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Collecting Dust for 50+ Years

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Bugs have an incredible following.They are NOT for the faint of heart, nor are they the kind of car you hop in, & pop down to the grocery store. Some owners drain the oil & heat it on the stove, pour it back in, & then start the car. Certain models, to do a valve job on, you have to remove the entire drivetrain from the rear axle forward, because they dont have detachable cylinder heads. To go at one w/a rag while cleaning the motor is to risk clogging up the carburetor-only fine bristle brushes will do. The payoff, though, is a 1930s car that went like no other,felt positively ALIVE when you were driving it, stuck to the road like a leech.
 
Yeh, the Atalante would be the one to have stashed away, alright. One thing about it I find somewhat surprising is that, with models as rare and few as this, someone, somewhere usually knows EXACTLY where every one of them has been since it left the factory. Old dead dude must have been very stealthy.
 
My father and I went to look at a car that had been stored in a garage for a LONG time.
The car was in great condition.
Couldn't say the same for the owner.....who committed suicide, sitting behind the wheel.....and slowly decomposed.
The car smelled.....A-W-F-U-L!!!!

Dear old DAD.....passed on the sale................

Steve
 
The Bug to find would be the Royale. There were only 6 of 'em made in the late Twenties. The motor was nearly 13 liters capacity-My Mighty Valdez's motor is a measly 6.8 V-10 by comparison-they had 170" wheelbases-My Valdez's is 137", & were 252" overall in length-The Valdez is like 230". There were 7 built, the prototype was wrecked in '31, & all the rest are now in collections. There were 25 of the engines initially made, they were pressed into service in the French national railway system, where they were so successful, another 186 engines were ultimately made, serving into the 1960s. One set a record of going an average of 122 MPH for 44 miles. All this was set off by an unintended insult- Ettore Bugatti was at a party, & a female guest made a catty remark that his cars weren't as fine as Rolls-Royces...I remember around 1986, all of the remaining Royales were assembled for a group portrait. It was quite impressive. They were supposed to be able to go from 3 MPH to top in high...I don't know what the top speed of one of these 7000 LBS barouches was, but it was easily over the ton...I don't know if anyone ever had the nerve to see...
 
I read another article about it. There is some collector (?) whom they interviewed, and he says he has known about the car for years, but honored the doctor's wish, or the family's, to keep it quiet.
 
Damn! Why don't I have any eccentric relatives like that? I wouldn't mind hearing from a lawyer telling me that some obscure 4th cousin just passed away and left me his collection of 400 mint condition R390s.
 
That's quite a find... I saw it on the news yesterday. It reminds me of when Jay Leno found a Duesenberg in the garage of a little house in Glendale, CA, which a widow had forgotten about since her husband had passed away decades before.

I had a slightly exciting find about 5 years ago myself: On an old farm in Ventura County not far from where I now live, there was a bunch of beat-up, but California RUST-FREE cars sitting around. The land owners were known as hostile, and they didn't appreciate that suburbia had completely surrounded them, and that people were always dunning them to sell their land. Several big Cadillac collectors knew that the car was sitting there, but according to one of those collectors with whom I spoke later, anyone approaching would be met with a shotgun-toting man who would invite them to leave with no further discussion. I happened to have a mutual friend with one of the sons, and this is what I got:

9c4bfbf2.jpg


A 1938 Cadillac series 90 formal sedan V-16!!! $5000 delivered. It pays to be polite and respectful. I got for $5000 what some wealthy car collectors couldn't get at any price. The car is slowly undergoing restoration. Body and chrome all done, paint underway. There was NO rot whatsoever on this car... Plenty of surface rust, but NO Holes, amazingly, even in the floor or underbody.

Charles
 
Charles-Homina...Homina...Homina !! Those bad boys were made 1938-40, were the LAST of the multi-cylinder Cads. The same body was used for the 75 series, which was the same cat, but V-8 powered.. If yr car has a division, then it is an Imperial sedan. That was the most common bodystyle, "common" meaning they may have made 1000 during the 3 yr run. The motor is an 135 degree V-16, almost horizontally opposed, & if memory serves, it can be run off either side. They aren't all THAT powerful, smoothness & silence rather than brute force was the order of the day. They DID have heavy thirst, & a lot of them got junked for V-8s during WW2, or the brilliant Cad OHV V-8 of '49.
 
Bogframe said:
You-lucky-bastard.
Click to expand...

What Bogframe said. :D

Sandy G said:
Charles-Homina...Homina...Homina !! Those bad boys were made 1938-40, were the LAST of the multi-cylinder Cads. The same body was used for the 75 series, which was the same cat, but V-8 powered.. If yr car has a division, then it is an Imperial sedan. That was the most common bodystyle, "common" meaning they may have made 1000 during the 3 yr run.
Click to expand...

My father-in-law has either a 1936 or '38 caddy that looks virtually like the one pictured by kx250rider. It is sitting in a field near Abilene, TX slowly rusting away. My F-I-L has a V-8 replacement engine for his caddy at his house sitting on the garage floor. When this engine is sitting upright with the oil pan directly on the floor, the top of the intake manifold is about navel/belt buckle high to an adult male.

When the bucket-sized oil-bath air cleaner is installed, the overall height is almost chest high. The caddy V-8 of the mid-to-late 1930's era is a HUGE engine.
 
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