This why I shouldn't be scanning the for sale ads on the AACA website.

1948 Lincoln Continental offered at 35,000.
Or B/O

I often find something that I would really like to own. 

Sometimes the price is low enough that I can swing it. Barely.

Other times it's more than I can handle without a major reorganization of my hobby car fund. 

Look at this car, it's one of the final models of the Lincoln Continental. It doesn't have the delicate ship's prow of the original model, but it still is easily recognized as a Continental. This particular car has a rebuilt engine, a reupholstered interior and recent paint. The seller has owned it for quite a few years and uses it to take long tours. He says that he drives it all over, it never just sits. 

If you are looking for a vintage car, you should be looking for something like this. Asking price is 35,000 dollars and believe me, you could never restore a car for close to that price. And it is a well sorted out machine. 

I'm always loving on the green.

This is quite a bit more expensive than what I would generally consider.

On the other hand, this Cadillac is offered at 11,000 dollars.

The '65 Cadillac is perhaps the personification of the marque I appreciated as I was growing up. In other words, this is a Cadillac that really looks like a Cadillac!

This is a clean, gimmick free design, in many ways similar to the 1961 Lincoln Continental.

The price of the old Lincoln would be quite a reach, it is more than twice what I've got tied up in my current hobby fleet. Of course I've toyed with the idea of financing  a car...

After looking at these cars I will admit that they tug at the old heartstrings.

But would trying to acquire either of these cars be a good idea?

And, if I were to buy one of these cars, would it be something that would make me happy?

Probably, maybe, who knows? 

I'd been reading that the new Navigators and Aviators have been having a bit of a problem with fragging transmissions. Even worse, was the report that some Navigators were spontaneously catching on fire! 

Then I read that the Nautilus will be going out of production after '23 due to poor sales. It was reported to have transmission problems also.

The "new" Continental was discontinued after three years of poor sales. 

What does it matter to me? It wasn't like I was ever going to buy a new one!

Of course, there is an even better solution. There are benefits of buying used. 

I really like my Navigator. Why not just drive the Navigator? It's been around for 100,000 miles and 17 years. If it was going to catch on fire, it probably would have done it already!

It only has a bit over 100,000 miles, so it's got a lot of life left.

I've been driving it more than my '06 Mustang, probably because it's been raining so much, and I don't want to get it dirty. And, the Navigator is parked in the driveway and readily available.

I have even got to thinking, maybe it would be best if I only had one hobby car at a time, and drove the heck out of it for a few years. Then sell it, trade it in, whatever, and start over with another car. Why have other cars just sitting around costing me money?

Why do I think that I need a collection?

I have other "family cars" 

Is this kind of talk Heresy? Maybe.

The point was driven home as I was working on my garage door. I realized that those two Mustangs are just sitting in the garage.

Do I really want to keep any car for my entire life? Is there anything that I want that much?

Dangerous talk? Again, maybe. 

I should make a real effort to keep my cars in the rotation.

Am I just saying this because I was frustrated about my '96 Mustang and the smog situation? Probably.

 Or maybe, this is just what I get for thinking!

 Every once in a while, I still think about riding motorcycles.

This beautiful '64 Sportser is selling for 14,000 dollars.

Again.

I rode motorcycles for a very long time, around forty years, and I rode a lot. Not just on weekends, puttin' around town. I rode every day, through all kinds of weather, and on many long trips. 

When I quit riding them, some in my family were kind of shocked. My Brother said, "that's kind of like Fonzi getting rid of his bike!" 

So, what happened? Was there any event that made me change my mind? 

Time? Maturity? Fear?

I'm firmly convinced that motorcycle riding is now more dangerous than it was, even back in the 1990's. Everyone is always on their cell phones, that includes a lot of the people driving down the road. At one time people would do the hands free Bluetooth thing, and talk on the phone, now they need their fingers to text. Their attention is directed for too long to that little screen. I wish people had to pay for their service by the minute, they would keep their messaging much shorter. 

I used my bikes for  everyday commuting to work. Besides longer trips, I used to take little rides around the area for fun. 

I found that over time that I just stopped going on these rides. Life's circumstances certainly change over the years.    

I have lived in my current location for almost forty years, add that to the time that I spent growing up in the East Bay. Except for a couple of years when I worked in the LA region, I've always lived in the Bay Area. 

When I was a kid, just starting out riding motorcycles, every trip down every back road or highway was an adventure. It was all new to me. Over the years I expanded my range, now it seems that I've been down almost every back road in my part of Northern California. 

It used to be that I had to go a hundred miles to hit some unfamiliar territory. Now I have to go much further.

