Bingster

New email for Ross Collins: ross.collins@att.net

I have a newer Chrysler 300. I am wondering if the demise of Chrysler will increase its value or decrease it.

I do paint for a living and $10 an hour is giving your work away unless you are a very bad painter. That does make a difference, you know, your experience. I've painted in Beverly Hills houses and now I am in Iowa, and locale also makes a difference. For one thing, people's tastes in the Midwest here are not as sophisticated as those in Los Angeles, for example. What I mean by that is that I have gotten a lot of "Well, we used to paint our house ourselves but just wanted to see what it would cost . . . " You are either going to have a clientele who will hire you because you are cheap or because you are good. Just don't be good and cheap! I started around here at $15.00 an hour and could not survive. I raised it to $20.00 and still struggled. I now charge $30.00 an hour for basic painting and $45 an hour for sheet rock and plaster work, also for carpentry. That is about what the market will bear here, and most of my work is word of mouth. Unless you are a very good painter and live in an upscale area, $35.00 may be a bit high but if you can get it . . . I find that beyond a certain point a lot of folks don't care about super high quality, especially if they are comparing your prices to their painting their house for free. You know what I mean? Let me clarify that. My worse work is many painter's best, and a lot of folks think those other guys are fine. I'm not saying this to boast or anything, but I have gone through the whole psyhcology of painting and this is what I've come up with. What I often do is charge labor and then charge paint and materials to their account at the local Hardware Hank, for example. The store is happy to have the business, and will set up a temporary account for the client if they don't already have one at the store. This way, you don't have to worry if you under bid on the paint and materials. On the other hand, I have been providing materials and marking them up as contractors do. This way you make a little dough on the paint as well. It can backfire if you are not experienced at bidding correctly, and even after a lot of years I eat a job here and there. Have all your tools - pole, ladders, brushes, etc. - and charge for roller covers, disposable paint trays, sand paper, etc. They add up. Buy good quality brushes. Purdy is a good reputable pro brand. It makes such a difference to use good tools. I think that paint store paint is over priced. Sherwin Williams, etc. Val Spar, for example, makes Hardware Hank paint and they have been in business for decades. They have two lines: the Hank line and the Val Spar line. For most people, the Hank line is fine. Tru Value paint is crap. It runs like a runny nose. You cut in on a ceiling line and you have to go back and smooth out the drips. A good paint will cover and stay put. I find that most interior jobs need a primer coat and a top coat. Unless you are very good, this one coat stuff just doesn't cut it. Have the store tint your primer the same color as the topcoat. Good stores will happily do it and not charge you. Some colors with too much tint will not allow the full formula to be put into the primer can. Have them put in as much as they can, usually three ounces at least. Always use 3M blue easy-off masking tape and avoid problems. Beyond that, if you have any questions let me know. By the way, get half the bid up front and half when done. If it's a large job you might put into your "contract" another bump half way into the job. If you live in an area that rains frequently or has high humidity and you do outside work, be advised that a simple job can string you out weeks trying to dodge storms.

Are there any issues with condensation under the cover and rusting or anything?

Am trying to get his new email.

I don't really know a lot about car values, but yours looks pretty darn nice. That is, with a little more work it would be complete and fetch more money. I think a buyer would take advantage of the fact that it is not complete, but what is there certainly looks nice. If you could, hang onto it at least till you can complete it then sell. I took out a loan to buy my car and it was complete but needed an overhaul. I paid about $3900 for it. I've got a lot of labor into it on degreasing and cleaning alone! I guess even when completely restored it wouldn't bring what a person puts into it. It all boils down to whether or not you can afford a toy sitting around that eats money and time.

Okay, I know we have been there and done this before, but I am at the point of deciding whether to buy Monroe shocks for my '47 Desoto S-11 or maybe Kanter, as some other Desoto guys have done. Quite a price difference. What again are the shock numbers for the front and rears? I have heard on another Desoto forum of having to reinforce the Monroe shocks with a weld to strengthen them, which seems to me too much trouble to save a few bucks. Any body have any problems? Are the Kanter shocks really that different from the Monroe?

Your car looks great! Could it have looked any better when new?

Is that your car in primer ready to shoot? All I can tell you is that where I live, I asked a local body man if I brought the car in ready to shoot how much? Well, for base & clear coat black it was going to be well under a grand, if I polished the clear out myself. For a guy to basically shoot the car twice, it does not take that much time. I think you are asking the wrong guy. Because he IS an artist and does high priced work, why should he slum giving you a deal? I'm certain he doesn't need the work that badly. Go to some local shops. Ask at auto parts stores who is reputable, does good work and might work with you. Also, go to the body shop of your local auto dealerships and ask the body men if they moonlight doing paint work. Mine did at the Chrysler dealership. Very reasonable. These days a lot of these folks are trying to make extra dough. If a dealership in your area has recently closed down, seek out the body guy that worked there. He may be itching to paint a car. Good luck.

