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In October my wife Mary and I along with our friends Don and Jane Palmer from Connecticut went on a trip on Route 66. We left on October 5 with our 1965 Plymouth Barracuda and the Palmers 1965 Dodge Dart both with slant six automatics. We saw a lot of great sites like the Grand Canyon, Gateway Arch, and the Petrified Forest. It took 15 days to get to Santa Monica, California from Battle Creek Michigan. We then drove up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco and back to Michigan on I-80. The Palmers drove back across the south and up the east coast to Connecticut. It was 3023 miles from Battle Creek MI to Santa Monica CA and 5889 miles for the entire trip. We went through 14 states, used 280 gallons of gas and averaged 21 mpg driving 65-70 mph with the air on quite often in the south. JohnS

Outside temperature here today is -5 F . Indoors our wood stove is helping to keep things toasty warm.

Garlic is my opinion as important as salt is to your diet......it is good for the blood..it is good to keep mosquitoes from biting...I have a few family members and friends that say they hate garlic and will not eat anything prepared with it...bull-hockey..they go for second and third helpings 95% of the time...what are these little tasty chunks they ask as they gorge on garlic shrimp...roughly it is mind over matter and I do not mind telling them they do not matter...lol

full pressured with pump....the filtration is full on some larger models, and by pass on all others. A service manual has the full operational blurb and pictorial on the system...being new to these cars increase you learning curve greatly by purchasing a book...be the best tool in your tool box when time to make repairs or testing of systems.

been there..done that also....Lowenbrau tent is absolutely H U G E..the main thing that brings back the memories of the Oktoberfest was not the beer...but the many rows of smoked herring...ah..the aroma is second to none...

Oktoberfest...prost!

I was in the military many moons ago...stationed in Augsburg for two years. Tripped all over the southern part of Germany, different town and or a different country every weekend. One of my favorite past times was the Volksmarsch...saw all the wonderful country side and small burgs that way. New Ulm was the site of one of these events, a winter march in 1975.

You can't on a computer screen. Differences in computers, cameras and screens will interpret digital colors differently. Go to a jobber and look at their chips, in the sunlight - not under a fluorescent light. I can get them close comparing chips to a paint sample indoors or with a camera but I take them outside for the final comparison. The camera does not ensure a color match. Spectremaster has chip books that goes by shades of a dominant color and it's fairly easy to get it down to two or three choices for best match. The lighting inside may make it a perfect match, take it outside and it's off a little, shade lighter or darker and it may still need a bit of "hand craft". Your local jobber can do that for you. If you want to match a color, do it locally.

I'm 64 and it gave me an 18. average over 6 attempts was about 23, had a low below timewise below 18, ( 262 milliseconds). high of 31. I get to practice defensive driving every day at work.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess the engine doesn't run?

I'm 55 and it gave me a 23, but I've been staying alive and training on reaction time for over 30 years now. Should be some way to figure in your "contributing factors", but it's an interesting test. I recall back when I was in the Army in Germany that one of the driver's license tests to get a West Germany (DDR? - if you know that you'll age yourself ) driver's license was a reaction time test - that I barely passed at 20!

Crawling under a truck to retrieve a spare tire is automatic renewal of a dude's Man Card...going to a Sarah MacLachlan concert is an automatic revocation of a dude's Man Card

Every day is a new beginning

I had to modify my oil pan as pictured. I also had to modify my front cross member as pictured.

Hi BillyBoySmith - Depending on where your car was built, its quite possible in 1949 the frame was made in Hespler Ontario and shipped to the assembly plant in Detroit, in which case the holes are already drilled in the frame to turn the bracket and move the rad ahead. Some of the Dodge Wayfarer's I saw in England were Plymouths with Dodge badging. In any case had your car been made in Windsor like by 1949 Plymouth, whether the Plymouth or the Dodge it would have the 25 1/2" big block in it and the cross member is the exact same part number in the Canadian and the USA car. I can certainly put you in touch with people who have made the change and depending where you are in England maybe even someone close to you. Tim fargopickupking@yahoo.com ps: The use of Spitfire was far more a tribute than it was a marketing ploy, but that is another discussion

Don Coatney put a 25-inch DeSoto engine in his Plymouth. Doable, but radiator gets moved and cross member gets wallowed out.

One of my spring projects was to tighten up the steering on The Blue Bomber, as I-35 demolition/construction has constricted passage to what I call "gutter lanes" of minimal width bounded by unforgiving concrete barriers, with rapid lane transitions decorated with skid marks. Worn parts were replaced, steering box was adjusted to specs, and the truck still needed to be jockeyed down the road with a significant pucker factor when passing 18-wheelers. So I bit the bullet & installed a steering stabilizer, and it was like a new truck: steering was precise, and wander was gone. The only problem I've had since was cutting a tire at the start of a 2 mile long gutter lane and limping out, barely avoiding getting smoothed over by a Veracruz Jumbo Bus... The alternative to installing the steering stabilizer was to replace the steering gearbox, and that was gonna take a lot of time & cabbage to complete. Even with the new gearbox, the frame flex may be enough to still induce steering wander at highway speeds. The steering stabilizer is a bolt-on contraption that supports the cantilever steering gearbox output shaft, as well as adding a small crossmember in the steering area. The best adjustments I made on the gearbox put it just barely within tolerance, so the gearbox still worked well at low speeds, but induced white-knuckling above 45mph. The problem with the 2nd gen design is that the Pitman arm magnifies any play in the gearbox, as it is sized so that the gearbox would have a mechanical advantage to overcome any bumpsteer. Compared with the Pilot-House Pitman arm, the 2nd gen Pitman arm is gigantic.