Classics: Buying MGB (or other) Sports Cars, Part Three. Louis Shalako.

Triumph Spitfire. Sven Homberg.

 

Louis Shalako

Okay. I have been researching British sports cars from the past, and I have found a very small number of Triumph Spitfires in Ontario. Kijiji is a free online ad service. There are other websites, some of those cars go for a lot more money. Arguably, some of those guys know what they're doing. For a car of this type, $8,200.00 seems a reasonable asking price, so-called haggle or wiggle-room, is actually a wider split than some much more modern used car, one that is intended to be a daily driver. My point here is that it is not really practical transportation, and you have the option of low-balling an offer and if it is not accepted, then just walking away.

The seller has the option of saying no way, Jose.

That seems fair enough.

I can't even say these cars are rare, (they shouldn’t be), but it's possible that people are just hanging onto them. I can't even drive a Spitfire, I can push in the clutch, but when I go to let it up, my knee hits the bottom of the dashboard...there is not enough space to slide the left foot down beside the clutch. In other words, a very small car, even for the time and place. This is the best of maybe three vehicles, (I found 31 results for MGB recently), and the sort of average price makes fixing up a project car kind of a lose-lose situation, in terms of the money. I've always liked the front end that tips forwards, exposing the working guts of the vehicle, and of course, the GT-6, a two-litre, straight six coupe version is one of the most attractive small car designs of all time. How do we price such vehicles? The online Kelly Blue Book sort of websites only seem to go back to the year 2000. There must be other websites for the serious buyer or collector.

The M.G. Midget is also inaccessible to me, it’s simply too small in the cockpit for me to drive it.

It's all wonderfully accessible...$8,200.00.

I believe the 1975 Spitfire has the longer trailing arms on the independent rear suspension, and that it cornered at an impressive 0.87 on the skid-pad. I get this sort of info from the Wiki articles and other sources listed below.

In a previous blog post, I mentioned a red Spitfire with a Chrysler alternator. Fuck, I’m looking at photos online, but with this one, I really have to wonder.

Is that you, Dave…???

I’m just going on memory here, but the Spitfire had a very tight turning circle, the steering wheel taking 2.3 turns, lock-to-lock, and nothing much under the fenders to obstruct the cranking of the wheels. Visually, you can see the attraction of lifting that front end and there it is, all accessible. The GT-6 has been called the poor man's E-Type for just this reason.

If you can’t see that, this might not be the collectible car for you…

In the photo, the left front tire is wearing on the inner area, probably an issue of alignment, you may want to replace the tie-rod ends. Yet the overall package seems good, and the very small number of available vehicles sort of answers the question for itself. It’s going to cost you money—how badly do you want to do this, sort of thing.

The radiator has an overfill tank on this model, and the windshield washer bottle is up by the firewall. It helps to know what you’re looking at, rather than driving all over the place, doing the research first-person. I am, quite frankly, educating myself, before even picking up the phone and talking to a real, live person with a car to be sold.

This example is at least worth having.

I’m time-tripping again. I agree, a mechanic who cannot plug into the diagnostics would have to have some direct knowledge and experience. In this town, that would be a rarity. Larger cities in Canada still probably do have their very professional, enthusiast-mechanics. I may be the most qualified guy in Sarnia, population 72,000. Don’t get me wrong: there are Porsche and BMW mechanics in this town. They’re working on fairly new vehicles and have all the dealership and factory support they can handle. If you brought them a 356, they could fix it, and they could probably fix an M.G. as well. This would be at the prevailing shop rates. There are jobs you don't want to do yourself, that's especially true of rolling around in the driveway, in winter, or rain, or heat, and trying to fix something that's better left to the pros.

The black ’78 MGB pictured has over 102,000 k, according to the ad, although that is more probably miles.

I’ve seen some interesting cars just rotting into the ground, with trees growing up through the floor and what’s left of the roof. The only thing there is the castings, perhaps the glass, a few fittings, instruments perhaps. Yet you can buy rebuilt and new parts from any number of U.K. and U.S. suppliers. Obsolete Automotive is right here in town.

With this company, I reckon it’s mostly online sales, mail order, and stuff like that. The amount of walk-in traffic would be minimal.

Open up the doors, and you see why the sills and the transmission tunnel are so important structurally.

Nice. I know I can take the thing apart and put it back together again. The real problem in Canada is corrosion, and some projects just aren’t worth starting. You have to know when: that is a parts car and the rest is scrap metal.

(See previous blog post. - ed.)

