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David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Mar 21

Coo loo coo coo, coo coo coo coo!

Get in hosers, today's episode of Dave's Car ID Service is taking off for the Great White North with a salute the oddball world of Canadian-spec car models and brands.

Pictured airdropping a keg of Elsinore over Toronto: Bob & Doug McKenzie's 1977 GMC Vandura from the Canadian cinematic masterpiece STRANGE BREW (1983). Sadly not a Canada spec item, but there was an era when residents of Canada had a bevy of cars Detroit (more specifically Windsor) made especially for them - albeit minor twists on their American cousins.

Oddly enough, due to a geographical oddity, our story begins SOUTH of the border in Windsor Ontario. It's south of Detroit, Google-map it. Anyhoo more than 100 years ago, Detroit car makers set up plants in Windsor for the Canadian market. The models were basically the same as US; a Canadian Model T was exactly the same a US Model T. Local manufacture was largely due to tax advantages.

But eventually there was a marketing advantage to having distinct branding for Canada, with the vehicles becoming a source of Canuck pride.

Nowhere was that pride greater than Canadian farms who were treated to the special pickup brands like Mercury and Fargo. Mercury was basically a rebadged Ford (1953 Mercury M-100 shown), and Fargo a rebadged Dodge. But for my money they have a bit more pizzazz and mystery to them than their US equivalents.

It is kinda weird though that Chrysler chose an American town name for their Canadian trucks; I guess "Winnepeg" had too many letters for the badge.

Oddly enough, while Ford was making Mercury pickups in Canada it wasn't making Mercury cars; or at least up to 1961. For Canada, Mercury cars were rebranded as "Monarch." Pictured in (1) is a 1949 Monarch; and in (2) yours truly in a hubcap selfie with a 1946-48 Monarch hubcap, a de rigeur item with the hot rod set.

Ford's Canadian rebranding efforts didn't stop there; from 1949-76 Ford cars there were rebadged as "Meteor." In #3, a 1960 Mercury Montcalm. And there was the 1-year-only 1960 Frontenac brand, basically a rebadged Ford Falcon with a jazzed up grille.

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David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Mar 14

Good morning, car mystery fans! Today's Dave's Car ID Service topic is... Hail Marys. Swan songs. Curtain calls.

In the epic grand opera that is US automotive history, there are countless characters. Roughly 3000 different makes have entered the stage since 1890, and all but a handful have been knocked off at some point. Even Shakespeare didn't write that kind of mortality rate.

It wasn't all tragedy for those unfortunate doomed companies, though. Rather than dying with a wimper, a noble few stared into the eyes of the fiscal Grim Reaper and went out in a blaze of glory.

Exhibit A: the 1963-64 Studebaker Avanti. Struggling Studebaker was in its death throes in the early 1960s, and brought in Raymond Loewy & Associates to design a new personal luxury coupe to help boost moribund sales. The resulting Avanti was a stunner - clean, sophisticated, uniquely modern.

It wasn't enough to save Studebaker from the grave, but the Avanti became a design icon with a life of its own. In 1965 a group founded the Avanti car company (sans "Studebaker" in the name) to make continuations from remaining production bodies. In 1967 the Avanti II became powered by Chevy small block. The Avanti II remained in production until 2006 (although by then it was a Chevy Camaro with a stylized front end).

For an automotive design, that's staying power. Unfortunately for Studebaker the patient died, but hey, the operation was a success.

Studebaker wasn't the first dying patient to get an emergency design surgery from Dr. Loewy. In 1934 struggling Hupmobile commissioned him to jazz up their image with one of those sleek streamline designs he was famous for. Thus the 1934-37 Hupmobile 518 Aero-Dynamic was born.

Those moulded in headlights were far ahead of their time, especially for a modest price car. I would surely dig having a Hupmobile Aero-Dynamic coupe. But "Hupmobile Aero-Dynamic" almost sounds like an oxymoron, an old-timey horseless carriage make with a futuristic model name.

It wasn't the last gasp for Hupmobile though, that came with the 1939-41 Hupmobile Skylark. Not really a Hupmobile design though - it was based on the 1936-37 Cord 810/812 Westchester sedan (1), designed by Gordon Buehrig. Those "coffin nose" Cords, with front wheel drive, supercharged engines, and hideaway headlight remain a design classic, but it wasn't enough to save the company.

Hupmobile bought up spare Westchester bodies and parts to make the Skylark (2), which had conventional rear wheel drive and headlights.

Oddly enough Graham (formerly Graham-Paige) had its own Hail Mary Cord Westchester-based sedan, the 1939-41 Graham Hollywood (3). While it too was conventional rear wheel drive, it did offer a supercharger; I have one in my parts pile.

All three were handsome cars, but like handsome Ted McGinley, one unfortunately associated with multiple failures.

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David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Mar 11

https://twitter.com/JinWooIQ/status/2031765428608086230

This will be the most complicated Amazon order return ever

https://twitter.com/JinWooIQ/status/2031765428608086230

This is why I buy all my Chinese missiles at Harbor Freight, if they're duds they'll give you a store credit

I really like Harbor Freight Chinese missiles, they're perfectly fine when you need a cheap, low accuracy missile for a one-time project. But it does kinda bug me that they brand them as "Uncle Sam"

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David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Mar 10

https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/2031413910352302082

https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/2031413910352302082

https://x.com/iowahawkblog/status/1827424207925317702

https://x.com/iowahawkblog/status/1827424207925317702

Sure, I hate the Irish, but in my defense I am Irish

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David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Mar 8

Greetings, car mystery fans! In yesterday's thread I examined the strange story of Bib, Michelin's long running humanoid tire stack mascot. To further enhance public appreciation for the tire advertising arts, today's Dave's Car ID will delve deeper into a few bangers from the early days of tire promotion - starting with this 1933 illustration for General Tires.

