News | restoration of a 1958 Cadillac Extended Deck Sedan - Part 3

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Aug
01

What A Wasted Weekend

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It has been a slow week, wanted to do cruise nights on Tues­day and Fri­day, but weather man­aged to nix both of them.  Tues­day was just to hot to bother, and Fri­day again saw the threat of severe thun­der­storms.  good thing we can­celed Fri­day because a very severe band of storms ran through, with trees down, large hail and very heavy rains.

My sched­ule is so messed up!  I com­pletely for­got about a show I wanted to attend in Stafford Springs, CT on Sat­ur­day, which was a beau­ti­ful day by the way.  Busi­ness and Board meet­ing com­mitt­ments have really messed with my mind, it’s not like me to miss a great day for a show!!

Sun­day I had the oppor­tu­nity to attend “Cars Of The World” in War­wick, RI or a big show on the Con­necti­cut shore, I opted to skip both in favor of a local show to ben­e­fit the Shriners Hos­pi­tal and children’s can­cer char­i­ties.  While it was for a good cause, it was a ter­ri­ble day.  I won’t name the show, in an attempt to pro­tect those who are doing the right thing, for all the right rea­sons in a very bad way.….  It was sunny and very hot when I arrived to find we were park­ing on an asphalt lot, great, hours in the blaz­ing sun, with no shade in temps that were 90+  Low bud­get DJ and not a lot of activ­ity all con­tributed to a few hours of my life I will never get back.  The top­per was when they announced the top 10 awards and best of show.  The major­ity of win­ners were all Chevro­let, I’m told, just like what hap­pened last year.  The stun­ner though, was the best of show, a car that shall remain un-identified, it was not a Chevro­let.  It was a con­vert­ible, met­alflake pur­ple, that was painted in his garage for $300.00, had rusted bumpers and an orig­i­nal shred­ded inte­rior that was holier than a cathe­dral on Easter Sun­day!!!!  In fact, not 20 min­utes before the award I was talk­ing with the owner of the car who was admir­ing our paint job, when he was telling me how they painted it.  OMG, what were they think­ing, OK I get it, you want to give your buddy an award, so put him in the top 10, but “Best Of Show” are you kid­ding me.  We will send a check next year because it is a really good cause, but there is no way we’ll be attend­ing again, I’d have more fun tak­ing a nap!  Pho­tos show a cou­ple of beau­ties that were awarded noth­ing and com­pletely over­looked.  The ’33 Lasalle was an obvi­ous stand­out in that field and did not even get in the top 10!

Hope­fully, the com­ing week will be bet­ter, we are really look­ing for­ward to “Cadil­lac Day” spon­sored by the New Eng­land Region of the Cadil­lac LaSalle Club and Long Cadil­lac out in East­ern Mass­a­chu­setts on Saturday.  Sunday will find us down in Man­ches­ter, CT where they close 1 mile of Main Street and could attract hun­dreds if not thou­sands of cars.  Fin­gers crossed for bet­ter weather.

Talk later.….

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Jul
22

Caddy Show Board

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Just got the final proof back for our Show Board.  This is what it is going to look like.

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Jul
18

Holyoke Soldiers Home Cruise Night

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I was happy to be able to attend the Holyoke Sol­diers Home Cruise Night, Sat­ur­day from 4:00 – 7:30PM.  This event sched­uled only 4 times a year is a ben­e­fit fundraiser and all of the funds gen­er­ated go directly to the res­i­dents.  What a great way to honor those who put every­thing on the line to defend us!!!  I was impressed with the facil­ity, never hav­ing been there before (shame on me).  I’ll admit it is not the best venue for a show, kind of hot out there in the park­ing lot, but they do have a great pavil­lion out in back, the food was ter­rific and we as car own­ers need to do every­thing in our power to assist, encour­age and par­tic­i­pate in the remain­ing events.  Their next sched­uled cruise is going to be August 20, and a final one on Sep­tem­ber 25th.  Please mark your cal­en­dars and make every effort to attend, your efforts will bring a smile to many of the res­i­dents and help to put some money in their accounts.

Shortly after I arrived, Bob Simp­son, a Holyoke res­i­dent arrived with his Kaiser Dar­rin and parked right behind me.  Bob was a weekly win­ner with that car at But­tery Brook on Fri­day night, where I failed to get a photo, I didn’t miss the sec­ond oppor­tu­nity, so here it is.  The new Super­in­ten­dant of the Home and I had a great con­ver­sa­tion and it turns out he is a car guy too!  He has a ’53 MG TD and as it turns out, I have the same car on the floor of my garage in pieces as I have begun a frame off restora­tion on it…

Please mark your cal­en­dars and lets try to help boost the atten­dance at their next event, it’s a great cause and the least we can do to help those who have been there for us.

