I have gone more than a month without any major computer failures and I finally have the office mostly back on line. The server is still down, but I haven’t made my mind up if I am going to repair it, I have been thinking about trying one of the cloud based backup systems. I need to do some more research before deciding.
On the shop front things are moving along pretty well, other than trying to remember how stuff came apart all these years ago, thanks to my photo archives I have been able to do a pretty decent job of getting the wagon back together again.
Oh, the comment about “She is a ’56 again!” was in fact directed to the fact that I had bolted the chrome tail fins back on the body. The ’56 Dodge Sierra wagon body was in fact for the most part a ’55 Sierra wagon body. In 1956 Exner created the Forward look, i.e. the cars started taking styling cues from jet airplanes which were coming into vogue at the time. Other than the wagons, the rest of the Dodge line up got tail fins that were actually stamped into the rear quarter panels. I am guessing that Dodge felt the wagons might be a bit pedestrian to warrant the cost of new quarter panel tooling, so they reused the 1955 wagon tooling for the body and added the nifty chrome bolt on tail fins to tie the wagons to the rest of the line.
IMHO, the fins still look like something I might have bought at Warshawsky’s down in Chicago back in the day. JC Whitney and Warshawsky’s were two of the biggest auto-part catalog sales stores back in the ’50s and both ran huge ads in Hot Rod, Motor Trend etc. They were constantly fighting with each other in their ads over quality, price etc. One day a couple of my friends and I drove down to Chicago to go shopping at the brick and mortar store mainly to pick up a set of cheap seat covers for my Plymouth. The building that JC Whitney occupied was one of those trapezoidal shaped structures that occupied one of the odd shaped lots formed when streets are not laid out parallel as many in Chicago were. The building had multiple stories and had two long sides, almost a triangle, each of the long sides faced a different street and each side had it’s own entrance, one on Archer Ave was JC Whitney and the one on 19th Street was Warshawsky once you walked in either door you were standing in the same store.
Needless to say, we were all quite surprised and a bit miffed by this effort to delude the public, but I went ahead and bought the cheap ass seat covers that I had driven down to buy, but from then on I was always skeptical about retail sales outlets…. thank heavens we now have eBay and Amazon! 😉