this was one of the most full weekends I've had in a long time... extremely productive.. saw some old cars... talked with good people...bought some cool stuff and ate some good food...

Hot Rod Magazine....

A friend of mine named Skip Bender gave me his collection of Hot Rod Magazines about 8 or 9 years ago...Almost all of them from the beginning till now... over the next year or so I collected all the missing copies (unfortunately reprints from 48). I built a bookshelf to hold these jewels in my bedroom.

There it was... a simple black wooden bookshelf with the history of all things "hot rod" right at my finger tips. There was that smell....oh that beautiful old magazine smell...all incased in red binders. My whole bedroom took on the old book smell as I studied each and every article I could. I read them cover to cover from the beginning... all the articles, all the adds...everything! The earliest ones seemed to keep my interest more then the later 50's and newer... Those old dual purpose roadsters really struck me...

You see, I had recently bought a model-A sport coupe... planning to make some sort of a "roadster".. I didn't really know what I was doing. I knew I wanted a flathead V8.. 3 speed... banjo rear... etc... but I didn't really know what was good and what was bad... I just had a dream... that may never have panned out...

Skip was a guy I had known through other friends related to bicycles... I didn't know he was an old hot rodder... I was new to the game... I randomly showed him a photo of my sport coupe... his reply "do you want some old magazines?"

Little did I know that this would inturn change my life...

Just as it had done 50-60 years earlier.... Hot Rod Magazine... made me a Hot Rodder....

I pushed the sport coupe aside... found a REAL roadster... a real '32 frame...etc

I haven't been the same since....

www.ZACHSUHR.com

Well would you look at that... www.zachsuhr.com ... why not?

I'm going to TRY to keep this thing going on a more regular basis... A journal of sorts based on whatever it is that I feel like writing... This may not be entirely old car related but obviously if you know me at all... you can guess that old vehicles will likely be the underlying theme.

I am physically working on a whole array of different things lately... some more interesting then others and many may well be a subject on this "blog".

Digging through some things in my house over the weekend I came across a scrapbook that a friend of mine put together over 50 years ago... Mostly filled with big cars and midgets... I discovered 2 pages with photos of roadster races at Williams Grove Speedway (www.williamsgrove.com) in July of 1949.. along with an envelope filled with negatives.
Now you have to understand, I have quite an affliction for roadster racing. Something about it just draws me in. I believe it may well be realted to the fact that these guys took a normal street car mixed it with parts off various other old cars and came up with something capable of impressive speeds without spending a lot of money. I think this comes back to me in the feeling that I could replicate one of these cars... I could have been one of those guys in the 1940's with an old roadster body and a wrecked later model Ford. Mixing and matching in the quest for speed. Though, maybe my feelings towards this are purely romantic...
I've never driven a race car, never gone full out around a dirt track with disregard to the world around. I have grown up around dirt track racing... It was a mainstay of my life for quite some time. From race cars being built in our basement to our whole family working at Silver Spring Speedway (www.silverspringspeedway.com). My dads stories of growing up with racing played heavily on my feelings towards this "sport". To this day I feel more comfortable on a left hand corner then right... its just how it is.... Maybe it really is in my blood? The closest I have come was a few laps in my roadster around Latimore Fairtgrounds during the Jalopy Showdown (www.jalopyshowdown.com).
Today is a different world then that of the post war years. Safety has changed the way the cars are built. Mixing this factor with the "buy and replace" attitude where the big money teams win all the races. You don't have the same courtesy in driving styles. Its not a guts for glory thinking mans game any more... spend money and stand on the gas inside a protective rollcage....

I'm not old enough to have actually lived in an era where you built your entire car in your garage with parts that you scrounged up in the junkyard. But I've tried to pay attention to those who were. I Read books, study photos...take in whatever I can... and to me... this was real racing.