That doesn't mean that I don't enjoy driving somewhere, I still do, but the point is, that I need to be actually going somewhere. I need a destination. Aimless wandering doesn't entertain me anymore. 

It was over ten years ago that I sold my last motorcycle, a Honda Shadow 1100. A couple of years later I bought an old Yamaha Virago as a project. My plan was to build it into a Bobber. The bike had some problems with the electric starter, a known problem, (which I didn't know about) that could not be easily or cheaply fixed. I thought I'd just buy and fix up this bike as a project, then sell it. It ultimately seemed kind of silly to buy a motorcycle if I never planned on riding it. 

I have sustained some fairly serious back injuries, ironically enough, it wasn't caused by a motorcycle incident, but work related. These took increasing amounts of time to recover from. The first episode was pretty debilitating, I even had difficulty walking for a while. Luckily, It only took three or four months for an improvement. Almost ten years later I had another incident, it was a re-injury, and this time it took almost a year to get back to 90% of normal. 

I am quite aware that another  re injury would take a long time to recover from, if I even had a "full" recovery. That doesn't make a strong recommendation to get back into riding. 

Do I even really miss riding? I was an extremely active rider, but I wasn't someone that rode like an idiot. You don't make it into your Fifties riding like that. 

I don't often go on long trips by myself, now usually it's me and the Wife, I don't think that she wants to ride a bike anywhere. I don't blame her, at my age I prefer to be comfortable. If I want an open air experience, I'd just take my convertible. I had kept my bike as a personal enjoyment, a part of myself to hold onto, during the times that family responsibilities required that I have uninteresting cars like our two minivans. 

So would I buy a bike just as a project, and not expect to ride it much, if at all? Maybe. 

The early HD Sportster is a bike that I am quite familiar with, However there are a few Japanese bikes that catch my eye, that might hold potential. The Sportsters have very simple electrical systems, they have few essential components, and the ones that they do have are easy to relocate and hide.

I found out that the old Virago had lots of electrical components; fuses, junctions, and relays, located in the headlamp housing as well as under the seat. I don't know how easy it would be to eliminate these components. Just like a modern car, these bikes are more complex. Newer HDs now even have fuel injection! I would need something very basic and simple.

I bought a buckle like this from an ad in the back of Easyriders
magazine back in the mid 1970's. I've still got the belt.

But I'm probably just kidding myself. Motorcycle riding is just something that is now part of my past. Motorcycling is about as likely to fit into my current life as that old Harley Davidson wing emblem belt is likely to fit around my current waist. Which is not at all! 

The time comes when you just have to put a part of your past life aside and move on. Even if I never ride again, I'll always have the memories. 

Not to mention the tattoo!

 Why do many old car guys think that only really old cars can be the vessels of our fondest memories?

Does it require sepia tones to be authentic history?
photo source: Unsplash

Black and white toned scenes float by in our memories. But how many of us were born in the era before color photography? How many of us have grown up in the digital age, where images are rarely, if ever, consigned to hard copies? 

You can think of the cars from your formative years. Unless you are well into your 80's, the cars of your memories are likely to originate from the 1980's and even later. I was born in the mid 1950's, my family's cars spanned the last years of the 1950's, then were from the 1960's. During the years of my early childhood my Dad bought only newer cars. They were either bought brand new, or only a few years used. Our parents had lives to live, and families to raise. They needed good cars to get things done. I know that during my childhood, my folks needed a good car to take care of business. There wasn't any nostalgia expended on an old car, they were just tools.

As a child growing up within your family, these are the cars that you rode in as a child. Cars that were driven on family vacations. For many of us growing up in the 1950's and '60's, it was a station wagon.  These were eventually replaced by minivans, and those were ultimately eclipsed by the SUV and Crossover. They were usually also the cars that you learned to drive in. 

Then there are those cars that you owned as a teenager, or as a young adult. For many of us they were the old family cars, handed down to us by our parents or relatives. If you were already a real "car person," they were the old cars that you bought for yourself. We either worked during the Summer, or during the year at a burger joint or gas station.

These are the cars of your past, they will probably not match the cars that are celebrated in popular culture. Like in American Graffiti or Happy Days. These are not the cars that authors like Thomas Murray like to use to draw the connections between the events and experiences of our lives, memories, and family.

But memories are being built all the time, right now in the present! "The Good Old Days"are occurring every single day, for someone who is experiencing Life for the first time.

While it's fun to reminisce about the cars of the old days, it's important not to overlook and devalue those that we are using to make our memories, right now. 

