Foto: rookecustoms.com
from Racing Café
dimanche 30 décembre 2012
THE RAG & BONE MAN.
For our debut Make Your Bones film we check in with Paul Firbank, AKA ‘The Rag & Bone Man’. Paul spends his days locked deep in his man cave creating beautiful objects from the dregs of East London’s scrappers.
He sorts and sifts through the scrap yards, railway arch grease shops and the thrift markets finding the remains of vintage engineered machinery and outmoded modern metal parts that make up scraps of British industrial history. Paul assembles these shiny unwanted fragments into new playful designs. Restoring, welding, turning, stripping, polishing and lacquering he develops each piece responding to the materials he has found.
All pics theragandboneman.co.uk
from http://makeyourbones.com
PETROL – FOOD – BEER
This wonderful short film tells the tale of three British men who decided, in the early ’90s, to climb onto their £500 motorcycles and ride them around the world. With no preparation, forethought, research or very much money. And they did it.
It took 14 months and they saw 44 countries on their journey, the film has left me with that slightly wistful feeling we all get when we want to do something crazy. Just like this.
Via MakeYourBones.com
Featuring HorizonsUnlimited.com
origine du Paris-Dakar : The Mint 400 Great American Off-Road Race
FROM goodsparkgarage.com
Introduced as a two-buggy race in 1967, the Mint 400 quickly became known as one of the toughest desert races in America. Its $100,000 prize, its celebrity competitors, the Girls of The Mint 400, and the always-challenging terrain helped catapult the Great American Race into icon status.
Around 1961, the Mint Hotel and Casino in downtown Las Vegas was purchased by Del Webb, a real estate developer who hobnobbed with folks like Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Howard Hughes. Webb’s money and history go way back to WWII days, when his construction company landed many military contracts (one being an internment camp for over 17,000 Japanese-Americans in Arizona). In 1945, he and two partners bought the New York Yankees for $2.8 million. In 1960, his retirement community project, Sun City, AZ, made the cover of Time magazine for its success.
Webb’s PR guy for the Mint Hotel, Norm Johnson, was inspired to create the Mint 400 after reading about the Baja 1000 in a magazine. He thought it’d be a good way to draw attention to the Mint’s annual deer hunting contest in 1967 (of which the grand prize was a dune buggy). Two racers were hired to compete in a 600-mile race to The Sahara Casino, which was the Mint’s sister-casino built by Webb. It was a success. The next year, a multitude of participants were invited to race a 400-mile loop in the Vegas desert, but many of the 115 buggies and motorcycles succumbed to the challenging conditions. Dust overwhelmed the racers. Even Parnelli Jones’ Bronco seemed doomed after a few breakdowns. A Mint executive staffer deemed the event a disaster until Earl Thompson, president of the Sahara Casino and competitor in the 400, drove in saying, “‘This is the greatest God**** thing I’ve ever seen!” (See the article where this was mentioned.)
400cc Huskies at the start of the Mint 400 in 1970. Pic found at www.dirtbike.off-road.com
Another chapter in the Mint 400′s storied past includes Hunter S. Thompson, who was sent out on assignment by Sports Illustrated in 1971 to write photo captions for the event. During his experience in Las Vegas, he ended up writing a 2500-word piece that was rejected by Sports Illustrated. The manuscript was picked up by Rolling Stone magazine and later evolved into his most famous novel, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.”
Hunter S. Thompson sits in his “White Whale” in Las Vegas, 1971.
Photo by Doug Sutton at the 1971 Mint 400. Found at www.offroadaction.ca
As the legitimacy of the race grew, so did the purse. From no more than $30,000 in its first couple years, the prize rose to $100,000 in 1975. The number of celebrity participants rose, too, including racing royalty and headlining entertainers. Parnelli Jones, Al Unser, Rick Mears, Mickey Thompson, Ivan Stewart, Walker Evans and many more racers from different disciplines competed along with big screen stars like James Garner and Steve McQueen.
In 1972, Mint Hotel exec K. J. Howe upped the promotional ante by creating “The Girls of the Mint 400.” Hundreds of contestants would be pared down to ten girls, then a final five would be chosen to be the Mint 400 Girls. Several would go on to appear in TV shows, commercials, and Playboy Magazine. Two you may have heard of? How ’bout Vanna White (below left) and Wonder Woman herself, Lynda Carter (below right).
What inspired the writing of this article and our hunt for pictures of the Mint 400, was when we came across Bill Eppridge’s photo, taken in September of 1971 for LIFE magazine (first pic of this article). Seeing all those ol’ bikes bouncing across the dusty, unforgiving terrain made us want to grab a pair of old lineman boots, a metal-tanked Husky and go back in time to that very moment.
Things changed after the glory days of desert racing in the late 60s and early 70s. Motorcycles were phased out of the event in 1977. Webb sold the Mint Hotel in 1988, signalling the end of a two-decade run of the Mint 400. If you get bummed when special races like this meet their demise, you might happy to know Mint 400 was revived in 2008. The current organizers try to include and respect the classic attributes that made ”The Great American Off-Road Race” such an icon of American racing. (Click here to learn more about the modern day Mint 400.)
Click here for a nice li’l vid showing a timeline of the Mint 400.
A Fremont Street parade to kickoff of the Mint 400. Pic found at www.gaming.unlv.edu
Penton offered a 6-speed 2-stroke 355cc model called a Mint 400. Pictured is a 1974. It weighed under 225lbs with 43HP.
Honda Resto Mod With a Triumph Mini Scrambler Look
Todd Hunter's Honda SL70 resto mod with a mini Triumph Scambler theme
Todd Hunter wanted a nice little bike to run around the campground and found just what he needed, a 1971 Honda SL70, and though it ran just fine, the picture he had in mind was something a bit more classy. He sent me some photos of his little resto-mod that looks, for all the world, like a mini Triumph Scrambler. Look closely, you'll see a lot of detail work that completely transforms the little Honda. Quite impressive and very sweet!
