The friend I have who has had the most experience with the full blown intensive “security” search was an airline pilot. It happened to him almost every time he was deadheading on an affiliated airline between Honolulu (where he flew from) and Vancouver (home). They would pull him out of the line and give him the…

Actually, adjust to constant dollars and those Wardair flights cost about the same as a flight over the same route now. You can also dig up plenty of studies showing that overall air travel hasn’t gotten relatively cheaper (heavily traveled routes with competition cost less but other routes more) in North America.…

There is a good answer to mom (but I doubt many of us would have dared try it even if we had thought of it):

Yeah! Isoproanol is great stuff!

Yeah, great car but I want to know who the elegant lady in the first picture who seems to have stolen Tintin’s dog is. Oh, I notice there’s no-one in the driver’s seat, maybe our hero just left Snowy in her care while he tries to sober Haddock up.

Funny, it’s older farts like me that frequently bemoan the state of air travel because we can remember how much better it used to be before the deregulation era started. Mind you, though the actual flights are much worse than for example my trips to Hawaii on Wardair back in the 80's, it’s the demeaning “security…

Yes the gyro driven part of the turn and slip is dead. Since you don’t need it for crop dusting (you sure as hell aren’t going to be doing that sort of flying in IMC!) only having the slip/skid ball would be fine.

My mother bought a Ridgeline new back in 2013. She wanted a pickup, and at 75 years old she actually did need a pickup as she regularly uses the bed to carry lumber, gravel, bark mulch, paving stones etc. for gardening and home projects - she’s still going strong in 2018 too. The under bed trunk and the fact that when…

Finding a good one might take a while. I’m sure there are some real beauties out there but with the Mustang (and many of the other performance cars) a lot of the cars for sale are about as attractive a secondhand buy as are condoms.

I’m going in for eye surgery this Friday so that image in particular doesn’t do much to work up my enthusiasm for the car. It’s bad enough having a cataract in there let alone a 1:270 scale Clown Shoe:-)

Thanks for a bit of an insider’s view on the era. A book on what the British motor industry went through in that time period (like Bert Hopwoods memoirs where he talked about the mid 60's through to the end of his involvement in the motorcycle industry) could make fascinating reading. I find business histories…

Cloverdale. Way back in the 90's when I had a TR-4A I used to love going out to Fort Langley and heading out to the roads to the east between the Fraser and Highway 1. Going up Armstrong from River road was a favorite. The area was nice and close to home for a quick country road drive after work or on the weekend.…

You don’t understand - they were going for a Porsche design language cross-pollination by combining the 911 shape with the right-out-of-the-factory panel gaps of the 924/944 series:-)

Too bad I don’t have any pictures of my first car, it was a bastard in the snow. 1974 Capri 2.8 4speed. Widened stock wheels with BF Goodrich TA tires - BR50-13 and this was in the late 80's so not only did I have wide, summer only tires but ones that were old enough to be in the old size and only slightly less hard…

Going by your user name that has to be from last winter, right? It doesn’t snow much here in the Fraser Valley but when it does it can cover the roads with a deep layer of slush like a vanilla Slurpee and below that slush it can be ice. Last winter I still had my AWD Element and with four snow tires I still had some…

More than the overall size it’s the bed height of today’s pickups that I don’t like. I remember delivering 205 liter drums of aircraft paint stripper to a customer that didn’t have a forklift - in the 1990 Mazda or the 1994 Nissan we had it was easy to roll them to the tailgate, turn them and slide them off the truck…

No matter what models they bring to North America they’ll have to be well built and reliable. Even more important: they had better have a strong dealer network (or factory stores if by some miracle that can get past all the legal obstacles), good parts supply and lots of technical training for mechanics. Without that…

You had a $1,500 beater when you were 16? You spoiled Richy-Rich rat-bastard! When I were a lad all I could afford was a $1,000 car and I had to work 34 hours every day scraping the slag out of blast furnaces with me bare hands and when I got home my dad would kill me and dance about on my grave singing Hallelujah.

I had two, both bought new. Fuel economy wasn’t that great. OK but not great - the best I ever saw was 24mpg, the worst about 20. Other than that I loved them. They could haul a lot (though only four people because they only have four seatbelts), the fold down seats made a decent bed (at least for me at five feet, ten…

If fully autonomous cars ever take over how are the various governments evr going to make up for the lost speeding ticket revenue? My guess: “Enhanced Civil Asset Forfeiture” Being out in public will be deemed probable cause for search and seizure of anything they can get by holding you upside down by the ankles and…