Car Thread

[robert.]

Is "brown furniture" a trade term, or do you literally mean furniture that is brown in color?

yes brown in color.
With the exception of a few years during high school this is the only job i have had. Selling and restoration of 18th and 19th century french furniture.

I started when i was 12.The guy i worked for was 22 at the time. In the last 33 years i have been all over. All our furniture would come from France or Italy. 10-15 sea containers. we would start to unload them at 5am. outside our shop would be dealers waiting to buy the stuff. lesser quality stuff would go to the dealers. Top notch stuff stayed for the showroom. At one point we could go through 150 gallons of stripper a month. That brought the EPA down on us.We had noway to prove where to used product went.
Bedroom sets would fly out of the store. $12,000-$18,000. Tables buffets severs and sculpture. everybody had to get theirs. I thought it would never end. Then mid way through bill's second term. things slowed. The average guy would not come in to buy his wife a bedroom set for $15,000. The euro was getting stronger. prices were climbing. Next thing you know 2 planes hit the towers and markets changed.
After that it was all down hill. I would work in nyc twice a week before September 11. Now i see it 3 times a year. We were in 4 stores up there 2nd ave, 57th street design, 22 st. showplace, and 8th and Broadway. We had a place in Virginia beach. That's closed. The only place that stayed the duration is our place in savage mill Maryland. Everything has been brought back to Pa.Travel cost ad up quick these day.
At one point i would travel to 10 antique shows a year in the us. Gone is the good promoter. A guy who would schlep his show and get people through the gate. Most of their kids have taken over and do horrible jobs.the kids end up selling to large corporations that only hold interest in the show for the date.After 2 years in they cancel the show. Our last two shows have been bombs. the Baltimore summer antique show and the Birchwood manor show. The next show up is the Miami beach show in January 2016.(They don't have a show date for 2017 yet) Shows are getting canceled left and right. Nobody wants to buck up a year ahead.
This is why you find your auction so cheap now. Kids don't want the stuff. their parents don't want it in their Florida condos. Most the stuff i sell requires a 10 foot ceiling. Nobody wants to maintain that house anymore. I had a couple come in on last month. About ten years ago they bought an Louis the 16th armoire. They got at some trendy shop for $12,000. nobody wanted it their kids the local auction or their friends. I gave the guy $400 and he was happy to have me come pick it up. It's in the store for $2,500. with 50% off. so you could get it for 1,250. Nobody wants it.
like tech stocks remember when some were $600. and now they are worth $23.00 a share.
Here are some photos of the Miami show

Now you wana talk cars and art. click the links to see the second most famous Bugatti.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt_Bugatti
https://www.google.com/search?q=bugatti ... oJ3w&dpr=1
All right I'm off my soapbox.

[John Webster]

There was a Bugatti exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art about 20 years ago that included some of the furniture and sculptures. The animals were very striking. The cars included two type 35 racers, the black Atlanta Coupe and a Royale.

[healey36]

It's raining buckets so no roadstering (sic) today. Instead, a good day for staying in, a bit of Scotch and a good Youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xWL0wCfIFU

Mercedes and the Belgian Grand Prix with Fangio and Moss in their F1 run-up to the disaster at Le Mans in 1955 (never to return until the 2010's). Maserati, Vanwal, Lancia, Ferrari and others, just thirteen cars. Eleven years earlier this stretch of countryside was the scene of Germany's last great offensive in the west, now known as "The Bulge". A vintage documentary...great fun.

When Sarge and I were at MG's on the Rocks last week we spent a few minutes rummaging through the racks of a guy selling die-cast...always a weakness. When I got home I fired off a quick order to Replicarz...received this 1/43 1957 Maserati 250F by Brumm yesterday:



Driven by Fangio, it was the car he moved to after Mercedes' withdrawal.

Anyway, hope you guys are staying dry.

Cheers,
Healey

[Tramp]

Healey, I just installed this marble shelf. Recognize the cars?

[healey36]

Ferrari's are lovely, Tramp, I never tire of looking at them, especially the early ones. That's Phil Hill's 1961 156 Sharknose there in the middle. Hill was money, rarely remembered as our only American F1 champ:



He scooted to the '61 championship after his teammate von Tripp got killed. I'm not sure I'd have had the strength to carry on.

The Old Man loved Hill, but hated Ferrari. I was never sure where that came from. He despised spaghetti too, lol. He loved it when Ford muscled up and crushed them at Le Mans in '66 and for a few years thereafter.

Nice job on the shelf.

Healey

[sarge]

No roadstering today, but looks like Monday will see some sun.

Meanwhile, cold and wet make the bones ache a bit, but these guys help immensely with that effect while finishing up some editing work:



Hobbes the ginger tom is just over 20 lbs, whilst little Grrr (aka Dear)the Manx is about as big as she will get, still under 10. Brilliant on a damp day!

I'm off to look at the diecasts on that site...

[Tramp]

Sarge, you have the poetry of home in you. Do you have fireplaces, I can't remember.

