Posted by Daniel Strohl on January 23, 2007 under Daniel Strohl, Hemmings Classic Car, junkyards and abandoned vehicles, snowmobiles, station wagons, trucks and Jeeps | 
One of the gals upstairs had an uncle who wanted to start an auto repair business back in the 1960s or so. Apparently, his business approach consisted of buying up broken-down cars, hauling them back to his place and using them for parts to repair customer cars.
Well, the business didn’t last too long, but he still had all these cars up on a hill on his property. Fast forward 40 years and only the elements touched the cars. The uncle recently passed, though before he did, a couple editorial staffers got a nice tour of the collection. Their fate, as far as we know, is up in the air. Their location, until such fate is decided, remains a secret.
Posted by Daniel Strohl on January 8, 2007 under Daniel Strohl, Hemmings Classic Car, Hershey, shows, exhibitions and events, snowmobiles |
The Nova snowmobile and the Metro-Sled were no mere flukes. Decades before, Model T owners in the Snow Belt of North America, convinced their Ts could do anything, including milking the cows and animal husbandry, converted their rides into sleds. Fortunately, they had assistance from a kit developed by Virgil D. White, of West Ossipee, New Hampshire, a Ford garage owner who is thought to have coined the term snowmobile in 1913 when he patented his conversion kit, consisting of a pair of wooden skis in the front and a track at the rear driven by two of the Model T’s wheels (the front wheels moved to the back, where they served, essentially, as idler gears).
According to an article in a local newspaper, White eventually sold about 25,000 of the snowmobile conversion kits during the 1920s, enough of which survive today to warrant the Model T Snowmobile Club of America, a chapter of the Model T Ford Club of America. The kits proved popular among rural doctors and mailmen, but the end of the 1920s saw the demise of the Model T snowmobile and of White’s Snowmobile Company, Inc., as municipalities started to first pave their roads and then plow them.
I shot the T snowmobile above at Hershey this year, shortly before the Model T Snowmobile Club’s annual meet. This year’s Model T snowmobile show, by the way, will take place February 2-4 at Lake George, New York.
UPDATE: It looks like Coop wants one of these bad. He provides a link to one that was used as a postal delivery vehicle in Central Square, New York.
Posted by Daniel Strohl on January 5, 2007 under Daniel Strohl, Hemmings Classic Car, snowmobiles, stuff Dan lusts after |
This one’s been floating around for more than a year, but with the Nova snowmobile and the snowed-in cars that we’ve featured recently, I couldn’t go without posting the Metro-Sled, as its unnamed builder christened it. He took a 1957 Nash Metropolitan, added a rear-mounted 1998 Yamaha three-cylinder 700 SRX snowmobile engine, twin Polaris tracks and twin Ski-Doo suspensions. Owner had it for sale in November of 2005, asking $10,000, but I don’t know whether he has sold it since.
I’ll give featured space right here to anybody who’s ever turned a Metropolitan into a jet ski – Met-ski!