Originally Posted by
Rudolph Hart
Barry your dad sounds like a whizz engineer,you were lucky to have that level of know how to help.Daytona beach has been famous down here too for as long as i can remember.Every motorcycle riding mate i knew back then used to drool over the bonnie and people our age still do.They bring quite big money now.As you know the mach 111 popped up about the same time as the 69 bonnie,the only thing they had in common was the fact that both had two wheels.
Hi Old Fart- Yes, I was very very fortunate to see all that stuff all my life. I never understood how he learned things. It was like the knowledge just brushed off things and jumped into his head. He just somehow learned electronics one day and began making money on the side repairing TV's. We were a bit poor in the 1950's, so he worked on TV's and was one of the first mechanics for European imports in Atlanta. He cleaned up a lot of money working on the first VW beetles. We had a used '57 bug with a suicide gearbox- first wasn't synchronized. He put an upright Porsche engine in it. It was basically a drop in and go fit back then.He drag raced in that and brought home the trophies. It had a vinyl like accordion fold sunroof that slid back. He later read an article in Road and Track or Hotrod magazine about putting a Chevy Corvair engine in a Karman Ghia. He found a used Ghia and he stuffed the Corvair engine in the back. It looked like a factory build. I never got to drive any of those. He bought a Cobra 289. I remember uncreating it with him. He put that in a Volvo. That was probably the first S 2000, lol. It was insanely fast.
Somewhere around here there's a photo of me taken around 1955. I was sitting on the gas tank of his Bonneville.