February, 2004
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Crashed the car in a closed, locked garage?
It’s been since last summer since I updated my epic. I’m doing well, but the car is in suspended animation as I attempt a career change, which is sucking up too much of my time to allow much forward progress. I am struggling to start again by just doing incremental work because I swore that I’d finish this thing, and absolutely refuse to let it die in my garage.
There have been several other exciting developments elsewhere that I’d like to note here.
My brother and his wife came to stay with me for a couple of months, and he was parking his small car in the driveway regularly. One day I came home and the garage door was all banged in and askance. I wondered what that was all about, and went inside. I found out that he’d been in the driveway, and had stepped on the brake, only to find that the gas pedal was underfoot instead. The car shot forward and nailed the garage door. He was very apologetic and we agreed that he’d replace it and there was no problem with that. We’re brothers, I love him, and it was obviously a mistake.
So a few days later, I went out with some laundry, and was puzzled to see a dent in the rear end of the car as I passed it on the way to the washer/dryer. My initial thought was that my sister-in-law had bashed the car with a laundry basket or something, and I started to get heated up for a fraction of a second, until I remembered how I had to hammer the hell out of the body panels to shape them during the bodywork phase, and I decided that this probably wasn’t a laundry problem.
I looked at the entire area, and found that the dent in the car matched a giant dent in the dryer, which matched an indentation
in the drywall. Seems that when the car had hit the garage door, the door had come inwards, knocking the Imperial
back into the appliance. It then rolled back into position and pretended that it hadn’t done anything, but it was obvious what had happened once I took a longer look at the line of dents that were all obviously related.
How does one have their car, with no drive-train or anything else on it for that matter, get into an accident in a closed, locked garage?
Only in my life.
At least it wasn’t painted and I can redo that area.
- Drag Racing White Coupes
The other day a message came across the Mailing List about a guy that wanted help looking at some cars in San Francisco. I wrote him and offered. Met him the same day, and we went out to pier 50 just south of Pac Bell Park. There we met a fellow that was about 80 and preparing to move back home to New Zealand. He had 2 cars that he desperately wanted to jettison, as well as a large cache of NOS parts. Apparently his girlfriend knew the fellow and he was doing a favor, being the car guy of the family. I owned a VW Golf once, and liked it, so I forgave his misguided interest in Passats.
We took the cars out and took pictures of them outside with the intent of putting them on ebay as a favor to the owner, and since the guy that took me in there was a buddy, he knew that we could take them around the block and it’d be OK. The owner was off doing something else, and so we just took off in them. Posed them in front of Pac Bell Baseball Park, and when we hopped into the cars to drive them back, we had an impromptu drag race. 1957 vs 1958 white coupes! Mine was a little down, or I got off the line late or something, but it was pretty much neck and neck for about 200 feet before we backed off and smiled at each other.
I took pictures of the stash of NOS parts and the cars. The guy had had a collection at one time, and I can remember a building that stood where the ballpark is now that had roof parking and a metal railing. When you drove down the street, you could see all sorts of fins up there, and after I enquired, I found that this fellow was the owner.
- King George the 64
About 5 months ago, I received an offer of a free car from someone, and I followed up on it and wound up traveling to Fairfield, which is probably about 90 minutes north of here on the way to Sacramento.
A gentleman that was going into an assisted living facility owned it but could no longer keep the car, and he wanted it to go to someone that would appreciate it.
He had bought the car in 1968 at a used car dealership, and told me that he swore then and there that he would get every last nickel of value out of the car before he gave it up. Well, I think that there was at least twenty five cents left in the car, and he seemed to have hit retirement before the car did, but it was a neck and neck race right to the end. The car was rough, dirty, and had some interesting oil trays home-built into the valve covers to divert leaking oil off of the exhaust manifolds, but it started up and ran, so I signed for it and drove it home.
The car’s name is King George the 64, and he’s been run hard over the years and has settled into a sort of happy dilapidation where everything fits together from obviously quality materials and workmanship, but everything is also so very dirty and worn. It will take some considerable time and cleaning to bring him back to presentable condition. I kept looking out my bathroom window on him where he’s parked in the side yard as I took my morning showers, and kept regretting that he was sitting outside and not being appreciated, so I tossed out a message to the Imperial (email) Mailing List and offered him for the same price that I had gotten him - Free.
My offer was accepted by a gentleman in LA, and he’ll be driving the car home in a few weeks. I give him a 7 out of 10 chance of making it without hassle. The car is pretty tired, but ya know, it could just surprise everyone and make a good showing of itself on the trip to LA.
Below are pictures of the previous owner, King George, and Mark Lamp’s 1960, which also lives in Fairfeild. Mark knew the guy from meeting him at the supermarket and offering help in fixing the power window motors previously.
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