As if I wasn’t busy enough with the TI, I decided to buy a ’67 Volvo 122S, aka Amazon. It’s a 4-door automatic, which means I won’t be falling in love with it any time soon. (It shares the same tranny, the Borg-Warner 35, as the Datsun 411 wagon my friend Luigi now owns.) On the bright side, it’s that weird shade of Volvo green that is arguably the best color for an Amazon.

The Volvo, very dirty, and green with envy as the Super looks on, clean and greenly confident in its superiority. The assisted living people across the street would rather watch me flail around on old cars than watch the latest installment of Project Runway. (Actually the guy sitting there speaks only Chinese and occasionally yells stuff at me, in Chinese, in response to which I can only smile and wave.)

The good news: it’s a 98% complete and original car. It runs. It goes. It stops. There’s zero rust beyond some surface stuff where the car suffered some fender benders and parking lot dings.

The bad news: 20 years of deferred maintenance. There is significant smoke (white) coming from the exhaust. The brakes are sticky. The hood brakets are broken (both of them) and the front end was bent in so the hood barely closes anyway. Half of the electrical stuff doesn’t work. The other half doesn’t always work. The trunk latch is broken. The driver window winder cable is gone. Lots of little dents to try to bang out. Etc, etc, etc.

Naturally I’ll be addressing the smoking motor first. I’m hoping–really hoping–that it’s not rings, and that it’ll go away (or reach a more acceptable level) with an oil change, check of the valve clearances, and possibly a good old fashioned Italian tune-up. Stay tuned.

For as long as I can remember I’ve had a fascination for the cars of the 1950s and ’60s. Growing up in central California meant there was never a shortage of these cars for me to admire, daily drivers that enjoyed a dry climate, mostly flat roads and until recently not very much in the way of urban gridlock traffic. Because so many of these cars were driven by their original owners, the black plate was a natural but important attribute, like a seal of authenticity that in actual fact meant very little. By the same token, a car of that era wearing a modern plate (god forbid, personalized!) just has less appeal. There’s not much rational explanation for this, but I can’t deny it and the sentiment is shared among most of my car-geek friends.

With this site, I’m looking to catalog and share some of my experiences owning and maintaining a small and ever-changing fleet of mostly black-plate cars. There are a few similar blogs out there, and hopefully this one will add to the pool rather than dilute it.