As I mentioned in the auto museum article I accompanied some friends to the Goodguys 25th West Coast Nationals Hot Rod Show while my propeller was out getting new seals installed. I enjoy looking at nicely restored or modified cars, but I’m an airplane guy at heart.  So, whenever I found something that was even remotely aviation-related I took a picture of it.

The entrance to the show first took spectators through the flea-market area. Just like AirVenture the place was filled with parts vendors and people selling restoration projects. There was a partially restored truck at one end of a row with an enclosed flat bed that held my first aviation discovery…  These RC models were for sale. The one on the right seems a bit expensive, but I’ve never had an RC model so I really don’t know. I’ve never been able to justify spending money on a model when I have a full-size version to try and keep in the air.

Almost any flea-market operation will have at least one vendor who is selling old (or new) metal signs of one sort or another. There were several from airlines now long gone and quite a few with warbirds on them. I’m always tempted to get one or more, but manage to resist the temptation (see spending money above) – I already have several on the wall around the hangar.

Concurrent with the hot rod show was a gathering of people who build or collect miniature engines – gas, electric and steam – that are true to design and fully operational. The displays occupied one of the buildings on the fairgrounds where the auto show was being held.

This is a working model of a 1917 Bentley Rotary engine. Unfortunately I was never around when they demonstrated it running.

This is a working model of a 1917 Curtiss OX-5 aircraft engine.

This is a working model of a 7-cylinder radial aircraft engine. Smaller single-cylinder engines are on a small display stand to the right and a set of really small spark plugs is on a stand to the left.

This is another radial aircraft engine, this time with cutaway cylinders and case to show the inner workings. So that’s how it works!

OK, this is stretching the aviation bit a  little -  it is a 1941 Western Flyer. I really like the ‘rudder’ off the top rear of the body.  It’s probably dangerous to drive, though. Everybody you passed would feel that strong urge to take a photo and text it or post it to Facebook while they were driving.

This is the view from the front. From this angle it looks like they wanted it to look like the front of a train.

It was for sale. Unfortunately the interior was pretty much bare. Guess they blew their budget restoring the outside.

Much closer to airplanes again – this hot rod truck was restored to a vehicle used by a flight school. It even has a wooden propeller on a stand in the bed.

Steve Moal and his sons, Michael and David, are carrying on the work of Steve’s grandfather and father in the area of coach building. He is known to have something new and off the wall each year at the Hot Rod Show. This year it was this aluminum-body speedster.

The aluminum body is hand-formed. The fenders were made in multiple pieces, welded together and then hammered and formed to the point that the seams were no longer visible. You can see a row of perfectly formed rivets around the bottom of the body. Their website is at Moal Coachbuilders.

This is a look at the ‘cockpit.’ It looks like he bought a wrecked airplane and took all the instruments out of the panel. Off to the right you can see the altimeter. The oil pressure and temperature gauges look pure airplane as do most of the switches and other gauges.

For those of you who are car as well as airplane fanatics I’ll include photos of some cars the caught my eye. The workmanship is outstanding. I’m sure that any one of the builders/restorers could complete and award-winning aircraft.

I couldn’t pass this up – like putting a Merlin into a C-172 – only fewer problems with the c.g.

Beautiful paint, beautiful interior. Great body work. I can’t imagine taking this out on the road.

Makes you want to have a beer – and get your hair cut…

And here is the Goodguys’ music video of the 2011 event. Next year’s West Coast Nationals at Pleasanton, CA will be August 24-26, 2012

Last week, while my prop was out getting new seals installed,  I spent a couple of days with some friends at the West Coast National Hot Rod Show in Pleasanton, CA. It’s the hot rod version of AirVenture for the West Coast. Instead of rows and rows of airplanes of various shapes and sizes the rows were populated with cars and trucks in the same state of restoration or modification.

On the way to the show we stopped at a museum that the group I was with wanted to show to the ‘new guy’ (these guys have been making this trip for over ten years – there’s that AirVenture similarity again). The place that we stopped is the Blackhawk Museum in Danville, CA. It is located at one end of a very upscale shopping area.  I was going to just show you a photo or two and move on the the Hot Rod show, but I couldn’t pare down the shots I took, so we’ll get to the hot rods in the next post. Hang in there – you’ll see more than one aviation reference in the car descriptions.

Donald Healey was initially a race driver – he won the 1931 Monte Carlo Rally. In the 1930′s he was Experimental Manager for Triumph, then started Donald Healey Motors right after WWII. This Healey Silverstone was introduced in 1949 – an open-top two-seater with an aluminum body. Only 105 of them were built during 1949-1950. Survivors of the model are very rare.

1937 was the last year for Cadillac’s 452 cu-in V-16 engine. They made only 50 cars that year and only allowed 2 chassis of the model to be taken to independent coach builders. This chassis was purchased by Phillipe Barraud who took it to a fellow Swiss, Willy Hartmann. Hartmann designed and produced this 22-foot long cabriolet body.

Andre Dubonnet was already an accomplished race car driver and pilot by age 26. His family amassed their fortune selling the aperitifs and cognacs which still bear the family name. Dubonnet contracted with the Nieuport Aircraft company to make a body for his new car that would be good for racing and touring. They used 3/4″ stringers covered with a 1/8″ wood veneer. Then strips of tulipwood of uneven thickness and length were attached to the veneer with thousands of brass rivets. The sealed, sanded and varnished body weighed about 160 pounds.

Phil Hill was the 1961 World Driving Champion and was the first American to win the Formula One World Driver’s Championship. His record stood for 17 years and now is shared with Mario Andretti. This 1953 Ferrari 250MM Vignale-bodied Spyder was Hill’s personal car. He drove it to first place in the 1953 Pebble Beach Road Race.

