Drive your Studebaker

What year fins?

Bo

64dayt> What year fins?

I think the front of the fins changed slightly in 59? I think? All

nate

John Poulos wrote:

N8 Bait!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Normally it would be but I'm set on a truck now... looking at the piles of topsoil/mulch I have to move... anyone want some? Just bring a pickup or trailer, I'll load! Previous owners of this place were nuts...

nate

How about fins on a truck?

Jeff DeWitt

Funny you should say that. My grandad has this old rusty '53 2R pickup at the shop, and I stuck a set of '60 fins on the bed sides and it actually didn't look all that bad!

Matthew Burnette

Bring a truck load over every weekend, I'll unload.

Nate Nagel wrote:

But he needs your truck! Shoot, I'll need about 30 yards this year too! Nate, swing by with JP's truck and drop it off!

Jim

If you seriously want some, I can start in a couple weeks (my parents are coming to visit later in the month) if I can borrow your truck. otherwise as soon as I find one of my own I will be on it.

Be careful what you wish for, there's more than you're probably bargaining for. I estimate at least a full pickup load just to move the stuff I've already cleared off the asphalt - and that's only from the back of the house to the street, I've probably got another 40' of driveway to go.

For those who are confused as to what I'm talking about, the previous owners of this house were total enviro-nuts; they only had one car (an ancient Honda Civic) and did not use the driveway. The guy's hobby, apparently, was composting and making topsoil... the entire driveway was covered about 6" deep in decomposing/decomposed wood chips. Makes great soil; not so good for working on cars. He'd been doing this so long that when he installed an above ground cistern to catch the rainwater from the gutters, he'd either forgotten or didn't care where the edge of the driveway was; when I started clearing it off I found that the cistern was hanging a good two feet into the driveway! (it is still a narrow driveway, it was near impossible before, so leaving it "as was" was not an option.)

I understand why he did it; his big thing was controlling runoff and the resultant pollution of a nearby stream. I'll keep the cisterns, it's a good idea and handy for watering plants. However, I'm not about to sacrifice my driveway... surprisingly enough, the asphalt below is in mostly good shape, I think with a couple coats of sealer it should be good for quite a few more years.

nate

John Poulos wrote:

Send Lee by next time he makes a run this way, I'll load up SuperDually and whatever he's towing, too!

nate

"I'll keep the cisterns, it's a good idea and handy for watering plants. However, I'm not about to sacrifice my driveway..."

Just to push the point that there's nothing you can't argue about on the NG, and that there's nothing so trivial that it is not part of automotive history:

I keep several hundred gallons of rainwater for gardening. Keep a close eye on those cisterns. We use a wired-on cover of fine window screen and also tablets of soluble (they tell me it's "organic") insecticide to keep the water surface from becoming a mosquito breeding ground. Standing water is so closely linked to mosquito-borne diseases and typhoid that "draining swamps" was still a newspaper-endorsed reason for random highway-building less than

Farmers and governments used to keep standing water on purpose, for watering horses. Full roadside ditches were common, as were deliberately-dug swails to keep water handy. There were typhoid outbreaks in 1912 and 1914 (one of them killed Wilbur Wright) and there followed a nationwide campaign to drain them all. Steam cars were nearly total-loss systems: they required frequent [free] replenishing of their boilers. The loss of access to free water was the end of the steam automobile.

Right now, I could get a tax break for putting in a retention pond (not counting the one I have anyway as the frost thaws). A neighboring county will build one for you, if you're willing to attach a fire-engine standpipe. If you file a development plan to drain a wetland, you have to restore an equal acreage of wetland somewhere nearby. All to the good, from our current viewpoint, but I reckon we're about 10 malaria diagnoses, or one good AIDS-mosquito scare, from pumping them all dry again. Public Health is very faddish.

And FWIW, if closed-circuit condenser tech ever makes a comeback, and a steam turbine car emerges, it would be a TurboDyne, therefore, by Worthington derivation, a Studebaker. Ha! Not OT!