Yeah, people pay to import Carolina or ‘southern’ cars. The red MGB locally, purports to be just such a car. Price: $12,000.00. Sounds good, but not exactly a money-making proposition.

Nowadays there are all sorts of tutorials on Youtube. That being said, I’d just pull the motor and take it to a professional machine shop or ship it in a crate to someone with a good reputation. All it takes is cold, hard cash…

…This is the straight dope: when I go off of disability, I will get a raise of $300-400.00 per month. The average new car these days is $66,000.00 here in Canada. Ten or twelve grand for a good B almost seems reasonable. The thing is, to have that daily driver. The M.G. is more for pleasure.

$8,100.00.

Behind our shop in the wilds of Plympton-Wyoming. There are fourteen storage units, last I heard, the rate was $180.00/month. The doors are at least ten feet wide, and the units at least fourteen feet long, just going on eyeball and instinct. A hundred-foot extension cord. A couple of work lights on poles. A bench across the back, a few tools, a good manual, and I could work on an MGB. I could build a low ramp and get her a foot or so up off the ground...you can buy cheap metal ramps for oil changes, just for example. If I was going to drive the B for the summer, I could leave the minivan outside, clean up the unit and I would not have to pay the monthly fee...right. If one must have some kind of a crazy dream, we might as well go into some detail. And if the opportunity should arise, we now have some semblance of a plan.

If I had any brains at all, I’d make myself some kind of authority on the subject, and then write a really helpful and entertaining book about it.

The price on the black ’78 has been reduced, from just under ten thou to $8,100.00. Okay, the later models have many knocks against them. But in terms of this marketplace, a clean body shell is everything. With a good monocoque, good steel in all the right places, everything else is possible.

All it takes is money, time and a good dose of passion.

The bodywork on this machine looks fair in the pictures, bearing in mind the age of the vehicle, Canadian winters; road salt, and simply being left outdoors. I’ve always wondered what Jay Leno had against rain. Jay has cars worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. As for myself, I hate to see any interesting vehicle parked in the long, wet grass for any period of time. They deteriorate so much more quickly. That includes relative cheapies such as the MGB or Triumph Spitfire. 

I could have work space for a price...

…This vehicle is 46 years old. The basic engine is the same as earlier models, it has been detuned and pollution-controlled. This is one of several knocks, considering an 18-second 0-60 time.

(Link will become dead when it sells.)

…Looking into the engine bay, we can see an overflow tank on the aluminum radiator, the old Tudor drink-bottle style washer fluid bottle has been replaced with a larger unit. This is a single-barrel Zenith-Stromberg carburetor, the rectangular thing on top is the air cleaner, and we can still see the old EVAP cartridge thingy behind the washer bottle.

The brake and clutch master cylinders appear to be newer, much larger units. The exhaust manifold is unchanged, and that is a stock M.G. alternator of 35 amps. I’m thinking the old, copper radiators had the hose going to the thermostat housing from the other side, in my recollection. If you look closely, you will see the hot water valve on the side of the engine and the upside-down oil filter cartridge.

I would think that before tearing a bunch of stuff off of this engine and trying to convert it to a previous spec, (thereby gaining thirty or so horsepower), you have to be familiar to the type that you are building it to, if you take my meaning.

The author is relying on limited knowledge and a lot of memories. Mistakes of a technical nature in the text are his responsibility and his alone.

END

We talk about this engine in the text. To be objective, this engine and this car are not hopeless.

Classics: On Buying an MGB. Louis Shalako.

Buying an MGB. Part Two.

Triumph Spitfire. (Wikipedia)

M.G.Midget. (Wikipedia)

Obsolete Automotive.

Collector’s Car Market.

Hemmings.

Hagerty.

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on Fine Art America.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four. Female Sexual Behaviour. Louis Shalako.

"Yes, Louis. I am a good Catholic..."

Louis Shalako

Female sexual behaviour. Why I hated one teacher more than any other has always been a good question. In later years, I liked my high school teachers, at least to some degree. I might have even admired my college instructors.

We weren’t kids anymore. We were adults, certainly in college we were there because we wanted to be, and not because someone had dragged us to school by the ear or the collar or whatever.

