Technical Practicality of a HAMB daily

That '59 was owned by a member on the ChevyTalk forum and was a nice car; it wasn't gutted. Come up with all the conspiracy theories all you want, but that collision was a good representation of what would happen between a late model and an X-frame car. There are other photos on the internet of X-frame crashes that back up the crumpling that happened in the video. The photo that was posted earlier in this thread of the 60s car vs. modern Benz is also good example. New cars are safer than old, plain and simple, and you're kidding yourself if you deny it. If I had a child that I toted around frequently, I wouldn't use an old car as my kiddo transporter.

I used to drive a '62 Biscayne daily in both the summer and winter up here in Iowa. After about four years of sweating my ass off in the heat of the summer and freezing my balls off in the cold of the winter, I upgraded to a modern muscle car. It's nice having A/C in the summer and heat and defrost that's actually worth a damn in the winter.

 

No doubt I am sure x frame cars are scary in a crash..I own a 61 bubble top (yes I call it a bubble top) and saw a video of one crash tested into a pole..pole ended up in the back seat. I will do my best not to drive into a pole. I am sure that video is on youtube, I will have to look it up.

 

Maximize the brake system. The rest is fate & poor drivers. Patched rust buckets are perfect for our nasty climates. You all do have a 1965 older driver/semi show ride right?

 

This is about to become my daily. My wife drives the Honda just behind it as her daily. Is her car practical, hell yes since we paid it off a couple years ago. My Chrysler to me is practical, I absolutely love the car and absolutely hate car payments. Before I bought this car I had a shiny new challenger for a couple years and was paying just over 500 a month for it then another 200 a month for insurance. I don't think (knock on wood) that I'll be having to pay anywhere near that amount to keep my Chrysler going every month. Oh and since right now I can work from home my "daily" doesn't really get much use or traffic time.

 

This was my Mother's daily from 1965-85. Retired by my Father at 200,000 + miles and parked in the barn. I pulled it out in 2006 to start the restoration process. It gets about 21 mpg hwy with 2.73 gearing. I can and have used it as a daily but live in a touristy area so it stays in the carport most of the summer. If I had the $, I'd find a 63-65 Riviera for daily use! Those cars look great, have all the comforts, and power to boot.


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I got a 65 riv for ya, but it needs a bit of restoration..

 

My profile pic has my hamb-ish daily driver. Minus the ugly wagon wheels and radial tires it is 100% stock and I daily drive it at least 8 months out of the year. South Dakota winters get cold with no top or heat, but I know at least one guy on here has seen me drive it 4 miles to work in -10 degree windy weather. Heck, anything above 20 degrees with the windshield up is perfectly reasonable.

As far as I am concerned if you use any vehicle within its original intended design and keep up on maintenance, almost any old old car or truck can be a great and potentially very cheap daily driver. Any modifications should be well thought out and executed. Don't start throwing parts at the thing unless they will increase reliability and functionality. For local use, I try to keep spare wear parts on hand so I don't have to wait 3-4 days for oddball parts to come in. If my junk drove out of town on a regular basis I would try to drive something that has as many common / bulletproof parts on it as possible, and keep up better on preventative maintenance.

Manual drum brakes are fine as long as you know their limitations, and a dual master cylinder would also be a good thing. Points are fine, but electronic ignition is pretty nice, as long as it doesn't require any custom parts. You don't need power steering or rack and pinion, that's just more stuff to go wrong, and potentially more oddball parts. Some of the older automatics, especially on cars with closed drivelines scare me simply because of parts availability. Honestly automatics in general scare me. Nothing wrong with a 3 speed. Worst case you spend $100 on a spare junkyard transmission and another $100 on a clutch and hit the road again. My 6 volt generator is out right now and I am contemplating going to 12v. Then I could get a jump without potentially frying my coil, buy headlights of the shelf, and pick up a whole new alternator for well under $100 instead of the hundreds that fixing the generator is going to cost me. That is another thing to think about. After the 2nd or 3rd time you have to have your co-workers push start you they start to get a little annoyed.

You also need to be aware of the risks you take insurance wise driving an old car. If you could get an agreed value policy that does not restrict driving that would be the best bet. There are many threads on this subject on here. All of my stuff is paid for and I am cheap, so I just put liability on my stuff. If it gets wrecked and I'm at fault that sucks, but that't why they have parts cars. Many insurance companies use NADA value to asses the replacement cost of a vehicle, so don't stick 20k into a vehicle the NADA tops out at 5k. If you get in an accident with someone else at fault their insurance company will only pay out for direct damage or reasonable replacement price, plus any loss of use of medical claims. Having receipts and pictures to show the prior condition are important, but you will never get more than what the insurance company thinks its worth.

My Willys did get wrecked a couple years back, but the other guy was at fault. His car was driveable after the wreck, while I got towed away with a bent frame, broken springs, axle, engine mounts, wrecked wheel, crumpled body tub. I came out lucky, and was able to prove the prior condition of the vehicle, and NADA on these old Jeeps has a pretty wide range, so I had a pretty nice settlement to the tune of 3-4x what I had into it at the time. I spent a couple hundred on it to get it going again, and the rest bought my wife a late model car and paid for my house down payment, so it did not work out bad at all. It was just more a shame that my almost completely original 25,000 mile 60+ year old vehicle got wrecked because some idiot wasn't paying attention on his way home.