Healey, this is the car to the right of the Hill Ferrari:

[sarge]

Tramp:

Yep, we burn wood here in the winter, and the cats are wise in the ways of wood-stoves.



Love the models; makes me want to drive 'em!

[healey36]

Nice, Tramp, really nice. The one on the left looks like a '57 Maserati 250F, 1/18, made by CMC (?) If so, you've got some serious coin tied up there and you're way out of my diecast league. Can't tell which GP, maybe Germany...looks late with those little winglets behind the front wheels (what the hell are those?). That was back in the day when you could reconfigure the car for each race. The silver one also looks to be a 250F, but silver? You got me there... The 250F sure was a lovely looking car. Stirling Moss has always spoken affectionately of his time behind the wheel of the Maserati. John Cooper had to spoil everything by moving the engine to the back, lol...

Healey

[sarge]

Sometimes the simplest things make all the difference.

When Healey and I went to the MGs on the Rocks show a couple weekends ago, I was on a mission to replace the truly silly shift-lever knob on the Midget.

It shouldn't be a big deal, a shifter knob, but it was. It was skinny, not very nice in the hand, and the threading was this hateful rubber tubing that took any thread on the one hand but didn't survive well on the other. After years of use the knob spun on the lever. Even those faults really shouldn't be anything beyond a minor annoyance, except for the type of gearbox we're speaking of.

The gearbox on the MkIV Midgets was the same as that used on the Triumph Spitfire (one of which I owned years ago so pretty familiar with it) and originally from the Morris Marina (a truly bland and boring saloon from the late '70s). It's a good gearbox, except for the fact you have to pick up on the lever to clear the gate into reverse. That suddenly makes a skinny shifter-knob that spins on the lever really annoying and puts its replacement pretty high up on the "things needing procurred" list.

Back to the show, there was a gent there who made shifter-knobs. We contacted each other via email after the show and he sent me photos of quite a selection, done in rosewood or zebra-wood with a choice of various inlaid medallions aimed more for the tofts to customise their cars with.

OK, I'm admittedly up for pretty and such myself. I picked a zebra wood knob he already had made up (had a new-penny inlaid in the top, which wasn't particularly important to me one way or the other). and this arrived today:




This lovely shifter knob would make you think I've gone all car-groupie and am in the market next for a wicker picnic hamper. Ah, not really the case. I do like zebra wood, I admit, but the shape and the engineering is the key:




It's nice and fat so feels very pleasant in the hand. It's tulip shaped, so that picking up motion to go for reverse is now very un-annoying. Lastly, it has a true threaded insert with a jam-nut, so it feels solid as the C of E.

It's just a shifter knob, but what a pleasant difference.

Tony and Healey, if you want the gent's contact info, let me know. These are very nice indeed.

[healey36]

Well, that's very nice...the Queen never looked better. Definitely an upgrade over the stock knobby.

If you query eBay for "Iron Duke" you will occasionally turn up a variety of items that were made from the teak deck planks that were salvaged from the ship when she was scrapped in 1946. A common item is a small barrel that has a brass plate attached indicating the source. HMS Iron Duke was Jellicoe's flagship at Jutland...I always thought it would be cool as hell to purchase such an item and have a knob made.

But you know me Sarge, it damn near killed me to give up the old electro-mechanical fuel-pump and go with a solid-state unit. (Sometimes I honestly miss getting down on my hands and knees to deliver a good wallop with a screwdriver handle to get the old one pumpin'.) No posh shifter for me, I'm afraid...I'll stick with the original:



It feels like you're changing gears via the business end of a pool cue.

And no that's not a stock hood release...

Healey

[Tramp]

I'm going to sleep on this one, but I hope I don't dream of zebras chasing newly minted pennies or some such.

Sarge, being a pool cue type, I like exotic woods. No worries, it's a nice knob.

Healey, yup, CMC. All four cars, which I did not pay over $200 for any of them. Expensive? Maybe. But the quality and joy from each viewing seems to be worth it. Besides, they have almost doubled in value.

[sarge]

Healey, mate

Your stock one is fatter than my stock one was, and it isn't broken like mine was.

To get an original would cost me something like $80 or more (if you find one in one piece) for the same crappy fit of hand; a repro has the stupid rubber sleeve rather than real thread and won't survive. So, the aspirational one is better in function and survivability, so I apologise to no-one for its ostentatiousness and proudly admit picking it out for the cool looking wood.

There are times when obnoxious is actually an improvement.

BTW, do you have to pull up the knob to get into reverse?

[healey36]

Again wow, Tramp...they look nice, and that Moss/Jenkinson Mille Miglia 300 SLR is gorgeous. I have three or four 1/18's but they are decidedly low-end...surely CMC and Exoto are the top-of-the-line. The bulk of the collection is 1/43, including a number of kits I built when I was a kid or shortly after college. I still have a stack of resin kits that never made it onto the table...maybe someday.

For sentimental reasons, my favorite 1/18:



For me, the culmination of the formula at Le Mans.

Healey

[Tramp]

I'm with you on those Porsches. If you like any of these 1/43 scale models, just say so: