|
Browse by Tags
All Tags » 1970s » 1974 ( RSS)
-
|
Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. When we had the quasi-abandoned '70 Karmann Ghia last month, I got a flood of emails from rusty-state readers who were aghast that such a rare car would be allowed to go to The Crusher. Thing is, Karmann Ghias aren't at all rare around here; I've been passing today's car- which is located just a few blocks from my house- for months and months, figuring I'd get around to shooting it one of these days. And here it is! This one might not be a '74, but the bumpers place it somewhere in the Malaise Era. It's a Beetle under the skin, but for some crazy reason the sporty Karmann Ghia actually weighs more than the utilitarian Beetle: 1,919 versus 1,831 pounds. Both cars got the 46-horsepower 1600 engine. Yes, US emission-control regulations were tough on the air-cooled VW. The price tag on the Karmann Ghia was pretty nice for a...
|
-
|
Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! Yesterday, the "get out of jail free" supercharged Beretta edged out the "must stand 100 feet back to take the photo" Mazda Millenia in the Choose Your Eternity poll , in a 54:46 split vote. For today, we're going with a couple of cars suggested by 24 Hours Of LeMons -loving readers who were inspired by the Corvair and Peugeot 505 Turbo racers to look for even better LeMons entries… When you think about a Chrysler-engined British car, the Jensen Interceptor is probably the first thing that comes to mind. While the Interceptor makes a fine Project Car Hell candidate , its perceived value to Jensen masochists aficionados is such that you'll never find one for anywhere close to the 500-buck 24 Hours Of LeMons limit. Hold on, though- what about the Bristol 408 ? Powered by the good ol' reliable Chrysler 313 , the Bristol combined...
|
-
|
This is Down On The Street Bonus Edition , where we check out interesting street-parked cars located in places other than the Island That Rust Forgot . Today we're going to show that old GM cars don't always dissolve into reddish stains on the pavement, even in a damp climate like the Pacific Northwest. Zeet has photographed this pair of very solid-looking examples of The General's products for us; note that all eight hubcaps are still present! galleryPost('DOTSBEOlyGMs', 3, '1963 Pontiac Bonneville And 1974 Chevrolet Nova Down On The Olympia Street'); DOTS FAQ
|
-
|
Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Today's car is a model that you'd expect to find on the island in large numbers, given the sheer quantities sold, but that's not the case. In fact, this is only the fifth Chevy Nova (we've had a '63 , a '70 , a '74 , and a '77 so far) in this series. Why so many more Dodge Darts then Chevy Novas? I think the answer lies partly in the incredible durability of the Slant Six and partly in the simple equation [Nova + Junkyard Small-Block + Cheap Beer = Oblivion] . Yes, when you have a car that takes the engine with the best power-to-money ratio in the world as a bolt-in, you figure there won't be many left in a hoon-friendly area like the East Bay after a few decades. Still, this refrigerator-white '74 (which lives just around the corner from the '69 Volvo P1800 ) has beaten the odds, looking like it just rolled...
|
-
|
Many years ago, I bought a bunch of used glass 35mm slide mounts at a photography-gear store. Some of them came with transparencies used by Malaise Era Chrysler dealerships, including this classic shot of the 1974 Hang Ten Edition Dodge Dart. See, 1974 was a great car year!
|
-
|
We know, The Dude's Gran Torino was a 1973 model, but this '74 would have done an equally good job as Jeff Bridges' movie ride. Hollywood stardom eluded this Malaise Ford sedan, however, and now it awaits a trip to the Schnitzer Steel facility at the Port Of Oakland. galleryPost('DOTJ74GranTorino', 3, '1974 Ford Gran Torino Down On The Junkyard');
|
-
|
It was Half Price Day at the local self-service yard last weekend, and I had my eye on a Porsche 928 that had been there the week before, thinking I could buy that purty Porsche intake manifold to hang on my wall . Sadly, the 928 had already gone to The Crusher, so I decided I might as well check for other interesting stuff... and, sure enough, here was a super-rare '74 Datsun 610 wagon. The L20B is still there, and so is the factory 8-track player. Well, the 8-track was there, since I felt compelled to grab it. After buying all those 8-track tapes for the Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox , I need a backup deck! galleryPost('DOTJ74Dats610', 3, '1974 Datsun 610 Wagon Down On The Junkyard');
|
-
|
We saw a somewhat rough E9 BMW last fall, and now we're going to look at one that's a bit nicer. I've seen this '74 3.0 CS moving around under its own power pretty regularly, while the '73 3.0 CSi seems to be more a work in progress. The 2002s seem to get a lot more love than the big 6-cylinder cars of this era, but we'll see who fares best in the poll after the jump. Looking at the past BMWs in this series, I'm realizing that I ought to go photograph one of the late-70s/early-80s 5- and 7-series cars I see around town. They're DOTS-worthy, yes? This car lives quite close to the 1972 Fury , which can be seen in the background of this photo. Same era, totally different philosophy. The price tags on the two cars differed quite markedly as well. The '74 3.0 CSi coupe sold for $10,634, while the '72 Fury III 4-door hardtop listed at $3,813. You got a 150-horse 318 V8 standard in the Plymouth, while the BMW cranked out 170 horses from its 3-liter six ...
|
-
|
The VW Thing was only sold in North America for the 1973 and 1974 model years; we've already seen a '73 , which means we're due for a '74 (there's no telling what manner of VW the Very Low Thing really is). Alameda has at least two more Things parked on the street (that I know about), and this one appears to be the nicest one. It definitely gets driven regularly, although the Low Thing is the one I see driving most frequently . It's got a rollbar, the doors have been removed, and perhaps the engine has been upgraded from the original 46 horsepower. This Thing is ready for some serious off-road action... which it won't find in the utterly flat and quite urban terrain of Alameda. The Beetle's interior seems pretty luxurious next to the Thing's, but you can see the family resemblance in the steering wheel, speedometer, shifter, etc. I hope the owner hasn't lost the doors, which can be removed without tools. The rainy winters here tend to promote rust...
|
-
|
This DOTS Bonus Edition thing has really taken off, with photos coming in faster than I can post them (be patient- my jumble of files rigorously organized system will result in everyone's shots appearing sooner or later). We've seen North American cars and a few in Europe, and now it's South America's turn. Chilean reader Felipe sees this '74 Torino parked in his neighborhood (I forgot to ask which city), and he's gone out and interviewed the owner for us. ¡Gracias, Felipe! Make the jump for the car's story... but before that, let's look at a Malaise Torino that's not quite as nice as this one! galleryPost('DOTSBEChileTorino', 9, '1974 Ford Torino Down On The Chilean Street'); This Gran Torino Brougham from the year 1974, was imported new to Santiago de Chile. Around the year 1990 it was sold to the owner which I bought it to, it was taken to a southern city called Los Angeles (Not California). There it was well maintained, it was used...
|
-
|
The French car beat the German one in our last Choose Your Eternity matchup , which means we need to give France's cross-Channel rival an opportunity to snatch the PCH Trophy (which features several rods hanging out the side and a spreading pool of oil below) today. We're going with something a bit different this time, however; ever since the What Should Mad_Science Drive To Work QOTD, we've been thinking about non-petroleum-fueled car projects. Not boring ol' electric cars that can barely buzz up to highway speed, or seen-one-ya-seen-em-all veggie-oil-powered Mercedes-Benzes, though. Something fun! Something... HELL! There's no law that says you have to run dinosaur juice in your diesel; vegetable oil or animal fat works just fine! Oh sure, some worrywarts will tell you that you need to use some kind of witches' brew of methanol, lye, and who-knows-what-all and make actual biodiesel, but that's only if you want to run the stuff in an unmodified diesel engine...
|
-
|
With today's Engine of the Day being the AMC inline six, it seemed only good and proper that we have a Choose Your Eternity dilemma featuring a pair of vehicles powered by that fine powerplant. It's also good to have a couple of American cars, which I really can't use very often in this series because the stuff out of Detroit is too simple and parts obtainment is too easy to make for true hell. Not so with Kenosha products, though- even though the drivetrain parts are easy to find (thanks to the Jeep connection), the body and interior components are another story entirely. And today's trip into Hell isn't just about restoring an old AMC- it's about hot-rodding the six-cylinder engine so you get at least 300 reliable horsepower out of it. The road out of Hell is steep, you see, and you'll need plenty of power to climb out of the boiling sulfur! When you see an American rear-drive car with a big fiberglass hood scoop, brightly-colored racing stripes, and rear tires...
|
-
|
57% of answered in the negative when asked whether third-gen Camaros belong in this series , which means that it's been well over half a year since our most recent DOTSworthy Camaro (though if I can find the right '82 I'll go ahead and shoot it). Second-gen F-bodies are fairly plentiful on Alameda's streets, so it was no sweat finding a good example of an Early Malaise machine for today's post. I ran across this '74 in the vicinity of the '50 Dodge pickup and at least a half-dozen other DOTS vehicles; truly, this car's neighborhood is a rich vein of street-parked classic iron. The Camaro for '74 hadn't quite reached the overwhelming level of Malaise tape-stripe/plastic-snout overdecoration it would achieve a few years later, but you could see it coming. The 5MPH crash bumpers weren't quite as tragic on this car as on many of its peers, but the 145-horse 350 engine (185 horses if you went for the optional dual-exhaust powerplant) moved the car's...
|
-
|
newVideoPlayer("74_Comet_Capri_476.flv", 463, 387,""); How is it possible that a car weighing just over 2,200 pounds and equipped with a 2-liter engine can drive from Phoenix to Los Angeles at the maddeningly geriatric speed of 50 miles per hour and manage only a pathetic 32.4 miles per gallon? Yes, that's the best the '74 Capri could do! We're thinking it was the weight of several tons of Malaise pushing down hard on the car during the trip (not to mention the restrictive first-gen catalytic converters and miserable engine compression ratios of the era). The six-cylinder Comet made the same trip and grunted out an Saudi-oil-baron-pleasing 26.6 MPG, so we shudder to imagine the sort of single-digit mileage a 460-equipped Country Squire would have achieved.
|
-
|
The completely indecipherable photograph and PCH Superpower heritage of the '48 Morris Minor truck were the winning combination when it came to beating the 89-year-old Dodge in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll . Today we're going with a regional theme, because the last time we had two vehicles from the same American region was when we had the PCH Philadelphia Edition , and that's just too long. Today we're looking at some high-quality project material from the state where the Civil War began: South Carolina! Thanks (and a PCH Tipster T-shirt ) go to Ktek01 for these tips! The Triumph Spitfire has good Hell Potential, of course, but it's just too slow to be cool enough. But when you go for the GT6... now you're talking! So head on down to Columbia and pick up this 1971 Triumph GT6 (go here if the ad disappears) for just one thousand dollars. That seems pretty cheap, doesn't it? Well, some negative-minded folks might read the part of the car's description...
|
More Posts Next page »
|
|
|