I could have easily been killed too with no roll bar or seat belts, but thankfully I held on for dear life. After fixing it I still drive it was it was with to roll bar or seat belts. I figure If I get killed in my old Jeep then that is the way it goes. I'm not going to worry about it. Instead I focus on enjoying the sound of the stock flatty screaming though a straight pipe, with the windshield down and the breeze in my hair while driving along side everyone else with there hybrids and ugly SUV's. For me that makes it worth the risk.

 

Let me bump this as I have been wondering about the need for a new daily in a few years. You guys in Cali and Florida and the Southwest have it easy. I commute 25 miles each way on the East Coast. Most of my commute is on I-95, speed limit 65mph and traffic is very heavy. I have to wear a suit and tie and I have to drive in rain, snow, salt slush, etc. Summers are 95 degrees and 95% humidity. I'm not as concerned about safety issues since my safety is my responsibility, but I am concerned about the constant battle with rust and the need to stay cool in a suit in the summer. So, I need a rustproof, water-tight hot rod with A/C ... I guess I'll keep looking.

 

You and much of the HAMB membership may cringe at this and possibly flame me for it, but here goes:
If you work in a white-collar suit-wearing office and are seeking to climb the ladder, your "superiors" are looking for normal, stable, non-rebellious conformists to promote (it sucks but it's true). Driving a HAMB-friendly car into the company parking lot is like having tattoos on your bare knuckles or body-mod jewelry--- you're gonna stand out as "different" and that's a bad thing if you want to be taken seriously at work. Believe me, the "suits" don't understand our hobby. They think it's beneath them. If you smell like non-catalyzed car exhaust (and you will) it's not going to go over well in a meeting room. If your hot rod breaks down and you're late or absent from work, that's a career problem.

I've been wearing suits for my entire career. I also have hobby cars and regularly work on my entire family's DD fleet. I've also invested a lot of money in hand cleaner. My suit friend's minds are blown when they find out what I do on the weekends.

Get a clean older Civic/Camry/Sentra with 100,000 miles on it for $1500 (because nobody can tell the difference and those cars last forever) and spend the rest of your money on a cool Hot Rod that you can drive into the sunset after work and on weekends.

 

Not gonna flame you, but that's not my situation. My superiors have no idea what I drive: parking lot's too big and they don't see me coming or going. And even if they did they couldn't care less. They're all military officers and I'm pretty sure most of them would get a kick out of it.

 

You just described me.

Move to California.

I have a meeting with the Vice President of IT (of the whole $145B global corporation) and a 63-patent holding senior distinguished engineer, on Tuesday, about my 4th promotion, in 22-months.

The old ways are dying. It is just taking longer in some places than others.

I don't wear a suit. The suits do not get me, but they are smart enough to see that I am not what I wear, or what I look like. I am who I am, and what I bring to the company.

My boss brings his giant dog to work, in his vintage BMW sidecar rig, in full leathers, on a regular basis. I am absent from work on a regular basis. He does not care. He calls that "life". I am judged by my results, not my attendance.

That's the future. For me, it's now.

 

Suits ruined the free world. All dressed up for each others side show. Build/put the damned old car on the road. So it 'suits' you................D:dd;d.

 

I'm over 100k miles in 18 soon to be 19 years in a '49 Chevy 1/2 ton daily driver ONLY vehicle. I live in Virginia, so it can be done. The assholes are using that pre-emptive brine shit on the wintertime roads for those northern crybabies that come down here to live...got to get to the store for their chips and beer at any cost. We're only on earth 90 years or so, why not have as much fun as possible? Those of us that are 'saving' our cars and trucks by not driving them are saving them for people that will (possibly) change them to an unrecognizable hulk after we are gone. And that's just my humble opinion.

 

I love the handicap plate doing a burnout.lol.

 

I've become spoiled with creature comforts that newer cars provide. Back in 1975 when I was driving a '64 Ford at 70 with bias-ply tires, you knew you were doing 70. My newer OT cars are comfortable at 90. I like the AC, power windows, cruise, satellite radio and so on.

The '59 Ford will have none of that and I'm looking forward to a little power and noise. Yeah I could build all the above into the car and many people do. I just want to be able to jump into it and drive it any time I want to. As a sole DD, it doesn't work for me right now. Real bad weather, new cars have it beat by far. Our winters are tough too, hate to see someone slide into my old car on an icy day.

 

This is not directed at bob, bot bob's last statement in this post helps illustrate a general observation that I have made over the years.

When we were young men these were just cars that we drove. Summer winter we just drove 'em because they were just cars. some of them were hot and others were not. Today we place too much value on them to just drive them, that is what keeps them from being dailies to us. If we took the same attitude that we had back 40+ years ago more of our cars could and would be daily drivers.