Buy What You Love, Pay What You Should
Blogs
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Keith’s Blog: Put Those Hoods Down!
Owners who leave the hoods open on their cars for the entire day are my car-show pet peeve. Two weeks ago, while I was emcee of Keels & Wheels in Texas, I mentioned this to the organizer, Bob Fuller. He said, “It drives me crazy too. I spend all day going around asking people to…
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Jim’s Blog: Buy it Done or Build it Yourself?
A friend of mine called me a few weeks back to shoot some photos of a GTO out in the weeds on his property. After years and years of an “I’ll build it someday” mentality, he’s finally decided that it’s just never going to happen. Time to sell the GTO while there’s still some GTO…
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Keith’s Blog: What to Do When the Wipers Stop? 300 Miles in a Bugeye Sprite
We were traveling at 70 mph in a torrential downpour. Interstate 84, which runs through Oregon’s scenic Columbia River Gorge, was a nightmare of high winds and large pools of standing water. It was not the weather I would have chosen to take Bradley’s 1960 Bugeye Sprite on its inaugural road trip. There comes a…
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Keith’s Blog: Wooden Boats and Gleaming Cars — Keels & Wheels Turns 22
“We expect to donate $100,000 to charity this year,” Bob Fuller said to me this past weekend at the 22nd Annual Keels & Wheels concours. In its 22 years, Keels & Wheels has raised over $1.6m for various children’s charities, the foremost being Boys and Girls Harbor. According to Glen R. Royal, mayor of Seabrook,…
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Jim’s Blog: 4-speed or Not?
I got my Caprice sitting right on a set of QA1 coilovers in the front, added a set of big-as-possible 275-series rubber in the back, and have a great-sounding BBC with a 236/245 duration roller cam with .625/.639 inches of lift cackling through a set of three-inch Flowmasters. But there’s one thing missing, and that…
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Keith’s Blog: Why I’m Not Buying a Lancia
I’ve owned well over 500 cars during the past 40 years. If I really got serious about counting them, I might reach 1,000. They have ranged from ’62 Nova Wagons to Plymouth Superbirds to Ferrari 330 Americas to BMW Isettas. There wasn’t a car that I couldn’t talk myself into. As Miles Collier noted, my…
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Keith’s Blog: It’s The Little Stuff That Makes You Crazy — Fettling Two Alfas
I made two round trips to Jefferson, Oregon last week. That’s where “Hooligan Racing,” Bill Gillham’s restoration shop, is located — 63 miles south of Portland. I’ve been taking Alfas to Gillham for over 30 years, my first being the ex-Ivan Zaremba 1967 Duetto owned by my college friend Arthur Levy. When Arthur was deciding on a car to drive from…
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Jim’s Blog: Swap Meet Time!
The Portland Swap Meet is the Northwest car guy’s kickoff to the car season. Even if it’s raining sideways, like it was this year. But for thousands of car-crazy parts chasers, the rain didn’t matter. Who’s afraid of a little rain when those vintage parts you’re hunting are just waiting for you to find them?…
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Keith’s Blog: Buy – Learn – Repent – Move on
I’ve bought and sold a lot of cars over the years. They tended to come in bunches. There was an MG period, then a Porsche period, then a Rover period and so on. Some more-disciplined collectors have a linear approach. For example, having one car of each year of Corvette production. That’s never appealed to…
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Keith’s Blog: The La Jolla Concours d’Elegance Raises the Bar
If location, location, location is the mantra for real estate, it’s the location, the cars and the people for car shows. Seven years ago, when I was emcee at my first La Jolla concours, the show was called the La Jolla Motorcar Classic. It was a good event at that time, but it wasn’t quite…