It is also true that I quit school at about fifteen and a half years old, and there was nothing, nothing, this side of heaven or hell, that could ever make me go back…

We have to understand the time and the place. The Catholic school board had to follow provincial directives. They brought in proficiency testing for mathematics and English skills. Somehow it turned out that I was reading at a first-year university level, which is not bad for a grade six student. Truth was, that was the top of the scale. It did not go any higher. The people who designed such tests never even considered the possibility that even a grade eight kid might achieve such scores, and the math skills were all right as well—this is the benefit of actually reading the book, and of course doing the homework, no matter how much kids hate homework.

So, what they did, was to take a handful of Grade Six and Seven students, and scatter us among a couple of Grade Eight classes for math and English. And this, of course, is where the bullies enter the picture. To be called a ‘browner’, or ‘teacher’s pet’, and to be regularly assaulted, by small groups of males, whether in the school yard or on the way to and from school, may in some small way help in explaining my sort of difficult attitude towards certain teachers. All of whom (the bullies, I mean), were bigger, stronger, had more experience, and operated in groups because a bully is just a coward that is bigger than you—just one more important lesson on the journey that is life. And they do like an audience, don't they.

While I do owe some debt of gratitude to my tormentors, who if nothing else taught me not only to fight, or how to fight, but the value of doing so. Because not to fight was to be destroyed in some way. Not to fight was to join them, and to become their punching bag, and to never have a day’s peace for the rest of your life.

When four of the worst offenders borrowed daddy’s car one night, when one of their older brothers bought them some beer, when some other friendly neighbourhood character sold them a bag of grass and a few hits of acid, when the four of them died in an almost predictable flaming car wreck, I will admit that I thought it served them right.

As for the teacher, that may be another story. The school board, in their usual heavy-handed but also totally incompetent fashion, had little choice but to provide some rudiments of ‘sex education’, mandated by the province, and the results were also pretty predictable.

I once brought Miss Hillman, our grade seven teacher, to tears with a question I asked in front of the class. In fact, she ran crying from the room, down the hall to the principal’s office, and oddly enough, she went on to marry our Principal, Mr. G. Boucher. So, in some sense I was the one that brought them together.

It was a good question, too.

I asked what business a 47 year-old virgin, never married and presumably a good Catholic, had in teaching sex education.

"What are your qualifactions."

Not very tactful, one must admit. I had also asked teacher Joe Abela, about sexual intercourse.

“Sir. There is some suggestion that the sexual act can be pleasurable. Any truth to these rumours, sir.”

“Ah, yes, Louis. Ah, yes, I think I can safely say, that there is some pleasure involved.”

Of course sex education was a joke—a Catholic school board was surely going to skip over contraception, and masturbation, and abortion, and any number of things. Of course I’d read the book—The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris, where the reader can find a fairly clinical description of the act of sexual intercourse, at least among primates. I had read The Happy Hooker, by Xaviera Hollander, for fuck’s sakes, and of course Dr. David Ruben’s, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, But Were Afraid to Ask. This was a big best-seller of the time, and of course my mother was an inveterate bookworm, and my old man probably read them too.

Why not? I sure did.

When your teacher tells you, “The penis is placed in the vagina and sperm is released,” you aren’t telling kids anything they don’t already know. No, we were supposed to be innocents. All you had to do, was to listen to the talk in the schoolyard, and you would have known better than that, ladies and gentlemen…

You’re just making fools of yourselves at that point, and I have always despised stupidity. I despise anyone who wastes my time, ladies and gentlemen. That one is deeply ingrained in my nature, whatever the hell that means.

But. It was the sort of thing you really can’t say to your teacher, or even your parents, for that matter.

This little bit of background may go some way in explaining what happened next…

It’s not as bad as you may be thinking, in fact, it is worse.

Funny thing is, I have never been ashamed of it.

I ain’t all that proud of it, either, but it does kind of make for a good little story.

***

Down in the basement, in the back of my father’s workshop, there was a small chest of drawers, and in that chest there was a book.

A small, hardcover book, with a fabric spine and the rest of it was covered in thin zinc. On the cover, it said, Female Sexual Behaviour. Opening the book, the inside was cut out—just like in a spy movie. The outer rim of the pages were glued together. Inside this hollow cavity was a little clip for a battery. There was a capacitor and an induction coil, basically just wire wrapped around a piece of metal, which was there more to hold the shape as much as anything. Attached was a thin strip of spring steel, with a magnet on one end. On the inside of the front cover was a small steel plate. When the book was closed, the magnet was stuck to the plate, and the circuit was dead. When you opened the book, the magnet lifted up, and up, until the tension on the spring overcame the attraction of the magnet. Fine wires led from the battery, one to a metal frame or plate glued onto the back cover of the book. The other wire led to that stainless-steel clip and magnet thing.