See you there? (I’m going to keep pes­ter­ing you…)

 

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Jul
16

Buttery Brook Cruise Night

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Mary Lee and I returned from Maine yes­ter­day at around 3:30, unpacked, dusted off the “Gray Lady” and went up to Cruise Night in South Hadley.  Being a show win­ner at the first cruise night of the sea­son Memo­r­ial day week­end, we were directed to the “Winner’s Cir­cle” an area reserved for past show win­ners and assigned tag num­ber 10 to iden­tify us to all who would vote for the win­ner tonight (all entrants to the show were given a bal­lot and asked to vote for their favorite in the Winner’s Cir­cle).  So, while it was the judges who got us to the top, it was the par­tic­i­pants who would deter­mine the real win­ner.  We were fol­lowed in by other past win­ners, a ’65 Mus­tang, ’57 Corvette Con­vert­ible and a ’54 Stude­baker Pickup, along with a whole bunch of oth­ers com­pet­ing for the weekly prize.

After the weekly win­ners were announced at the end of the night, one of which was a very rare Kaiser Dar­rin, they held the cus­tom­ary raf­fles and with a very close vote, some­one said it was by only one vote sep­a­rat­ing the win­ner from the run­ner up, we were announced as the win­ners of the “Win­ners Cir­cle” con­test!!  After the tro­phy pre­sen­ta­tion and pho­tos, we could finally kick back and relax, after what was a very long day that started at 5:00AM in Casco Bay, Maine.  Nice to be there, but glad to be back here too.…

The rest of the week­end will be busy as well, with all of the rain we have been hav­ing,  I’m not going to miss an oppor­tu­nity to go out and play with my toy.… Tonight we will be at a Cruise Night at the Holyoke Sol­diers Home in the “Paper City” and tomor­row will find us at the car show on the Belcher­town Com­mon, spon­sored by the Belcher­town Cruis­ers, which is a fundraiser for the Juvinile Dia­betes Foundation.

Hope you are hav­ing as great a week­end as we are, till next time.….…

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With no par­tic­u­lar plan in place, we awoke Sun­day to a bril­liantly sunny sum­mer day and over cof­fee decided to make a last minute trip to Sims­bury, CT to attend the Val­ley Col­lec­tor Car Club’s 10th Annual Char­ity Car Show.  What the heck, we could always relax while in Maine next week, packed a cooler, left the dog with a neigh­bor and off we went.  We left around 9:30AM and drove out routes 10 & 202 arriv­ing in Sims­bury around 10:30.

We were put in class K and directed to park in lot 6. 

Our Divi­sion K winner

The show is held in a beau­ti­ful Town, at a spec­tac­u­lar spot, the Per­form­ing Arts Cen­ter right in down­town.  I was more than a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed to find our­selves parked next to an ’80’s vin­tage Buick Grand National and on our other side, a ’57 Turquoise and White Corvette that we had com­peted against 2 weeks ago in Wind­sor, CT., I couldn’t help but think, geez what the heck type of class is this.….…

It was not until about an hour later that I real­ized every car in our lot was from a dif­fer­ent class!  We had cars from classes K, J, L, M all parked together.  As Cadil­lac own­ers we are always at a dis­ad­van­tage in a show deter­mined by pop­u­lar vote, but dra­mat­i­cally more so here, vot­ers ini­tially were not instructed to vote for one car in every class, and our class was actu­ally parked in field #2, a cou­ple hun­dred yards away and worse yet, our field #6 was very hard to locate on the map handed out.  This show has the poten­tial to be a real stand­out, it was metic­u­lously orga­nized, had com­put­er­ized bal­lot­ing, was in a per­fect loca­tion and had some very unique vehi­cles, but unfor­tu­nately we had no shot at being awarded any­thing the way it was set up.  How can some­thing so well planned and orga­nized be so poorly imple­mented?  Peo­ple were handed bal­lots with no clear instruc­tions on how to vote them, no one I talked to under­stood what they were sup­posed to do with the bal­lot until they began announc­ing instruc­tions just an hour before vot­ing was to close, elec­tron­i­cally read vot­ing is a great idea, that has the poten­tial to be a game changer, but not unless they can set it up  much more clearly.