Behold the insouciant Gatsbyesque power couple returning from the Copa, or somesuch swank uptown nightclub for millionaire swells, to his Streamline Deco penthouse apartment. Lithe curvaceous Daisy is already eager to get into something more comfortable, perhaps because of the champagne, or perhaps because of the soft cushioned ride there provided *SPOTLIGHT* the General Deluxe Dual Balloon tires on Jay's powerful coupe. The doorman knows what's up, and offers a salute and wink.

Buy General Dual Balloons.

Making tires - let's face it, the filthiest part of the car - glamorous and sexy is not the easiest job on Madison Avenue. But as a former tire shop monkey at Ben Fish & Son, I do appreciate the effort. General had a whole campaign in the early 1930s to glamorize and sex-up their new Dual Balloon (a/k/a General Jumbos).

I guess it was kind of the Pre-Hayes Code era of advertising, and the imagery is fantastic. Incidentally, General Jumbo tall sidewall tires and their associated special small diameter wheels are still quite a collector item amongst those of us in the hot rod & custom world.

Of course when it comes to selling with sex, the uninhibited French were first to apply it to tires (1), albeit bike tires. While Michelin was touting their weird monster TireMan, rival Badou countered with 1910 poster for their new Sirene model, featuring a beaming mermaid in the altogether.

Even the staid English got a bit daring in their 1930s tire ads. These ads for Dunlop (2-4) hint of some scandalous upper crust weekend in the English countryside, replete with infidelities - and a murder mystery. Which will be solved by a quirky genius detective using a clue found in a Dunlop tire.

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David Burge

@iowahawkblog

Mar 7

Time for an old fashioned Dave's Car ID Service meandering car history lesson! This time about the world's most disturbing, and long-serving, tire company mascot and restaurant critic, The Michelin Man.

That's what we here in the States call him anyway, elsewhere he's called 'Bib.' And how he came to be is a bit of a stemwinder, but one that you can use to amaze and/or bore to death fellow cocktail party guests.

Let's start with the Brothers Michelin, Edouard and Andre, who owned a farm implement business in the southern city of Clermont-Ferrand. One day circa 1887 a bicyclist showed up at their door with a pneumatic tire in need of repair. That was a real bitch at the time, a couple hours of work, because tires were fixed to the wheel rim. That inspired them to design and create the first removable pneumatic tire, for which they received a patent in 1891. Voila, les freres Michelin struck it rich almost overnight, what with the huge bicycle craze, followed by cars, trucks, and motorcycles.

This was also the high age of French advertising poster design, and you had to go big to attract attention on the poster-covered walls of Paris and Lyon. Enter "O'Galop," the pen name of French cartoonist Marius Rossillon. For the Michelins he designed a chimera tire-pile humanoid that that debuted at the Lyon exhibition in 1894.

The 1898 poster below, by O'Galop, show how 'Bib' got his name:

'Nunc est bibibendum!!' - a Latin quote from the Roman poet Horace, meaning 'Now is the time for drinking!!'

The rest is in French, which translates as "that's to say: to your health, Michelin tires drink up the obstacles!"

Thus Bib is short for Bibendum, which is Latin for 'Drinkin' Time.' And look at ol' Bib, still poundin' down another glass of jagged rocks and broken glass while his competitors like 'Pneu X' are near dead.

So why, as a pile of tires, is Bib white and not black? Because the process of carbonized rubber had not been invented in the 1890s, and rubber tires were off-white, the natural color of raw latex.

Sometime after the fin du siecle, Michelin decide to bring Bib out of two dimensional poster world into 3D Meatspace, and the effect at first was somewhere on the border between hilarious and terrifying.

In #1, coming to the rescue of a stranded 1925-27 Ford Model T C-cab candy delivery, like some sort of horrifying magical tire fairy.

#2: Some sort of final Tire Monster Boss Battle, in what looks like WW1 war ruins.

#3: To ensure the continuation of the Mutant French Tire Being species, Bib was given a mate sometime in the 1920s; note her open toed shoes.

#4: Michelin Tire People Bizarro World even had its own dance band. I have searched in vain for surviving recordings.

So how did a drunk rubbery monster become a feared food critic? Leaving aside that most feared food critics are drunk rubbery monsters?

Because as a courtesy to travelers, Michelin also began distributing an annual guide in which restaurants were rated on a 3-star scale: 1=very good, 2=excellent, 3=exceptional and worthy of a special trip in and of itself. The difference between unmentioned 0 star and a single star became a matter of life and death.

#1 below is the very first Michelin Guide, from 1900, which only covered France. Over the years new editions for other countries were released; in #2 Bib touts the guide to Britain for 1911. In #3, Bib touts a whole host of travel guides for France in the 1950s; finally in #4, a group of California restaurateur celebrate their star-knighthood by Bib in 2023. Only later will they discover each star is actually a curse that will haunt their nightmares with fears of star-loss. Bib giveth, and Bib taketh away.

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