The taxes in California are going UP, or the state is going down. There is no other way. Simple economics. California citizens voted themselves a free ride. Payback time! Sorry, my California friends. It is not all about vehicle taxes. Look farther ahead. You can't have it both ways. Choose wisely. Join the rest of the states and be responsible for education, public works, the things that keep you alive and viable in the future. Future? Yeah - what a concept, eh? Get into it! And if you don't get it, then don't come here when everything you voted for comes to a crashing failure.
Ah! I see no abuse. For the most part, everyone's been pretty cool. That's a good thing and typical of the ACVW community. Besides, I can probably kick the ass of anyone here half my age. Now don't go ballistic, folks! Remember the old adage: "Never take on an old fart! If you win, there's no honor. If you lose, youi will never outlive it!" :)
Seriously, put that behind us. We are all really in the same space here. No problems. My comment was coming from the fact that my '72 is pristine and if someone bought it for less than they would put into a friggin rusted wreck, they would be ahead.
The following is a post by John Henry yesterday on the Common Gear list. It seems well timed and completely appropriate the current thread.
Enjoy.
========================================== Ok, I hope I'm not breaking any laws here, but I really wanted to post this article. I was just deleting files from my hard disk in anticipation of a computer migtration and I came across a .zip of some Peter Egan articles. Peter writes for Road and Track and is one of my all time favorite wirters. I have a xerox of on of his from 10+ years ago called "Salt cars" about someone from looking for a winter beater to drive (he lives in Wisconsin). This is not that article, but I hit it doing a web search some years ago. And it is a great article, I think we'll all relate. For those of us who live in the "salty" areas in particular. Print it, sit down in a comfy chair tonight with your favorite beverage, you'll really enjoy it. Substitute your own VW for the 356 he speaks of, and you'll get it.
I like to write, and Egan is huge influence of mine. His style (an of course his subject matter) is something I can really relate to. I don't subscribe to R&T but I allow myself to buy one just about every business trip I take to pass the time. I always anticipate his articles in his column "Side glances".
Enjoy...
John H.
Road salt and the 50-mission car
BY PETER EGAN
It finally got to be too much. My 1963 Cadillac, which had been dripping red transmission fluid all last summer, suddenly began leaving an unbroken trail of fluid about the width of a typewriter ribbon (surely you remember those) everywhere.
The old original seals, after 34 years, had finally given up whatever sort of ghost seals can be said to have. Time to act.
My neighbor, Chris, pointed out that, for the cost of a transmission rebuild, I could continue to add cheap, bulk-quality transmission fluid for the rest of my life and still come out about $10 ahead. He's right, but there's something unseemly about a car that hemorrhages fluids on your garage floor. Also, your old Cadillac becomes useless as a getaway car for bank robberies, alimony evasions, weekend trysts, etc., because it's so easy to track:
"We found him, chief; followed the trail of Dextron II across Nebraska, and we got him and a woman named Dixie cornered at the Star-Lite motel."
Something had to be done, so I took the car to a Madison transmission shop. I suppose I could have tried fixing it myself, but I have a lifelong aversion to working on automatic transmissions. This is partly because I don't understand how they work, except in theory, and partly because their internals always look to me like the underside of a Maytag washer.
Anyway, some things are best left to specialists, and I find that pleading ignorance on any number of subjects--ironing shirts, programming VCRs, measuring curtains, etc.--gives you more time to read.
So I drove the Cadillac to the transmission shop during a break in the winter weather when the roads were clear and relatively free of salt. It was my fondest hope to get the Caddy back to my own heated garage, clean and dry.
But this was not to be. The transmission shop called during a minor blizzard to say the car was done and they couldn't store it overnight, seeing how it was taking up so much space as to cause oxygen starvation in the work force. So Barb drove me into the city to pick up the car.
On the way into town, I was much encouraged. The roads were snow-packed, frozen and windswept, and the salt trucks had not yet appeared. Perhaps I could speed home and have the car put away before even a single crystal of salt had a chance to defile the Caddy's underside, which was almost miraculously free of rust. The elderly woman who owned it, I think, did not like to drive in the snow.
Those who have not lived with road salt cannot imagine the damage it does. A car whose wheel arches and frame members are packed with salty slush dissolves before your eyes like a slow-motion Alka-Seltzer in a glass of water. You can stand in your garage and almost hear it happening.
So of course I paid my bill at the transmission shop and rumbled onto the highway for the 25-mile drive home just in time to watch a Dane County Highway truck roar past in an explosion of flashing yellow lights, clanking tire chains and salt. Too late. They were everywhere, these trucks, like microbes in the bloodstream.