On a brighter note, we had intended to order a Show Board while there from a ven­dor we had seen at other shows, we spoke to him ear­lier in the day and made arrange­ments to final­ize the trans­ac­tion later in the day.  Not 45 min­utes later we won a driver’s raf­fle and scored a gift cer­tifi­cate from the very same ven­dor in the amount of $125.00!!!  After the show broke up, we met with him, he took many pho­tos and will have a proof to us in a week or so.  As usual, we were mobbed with peo­ple admir­ing the car and ask­ing many ques­tions about it, many times we had groups of a dozen or more at one time around the car, it is nice to know some oth­ers appre­ci­ate it as much as we do.….

Over­all, a nice day, a beau­ti­ful ride there and back, per­fect loca­tion, BUT sadly, not an event we would be in a hurry to go back to, not to take any­thing away from the Club’s efforts, our time and effort is prob­a­bly bet­ter spent some­where else.….…Of course, “Your Mileage May Vary”.

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Jul
09

The Week In Review

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Tues­day night we rode on out to the weekly cruise night at the Elks Club in Lud­low, MA.  Great music, great cars and made some new friends.  This was our first visit here and we surely will be back, there were prob­a­bly 200 cars there.

Sat­ur­day had us at the Change The Wind Char­ity Car Show for the ben­e­fit of the Spring­field Tor­nado vic­tims.  It was a great day with much sup­port from the local com­mu­nity and hope­fully a lot of money was made to go to some very good causes.  Many car own­ers trav­eled great dis­tances to par­tic­i­pate, the ’58 Mer­cedes parked next to us had trav­eled from Boston and I also saw many out of  State plates rep­re­sented.  We had the plea­sure of meet­ing up with Fran & Ann Har­ris, the cou­ple who we pur­chased the “Gray Lady” from more than 2 years ago.

I was impressed that such an orga­nized event could be put together just a lit­tle more than a Month after our weather dis­as­ter here in the Pio­neer Val­ley of Mass­a­chu­setts.  The “Mil­lion Dol­lar Cir­cle” was made up of cars not nor­mally seen at local events.  There were at least 3 Spring­field, MA built Rolls Royce autos there, along with beau­ti­ful Stutz, Pierce Arrow, Packard and Cadil­lac exam­ples.  Atten­dance seemed to be more than 400 cars and while not truly a com­pet­i­tive event, there were 17 tro­phy awards, one tro­phy rep­re­sent­ing each Town affected by the weather dis­as­ter.  Mary Lee and I were lucky enough to receive the “Belcher­town Award.”  I’d like to say “see you again next year”, but sin­cerely hope a dis­as­ter like that never occurs again in our home towns.

We finally had a week of great weather and hope­fully it will con­tinue for the rest of the sum­mer.  Mary Lee and I are head­ing up to Maine next week for a lit­tle R & R, we will be back on Fri­day in time to show the “Gray Lady” at But­tery Brook Park that night.  Sat­ur­day I plan on attend­ing an infor­mal event at the Holyoke Sol­diers Home in Holyoke, MA, not a for­mal show, but an oppor­tu­nity to brighten the day for many of our dis­abled,  ail­ing and aging vet­er­ans.  It is an event held only about 3 times a year and we have not been able to attend so far due to sched­ul­ing, work and fam­ily issues, we’re not going to miss this one.  Sun­day we will be attend­ing the “Car Show on the Com­mon” a fundraiser for the Juve­nile Dia­betes Research Foun­da­tion spon­sored by the Belcher­town Cruis­ers, all weather per­mit­ting of course.….

See you there?

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Jul
04

Happy Independence Day!!!

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It’s been kind of a laid back week­end here, Fri­day night we went to the Cruise Night at But­tery Brook to com­pete for the “Best of the Best” a com­pe­ti­tion amongst past show win­ners at the park.  Sadly, we were beat out by a 1957 Chevro­let Nomad Wagon.…  Ahh well, we can’t win them all and we will have a sec­ond shot at them on July 15th.  Sat­ur­day was another beau­ti­ful day, with plenty of rest and relax­ation look­ing for­ward to 26th Annual Berk­shire Char­ity Car Show on Sun­day, but it was not to be, we awoke to sun­shine, but by 8:00AM the show­ers began and it rained through­out the day.  The show went on, as the weather up in the Berk­shires was bet­ter I guess, but I did not want to take her high­ness out in the rain so we stayed home.  Nat­u­rally today was beau­ti­fully sunny and hot again (it only rains on our sched­uled events) so I took some time to get to some things done on the “Gray Lady”.