This is the business end of a 1936 Duesenberg Model SJ. The “SJ” designation indicates that this is a supercharged version of the model J. The supercharged Lycoming engine became available in 1932 and upped the horsepower from 260 to 320.

This is a 1933 Packard 1004 Sport Phaeton in all it’s glory. Only two of these cars were built. It has a 142″ wheelbase and sports a 145 HP straight-8 engine. True elegance.

This is a 1953 Alpha-Romeo B.A.T 5. It was designed and created by Franco Scaglione and Nuccio Bertone. It is the fifth design exercise and the first of their full-scale cars debuted at the 1953 Turin Motor Show. The B.A.T (Berlinetta Aerodynamica Technica) was designed to have the lowest possible drag coefficient – it was built on the Alpha-Romeo 1900 Sprint chassis.

This is the first commercially available automobile ever offered. Karl Benz used his love of bicycles as his inspiration and applied for a patent in 1886 as an automobile powered by a gas engine. This is a working replica of that vehicle. It is powered by a 3/4 horsepower 0ne-cylinder engine turning at 400 RPM. It’s top speed was 8 mph on 25 mile per gallon.

These were only a few of the beautifully restored cars on display. I would highly recommend a side trip to the museum if you are ever in the Danville, CA area – even for an airplane guy like me it was an excellent experience.

I want to thank those of you who posted comments and sent emails concerning my last article. It’s really nice to get some feedback on how my writing is accepted. I realize that I haven’t been asking for feedback or engaging with you readers as much as I should and I will try to do better in the future.

Yes, I’m going to continue writing and see if I can become a better writer and friend to all of you.

This week is the National Championship Air Races at Stead Airport, in Reno, NV. That is both my home town and my home airport. I will try to write something each day about what I have seen and will include photos that I have taken.

And on to day one.

I’ve been on an airline trip forever. Well, not really, but it sure seems like it. There hasn’t been very much to report about the trip. The second leg started in the rain, but the rest of that leg was glass smooth. We have had a little turbulence on some legs, but our outstanding meteorology department has recommended altitudes which have kept us out of the really nasty bumps.  No whitecaps in the coffee cup so far.

Enroute we’ll often talk to each other about what we do in our time off. In one of those conversations I found out that one of the other copilots was going to go pick up a new airplane after his trip was completed.  Several years ago he had trained for and received  his ASES rating and had recently renewed his currency in preparation for buying an airplane. He lives in northern Illinois, near several lakes and decided to buy an  LSA capable of landing on the water. He chose a Sport Hornet equipped with amphibious floats. I had no idea what it looked like so he pulled out a photo that he had printed from the company web site. You can find it in their photo gallery from the Sport Hornet link above. He said that he will have it at Oshkosh this year parked in the manufacturer’s display area. It looks like a pretty nice machine.

The only other small airplane conversation that I have had so far was with the current captain on my crew. He and his family were at a social event recently and a family friend asked the captain’s son what he planned to do after he graduated from college (he is just finishing up his junior year). He said that he thought he would go into aviation like his dad. That was a complete shock to his parents since their son is majoring in a field totally unrelated to aviation. Before he entered college he had been taking flying lessons and had progressed through his solo flight, but the academic load in college was too great for him to efficiently divide his time, so he stopped taking the flying lessons and concentrated on his education. The captain has had no recent light plane experience so he asked me if I could help out with any information that he might be able to use.

I sent out a message on Twitter and received a reply with some information about flight schools in the captain’s home area and then provided additional information that his son could access through the internet during his senior year to reacquaint himself with the aviation.  There is a tremendous amount of information available online now, even when compared to what it was 3-4 years ago when he was taking his lessons. It will be interesting to see what happens.

I mention multiple crew members on these trips because we are not paired as a ‘hard’ crew throughout an entire trip. This particular trip lasts 14 days and includes 9 individual flight legs. Yes, I know that doesn’t sound like much flying in 14 days, but the shortest flight leg is seven and a half hours. By the time the trip is completed I will have worked with 5 different captains and 6 other copilots. Our training and standard operating procedures allow us to do this without a loss of safety or drop in efficiency. We know what is going to happen each step of the way during normal operations and know what to expect of each other if an abnormal situation occurs. It’s really nice to be able to operate this way and adds a bit of stability to what lately has been an unstable profession.

A friend I flew with recently sent me a link to the Publisher’s Letter in the June 2009 issue of AircraftOwner magazine. Greg Herrick is the publisher of the magazine. He is an aircraft collector, museum operator and president of the Aviation Foundation of America. He is a strong promoter of our aviation heritage, especially the Golden Age of Aviation and wrote the Publisher’s Letter about the way that the latest airline merger is progressing. It’s a very interesting read.

I ran across a couple more items during my internet ramblings this week that some of you might find interesting. Both were found on the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog. Bruce Clay, Inc. is an internet marketing firm. This first item is directed at those of you readers who fall into the ‘Geek with cooking tendencies’ category. It is referred to as the Table of Condiments that Periodically go Bad. It may explain why some of those things in the back of your refrigerator are getting a little fuzzy and/or changing color.

The second item is more for those of you who are involved with client-vendor relationships. It applies all those arguments that you hear during your contract negotiations to everyday events.

I haven’t posted in a while and don’t plan to have a ‘regular’ post up for a few more days. I have been trying to stay off the internet  for a few days while I prepare for my airline’s annual recurrent training. My session at the training center begins this Monday (April 13th) and concludes, assuming all goes well, on Thursday.  I leave on my next scheduled trip  shortly after that and will provide a post about my experiences as soon as I can.

Thanks for being patient.

Duty Not Including Blogging.