Crippling winter snow storms serve as a reminder that when the big snow or the Russians do show up, those all-season radials on that 1984 Plymouth Voyager in the driveway are not going to cut it. A snow shovel and some road salt might get the Voyager out of the driveway, but when you wake up to sub-zero weather and see Vladimir Putin doing shirtless chin ups on the kids swing set in your backyard, there had better be something heavy-duty out in the garage. The M-973 Cargo Carrier is equipped with not one but two sets of drive treads, a Mercedes five-cylinder turbodiesel, and can carry either 17 fully equipped troops or over two tons of supplies. Read the rest of this entry »
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From the West coast division of the Corvair shortening department comes this 1963 convertible dune buggy variant of the American air-cooled rear engine sports car. The car originally rolled off the assembly line as a factory turbocharged Spyder in 1963. An accident that buckled and creased both doors landed what was left the Spyder languishing engineless behind a gas station until 1971. What was left of the turbo convertible was purchased for 50 bucks to acquire a still complete dashboard. The catch was that the entire car had to go with the dashboard. Where it went began the journey of car shortening, engine transplants, and an orange paint job that lent the shrunken Corvair its name.
Garage talk concerning engine swaps or drivetrain transplants is plentiful. Thousands of instant message windows, forum posts, and Facebook updates are populated at any given second with declarations of Hayabusa powered mid-engine rear-drive Ford Festivas (or similar) with induction systems managed by MegaSquirt. And so on. Some folks actually go so far as to get the pieces. Far fewer fabricate the pieces into something that works. A 1969 Honda N360 is a perfect foundation for such great transplant ideas. How about a 60HP electric motor? Yup. Rear-wheel drive? Sure! Volkswagen GTI transaxle with limited-slip differential and Volksubaru Ground Control hybrid suspension? Oh yes. If your name is Forrest Koogle, you not only gathered all the required pieces, but are building this very car at Hectors Chop Shop. Forrest says that one of the their credos over at Hectors is that they can do anything. We believe it. These guys are well on their way to constructing a 100% electric rear-wheel-driver into the shell of a sixties front-wheel-drive Honda kei car. Fabricating the chassis and making everything fit is far more involved than merely saying it. Follow along with the ongoing transformation and unfolding story of Nikolai360 the E.V. over at the world of unforgiving tolerances.
From the before and after division of the project car department comes this 1934 Ford BB wrecking truck. The former tow truck is shown here in before condition, after the heavy-duty Ford made the journey to South San Francisco by way of the 
The jet age was upon us. Radio magnates, vacuum cleaner industrialists, and battery manufacturing cabals pooled their vast economic resources. Top electrical engineer Victor Wouk and Pulitzer Prize winning chemist Linus Pauling were put on the job. French automaker Renault was called in for their expertise. From this global effort sprang a compact electric automobile with a top speed of 60 miles per hour, and a range of over 60 miles on a single charge of its dozen sequential batteries. These pioneering Henney Kilowatt cars were sold in small numbers for brief time – from 1959 to 1961.
There is no finer automobile for around the ranch work than a solid full size pickup truck. This 1963 Chevrolet C20 truck had evidently finished the job. What job? The old Chevy is the sort of truck that Hoss Cartwright would drive into town for some dynamite to blow those stumps out in the west field, if he didn’t ride a horse on TV. The patina on this Chevy could only result as a combination between years of actual work, and judging by the date on the California black plate tags, ten or so years of stationary sunbathing in a big valley north of Los Angeles. Even with half of its wheels buried in Southern California soil, this full-size pickup truck of over four decades ago seemed far more compact than modern Potemkin-class pickup trucks. A new battery, fresh gas, can of carburetor cleaner, some air in the tires, and the retired Chevrolet could be ready for more service.
Taking the castaways of the automotive world and transforming them into race cars through ingenuity and steel tubing is nothing new in America. This sixties-built dragster was at one time a thirties-built Austin. Opportunity Washington’s Duke Cornell first constructed this Bantam bodied drag coupe 1961. Duke claims he ran 10-second quarters at the drag strip with alarming regularity using an injected small block Chevrolet for power. That’s Duke himself in the cockpit out on in the staging lanes at the NHRA California Hot Rod Reunion during the post-race celebration of nitromethane known as the Cacklefest. Duke built the car the first time on a twentysomething year-olds racing budget. After racing for a number of years he sold the car for the usual reasons. Duke recently unearthed what was left of his original coupe and brought it back to better than original condition for display at Famoso in Bakersfield. Now, if only they would let him run down the track a few more times.
From the cars you don’t see parked on public roads everyday department comes this 1949 Crosley car in red. The Crosely was manufactured by the Crosley Corporation, which to this day makes appliances and portable traveling turntables. 1949 was a pivotal year for the runabout, as the brazed aluminum and steel engine block that served with valor in World War II was upgraded to cast iron for durability. Peacetime engine coolant formulation combined with poor owner maintenance waged war on the coatings inside the 
Communications from operatives over the last day have produced not one but three AMC Gremlins. Two are evidently in the wild. One is for sale, and has a Porsche engine swapped in under the hood in place of the AMC peanut grinder. First was Jim, seeing and snapping a few Gremlins in the states to the north west. One Gremlin appears mostly stock, while the other is somewhat more mysterious and art like. Hours later came the ever vigilant 
There are simply not enough cars in your driveway. You like your automobiles in pairs. You want nothing more for Christmas than an English runabout with a transmission in the trunk. Better still, is you’re the one who has been longing for a duet of Morris Minors since Morrissey and Marr were together on stage in Manchester. There has never been a better time then now. Alan Rutter of 
