That's not to take away from the accomplishment of Pandamonium Racing's BMW E30; I'll post about their overall win once I'm back to civilization. Now I"m going to pack up the Crown Vic and head south 130 miles. Check in later for more LeMons Arse Freeze roundups!

That method worked wonders on the saleability of this Morris Minor Hell Project, and now we're seeing the cheesecake approach taken to new heights with the most decrepit awesome collection of Hell Projects we've ever seen offered by a single eBay seller. Looking for a '63 Ford Zodiac? Perhaps a '49 Salmson S461 is more your speed, or a '54 Austin A30. Whatever sort of obscure French, German, or British machine you might be seeking, German eBay seller Goldies-Boutique probably has what you need. The model, who may or may not be "Goldie," shows off an assortment of costumes while posing in a all the standard car-parts-calendar-style poses; we especially like the fetching grease smears on her face in the "Verdammt Citroën won't start!" shot. Now, there's always the danger that Max Mosley took one look at this tall, busty German woman posing in front of a '48 Panhard Dyna in a skimpy cop outfit and immediately bought all 23 Hell Projects… but you never know, you know?
[eBay Germany], thanks to Manic King Of Corinthia for the tip!

We'll start off with an octet from Discontinuuity, who has a knack for finding some great machinery down on the streets of the home of Coors: Golden, Colorado. Discontinuuity brought us these eight Golden vehicles plus this dignified Golden Mercedes-Benz Ponton a while back, and now we've got another round for you:

Nova Station Wagon: I've got a couple of good DOTS cars here for you. First up is a 1962 (or maybe '63) Chevrolet Nova station wagon gasser. I talked to the owner, Mike, who also owns a 1946 Austin hot rod and takes both cars out to the local Bandimere Speedway for Wednesday night drag races. The Chevy sports a 327 small block, not the stock I6, and has a killer stance in my opinion. More photos of an IH Scout coming soon.
International Harvester Scout: About a block away from the Chevy was this International Harvester Scout in fairly good condition. All I know is that it's driven by a School of Mines student and that it was probably built between 1965 and 1970.
Subaru Leone: I finally got around to photographing this Subaru today. From what I can tell, it was made between 1975 and 1978 and has every Malaise-tastic tape stripe and chrome option checked off (along with "5 speeds" and "Front Wheel Drive"). It looks like a pretty competent little daily driver though. Now I just need pictures of the much rustier BRAT last spotted at Taco Bell.
Volkwsagen Beetle: I saw the Beetle you posted for DOTS a few days ago with the engine cover propped open, and it reminded me that I needed to photograph this flat-black Beetle. I'm not sure of the year; it's probably from the mid 70s. Whatever the vintage, I think it captures the spirit of a college car pretty well: the Libertarian party bumper stickers, subtle yet somewhat half-assed mods, and the pile of crap where the back seat used to be. You also might note that it's parked on Illinois St, right in front of the MG from the original DOTS Golden post.
Toyota Starlet: I saw this Starlet parked on the street while on my way to a friend's house, and knowing the love that many Jalops have for the little Toyota I had to snap a few pictures. From what Wikipedia tells me this is an 81-84 model, and from what the bumper sticker and rust can tell me this little car has been driven hard through Alaska and Colorado since the Reagan years.
Ford Model A: I hope I'm not sending you too many photos from Golden, but I couldn't pass up this great vintage-styled hot rod I saw in a parking lot today. It's a 1931 Ford Model A (although the owner wasn't sure exactly what year it is, the title is for '31) with a chopped top, a 302 Ford V8, and some sweet pinstriping, all sitting on a '32 Ford frame and bias plys. I love all of the little details like the structural wood and fabric in the roof, flat green paint, dropped axle with hairpins, and the lakes-style pipes. Probably one of the oldest cars I've seen around Golden this year, and definitely one of the coolest.
Ford Thunderbird: I've got a couple more DOTSBE cars here for ya. The first is a beat to hell old Thunderbird I caught being transported on a flatbed, parked in front of this creepy industrial building. Whether its destiny is a full restoration or The Crusher, we can only guess.
Volkswagen Transporter: The second car is a newer VW Bus with a wikkid flame paint job, photographed near where I found the MG previously. The paint and aftermarket exhaust give it cool points in my book; however it also looses a few points because of the PRNDL between the seats. From the stickers on the back window, I infer that the owner (or previous owner) is a Christian, works on power lines, and has been a student at the Colorado School of Mines for the last three years or so.