Any material thing depends on us humans to attach meaning or importance to it. An old car - or a new one for that matter - is only a hunk of metal. I think cars are fairly unique in that like fashion, they have come to represent a statement of "modernity" - of where our culture is at stylistically at any given moment in time. Also, cars get used up and discarded. By that time, they are obviously out of style. Unlike antiques - furniture, etc. - which pretty much stay stable with relation to their physical make-up, cars are no good once they have worn out. At least to the mass population. Most people view an old Plymouth in back of a barn as a piece of junk. I know my mom would have. You and I would get a buzz from what it represents to us and the potential to bring it back to life. I agree that old cars are only "historic" if they served some important and specific purpose in history. But the barn car is a part of history by its very nature, but so are we. The average person would not want to drive either a barn antique or a fully restored '39 Cadillac for the simple reason that society superimposes too much judgement on what each would represent. The barn car - even if restored to a point - would connotate living behind the times, and the Caddy would imply vast wealth of a sort or putting on airs. And either attracts a lot of attention, the kind that most folks would not feel comfortable with simply because without any personal involvement, these cars are merely tokens from a past age. But on the other hand, the very fact that cars are more or less "disposable" does freeze their design in a particular era. Our culture stresses the most modern, new and improved. Old cars are hardly that, and so why would the average citizen want an old car? Style is pretty much dictated to us anyway. We take it or leave it. But we can clearly see what is behind the times with regard to design. I was looking up at an old building here in Iowa with a date marker of 1904 on the front, cast proudly in bronze. That building for all intents and purposes is still fullfilling the same function it was built to serve in 1904. Cars cannot. They either get used up and thrown away or the lucky ones are preserved. People don't seem to care if a building is sixty plus years old. Maybe because it's not theirs personally. But society places a lot of significance on buying new cars - sexy, practical, modern, safety - that our egos I guess are more prone to be involved than with an old building which belongs to the city. So yeah, it all boils down to what significance we place on an old car on a personal level. Don thinks of his father. He needs no better reason than that. Rodney gets a sense of history through his car. That's great. Whatever it is that makes classic car people love classic cars, that's our own thing. Most people will simply go along with the program cause that's what's given them. I bought a Chrylser 300 a couple of years ago because I thought it had a rather unique face. I think it's a very well designed car, but from what I recall of my old '53 New Yorker and my neighbor's '53 Packard when I was a kid, new cars don't ride as nice as the old. They might handle better cause they're lighter, but that mass gave the old cars a solid ride. If you took todays Chrysler 300 and built it back in 1947 with exactly the same body design, it would undoubtedly ride better than its contemporary twin. Don't you think so? It wouldn't handle as nicely perhaps, but the ride would be so smooooth! It's fun to get a little philosophical about these old cars once in awhile. They really are more than mere metal. They contain all the hopes and dreams of their era; all the ideas that people before us put into them. Hey, if they didn't, why buy an old piece of scrap iron and fix it up? Right?

I ordered a pair of cork-type headlight gaskets awhile back from Ross Collins. He's on the Desotoland site. His gaskets - I believe - are for his S-15 Desoto but the hole pattern fit my S-11 almost perfectly. A little Xacto knife trimming here and there. They are beautifully done, like factory fresh parts. His email is RCollinsii@woh.rr.com. They are fifteen dollars a pair and he didn't ask me for postage but I sent him an extra five bucks anyway. A real nice fella! He apparently can also custom make various parts.

Arrasmith designed the Washington, DC Greyhound Terminal.

http://www.agilitynut.com/roadside.html This is a great site!

Lowey did the Greyhound buses but a guy named W.S. Arrasmith did a large number of the Greyhound terminals beginning with a fabulous streamline design in Louisville in 1937. I stumbled on a book about him and his terminals called The Streamline Era Greyhound Terminal that is a great look at that era. Also, there is a web site with photos of a great many of them plus a lot of other Art Deco stuff. I'll find it and post it.

We always watch The Bishop's Wife two. "My" '47 Desoto black sedan is also in this movie. Remember when Cary is crossing that street early in the movie and a car screeches to a halt just in time? Yep, a '47 Desoto. What year was that movie? Could have been a '46 or '48. They'd all look the same. Are you talking about Sylvester's taxi?