Ear­lier I wrote about our con­tin­u­ing prob­lems with vapor lock, and I decided that I was tired of wor­ry­ing about dam­age from the ongo­ing saga of the engine run­ning hot.  It still doesn’t make sense to me, that she runs so hot, so today she got fit­ted with a new 16″ elec­tric fan that moves 2200 CFM on sale at NAPA for $109.00.  I con­verted the fan as a “pusher” did a thru core instal­la­tion and wired it as such to a man­ual switch under the dash, so I can use it at will and not have to worry about a ther­mo­stat kick­ing it on and off (I believe in the KISS the­ory, you know, Keep It Sim­ple Stu­pid!)  I’m happy to report that in stop and go traf­fic she now runs right where she is sup­posed to be, and on the high­way I don’t need the fan at all and just turn it off.  She will stay just this way until the ulti­mate res­o­lu­tion is finally fig­ured out, for now it solves the air­flow problem.

Today, I resolved the other issue that has been bug­ging me.  I got the car with door edge guards on only 2 doors, I pur­chased oth­ers on E-Bay and have been fuss­ing with them for weeks, try­ing to make them look pre­sentable.  It was not to be, they still looked like crap and because they are stain­less steel I could have sent them out for re-finishing but it would have been shock­ingly expen­sive.  When I saw the sec­ond door edge chip this week­end I snapped and went over to Auto­zone and bought an 18 foot  roll of chrome door edg­ing for 10 bucks!  Yeah, yeah I know it’s plas­tic and not stain­less, but unless you are a foot away with a mag­ni­fy­ing glass you are never going to know and when I cal­cu­lated out $600.00 for stain­less repair or $10.00 for plas­tic, well the plas­tic won, and the remain­der will pay for our trip to Maine the week after next.….…

Finally, after hav­ing put more than 400 miles on the old gal this sea­son, I decided that I am done lis­ten­ing to talk radio on the AM radio.  I installed an eas­ily remov­able Ken­wood deck under the dash with a FM tuner and CD player along with a port for my ipod.  Not want­ing to alter the orig­i­nal radio and speak­ers I debated this all week, and finally decided to add 2 addi­tional speak­ers.  Know­ing that this is going to be a nice weather car only, I installed 2 5 1/4″ Kick­ers in the front air vents in the kick pan­els.  My orig­i­nal plan was to put them in and cover them with the orig­i­nal air vents, but they had to be 4″ speak­ers or less and the sound was bad, so I pulled them back out, returned them, slightly enlarged the hole and put the larger ones in but the vents won’t cover them so I ended up using the speaker grills.  So finally we can lis­ten to some great music while cruis­ing and I can restore every­thing back to orig­i­nal in less than an hour should I need to.  I’ll post some pho­tos the next time around.

Next week will be extremely busy, I’m short handed at work, Elks Cruise Night Tues­day night and the “Change The Wind” char­ity event car show in East Long­meadow on Sat­ur­day.  Oh, and I almost for­got, I got a call this week to see if I was inter­ested in a 1947 Fleet­wood that has been in a local barn here for the past 20 years, all orig­i­nal com­plete car, got to find time to look at that too!!!!!  Mary Lee is going to kill me!

Till then.….….

 

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Jun
28

The Dreaded Vapor Lock

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After not hav­ing been out for more than a week and with a beau­ti­ful evening in progress, I decieded to run on down to Mark’s Cruise Night in East Wind­sor, CT. It was a smooth ride down Inter­state 91, that big old boat rides like a dream and much nicer than any of the new Cadil­lacs I’ve rid­den in lately. Once at the site we got stuck in line wait­ing to get through the gate and after about 15 min­utes of sit­ting in place, she over heated. I shut her down and when traf­fic began to move 10 min­utes later, we were a no go due to vapor lock. We rolled her back into the shade and let her sit for 15 min­utes and we were back in busi­ness. Not a big deal, but kind of put a damper on the evening.

It’s a con­tin­u­ing prob­lem as Mary Lee and I had the same issue two weeks ago. she’s cool as a cucum­ber on the high­way, but in stop and go traf­fic she heats up pretty quickly, not sure of the real issue, but on Thurs­day she gets fit­ted with a new aux­il­lary elec­tric fan and hope­fully the prob­lem will be resolved. She’ll also be get­ting a colder ther­mo­stat when the new gas­kets arrive in a cou­ple days. I’ll post more details when the project is finished.