Within sight of this old VW can be found the 1924 Ford Model T, the 1919 Ford Model T, and the 1971 Chevy C10 pickup. It takes a dangerously obsessed very devoted Karmann Ghia aficionado to be able to identify a K-G's year with any precision; I'm looking at the bumpers, taillights, and turn signals and guessing mid-1960s here. If any of you can provide a more accurate model year for us, please do so.


Air-cooled VWs tend to rust even in Alameda's dry climate, though this vehicle has rusty areas that suggest a brief stint in road-salt country. But so what? It's a reasonably early Karmann Ghia and it runs, so life is good for this VW's owner. This is the oldest example we've seen on the island so far; prior to today, we've had this '70, this '71, and this '74.

Even now, 25 years after Hubert The Hatred Bug went to The Crusher, its corrupting influence over me remains strong. Though somehow I've managed to become a solid-citizen homeowner by my 40s, I've never owned a car that cost more than $1600 (if you're going by initial purchase price), and my current daily driver is a beat-to-shit 17-year-old Honda Civic DX… which is actually one of the nicest cars I've ever owned. I can look at a basket-case hot-rodded Sprite with no electrical system whatsoever in my driveway and not even flinch, because I've been here before! The main difficulty I have with telling this story is the near-total lack of photographs of my first couple dozen cars; I finally shook down my relatives for the few you have here, and even resorted to scanning a shot out of my high school yearbook. That means you're going to get way too many words and not enough pictures here, but that's how it must be.


Yes, Alameda High School, 1984. This photograph really illustrates the difference between the kind of social group you associate with when you drive a hideous beater, versus the kind you get when you drive a nice shiny version of the same car. On the left is my Beetle, decorated with Led Zeppelin-esque graffiti and the words "Dave's Still Smokin'" (a reference to some deceased stoner friend-of-a-friend, presumably still firing up doobage in the afterlife). I'm wearing an ironic Ernie-&-Bert Shirt and peering out through the ragtop opening, while my buddies are all seriously geeked-out rejects, flexing muscles, fat rolls, and/or icky cutoffs, and destined to be the unemployable punk drummers and bitter conspiracy theorists of the future. Meanwhile, my preppie classmates pose by (future wealthy realtor) Nancy's showroom-condition '72 Beetle (which she called "Herbie" and labeled as such when signing my yearbook), in their bound-for-success sweaters; even through the crappy halftoned yearbook printing, you can smell the optimism in their attitudes. It's like they know that Reagan and Bush I are going to grease their path to success over the next decade or so, and they're totally geared up for it. And why wasn't I standing on the right with those folks, as should have been my birthright? Well, it all started with a phone call to Sweden…


In the summer of '83, I managed to get shipped across the ocean to spend a month or so with a family in southern Sweden. I was having a great time, as you might imagine a 17-year-old would, and I even got to indulge in some car-geekery by taking a trip up to the Volvo Museum in Göteborg. After a few weeks, a phone call comes from California: it's my mom, with some garbled story about a "$50 Bug with a Porsche engine" that my friend Scott had found, and did I want him to get it for me? Scott (the shirtless guy flexing on the roof of my car in the yearbook photo) lived with his survivalist blacksmith father in a crumbling East Oakland shop, with a Hell's Angels bar on one side and a junkyard on the other. The allegedly Porsche-engined Beetle was some sort of one-day-only sale deal at the junkyard; Scott figured it was perfect for me, and my mom agreed. A little family history here: my mom learned to drive on a '55 Beetle with a Porsche 356 engine, thanks to her ice-racing father, and always felt that setup was a great combination. I already had a total beater '67 GTO and a $50 1969 Toyota Corona at the time, but what the heck? "Sure, buy it and I'll pay you when I get back," I said.