When it released, the circuit was closed, and that spring-loaded contact hit a plate, over and over and over again until some sort of equilibrium was restored and it would lift off again of its own accord.

The result was maybe ten thousand volts, but also only about one ten thousandth of an amp, when coursing up through your fingertips, your hands, all the way up to the shoulders.

As one can imagine, once I’d found a battery and put it in there, the first thing I did was to open the book and try that thing out…

The only way I can describe the sensation is that it is a lot like a whole bunch of sledgehammers pounding right up through both arms, from the inside out if that makes any sense.

And like any kid, of course I had very little choice but to try that out on my brother, my sister, all of my friends, their brothers and sisters…everyone who ever opened the book screamed and threw it, and one learns to duck, to run, but holy crap. That book worked very well.

It strikes me that somebody gave my old man that book. Some of his friends chipped in and bought it for him. A stag party, a bunch of young men drinking beer, swapping crude jokes and slapping him on the shoulder.

Oh, and presenting him with that book, after a short and suitable speech by whoever was going to be the best man at the wedding—and there’s that rather provocative title, and it’s only natural that a young fellow looking marriage square in the eye, would have little option but to open that book and have a look—right.

That’s the way I have it figured, it’s as good an explanation as any.

***

As for my own little revenge, I have to admit it was pretty fucking diabolical, ladies and gentlemen.

You see, it went a little something like this…

I took the book to school one day, and resisted the temptation to try that out on a couple of buddies. No. I had bigger fish to fry.

It was afternoon, Miss Hillman was up at the front of the room, blathering on about some fucking shit book. Phoebe was the story of an underage girl, having premarital sex, and who got pregnant, and of course the teacher is reading this aloud, all part of our anti-sexual indoctrination which passed for sex education in the Catholic system.

I took out the book, head down, and I pretended to read. Looking up and around, I caught the eye of the guy to my left. I showed him the title and of course he was interested. Maybe even impressed. I let the top of the book show over the top of my desk once or twice, still pretending to read in class—which I was known for. What do you expect, when school is so unbelievably boring, possibly even irrelevant ladies and gentlemen.

I turned the other way, and showed the title to a girl in the row to the right.

Right on cue, she giggled and put her hand over her mouth. Turning back, probably with a sly grin, a quick glance up at the teacher, I pretended to read some more.

When the bell rang for afternoon recess, I armed that fucking thing with a nice, fresh battery—I slipped that into the desk, dropped the top closed, and went outside with the rest of the class.

***

"All right, people. Chapter Nine in the math book--and no bullshit."

After recess, we all come trooping back into the classroom. The lid of my desk is flipped up. Pens, pencils, textbooks and exercise books are scattered all around my desk. And there’s that fucking book, Female Sexual Behaviour, it was open, laying face-down on the floor. I scooped all that shit back up, put it away. I sat down, all prepared to face whatever shit was about the hit the fan.

Nothing happened.

After a few minutes, Mr. Burger, a grade six teacher from down the hall, poked his nose in the door, taking a quick and sweeping glance across all of us. I wouldn’t say he paid any particular attention to me, but to do that to me, would be to acknowledge me. I was probably the one guy he didn't look at.

He told us to do whatever—exercises for chapter nine of the math book or whatever.

“I’m leaving the door open, I’m just down the hall, and you will be quiet.” He gave us his trade-marked glare and stalked off down the hall.

I suppose we all kind of looked at each other—and the clock.

For the most part, people just shrugged, not having the slightest clue of what was going on, and with a collective sigh, I reckon we all opened up the math book and had a bash at Chapter Nine

It was no more than a few days later, a Thursday night. My mother was going out, she was in the bathroom, where as you know, women spend an inordinate amount of time, and when they come out the place smells like hair spray, soap, steam in the air, whatever.

Anyhow, there was a knock at the door and I went to answer it.

To my shock, it was Miss Hillman.

She and my mother were going roller skating. I had no choice but to let her in, and to tell my mother that she was there, sitting, in fact, in the armchair in front of the television set.

We didn’t have much to say to one another. I headed for the bedroom and whatever book I was reading, but a message had been sent—and received.

What is really bizarre, is that I never heard another word about it.

One can only speculate as to what they found to talk about, on their ladies night out…

They had no idea of what to do about me, in fact, neither of my parents ever mentioned it.

None of my teachers, the principal, no one said one fucking word about it.

Perhaps that was for the best.

