[ericwy]

Having my 77 TA wrecked after 25yrs ownership in Dec 07 sucked as you can imagine,
but its since been repaired with excellent results. To get the best possible parts I
spent alot of time over weeks combing local vintage bone yards looking for decent
parts.

Its sad to see most of these Pontiacs had probably found thier final resting place
without a hope in hell of anyone adopting them and bringing them back to life.

The whole thing reminded me how special our cars are that they have survived at all.

Keep 'em running!

[citydesk175]

Originally Posted by ericwy

Having my 77 TA wrecked after 25yrs ownership in Dec 07 sucked as you can imagine,
but its since been repaired with excellent results. To get the best possible parts I
spent alot of time over weeks combing local vintage bone yards looking for decent
parts.

Its sad to see most of these Pontiacs had probably found thier final resting place
without a hope in hell of anyone adopting them and bringing them back to life.

The whole thing reminded me how special our cars are that they have survived at all.

Keep 'em running!

Sorry for your loss but congrats on getting it back

The curator of the National Air and Space Museum said he was constantly asked why he did not bring some of his planes to flying condition. His response was that using the limited supply of money, talent, time and parts, it was all he could do to keep his fleet of planes from deteriorating that year. He continued that war planes were not meant to survive for more than 5-10 missions in war time. Essentially, it would be lucky for any planes of a given model to survive a year or two. He pointed out that the Netherlands had about 17,000 planes crash into it in wwII.

Planes were not expected to survive more that a few training missions or maybe one real mission. And certainly had zero life expectancy in storage.

Bur returning to topic.....Is there a designed in expiration date on a car...how long should it last?........... Is it a miracle that anything over 20 years old still exists?

Just curious

CD175

[JLHarper]

That reminds me of one summer I worked one summer just out of high schol laying a water main for a construction company in MD at the PAUL GARBER Facility in Suitland , MD

They would bring in many fine examples of Air/Spacecaft donated or owned by the US Govnt.
Basically restore them there prior to showing at the A&S or Smithsonian.

I got to know many of the gents working in their open stalls and saw interesting items donated and others awaiting resto. Apollo capsule, Beatles Limo was there for some reason, JFK motocade Ambasador car(I think it was).

One day guard I came to know was talking as we ate lunch. I asked about blacked out windows on this one lone building
We were on lunch break, leaning against this building on the ground, and a few of us got up and walked to the door with him.
He looked around and opened the door and there was the Enola Gay. Said he would be fired if he got caught.
Not to be seen yet for many years.

Since many parts were no longer available they made many parts from scratch, based on show not go. Not "airworthy" or mil spec, but nice looking.

They had one nice shop, actually many small nice shops.

[citydesk175]

From a web page: http://aafradio.org/NASM/Enola_index.html Good things are happening with Enola
The date listed for the info is august 12 2003


Now completely reassembled and staged at the new Udvar-Hazy Museum at Dulles International Airport, Enola is externally complete. I am still a day late and a dollar short on a wide variety of avionics restoration work inside, though - that will continue over the next few years. Although the general public cannot be allowed to file through this aircraft, I have been very careful to follow the restoration philosophy employed in the rest of the NASM collection, down to making sure the equipment donated for the effort had vacuum tubes with the correct date codes.

========================
Thanks for the story on EG and I am grateful for being prompted to Google it.
================================

In an off topic but Dead on topic Aside....... let me mention a conversation I had with the assistant Curator of the Ordnance Museum at Aberdeen MD. I pointed him to my web page that contained 2 pages of pictures of weapons captured from the VC and NVA by the 199th Light Infantry Brigade and displayed in Long Binh.

He asked what became of those weapons after we left Vietnam. I told him I bet they were torched or blown up.

He became upset and shouted: "That was part of our cultural heritage!!!"

Today I am thinking of our cultural heritage in cars and how many are saving that part of the heritage

Thanks to the preservers

CD 175

BTW the web page is in my profile

[JLHarper]

I grew up and lived /worked in DC area prior to moving south.
My prior career had me working with Military and Commercial Mil Subs in DC, NVA (not the bad guys..Northern VA..lol) and some of MD.

Anyway, I got to see some interesting "stuff" off the beaten path.

NRL, NSWC, NOS (..naval ord..) PAX RVR NATC plus many other facilities sometimes had older displays like the flight simulator at PAX RVR that was pretty cool. It was 16mm film on screen flying over Southern MD with cockpit/pedals. That type of stuff.

