My dream car. Yes, "Super Bird." Some had cool Road Runner horns. Dodge had the Daytona Charger. Those cars were so bad NASCAR banned them!
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Thunderbird Club
- Thread starter TBird1958
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- club thunderbird
Need more doller signs. More like: $$$,$$$!
One bird to rule them all, one bird to find them,
One bird to bring them all, and in the low end bind them;
In the Land of Music where the dancers lie.
As far as I'm concerned 75% or more fit the abomination category. Cars used to be rolling works of art. Even if they didn't run well, they still looked amazing sitting still. Thanks to the smarter than everyone else do-gooders, we now have what we have instead of what people actually prefer.
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Thanks. The first was a '72 Plymouth Scamp (318), the second '76 Chrysler Cordoba (400). It had the most plush interior I've ever seen in a factory car. It looked so good girls loved to comment on it. Always came with a free tour! Not always accepted, but don't want to talk about that.
My first car was a motorcycle (as were several others), so I kind of laughed at people who complained about their cars in cold weather- although we didn't have to worry about frost or actual freezing that often. And we did the wing mirror window trick in Helen's Beetle in college. I had learned that from Dad as a kid on our station wagon in El Paso when the heater quit working.
I thought, since there's a lot of talk about 1st/high school cars, I'd join in the nostalgia-talk
This isn't my actual car, no digital pics of it (and the film ones are....maybe (probably) in my storage unit? But this is mostly close, but prettier than mine was. It was one of the "too loud" cars that I drove for years. Loved that car!
1969 Dodge Coronet:
View attachment 4149974
I loved those. Had a model of one, and dreamed I'd some day own one. I never did, but ended up getting to drive Mema's a lot the summer I was 16. No clue how she ended up with one. She drove very sedately when I was in it. I can't say I alway did when she wasn't.
TLDR: adventures in a van with tons of personality as odd as my own.
In 1975, I bought a 1966 Econoline work van, the pale yellow version. 2x12 wood bumpers, painted a glossy black (they could have been steel until you got close). "Jesus saves" graffiti'd on the driver's side in flat gray. The Recaro-clone seats. Three on the tree connected to a six-banger.[0] Huge mags and tires. A 12" drag racing steering wheel with manual steering.[1] Two decent, home-built bass bins with 15" speakers left in the back (not built-in, just there)[2]. That's how it came from the previous owner. People tended to give it room on the road.
I bought a stereo for it at an electronics show, not realizing they weren't all the same size. I bought some speakers meant to mount on the rear shelf of a sedan or coupe and hung them from the walls by the roof. The stereo sat on the floor in front of the engine hump, facing up, except when maneuvers moved it. I hung a wire across the van by the roof just behind the drivers seat, and kept a heavy afghan to throw over it in the winter, trapping the heat up front. It turned out to also be good for privacy while camping. (The seats worked pretty well for sleeping, too.)
One day, giving Maybe (a co-worker) a ride home, I hit a big railroad track bump at speed like I usually did because it would launch me toward the roof. She froke as she saw it coming and put her feet on the dash to brace herself. When we hit the bump, the home-made seat mounts gave way and her seat fell over backward. She screamed and then started laughing. We got the seat reattached, but it was never quite as safe after that. She alternately giggled and cussed me out the rest of the way to her house.
Not long after Sharon and I started dating, she started riding on the engine hump to sit closer to me. Good thing she was already hot, because that was a toasty place to sit! The van had electrical problems, and we spent a number of dates debugging and fixing those. That should have been a clue right there we were going to end up married.
It eventually threw a rod in the middle of nowhere. The only shop around took three times as long to fix it as promised, and when I got it back, the rebuilt replacement motor was never as good as the original. Also, it had a worn clutch linkage pivot point, so sometimes when you went to shift, WHOMP! and the clutch pedal went limply to the floor. I got really good at prying it back on from underneath the van in mere seconds. It died a few months after Sharon and I got married. 8^(
[0] The shifter mounting bracket was worn out, so by default you had reverse and first, or second and third. To switch between the two, you had to stand up and slam down on the shifter close to the column, or just yank up right there. This was a workout in traffic, too.