I enjoyed your post, Rodney. I've just finished a book on FDR and how we got into the war and what happened throughout. I've always liked that WWII period of the early to mid forties, and what the country had to do to come together to defeat Japan and Germany. It is literally a gift from God that we won. In retrospect, I have come to the conclusion that I skimmed off the cream from that era - the Andrews Sisters, the ad art, the music, the movies - without having actually lived through them I'm 55 and our current times gives me some idea of what it must have been like to live through the Depression and WWII. They had no hindsight to enjoy the better aspects of their era, but had to live with the horror of poverty and war. And yet, I'll take those days over today, and I think that is what draws many of us to the past and linking to it through these automobiles. I really love Art Deco and Streamline Moderne which were the rage in the thirties and somewhat less in the forties. I think we as a nation have dumbed down morally and architecturally. Remnants of Deco and Moderne exist in the retro designs, and when I first saw the PT Cruiser on a billboard I literally pulled my car over and stared up at it in awe. How retro! I am consrtantly trying to figure out this whole time thing. Think of this a moment. When you are driving in your car, you are seeing the future through the front window, you are sitting in the present and the past is in your rear view mirror. Yet viewed from above, the entire thing is in the present. The future, present and past really do co-exist. As soon as a second ticks you are past it and into the next. I've thought a lot about what time actually is. Our old cars represent time frozen in a particular design and mentality. The old cars are very naive in their design. I don't mean simple or crude. Back in the thirties the teardrop was thought the ideal form. On some cars they took that idea and transfered it quite literally. But the fenders of that era reveal the thinking of that age. I think graceful may be the word I am looking for. Class. Elegance. And like now, money dictated how much of each you would get in a car. Grilles were a big unique design feature. The shape of the hood where it meets the grille. All that. I have a '47 Desoto that I am refurbishing to as built. Black. Fairly elegant for its day. I also think of where it has been and what has happenned in the world since it was built. Interestingly enough, mechanical things don't change their appearance as humans do. They may disintegrate but we can bring them back to how they looked when they were built. The average citizen looks at one of our old cars and greatly admires them. I think there is a natural drawing power of old things, hence all the antique shops. People seem to want to go back in time. To better times? Childhood? Simpler times? Humans - at least Americans - do seem to have a respect for the past. You know, when you think about it, a person could totally immerse themselves in any era they want through antiques, the car they drive, etc. They could live in their head whenever they wanted. Only our culture would betray the illusion. Plus, reality is in our minds anyway. We do make our own life. The earth is a prop that we walk through, and we can carve out any existance we wish if we wish it bad enough. Okay, maybe far too philosophical for this forum. But I know that a lot of you guys must think these things by the mere fact that you dig these old cars. I know Rodney does. He was interpreting the death of FDR through the cars he saw. He saw more that old film, old cars. He saw and felt the vibes - for want of a better term - of that era. And that's what these cars give off - the old vibes. Enough!

Yes. great cars and a very cute grandson. I was thinking, that to him, he has absolutely no idea that that car is not Detroit's latest model. It reminds me that to kids, they are born into whatever environment we provide for them. For all he knows it could be 1938.

They're always listed on ebay. I think one's on there now.

I don't have a lot of extra money but am still "restoring" my Desoto because there is an awful lot you can do for very little money and a lot of labor. Degreasing and cleaning the front end and engine compartment took a lot of time and labor and had to be done before anything could be replaced or repainted. In the meantime, buy the things you need here and there. Watch ebay. Then complete a section at a time. There is definately a sequence to be followed. Cleaning, which includes sandblasting if you have access to one or power wire brushing and scraping. I wouldn't sandblast directly on the car itself. Take the parts away from the car. That sand gets into everything! Then priming, painting. Suspension and such can be done with rattle cans or even a brush. They can't be seen. Re-wiring and installing new brake lines, etc. should be done after then painting, and that stuff should be removed prior to painting. Make sure you have a wiring diagram for your car and a repair manual. Keep parts labeled in coffee cans, mayonaise jars, butter containers, etc. You will spend a lot of time reconditioning sub-parts like the generator, air cleaner housing, etc. It's a good feeling building a supply of refurbished "off the shelf" parts that can simply be bolted on when the time comes. This stuff all takes a lot of time so be patient and have fun.

So is it better to get Raybestos - a reputable name for years - made in China or Mexico, or maybe this Brake Hoses Unlimited made in USA for about the same money? His hoses are approved and look to be very well made.

Anybody have any info on Brakehoses Unlimited hoses? They sell on ebay and are made in the USA. From their description they make a top quality hose. About $65 for a three hose set.

That really does look great, Joe! I've been very absorbed and amused with your sand blasting saga. It sure does make a difference. I've been blasting parts for my Desoto although I haven't done any fenders or body sheet metal. It is a messy job but there is something very satisfying watching that old paint & rust fly off and revealing clean virgin metal. Yeah, I don't get to my car near enough these days. Have to pay the bills, you know. But the weather is good now and I'll make time. Have fun.

Desotoland should be www.duricy.com.

There are two other sites devoted entirely to Desotos. www.desoto.org and www.desotoland.org.

Lee, I used to have an early fifties Chrysler New Yorker and it rode great. These Desotos were a high class ride in their day, and quite possibly your shocks and/or springs plus worn front end parts need total replacing. I would think that if you got your front end in factory condition that the ride would please you very much!