Back to Mark’s for just a sec­ond, amaz­ing turnout for this event every Mon­day evening, 837 cars were in atten­dance. Live music, good food and a whole lot of fun. With that many vehi­cles there are sure to be a cou­ple stand­outs and this trip was no excep­tion. My high­lights, a 1925 Spring­field built Rolls Royce that purred like a kit­ten and a very nice 1954 Lin­coln con­vert­ible along with a cou­ple of very nice fifties era MG TD’s that I looked over very closely as that is my next project, a 1953 MG TD cur­rently in pieces on my garage floor.  Plus a cool ’58 Impala and another ’58 Dodge con­vert­ible owned by the same guy that I had met on pre­vi­ous occa­sions with the 2 Lin­coln convertibles.

Our sched­ule going for­ward, will see us at But­tery Brook Park here in South Hadley where we will com­pete against other weekly show win­ners in a “Best of the Best” event within their reg­u­lar Cruise Night on Fri­day night.  Sun­day we will be in Pitts­field, MA up in the Berk­shires to attend the 26th Annual Berk­shire Char­ity Car Show on the cam­pus of Hill­crest Hos­pi­tal.  July 9th will find us in East Long­meadow, MA at the “Change The Wind” event, an impor­tant fundraiser for the vic­tims of the Spring­field tor­nado that tore through our area on June 1st.  See you there?

Until then.….….…..

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Jun
22

Dream Cars Event Video

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Jun
19

Dream Cars For Kid’s Dreams

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What a Day!  Happy Father’s Day to all you Dad’s!   Motored on down to East Wind­sor, Ct. to attend a ben­e­fit event for Con­necti­cut Children’s Place, a school for abused and dis­ad­van­taged chil­dren. I wasn’t expect­ing much, just happy to sup­port a great cause. The divi­sions were not very friendly for us Cadil­lac guys. They had a full size divi­sion, but it was lim­ited to vin­tage 1964 – 1969 vehi­cles, so we were out and the only other option was for us to be in the 1950 – 1959 stock divi­sion. On top of that it was par­tic­i­pant vot­ing, not a judged event, never a good deal for us Caddy guys as all of the younger par­tic­i­pants tend to grav­i­tate towards the 60’s era mus­cle cars and we usu­ally get pushed aside.

The key word here is usu­ally, as I lined up and parked the “Gray Lady”, there was a nice white Pon­tiac Bon­neville already in and I slid in next to an orig­i­nal ’59 white Cadil­lac sedan, what a dif­fer­ence a year makes, our 2 cars were totally dif­fer­ent. Next in comes a nice orig­i­nal Ford and then a mod­i­fied Chevy. What the heck is a mod­i­fied car doing in a stock divi­sion? Then in comes what we called the turquoise triplets, a ’57 turquoise and white Chevy again heav­ily mod­i­fied, a beau­ti­ful orig­i­nal ’57 Corvette same col­ors and then a ’57 all Turquoise Lin­coln con­vert­ible that looked as if it just came off the show­room floor. At this point I’m think­ing, I’m doomed.….… It con­tin­ued on with more mod­i­fied Chevys and I set­tled in for a long day.

Turns out the Lin­coln owner and I met 2 weeks ago at the Feed­ing Hills event, but that time he was dri­ving a ’60 Lin­coln Mark V con­vert­ible in dark gray paint, also beau­ti­ful!  I couldn’t resist and asked him how many of those he had and with a smile he said about a dozen!  Any­way, as always we gen­er­ated a tremen­dous amount of inter­est and com­pli­ments.  I was approached by 3 peo­ple from the CPTV pub­lic access chan­nel 15, who it turns out were film­ing a seg­ment for their show “Your Mileage May Vary,” they spent about 20 min­utes film­ing and inter­view­ing me about the car, don’t know when it will air, but they promised to for­ward me a copy of the show on DVD when it is ready,  Can’t wait to see it when it is done.

As the day fin­ished, I was at the award cer­e­mony and when they announced the Lin­coln as the first run­ner up, I’m think­ing WOW that ’57 Vette is a sure win­ner now!  Then they announce the Corvette as the sec­ond run­ner up, now I’m think­ing I’m going to be really PO’d when a mod­i­fied car wins in a stock divi­sion when they announce we are the first place win­ner.….…..  It is the coolest tro­phy we’ve won so far, and while they did not announce it as such, I believe that the tro­phy was made by the kids them­selves, mak­ing it extra spe­cial!  It will cer­tainly rest in a spe­cial place and not soon be for­got­ten!  What a way to cel­e­brate Father’s Day, you can be sure we will be back again next year.….…

I’ll post more pho­tos when time per­mits, until then.….…..

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