It turned out that the "Porsche engine" was actually a VW Type 3, as used in the Volkswagen Squareback and Fastback; this engine has a crank-driven fan instead of the belt-driven "doghouse" fan setup used on the Beetles and Transporters (even though I didn't get the Porsche engine, I did get a pair of Weber 34s instead of the Bobby Bosch fuel injection originally put on the Type 3, thus making the $50 investment worthwhile right there). How do you make this engine fit in a Beetle? Easy- just hack off most of the rear body behind the back window, to make a sort of a crude parody of a Baja Bug. And that was just the start of the carnage. There wasn't a single bit of wiring left in the car. No instrument panel. No interior. No cover on the huge ragtop sunroof. The brakes didn't work. The pan was mostly rust. Bondo everywhere in adobe-thick layers, including over rust holes. Still, I loved it right away, much more than the Corona and the GTO (which I soon sold for five times what I paid for it). A week or two of trial-and-error electrical work (melting wires are no problem when your car's interior is all sheetmetal), and I had the engine running, much to the dismay of the neighbors (who discovered that a Type 3 with dune-buggy megaphone-style straight pipes sounds like the World's Loudest Chainsaw in action). A few trips to the junkyard and I had brakes (after a fashion) and a driver's seat, and I was ready to start collecting the largest number of fix-it tickets ever issued to any driver in Alameda history.

The first thing I discovered about my new ride was the magic of the Power-To-Weight Ratio. Sure, that engine was probably making something like 60 or 70 horsepower (depending on how much help it was getting from the Webers and straight pipes), which doesn't sound like much until you realize that the 1958 Beetle came from the factory weighing just 1,609 pounds, and mine was completely gutted and missing much of the body. The transaxle was geared for 36 horsepower, and this combination meant that I suddenly had the quickest-accelerating car in town… for about 2 blocks. And it wasn't anything like the smooth torquey rush you got with a big V8; a hard launch with my Beetle was more like being inside a 55-gallon drum strapped to the nose of a Hound Dog missile fired into a burning oil refinery. The word "brutal" was the word most often used by my friends foolish enough to ride in the "passenger seat" (a small plywood stool screwed into the rusty floorboards), and few of them would take more than one ride. The pan would flex and vibrate so badly under acceleration that my eyeballs would jiggle out of focus, and everything got a lot worse better after I installed some VW-to-GM wheel adapter plates that allowed me to install 235/80-15 tires on '56 Olds wheels (complete with Olds hubcaps) in the rear; this "improved" the car's off-the-line grip enough that I could almost get the front wheels to leave the ground (I was able to get enough weight off them that the car would be nearly impossible to control, a real plus for a 17-year-old hoon). It wasn't really possible to drive it on the freeway, since the engine would be screaming near redline above 60 and the ductwork that enabled the Squareback to get cooling air to the fan was nonexistent, meaning the thing would overheat in a matter of minutes. Minor problems, compared to the joy of driving the most notorious car in town!


Then I bought as many junkyard off-road lights as I could find at the local junkyards, rigging them up on the hood and fenders… after that, a PA system from the legendary Quinn's Electronics, which meant I could blast my very favorite song at the time (Frank Zappa's "Stick It Out") for all the world to enjoy… then, of course, a dozen or so random car horns, all this crap controlled from an instrument panel made from street-sign aluminum and studded with dozens of toggle switches and cryptic indicator lights. What I really wanted to do was install a pair of toilets for driver and passenger seats, complete with water tank and pump so that they'd actually flush onto the pavement, but I couldn't figure a way to keep the sloshage from being too maddening, plus there was the shards-o-porcelain crash danger issue. Meanwhile, I was letting anyone who felt like it decorate the car, which went through numerous paint jobs, graffiti-bombings, decal schemes, etc. There was the Led Zep deal you see here, followed by a Dead Kennedys theme, and then it ended up with a Great Gatsby mural on the doors, for reasons that probably made perfect sense at the time. While all this weirdness made me pretty much radioactive in the eyes of all the Cyndi Lauper-esque AHS girls I lusted after at the time, it was still totally worth it. Unfortunately, all the photographs I have come from a single month, prior to the car reaching its true zenith of lameness awesomeness; can you see why I'm such a sucker for the 24 Hours Of Lemons?

Then I realized that, while the car was pretty quick, there was more power to be had in that engine. I made a deal with a Baja Bug-owning classmate for a set of used pistons/cylinders to get displacement up from 1600cc to 1835cc, and sent off for some Brazilian dual-port cylinder heads and the ubiquitous Bosch 009 distributor. While I had the engine apart, I painted all the various pieces of sheetmetal different bright colors and painted the menacing cooling fan (which was most effective at keeping tailgaters at bay) a screaming Day-Glo yellow. I was never able to get the registration straight on the thing (the junkyard guys who sold the car didn't have any paperwork on it and gave it the VIN off another Beetle they were about to crush), which meant that I spent a great deal of time standing in line at the DMV and explaining the situation to disapproving cops. Oh, it was great fun, and I somehow avoided a horrible, fiery death driving the thing.

