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Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

Collectible Cars: New England Concours d’Elegance 2008

Posted July 26, 2008 12:01 AM by Moose

Last weekend marked our second annual New England Concours d'Elegance, held once again at Stratton Mountain, Vermont, one of the nicest ski resorts in southern Vermont.

Look for full coverage in an upcoming issue of Hemmings Motor News, but for now, I've pulled a few photos from the weekend to give you a taste of the excellent time we had.

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All Aboard! The Rail Rider With a Hemi

Posted July 24, 2008 12:01 AM by dstrohl

If you missed last Saturday's story called Cars That Run on Rails, it's not too late to check out this 1950 Dodge Coronet. According to the description in the ad, not only is it a seven-passenger limousine, but it was specially built for executive transportation on the Boston and Maine railroad, which likely explains the extremely narrow track. A Hemi in a 1950 sounds rather odd, but we've seen crazier stuff built for executives. The engine could also have been tossed in after the car was built.

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1 comments; last comment on 07/25/2008
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Superheated Gasoline and Shell Games

Posted July 23, 2008 12:01 AM by dstrohl

Dave Perry of Old School Restorations of North Alabama had a mystery on his hands. A friend of his had bought this funky Opel (a 1959 Opel Rekord P1 Caravan) from the Talladega Speedway museum thinking it was some sort of Bonneville land-speed race car, but had no interest in it, so Dave picked it up. Oddly, the entire engine was wrapped in some sort of insulation and the rear wheels are only a few inches apart.

Dave turned to Google, and came up with something strange. Some folks at Shell Oil Co. once wrote "Fuel Economy of the Gasoline Engine", a book which predicted 376.59 MPG with a 1959 Opel in 1973. Read that again - 376.59 miles per gallon of gasoline. Apparently, as the theory goes, superheating the fuel - essentially vaporizing it before it reaches the engine - produces such results, but only if the engine is kept as hot as possible, thus the gobs of insulation.

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3 comments; last comment on 07/24/2008
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Joy in Detroit: Concrete and Cars

Posted July 21, 2008 12:01 AM by dstrohl

When Henry Joy brought Packard to Detroit, by hiring Albert Kahn he also ended up ushering in a new era in industrial architecture, especially for the automotive sector. Factories of this time were often downright dangerous, with poor lighting and ventilation and only the most rudimentary sanitary facilities. Most commonly made of wood, these structures were literal death traps, with many disastrous and deadly fires over the years.

By using reinforced concrete, Albert Kahn changed all of this. The Packard name became synonymous with innovation yet again, as virtually all of the major auto companies followed Packard's lead in their own subsequent construction, usually hiring Kahn. This dynamic new material also allowed ease of expansion not only horizontally but vertically as well, without disturbing existing buildings.

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Cars That Run on Rails

Posted July 19, 2008 12:01 AM by dstrohl

So far in these SIA Flashbacks, we've seen Cars that Swim, Cars that Fly, and now another cross-pollination of cars and other modes of transportation - Cars That Run On Rails. Now, if only there were a history of Cars That Floated Like Hovercraft and Cars That Jet Into Outer Space (and don't forget Cars That Intentionally Submerge), we'd have all our bases covered. Anyway. Whereas today, we mostly see full-size trucks and SUVs with railrider conversions, back in the Twenties, railroad companies used cars for such conversions. The story appeared in SIA #26, January-February 1975.

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2 comments; last comment on 07/25/2008
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