Using rose colored glasses we are looking back fondly, we forget the bad times. Oftentimes certain incidents take on a greater importance now, in retrospect, than they did when they actually occurred in the Past.

It's a trite expression that childhood has an expiration date.

So does Old Age! but it's not nice to mention it, or to remind others!

The vehicles that we owned and used during our own family's childhood years, probably play a bigger part in our kid's memories, than in ours. 

These were usually vehicles that we bought because we needed them, the four door sedan, the station wagon, the mini van, the SUV. Oftentimes, buying these required the selling of a favorite car. But family needs and responsibilities had to take priority.

They were not always what we would have preferred to spend our money on, but they were what we needed at the time.

I was reminded of this by events of the recent past

A three day road trip with my two grown kids including my son's fiance. 

Five now current adults in my new Ford Flex.

It's a bit sad to think that we will be moving apart as they build the rest of their lives together. My daughter will also start to build a future of her own.

I accept and even welcome that, my wish is that they will all be able to establish their own lives, and they need the freedom to do that.

I suppose that twenty years into the future we'll look back fondly on those trips in the Flex. The present will have become our collective Past.

Many times the actual perceptions and emotions that we are experiencing in the present, are quickly replaced by what is being anticipated. It is easy to dismiss the present as unworthy of the savoring, because we have become so focused on future events that we anticipate will be of more value. This can tend to lead us to "fast forward" through the present.

The same thing can happen with the recent past, we might feel that the events that occurred yesterday aren't "vintage" enough, and are instead considered commonplace. But it's these events that constitute "our" history. Thinking about the mid 2000's doesn't seem historic, but it certainly comprises a portion of our own personal history.

Recently I attended my 50th. high school reunion, I'll save you doing the math. I graduated from high school in 1973. So it's been awhile. 

A lot has occurred in my Life since I walked onto that stage to receive my high school diploma. Most of it has been more interesting and a lot more fun, than before I walked off that gymnasium stage. As an adult I became responsible for determining the direction of my own life, and later, that of my family. It wasn't always easy, and it didn't always turn out as well as I expected, or had hoped for.  But overall I think that I've come out ahead.

Whatever my Life has been, it might not have been epic, but it was mine. I guess that's enough. 

Minivans full of memories, nothing wrong with that.

 My '06 Mustang GT personalization post was well received.

This is the before shot.

I saw pageview numbers that I haven't seen in a long time.

I had tacked on an addendum to that post that stated that I had installed the spoiler and was pleased. That is true, but I forgot that I had taken a few photos of the process.

I had toyed with the idea of ordering this part, but it had been back logged for months. American Muscle kept sending me teases, when I finally checked it out, I found that the part was not only in stock, it was discounted a few bucks, and best of all, it had free delivery!

This thing comes in a big box! It was well packed and I received it in about a week with no damage.

I watched the installation video and they recommended either raising the car on a lift or jacking it up so that you could turn the wheels during the installation. I found it was easy to raise the front a bit with a small jack under the crossmember. 

Those little jacks have their uses.

I handled the installation by myself. It's a good idea to lay down an old blanket as you'll be flipping the spoiler upside down and it will get scratched and scuffed by rubbing on the concrete driveway. I also had a couple of bungee cords hooked up under the hood and hanging down in front of the bumper. This way I could keep the spoiler higher and in a better position. I had used this same trick when installing the chin spoiler on my '96 Mustang. I only have two hands!

The spoiler rests on the original lower bumper opening and is held in the wheel well area by four screws. The double sided tape is supplied in the kit, but it might be a good idea to mock up the positioning and length of the tape strips with painters blue tape first. I ran a little short of tape by putting a little too much in a couple of spots. I had to use some of my old cheap, no brand, double sided tape to make up the difference. 

Either do a mock up of the tape placement, or just buy another roll of tape. 

Just for comparison.

Looking Good!

It was a really easy installation and the result was highly satisfactory!  A week afterwards I took the car on a 300+ mile round trip up to Placerville with no problems.

Fuel economy on the way up was 25.9 mpg. keeping it mostly down to 70 mph. On the trip home I put the top down and lost a couple of miles per gallon. My result on the trip home was 23.9 mpg. Pretty much what I expected. Would it be worth driving an econo box to pick up another five miles per gallon? I don't think so. 

I plan to order the black honeycomb deck lid panel and the black tail lamp trim in a couple of weeks. I'll post my experience with the installation.

I think that these early S197 Mustangs are great cars, even with the V6. And the V6s  are priced at really tempting levels right now. I wouldn't mind picking up a fastback and making a more faithful Mach One replica or another convertible that I would like to turn into a mild custom.