[1] I lived and drove in heavy traffic from north Atlanta through downtown into East Point, which was smack in south Atlanta. Within a week, I'd added an inch to my biceps wrestling that thing around!
[2] I hauled those around for years. Finally pulled them apart and tossed the wood- about a year before I switched from guitar to bass. (SMH)
Nice! And yeah, the Epi PUPS sound great. A little different than Gibsons, but still a nice, pleasant grind.
Agreed!
But then again, I think almost everything looks better in candy apple red, or similar
I prefer metalflake, but red is always a great choice.
But maybe a Texas flag on the top and gas tank.
Ha!...ironically, that car came from “General Grant” territory LOL.....
"If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'"
- Jun 30, 2010
- 49,587
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- Disclosures
- musician/artist/owner - Gildaxe
Russ Meyers - a true eccentric filmmaker
I built a plywood box in the back of mine. Wall-to-wall, about 15" high, the size of a twin bed mattress(
), with a pair of 7ender 12" re-coned bass amp speakers and a coupla piezo tweeters in the front of it; separated by a vertical piece of plywood effectively creating 2 side by each bass cabs. The back side of the box was hinged on one side to swing open giving access to the spare tire, jack, and other[stuff] that was hidden from view. Amps, THUNDERBIRD, etc. went in the side or on top of the 'bed'. 302 V8, 3 on the tree, no AC(had a roof mounted air scoop about a foot back from the windshield and a vent 1' from the back of the roof-it helped[?]), pretty decent Radio Shack AM/FM/Cassette unit. Crappy clutch linkage as you pointed out. Broke once. Had to drive home shifting w/o the clutch. Turn it off at stop lights/signs, start it in first. Had a Busch beer tap handle as a shift knob. First of many vans.
I built a plywood box in the back of mine. Wall-to-wall, about 15" high, the size of a twin bed mattress(
), with a pair of 7ender 12" re-coned bass amp speakers and a coupla piezo tweeters in the front of it; separated by a vertical piece of plywood effectively creating 2 side by each bass cabs. The back side of the box was hinged on one side to swing open giving access to the spare tire, jack, and other[stuff] that was hidden from view. Amps, THUNDERBIRD, etc. went in the side or on top of the 'bed'. 302 V8, 3 on the tree, no AC(had a roof mounted air scoop about a foot back from the windshield and a vent 1' from the back of the roof-it helped[?]), pretty decent Radio Shack AM/FM/Cassette unit. Crappy clutch linkage as you pointed out. Broke once. Had to drive home shifting w/o the clutch. Turn it off at stop lights/signs, start it in first. Had a Busch beer tap handle as a shift knob. First of many vans.EDIT: Stoopid slow @$$ computer. ^&*()%$#@!
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there are many to choose from as far as practicality and price....everyone seems hung up on the 70 Cuda, 69 SS Chevelle and the 69 429 Cobra Mustang which although deserving the status, are NOT the only players..there are Vettes, Torinos, Javelins, GTOs and on and on, some really packing a punch for a non exorbitant but climbing price tag......not unlike playing a properly setup Thunderbird into the right rig..... NOTHING comes close to a large displacement high torque American OHV small block coupled to a manual transmission in a short wheelbase chassis...What an awesome Mopar!
Would look stunning in Candy Apple Red. Unfortunately the Coronets like almost all the other muscle cars these days have increased so much in value it makes it rather hard to justify buying one for fun, and they really aren't very practical daily drivers. I'm just waiting for the stock market to collapse and the zombie apocalypse to start so I can trade a few bags of food for a sweet 1970 429 Boss Mustang or maybe a Hemi Cuda.
Well, a guy can dream can't he.
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