Here's Todd to tell you how it all came together:
I developed a love for motorcycles in mid-life. Unlike about 95% of the guys I know who started out riding small dirt bikes as kids, I bought my first motorcycle, a 2006 Triumph Bonneville T-100, when I was 40. I am also involved an all hobbies miniature and motorized. Many people would consider my custom projects toys, but the term "toy" is relative. My love of miniature mechanical things, and motorcycles, lends itself well to the Honda horizontal engine bikes. I have built or restored seven of these little bikes since 2008.
Todd Hunter's Honda SL70 resto mod
The latest is a 1971 SL70 resto-mod I call Bivouac and is part of a continuing search for the perfect campground bike. It began as a mostly complete, veteran SL70 that ran like a top but had 42 years of patina and use showing. This, to a sensible person, would be a perfect campground cruiser - strapped on the bumper of a camper like another well used piece of camping gear. However I am not a sensible person and I could not leave it alone.
Unlike the other pressed steel, or single tube frames that the horizontal engine bikes usually have, the SL70 has an actual frame that reminds me of a "standard" bike. Since my first love was Triumphs and I needed a semi off road capable bike, this bike would be built with a Triumph-ish scrambler looking theme.
Todd Hunter’s Honda SL70 resto mod front wheel and brake
I wanted the tank and seat to be more horizontal and the bike to be a little longer. I am not a skilled welder but I do have a cheap flux-core wire welder that is good for melting steel together so I used that to make a bracket that changed the angle of the seat and tank by 3/4". That subtle adjustment changed the entire look of the bike and gave me the confidence to press ahead with the vision of a fully functional, scale model of a scrambler.
The swingarm is from a 1983 XR100 with the tabs ground off and the rear fender had to be moved rearward 4 inches to match the length of the swinger. While pondering what I would do with the front end, I remembered I had a junked CB125s frame and left fork on the side of my house that I was going give away as scrap. I looked at the badly pitted chrome but I noticed that the aluminum fork bottom looked really similar to the SL70 fork bottoms, and that it had the boss mounts for a disc brake caliper. The CB125s of that year used a mechanical cable actuated (as opposed to hydraulic) disc brake caliper and that seemed like a quirky feature I could add to a mini scrambler. This brain fart idea would become the most challenging and fun addition to the bike. All I had for the brake was the left lower fork and the rest would be found on ebay. The fork upper pipes are the stock SL70 pipes and the internals pistons, springs, and guides are a hybrid CB/SL concoction. The completed front end is a composition of Honda CL/CB/CT/SL parts from the mid '70s, some of them cut to fit.
Todd Hunter’s Honda SL70 resto mod
A 16 inch wheel was built to replace the stock 14 inch. The rear hub is the stock SL70, laced to a larger 16 inch rim from ebay, using the spokes from the stock SL70 16 inch front wheel. The front wheel was built using the CB125s hub, stock SL70 front rim, and some spokes I found online by accident that turned out to be the right length. I had to teach myself how to lace and true a wheel using videos on youtube.
The paint I did myself and almost ruined the whole project doing so - twice, but I learned what a nib-file is used for. The frame is Krylon Oil Rubbed Bronze and has an awesome dark gold and/or olive tone in the sunlight. The white is a GM Duplicolor spray-can and the green is a factory Honda automobile color from 2008 Kiwi Green Pearl chosen by throwing a dart at a panel of color swatches. An auto body supplier mixed the green color and put it in rattle-cans for me. The gold pin stripe is vinyl tape that I clear coated over. The clear coat is a two part (2K) rattle-can that has a hardener capsule inside the can that you brake just before use. Once the hardener is introduced to the clear, you have 48 hours to use up the can. The results of the paint are not perfect but by far the best thing I have ever painted - then sanded and re-painted.
Takegawa enhanced Honda engine
I fabricated my own front fender stays and oil cooler mount which I welded just below the head tube. The engine began as a 50cc from some other bike and is built up using JDM parts from Takegawa to be 124cc. It has 16t/35t sprockets and propels my 200lb body to over 65mph with ease which is plenty fast on a small bike. The ignition is 12 volt CDI but I use a 6 volt reg/rec, battery, and bulbs.
The header pipe is made from three different pipes including a piece of garden umbrella pole as a transition piece that allowed it to line up in a scrambler type position. The muffler is a vintage Cobra from a Honda ATC of some sort and the heat shield is an aftermarket piece I modified with scrambler "speed holes". Every fastener is from the original SL70 or NOS Honda. Whether mini or full-size, this is by far the funnest bike I have ever ridden.
by om http://thekneeslider.com
Man drives a Rolls Royce for 77 years, spends 1M USD to ensure preservation
Mr. Allen Swift drove a Rolls Royce for 77 years and before he died he took care of the car's future preservation.
It was the year 1928 when Mr. Allen Swift received as a graduation gift from his father a 1928 Rolls Royce Piccadilly P1 Roadster. He drove the soft-top convertible for more than seven decades. During this long period he clocked more than 170,000 miles (273,588 km) and maintained the car accordingly. In 1988 the RR received a full body restoration and engine rebuild.
In 2005 he died at the venerable age of 102 but before he passed away he donated 1M USD to the Lyman & Merrie Wood Museum of Springfield History to open up an exhibition to take very good care of the car. The vehicle is now being showcased in the museum's Transportation Collection.
Source: automotiverestorations.com via autoblog.com
M. Allen Swift with the 1928 Rolls Royce Picadilly P1 Roadster
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