Then it was time to head off to college, 430 miles to the south, and there was no way Hubert The Hatred Bug was going to survive the I-5 journey. I sold the engine, planning to build up another, even hairier one, and parked the car in the Martin family back yard. Unfortunately, my long-suffering parents grew tired of looking at Hubert out the kitchen window, refused to believe my promises that I'd be back to claim it someday, and finally pushed the engine- and license-plate-less Beetle out into the street to be towed to The Crusher by the APD.

So, that's why the 20R-powered Austin-Healey makes perfect sense as my personal Hell Project; it's the same sort of funky, stripped-down/overpowered rig that I've been yearning for since The Crusher ate my '58!

The 105S was made from 1956 through 1959, and this one proves that a left-hand-drive version was built. Kip shot this car, plus the Beetle in Gulf Oil colors, in downtown San Francisco. And that wraps up our DOTS-O-Rama Sunday!

Where else do you get daily-driven Peugeot 404s parked on the same block as mirror-world Mopars, just around the corner from a Renault-branded, Pininfarina-styled, Kaiser-engined Rambler Rogue? Evestay was way, way, waaay down south and shot these fine machines for us. Fiats galore, a Falcon, a Maverick, even a Unimog! Here's what Evestay has to say:

I'm not positive that it's a Cambridge. Is it an Oxford? Dunno.
The Jeep pickup might be cheating. I suspect that it hasn't moved in some time.
I *love* the rope hood fastener on the CX.
Enjoy

We had another Nice Price winner last time, with an overwhelming 75% of you believing that $105,000 was pretty reasonable for a restored Mercedes-Benz 600. We're considering another German car today, though it was built right here in North America. That's right, one of the last of the Mexican Beetles; by 2003, the 65-year run of our favorite clattery little air-cooled machine ended forever, so this low-mileage '01 is pretty close to the newest Old Beetle that money can buy. Oh, sure, you'll be in for a real adventure if you try to register it outside of Mexico, and it's partway through a conversion to the old-style bumpers (which means there are no turn signals), but it's still a pretty cool car. $10,900, though? What do you think?
[The Samba, thanks to Ben for the tip!]

Once again, VW's reluctance to mess with Type 1 design means I can't be 100% sure I have the year right on this one (though it's obviously not a Super Beetle). The vents behind the rear side windows means it's a '71 or later, and the taillights and bumpers say it's non-Malaise. I'm pretty sure it's a 1971 or 1972.


The Japanese (not to mention the Pinto and the Vega) were starting to squeeze the Beetle in the marketplace by the early 1970s, but the price tag on these cars was still quite appealing for penny-pinchers. In 1971, you'd pay just $1,845 for a new (non-Super) Beetle, which was 74 bucks cheaper than a new Pinto. However, the Pinto's OHC engine made a mighty 100 horsepower, while the Beetle's lawnmower boxer engine wheezed out a mere 60 horses. Tough choice?

Like so many daily-driven beater Beetles, this one got hit and had some replacement body parts installed... then never painted. Why bother when it will just get hit again? That's thinking long-term.


You used to see a lot more Beetles with spacers on the engine lid, to improve cooling. There's no factory temperature gauge or idiot light in these cars, so generally your first warning that terrible overheating is taking place involves frying a valve or piston in the #3 cylinder (the one with airflow blocked by the oil cooler). Remember those big RVEECO external oil coolers?


With 53 rampaging horsepower, the '69 was one of the more powerful Type 1s. You could buy a new '69 Beetle for $1,799. No automobile made in Detroit (or Kenosha) could even come close to that price; a 1969 AMC Rambler listed at $1,998, and the '69 Ford Maverick sold for three bucks less. A new '69 Datsun 510 was a little closer, at $1,896. The King of Cheap in 1969, however, was the Fiat 850 sedan, with a $1,466 price tag. Hey, it's Friday- let's have a DOTS Of The Week poll! Vote for the street-parked Alameda vehicle you liked the best; I'm predicting a Monte Carlo-M6 battle here, but perhaps the Mitsubishi van will get enough weirdness points to take the win.

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