dnastrau
Well-known member
Very cool video - I would love to do this (and keep the car afterward!) It is better viewed in expanded (full) screen mode by clicking the four arrow button in You-tube.
X-country in a '66 Chrysler 300: time lapse video (cool!)
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dnastrau
Well-known member
Here is a car like the one in the video
Love the 1965-68 slab-side Chryslers...
Love the 1965-68 slab-side Chryslers...
That was fun, thanks!
If they really only broke down once, pretty impressive.
If they really only broke down once, pretty impressive.
dnastrau
Well-known member
If kept in good repair...
...those old Mopars were quite reliable. I would have no qualms about taking a long trip in one as long as I had a spare set of points and a ballast resistor in the glove compartment. That is true of most American cars of that vintage in my opinion.
...those old Mopars were quite reliable. I would have no qualms about taking a long trip in one as long as I had a spare set of points and a ballast resistor in the glove compartment. That is true of most American cars of that vintage in my opinion.
I enjoyed the video. And more, I love cross country road trips. Here's a link to a site for guy that did one in his 1958 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham. I'm posting the link to what I think is the first part of the trip as I found his site rather wonky to navigate. Seems like half his archives are missing.
A buddy of mine just last fall took a trip from here in Phx, AZ to his family's farm back in Ohio in his 1934 Pontiac. His original plan was to drive it up there and back. Bout 5 hours from his family's farm it broke down. Ended up having to leave it there for an extra month while the engine got rebuilt. (The engine had been rebuilt by a place here in Phx about a year before the trip, but they did a crappy job.) Luckily he found a guy who specalized in cars from the 30's nearby his family. After it got done he flew back to Ohio and ended up driving it back here to AZ. This is a picture of him and his car in December a couple months after he got back with it. He's the one with the santa's hat on.
Thanks for the link, Andrew; it was a very cool video and the car is drool-worthy. I also love cross-country drives, and what a classic car.
Don't know if I'd have the cojones to try it in a '34 Pontiac, though, Justin, LOL. What an experience that must have been!
Don't know if I'd have the cojones to try it in a '34 Pontiac, though, Justin, LOL. What an experience that must have been!
dnastrau
Well-known member
You are welcome
Yep, I don't know if I'd have the nerve to drive a '34 Pontiac across the country either. Cars progressed a lot between '34 and '66!
Yep, I don't know if I'd have the nerve to drive a '34 Pontiac across the country either. Cars progressed a lot between '34 and '66!
Good video. I'm another fan of cross country road trips either in the car or on the bike and seeing what's out there, there's an awful lot to see and most people never do anymore.
In my experience...
...as the owner of a '62 Chevy and a '64 Lincoln, you can expect breakdowns of one sort of another in a car of that age, if you drive them long enough. I'm not talking about throwing a rod, but all kinds of things happen when mechanical and electrical parts get old. I can't count the number of times I ended up being towed. Comes with the territory! It isn't a reflection on how they were originally built.
Pontiacs were so attractive in the early Thirties! Their chief stylist then was Franklin Hershey, who later was responsible for the '55 Thunderbird, as I recall.
...as the owner of a '62 Chevy and a '64 Lincoln, you can expect breakdowns of one sort of another in a car of that age, if you drive them long enough. I'm not talking about throwing a rod, but all kinds of things happen when mechanical and electrical parts get old. I can't count the number of times I ended up being towed. Comes with the territory! It isn't a reflection on how they were originally built.
Pontiacs were so attractive in the early Thirties! Their chief stylist then was Franklin Hershey, who later was responsible for the '55 Thunderbird, as I recall.
Road trip in an ancient car? Sure!
I'd do it in the '34 Pontiac.
Not much of a competition, but Elginkid and I just got back from visiting a friend in Decatur, IL (I replaced a 30+ year old water heater and a lot of galvanized water pipe). We traveld to and from Decatur in his 1982 Volvo 240 GL station wagon (technically a 245). On the way back, the odometer rolled over to 218,000 miles.
We did suffer a breakdown of sorts, however. He knew the car needed a tuneup before we left and never did it. While in Decatur, we had to go to Menard's for more plumbing supplies. It had been raining all day and the car wouldn't start. We had our friend drive us to the auto parts store and we got some supplies. All we were able to replace at the time were the spark-plug wires (fixed it).
The drive was pretty nice and the sense of controlled adventure was great.
I'd drive a road trip in an old high-mileage car anytime (provided I knew what condition the car was in first),
Dave
I'd do it in the '34 Pontiac.
