#daniel strohl

From trucks to racing, the underdog’s V-8s and straight-sixes did a lot The common misperception about American Motors throughout the years held that the company just assembled cars from other carmakers’ parts, including other carmakers’ engines. While the company did, at times, purchase engines from companies as varied as Packard and Porsche, in fact its engineers developed several lines of…

The 2011 auction of Lee Roy Hartung’s collection included a number of items that attracted a good deal of attention, like the four matching sets of Tucker manufacturer license plates, a rare Edwards roadster and a bizarre Spohn-bodied 1950 Veritas. The sheer size of the collection, however, meant that plenty of curiosities went under the radar, including a unique 1937 Lincoln Zephyr modified with…

Ford Media image The designation’s so widespread, it’s almost become gospel among Mustang enthusiasts and the collector car world in general. You’ll see 1964-1/2 as a model year in the titles of Mustang books, in prior Hemmings articles (nostra culpa), even on Ford’s own website. Except, officially, Ford never designated any Mustang as a 1964-1/2 model year car. “All of the first production…

You don’t find such nice plaid seats in anything but a perfectly preserved 1976 Chevrolet Vega Kammback station wagon – Daniel Strohl @Hemmings

While it’s a tremendous and important job preserving noteworthy cars—the kinds of cars that get magazine covers and that twirl on the dais at car shows—it’s perhaps equally important from an anthropological view to preserve the everyday cars that, for the most part, get driven into the ground and rarely get restored due to lack of aftermarket support. This 1976 Chevrolet Vega Kammback station…

Compact cars: General Motors, with all the engineering and design facilities at its disposal, could never really master the concept. From the interesting but flawed Corvair, followed by the oil-burning and rust-attracting Vega to the recall plagued X-Cars, they all ended up failures — if not commercially((The Corvair actually sold very well in its first few years until the Ford Mustang and Ralph…

He got his start young to become one of hot rodding’s pioneers The quote’s familiar to anybody who’s hung around high-performance cars for more than a minute: “There’s no replacement for displacement.” It’s a genuinely American attitude toward extracting power out of a block of iron with some holes in it–just make the holes bigger, we got plenty of room. But, of course, it takes more than big…

Massive 124-cu.in. V-twin powers steel-bodied roadster A flathead Ford V-8 would’ve worked just fine. This was Tom Harris’s first hot rod, after all, and the sheer number of experts and parts for those engines would’ve made building and installing one as easy as tripping. Besides, his uncle used to race flathead-powered sprint cars all over the Midwest in the Thirties, so a flathead would’ve…

For any collector of strange old gas engines, the 1982 auction at Greenfield Village was not to be missed. Ed Rowland, a collector of strange old gas engines, missed it. But nearly 40 years later, he’s tracked down both of the experimental Ford engines he wanted to buy at that sale, one of them a prototype opposed-piston engine and an even stranger one that defies brief description. “I missed…