Happy Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving here in the United States and tomorrow families from around the country will gather together to stuff their faces with turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, and a host of other dishes. Thanksgiving, of course, is the celebration of the pilgrims dining together with American Indians back when Europeans were fairly new in this part of the world. In searching through my photo library, I found the three cars that best typified Thanksgiving were a 1924 Rolls Royce 40/50 Silver Ghost Pall Mall, a 1957 Pontiac Star Chief, and, of course, a 1957 Chevrolet Corvette.

Why those three cars? Well, they seem to mirror the holiday. The Rolls is special because it represents an Anglo built in the US (Rolls Royce had a factory in Springfield, MA from 1921-1925), so there is the pilgrim part. The Pontiac pays homage to its namesake, Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa Tribe, and takes care of the Indian element. And the 'Vette is pure Americana (and, coincidentally made by General Motors, who also made the Pontiac, so you could say they were 'dining together' at the communal table, of sorts). That is at least how I will phrase it.

As for the Turkey, well, I guess I could ascribe a car to that too. For the honorable position of turkey, I think the best fit would be an 1958 Edsel Citation. Not a bad car, but such a big flop that it could be considered a bit of a turkey itself.

Anyhow, I hope all my American visitors have a happy Thanksgiving! And to my international visitors, happy Thursday!

Picture, clockwise from lower left, are of a 1958 Edsel Citation, a 1924 Rolls Royce 40/50 Pall Mall, a 1957 Pontiac Star Chief, and a 1957 Corvette.

Knock-offs

In automobiles, as with most hobbies, there are a lot of words and phrases that can sound like gibberish to outsiders. This car-jargon can be heard at car shows around the world and we car people probably sound like we're talking in tongues when we get into an argument over whether the Jaguar XK120 or XKE was the more important post-WWII Jaguar.

That aside, I'd like to clear up one car term that get heard a lot, especially regarding vintage racecars and sports cars: knock-offs. This is not in reference to a fake or cloned vehicle, but rather a type of wheel nut. Racers have always sought to get an edge up against the competition, be it through an improved car or through improved racing logistics (the latter being one of the most unseen elements of racing). Minimizing the amount of time needed to do basic work on a vehicle, such as fill it up with gas, change a wheel or tire, or other basic race maintinance was a trial an error process. One of the results of this process was knock-off wheels.

Knock-offs were designed to help a technician change a wheel more quickly. In the era before air -powered impact wrenches, mechanics had to manually crank off a wheel nut with a large hand wrench. The knock-off was a simple solution to the time-consuming problem. But adding a set of wings to the wheel nut, the mechanic could take the wheel nut off simply by hitting the wings of the nut with a hammer. Hence, the mechanic could 'knock-it off.' Knock-off style wheels appeared very early on, in the late teens or early 1920's, and lasted up until the 1960's. The association with racing made knock-offs popular among street car owners, and many companies such as Chevrolet, Ford, Ferrari, Jaguar, and Mercedes-Benz had knock-off wheels on a number of their sports cars.

Wheels, clockwise from lower right, are from a 1957 Maserati 2000 Grand Sport Spyder, a 1964 Ferrari 250GTE, a 1967 Shelby Cobra, a 1937 Alfa Romeo 2300 MM 8C, and a 1930 Cord L-29 Cabriolet.