One of the BEST exhibits I found, ever was an old (small) museum at Washington Navy Yard near Bowling Army Air Corp Base and 295.

Not the best part of town, they had FEW visitors I was told and I wonder what happened to the exhibits when it was closed. This is 80-84 and it was to be closed I recall.
I happened upon it and stayed most of the afternoon. It wasnt a fancy "museum" but had many examples of what the enemy could do with our "scrap" materials or equipment.

They had captured VC weapons made from bailing wire and bamboo that would fire US rounds, Mortar tubes from the same, sandles made from truck tires, even some full auto weapons made from scrap.

The enemy would retreive ammo dumped in the river after patrols would go out and not want to hump it back...toss it, so exhibit said. They would modify their weapons to fire captured ammo.

Had a mock up of a cell in one of the prisons, complete with first hand account.

Had many of their anti personell "traps" captured and on display, uniforms, or clothes, small arms weapons. NVA and VC.

Montanard village mock up and weapons

It was really VERY interesting.

Its probably stored somewhere in a warehouse in VA.

[citydesk175]

Hmmmm Now I am obligated to pass this along to the Aberdeen curator.

I would love to know if he finds anything

Thanks for the info on this.

I love museums and I hope to visit the Heritage center this coming week. I will take a camera and look for hot Pontiacs and engines
Maybe get a shot at what records are kept
VBS

Regards
CD175

[GT182]

JL, this is ironic. You got to see tthe Enola Gay in her secret storage. I got to meet Genearal Tibbets 3 years ago at the Mid Atlantic Air Museum's WWII Weekend, up in Reading, PA the day before the show started as I'm a volunteer.

The link to MAAM is in my sig.

[citydesk175]

Just visited Maam page
another place to physically visit (GRINZ)

Thanks
cd175

btw
My webpage at www.geocities.com/citydesk175/
has pictures of an Australian recon plane in the Gallery section

I won't say the pictures are famous or rare but they seem to get "borrowed" for other web sites all the time

anyway, this is a chance to see a pilatus porter in Aussie livery

enjoy

[Keith Seymore]

Originally Posted by JLHarper

I got to know many of the gents working in their open stalls and saw interesting items donated and others awaiting resto. Apollo capsule, Beatles Limo was there for some reason, JFK motocade Ambasador car(I think it was).

I had a similar experience with the JFK motorcade Lincoln...

We were out prowling around in Greenfield Village, looking behind the barns and through the windows. We looked through one pane of (almost) blacked out glass and the Lincoln was sitting in there. My dad is the one who recognized it and pointed it out to me (I was just a little tyke at that time).

It has been moved into the Henry Ford Museum and has been on display there for a number of years now...

K

http://www.thehenryford.org/museum/limousines.aspx

[citydesk175]

One common theme here is preservation:

Nothern Indiana comes to mind as a hotbed of car museums.

Why is Indiana so special and focused?

Are there any other regions that can be identified as "preserver areas"
What drives the enthusiasm in those regions?
What does it take to create and run a museum?
Who wants to be a museum curator when they grow up? (besides me)

Regards
cd175

[Stuart]

I toured the Paul Garber facility in the late 1980s - it's probably the most interesting museum I ever visited. At that time, they had the Enola Gay out in the main workshop; the day I was there they were trying out different kinds of polishes on the fuselage, and they had the people in our tour group feel the surface to see which one we thought was doing the best job. It was an odd sensation to be touching that airplane.

Back then I was working for a company that designed and built wind tunnels for the aerospace industry. I had just spent several days at NASA Langley research center in Virginia, inspecting one of their older tunnels (one that had been originally built in the late 1920s if I remember correctly) in preparation for an upgrade to its data acquisition system. Anyway, during the tour at the Garber facility we were kind of poking around in some of the back buildings and happened across a scale model of that very same wind tunnel. It was apparently an engineering model that was built back when they were designing the thing. The man who was showing us around was kind of surprised when I piped up and started telling him all the details about that thing.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by citydesk175

Nothern Indiana comes to mind as a hotbed of car museums. Why is Indiana so special and focused?

Well, at least partly it's because of all the car companies that had been there in the past - Auburn, Cord, Duesenberg, Studebaker. The A-C-D museum in South Bend is a must see, for sure.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by citydesk175

In an off topic but Dead on topic Aside....... let me mention a conversation I had with the assistant Curator of the Ordnance Museum at Aberdeen MD.

Now that I think about it, I did some work at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds as well, on a small wind tunnel that was used to test projectile sabots. It was an interesting place.