Pulling out every navigation trick I knew, I took shortcuts, long cuts, crosscuts, back roads and frontage roads while crossing town, trying to stay out of the dreaded salt. If I could have done a split-S or an Immelmann, I would have done those too, but a Cadillac is not fully aerobatic.
When I got to Highway 51, it was littered with salt chunks the size of fake gems, and the hard-packed snow was already turning to a thick, saline mush. Forget Highway 51. I backtracked through the city and zigzagged my way to Highway 14.
Good news. Hard, frozen and clean. I pulled out onto the highway and drove nearly a mile before a salt truck swooped down an entrance ramp ahead of me and began to fling sand and salt from its rotary spreader.
I peeled off at the first opportunity, took back roads to the small town of Stoughton, ran the car through an automatic car wash and then drove the last six miles home on another elaborate set of unsalted, country roads.
When I finally pulled into my garage, I felt slightly exhausted, like one of those science fiction movie heroes who escape from a city where aliens are taking over. I'd driven almost 55 miles to make what was normally a
25-mile trip. But my car was relatively clean and uncontaminated.
That afternoon, of course, I drove R&T's long-term Toyota RAV4 into Madison to run some errands and didn't think a thing of it. When the RAV turned completely white with streaks of salt, I'd get it washed. Maybe later in the week. No sweat.
And Barb had driven me to the transmission shop in our 1995 Grand Cherokee and had then gone on to work over those same salt-sloppy roads without even flinching.
Funny business.
Compared with the Caddy, the RAV4 and the Grand Cherokee are relatively expensive vehicles. We are leasing the Grand Cherokee, and each monthly payment costs more than the transmission rebuild did on the Cadillac. If we'd bought the Jeep or the RAV4 outright, the sales tax alone would have been more than I originally paid for the Cadillac.
So: Logic would tell us (if we had any sense) to park the Jeep in a nice warm garage and drive that cheap old Cadillac through the salt every day until it melts into rusted nothingness. We could probably get another seven or eight years of good service out of the Caddy before it became too unsafe--or simply ugly and embarrassing--to drive. Compared with the Cherokee, which has already depreciated more than the Cadillac is worth, our transportation would be almost free.
But no, the Cadillac stays indoors, protected from harm, while the Cherokee runs around bathed in salt. Are we crazy? How do we decide these things?
Parked next to the Cadillac in my workshop is my recently acquired 1963 Porsche 356B, currently undergoing a transmission and engine rebuild. When that car goes back together, it will never, ever again be driven on a salt-strewn winter road. Not while I own it, anyway.
And yet the Porsche is also "worth" less than the Jeep (about half, by current market prices) or the RAV4. Furthermore, old Porsches work pretty well in the snow. You freeze to death, yes, but you have traction.
As if to echo that belief, Dr. Al George, an automotive aerodynamicist with whom we recently had dinner, told me he has two Porsche 356s. One, he said was his "good" car, a keeper to be driven only in the summer.
The other, slightly rougher, he bought to be his winter car, simply because he loves driving 356s in the snow and didn't see any reason to deprive himself of this pleasure just because the 356 is now regarded as a collectible car. He, too, pointed out that an old "beater" 356 is still cheaper than a 4wd Subaru wagon. So why not drive one in the winter?
"Good point," I affirmed. Then, after a short, respectful pause, I said, "So. Are you actually driving your second 356 in the snow and salt?"
He sadly shook his head, "No."
"Why not?" I inquired.
"Well, I finally concluded that, while 356s aren't exactly rare, there still aren't that many good ones left in the world," he said, "so it doesn't make much sense to ruin the few we have."
After Al left, I went out to my garage and sat down for a gaze at the newly washed Cadillac and my 356, which was sitting wheel-less on its jackstands. Two pampered old cars from 1963, sitting warm and snug in a workshop; frosted windows, snowdrifts on the roof and smoke from the chimney. The wind was whipping the trees around outside, but time was almost standing still in the garage, for the cars, at least.
I was feeling pretty good, so I poured myself a scotch, put the prelude to Rienzi on the garage boombox and leaned back in the shop rocker for a while. Dr. George's words had left a pleasant glow in my mind and I wanted to hang on to them.
The whole thing was a nice poke in the eye of the investment mentality that ran rampant in the car world less than a decade ago, not to mention the hard economic rules of cold materialism. There is in our love of well-crafted, half-useless, money-losing things a comforting denial of that mechanistic universe so beloved of modern behaviorists. It's hard to tell if we like these old cars because they have soul, or because they help us to have one.
Behind all this philosophizing, however, is the more obvious fact that cars simply don't rust out as easily, quickly and severely as they used to. We don't mind the Cherokee or the RAV4 being out in the salt because their undersides are largely sealed, undercoated, galvanized or plasticized. They will probably live a long time.
But you only have to look at the underside of the 356 or the Cadillac to see how vulnerable it was--and still is--to the elements. In 1963 the factory attitude toward rust protection was about the same as it was toward safety: "There's your nice new car. Good luck, pal. Don't hit anything and stay out of the salt. Have fun."
So, in part, we are protective of these old cars because they are genuine survivors of the road wars. Like the Memphis Belle and her crew, they've done their 25 missions--or 50 missions--and made it through. They radiate what Michael Herr once called that magic blue light of invulnerability.
But for every rust-free, undamaged 356 or old Cadillac sitting complete and happy in a warm, dry garage, there are 20 or 30 rusted, crumpled wrecks that didn't make it, shot down in flames or sunken into the good rich earth. The long road back to 1963 is littered with them.
So we honor the dead, but we really cherish our survivors, reflecting on their good fortune to be here at all. And maybe ours too.
The car I drove in Driver's Ed was a 74 Ford LTD POS with seatbelt interlocks. We owned a Corvair, which I had driven some prior to the Driver's Ed car. I hated that freakin Ford. The Corvair had Powerslide tranny with R-N-D-L only on the dash, and the old swing-axle rear, but it handled like a champ compaired to the Ford POS. Come to think of it, I drove a '73 full-sized Chevy Impala station wagon that handled better than that. But to me, anything after about 1934 in Ford doesn't interest me at all. A Model T, (especially the 26-27 ones) or a Model A (28-31) are interesting. I thought the 50's Ford's were downright U-gly. Of course my favorite 50's car has a 1200 cc air-cooled engine !
What's scary is I know where all of those roads are in Dane County. 14 winds its way up to Madison from Chicago, it runs 4 blocks from my house and also up to Sturgis SD, for those who didn't know.
51 winds down thru the middle of Illinois on its way to Mississippi. Part of it in Illinois has been converted to I-39 and the old roadway recommissioned as Illinois 251.
My dad had an old 77 Toyota that didn't make it. A deer ran into it and the shop that rebuilt it did a poor job on the paint, so the rust just accelerated after that.
Pure ecomonics makes '70's VW viable.Go to a dealer and see what 10Gs gets you.The same amount plus some time/sweat yields a pretty decent Beetle,or Bus,(Ghia,Thing ect.)To a VW nut thats good.And in five years,a clean d/d bug will still be wanted by someone willing to continue its guardianship.Steve
Max,the hardest part of owning a good,solid ACVW is talking the PO out of it.Restoring a rustbucket right is sometimes the only way to go.A plan B to be sure,But the end results are still one more on the road,makeing someone happy.Steve
A friend of mine is in fact an older guy--in his mid 70s--and I drove down in the vert last summer to pay him a visit. He loved the bug, and I took him for a ride, and we found $1.30 gas. Among other things, he's gotten into digital photography, and he showed me a shot of himself and a buddy of his in the guy's newly restored Model A.
So that got me on the same line of thinking as yours, John. When I was around 12 a neighbor showed up with a Model A. This was in the
60s, and even the post WWII cars that people still drove around weren't as radically different as the A, which was 30 years old at the time.
Now my younger son also happened to be 12 that summer, and to him and his generation the 30 y.o. Beetle is an Old Car. From another era of tech and styling, just like the Model A to me at his age. I say this because it's kids who determine what's old or not.
To us connoisseurs--or at least some of us--the New Beetle or even a 1600 may not be as desirable or as rare as a split. But I think they will be, because kids really do want to buy and drive them, and we ought to save the cars for them.
Thanks for all the replies. Some good points were made! My taste is for the lines of the earlier Bugs. My '72 and '58 stand side by side in the drive. I swear someone stayed up nights for years thinking of ways to screw up the classic VW lines - and they did it. I would sell the '72 nobody would pay a decent price for it. Seems all the would-be VW buyers think all Bugs should be unrealistically cheap. How much money does a person have in a rust-rat after it's finally fully restored? Far more than I'm asking for a pristine vehicle. So it sits in the drive, wrapped up like a boat for the winter. (ever seen that done?) I doubt I'll ever, ever drive it again. Maybe it will join my Big Twuck - stored in a barn and become a real find for someone in fifty years.
What to consider old then? I'm -73 and I have an old -73 car. To me that is an old car. It has no semiconductors (that I know of), the technology is more or less mechanical. _To_me_ that is still 2nd era car.=20
Considering an old Beetle (as an ACVW hobbyis). I would say that early -66 or older Beetles are old. Basically I draw the line with the type of headlights. -67 was the first year with the vertical head = lights, right?
Considering all cars (ricers, etc.). Anything over 15 years is old and=20 propably ready to either rust off or to drive to the scrap yard. Yes, they salt the roads here during winter time.
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