Not much of a competition, but Elginkid and I just got back from visiting a friend in Decatur, IL (I replaced a 30+ year old water heater and a lot of galvanized water pipe). We traveld to and from Decatur in his 1982 Volvo 240 GL station wagon (technically a 245). On the way back, the odometer rolled over to 218,000 miles.
We did suffer a breakdown of sorts, however. He knew the car needed a tuneup before we left and never did it. While in Decatur, we had to go to Menard's for more plumbing supplies. It had been raining all day and the car wouldn't start. We had our friend drive us to the auto parts store and we got some supplies. All we were able to replace at the time were the spark-plug wires (fixed it).
The drive was pretty nice and the sense of controlled adventure was great.
I'd drive a road trip in an old high-mileage car anytime (provided I knew what condition the car was in first),
Dave
There is one big difference between cars built before the mid '50s and those afterwards: it wasn't until then that there were many places in the world with modern controlled access, high speed highways. The first modern highways were Germany's autobahns in the '30s, then a few freeways here in the US in the '40s. Outside of these most non-urban driving was done on indifferently surfaced two lane roads with frequent intersections, which kept practical speeds down in many areas to 50-60 mph.
Constant high speeds will overstress a poorly designed engine, most particularly in the bottom end. Some pre-'50s cars had plenty of bearing area and good oil supply, but some didn't. I'd feel comfortable running all day at 70-75 mph on an interstate in a well-maintained car from the late '50s on, but with a prewar car in particular I think it would be best to stay on secondary roads and keep the speeds down.
There is a famous story about some troubles Rolls-Royce had in the '30s when the autobahns first opened. By the standards of the day, most R-Rs were quite fast cars and of course very well built. Some wealthy Britons were used to taking motoring vacations to the Continent, and when they first discovered the newly opend autobahns they simply put their feet down and ran the cars at 80 mph plus. The result in some cases was overheating, in others bearings failed with catastrophic results. R-R had to admonish their customers that top speed and cruising speed were two very different things. This might seem pretty self-evident, but in Britain of that time there was simply no place outside a racetrack that one could maintain autobahn speeds for long enough to damage an R-R engine so it had never been a problem, though undoubtedly R-R knew of the limitations.
Here in the US the Chevy "stovebolt six" was a mostly laudable engine, smooth and reliable and with overhead valves, but until '53 they all had the very nasty combination of heavy cast iron pistons and splash lube for the rod bearings (no oil galleries to feed the rods). My father experienced a failure in his '53, one of the last splash-lube Chevys, on a long drive in '58 from LA to east Texas. He'd bought the car new and maintained it well, but somewhere in west Texas one of those rod bearings gave up. Being an engineer who grew up with Chevys, he was able to drop the sump and rotate the bearing around, then removed the spark plug wire so that cylinder wouldn't fire. He made it the final few hundred miles of his trip on five cylinders, then bought a nearly new '57 Ford as he knew the Chevy wasn't really up to interstate driving.
Constant high speeds will overstress a poorly designed engine, most particularly in the bottom end. Some pre-'50s cars had plenty of bearing area and good oil supply, but some didn't. I'd feel comfortable running all day at 70-75 mph on an interstate in a well-maintained car from the late '50s on, but with a prewar car in particular I think it would be best to stay on secondary roads and keep the speeds down.
There is a famous story about some troubles Rolls-Royce had in the '30s when the autobahns first opened. By the standards of the day, most R-Rs were quite fast cars and of course very well built. Some wealthy Britons were used to taking motoring vacations to the Continent, and when they first discovered the newly opend autobahns they simply put their feet down and ran the cars at 80 mph plus. The result in some cases was overheating, in others bearings failed with catastrophic results. R-R had to admonish their customers that top speed and cruising speed were two very different things. This might seem pretty self-evident, but in Britain of that time there was simply no place outside a racetrack that one could maintain autobahn speeds for long enough to damage an R-R engine so it had never been a problem, though undoubtedly R-R knew of the limitations.
Here in the US the Chevy "stovebolt six" was a mostly laudable engine, smooth and reliable and with overhead valves, but until '53 they all had the very nasty combination of heavy cast iron pistons and splash lube for the rod bearings (no oil galleries to feed the rods). My father experienced a failure in his '53, one of the last splash-lube Chevys, on a long drive in '58 from LA to east Texas. He'd bought the car new and maintained it well, but somewhere in west Texas one of those rod bearings gave up. Being an engineer who grew up with Chevys, he was able to drop the sump and rotate the bearing around, then removed the spark plug wire so that cylinder wouldn't fire. He made it the final few hundred miles of his trip on five cylinders, then bought a nearly new '57 Ford as he knew the Chevy wasn't really up to interstate driving.
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