END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available fromSmashwords.

See his art on Artpal.

Louis has a free audiobook, One Million Words of Crap, available from Google Play.

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

 

 

 

Ideas Are Free: Some Hard Truths About Writing and Publishing.

Louis Shalako




Some nice young guy opened up the chat box, which is often a dead giveaway. Just some nice young fella from Africa. After a while, he mentioned giving me a book idea to develop. In a thousand words or less, I only use my own ideas. Like Robert J. Sawyer has said, I can't even look or listen to your idea, as maybe some people come back, years later, and hit you with a lawsuit claiming that you stole their idea and made a lot of money with it. Their deposition will state when and where they first told you about it, perhaps a convention somewhere—or the chat-box on Facebook, and you won’t even remember speaking to them. You don’t recall the name or the title or the big idea. Pretty hard case to defend, especially if there are resemblances between their alleged book and yours.

You don't have $35,000 to pay me to write a book for you. If you can't write it yourself, you are not suitable writer material. Your first book, ghost-written by me, is unlikely to be a bestseller. I know that from experience, in fact I've never had one myself.

If you can't pay me up front, or at least make a substantial first installment, why would I ever write an unsuccessful book for you, when I can keep working on my own unsuccessful books?

Here’s the thing about first books.

It will not lift you up out of poverty, nor will it get you out of whatever stinking shit-hole of a country you are in.

Ideas are free. My time is precious.

Books are hard to sell.

End of story.

What it Takes.

Here’s what it took for me to get this far, and up to this level of skill.

At the age of 25, I quit a pretty good job as a carpenter. That involved some risks, and I can honestly say that father was not pleased although mother might have been. Everyone else thought I was nuts. I went to Lambton College, where I completed the first semester of the Radio, Television and Journalism Arts course. Running out of money, I was gone by February, 1984—that would be 33 years ago. I worked for eight months at the Delhi News Record as sports editor. After that, I did a few media projects, including a training film for the Lambton Industrial Training Something-or-Other. The contract was for $1,500.00. One day I got a letter from their lawyer. Not happy with the progress or the outcome, and having paid me $1,000.00 already, the contract was terminated. A bit of a learning experience as you might agree. I also got some training as a portrait photographer, but then Dow called and I ended up working there for about $14.00 per hour in the construction/labour pool.

For years I fucked around with writing, and yes, submitting stories which were universally rejected. I thought they were good stories, maybe they were, maybe they weren't. When I finally got on the internet in about 2009, I had six completed manuscripts. 

They weren’t very good, but they were at least complete. I know that, because it said ‘The End’ on the last page. On New Year’s Day, 2010, I announced to the world, (and my few hundred Facebook friends) that I was editing the first two manuscripts, which took about ten months, doing two books at once and quite frankly, not knowing a damned thing about it.

I had also been offered contracts, three of them, by someone I now think was a kind of vanity publisher. I managed to weasel out of that. And I took some heat on Facebook, from traditionally-published authors who thought I was the worst thing to come along in quite some time…some of them, one lady in particular I sort of remember, was a real prickish sort of a person, and I eventually figured out she was talking to me…

Some of those people are now self-publishing, having been mid-list authors who were dropped due to low sales. And I read everything I could find on writing, publishing, storytelling, for about the next six or seven years.

I don’t even look at that shit now—not very often, anyways. If I have a specific question, I Google it.

I’ve never had a bestselling book. In fact the sales numbers are quite low, so low that I took part-time work just to feed myself on this miserable little Ontario Disability Support Program pension.

And now, I have twenty-one novels, nineteen under the Louis Shalako brand and a couple of others out there as well.

I don’t do ghostwriting, but I reckon that sort of contract would be pretty airtight in terms of who owns the work. I would never be able to say that I wrote it, and would receive nothing other than the initial payment for writing a book for you.

Quite frankly, I can’t be bothered.

If you want to be a writer, and you may be starting off with a lot more natural talent than I did, what you want do is to write a story of any length—start off with short stories. Submit them to the magazines and websites that at least promise feedback or critiques.

Put the years in, work your ass off, and maybe someday you will be able to call yourself a writer.

Incidentally, this blog post was my idea, and mine alone.

Not yours.

It’s nothing personal, okay? But I’ve done the work, and, at least to some extent, I have paid my dues. This is something none of us can escape from.

Anyways, good luck to you, and maybe you’ll find some joy elsewhere.


END

Louis has books and stories available from Google Play. Some of them are presently free.

Thank you for reading.