So this weekend is South Africa's "Streetrod Nationals" in Johannesburg. The event is held every second year in a different city. The biggest show we have, and if we're very lucky there may be about 500 cars in total. Although it's mostly streetrods, paintjobs straight out of the eighties, TV style muscle cars, etc etc, we are starting to see a few more traditional (our traditionally styled at least) cars locally. A couple of us set off in about an hour to make the 1000 mile trip from Cape Town. The original plan for about 12-15 cars has finally been whittled down to 4!! - and it looks like one of those will be trailered....(Flathead in a 37 pick-up that's overheating badly) So it will be my 64 Valiant, and my buddy's 40 Chevy. Both these cars literally got finished yesterday, so this is our shakedown run Oh and there's a 49 Chev tagging along too. Anyways wish us some luck on the road - I'll get pics up when we get back next week. Barry
Cool, best of luck! It sounds a lot like the Aussy nats, so many cars finished the night before and driven two days to be there. But thats where the fun is! Enjoy mate, Doc.
Keep us posted on how the trip goes Barry. I scored a Willys coupe in Gauteng Province a couple of years ago, which was originally in Cape Town - there is some stuff still out there. When I was a kid we lived on Boulders Beach, south of Cape Town for a couple of years - now I'm in Southern California - identical climate and agriculture. Perfect climate for hot rodding...
Well we all got back (mostly) in one piece, and had a blast. Met at a town called Worcester just out of Cape Town Got on the road and enjoyed a sample of the many mountain p***es in the Cape Not long after hitting the Karoo (semi-desert region that covers a large part of the centre of the country) we had our first breakdown. Fuelpump went on the '58 Delray We pulled the facet pump off the "trailer queen", and fitted that. Wasn't delivering enough fuel pulling, and we moved it to the real (to push) shortly after While underneath we noticed the one shock mount looked a little dodgy, so did a patch up there too. The '49 Chev Streetrod thing (in front in the pic) didn't last much further (stuck lifter I think) and it quickly gave up it's fuelpump and got a tow back to Cape Town. The scenery and evening thunderstorms in the Karoo made things really surreal - this pic doesn't really do it justice Gotta rush off to work now - I'll post meore details later Barry
HEY! WHATS FUEL COST DOWN THERE? just curious i guess. looks like a cool run. i'm tippin my pint to ya!
I spent most of October in Johannesburg (Sandton). Didnt get to see a lot of vintage cars but I was next door to the Ferarri dealership and lots of exotics. Most amazing to me was seeing that its legal to ride in the back of pickups, or even on top of a loaded truck and trailer. You get a ticket for that here. Very cool road trip!
It never ceases to amaze me just how far the HAMB has reached. Best of luck to all you guys and gals. ~Jef
Road trip, cool. and not without their trials and tribulations. Sounds like you had a good time inspite of the mechanical problems.
Yeah - an awesome time, despite this kind of scene being the order of the day This time it was actually as a result of pure stupidity on our part. He had driven over a large rock earlier in the day (doing some evasive driving for not paying attention to us stopping at some roadworks) There had been no noticeable problems as a result, but around lunchtime we thought that the exhaust was maybe a little close to the RH rear tyre (exits in front). It seemed like a good idea to try to bend it forwards a little. Our efforts resulted in breaking the manifold at the collector No chance of a replacement or any likelihood of finding a welder, and being less than 200kms from home, lead to a work of art patch job using wire, coke cans, and a great gloops of RTV.......... The '40 gave us the strangest problems of the trip though He is running Jag' front suspension. In the rush to get it built (only finished 10:00PM the night before we left) the shock towers were a poor design, and not gusseted properly. These had almost completely broken off by the end of the first day - last 40 kms on REALLY bad road was the clincher. A 600km trip without shocks was ...um... interesting. The bad road also took care of the headlights which both stopped working at the same time, but after checking all the switches, relays etc, the problem turned out to be blown globes! The trip back was where the real fun started - he developed a starting problem at a fuel stop, which had us checking points, coil etc. The fact that it swung slowly even when hooked up with jumper leads had us baffled until we took a closer look at the power steering pump - it was jamming up/seizing and dragging the motor. This being the tensioner for the waterpump too, had us stripping the guts out of it and re***embling.... A little later he developed a miss which got progressively worse. No spark at #2 had us swapping leads, playing with points again, checking the cap, pickups etc etc. As it was getting dark, swinging the motor without the dizzy cap showed the points not opening properly/consistently. Not sure if the shaft was bent or the lobes just worn, but we were very lucky to find a mechanic who had an old rusted up distributor in the back of his shop. We stripped it, cleaned the shaft fitted in the otherwise good dizzy. Car ran like a top after that. Did develop an odd fuel leak (tank seemed to have shifted slightly and tweaked something) but we just short filled to below that point every time, and luckily had brought a jerry can with. I'm happy to say that my Valiant (also finished the night before) never put a foot wrong!! Actually I lie - alternator wire came off, and I had to push start one time I did use about 4 gallons of oil though, so a rebuild is high of the agenda.... Can't wait for the next one!! Thanks for looking Barry
Here's a link to some pics of the actual show http://sahotrods.com/forum/index.php?topic=727.0 WARNING:Very little of a HAMB friendly nature!!!!!!! Does give a good overview of what rodding in SA is like though. Thanks for all the comments Weasel - that Willy's looks cool!! We have unfortunately lost an incredible amount of old tin exported due to our weak currency. Locals still don't get it though, and refuse to pay what the cars are worth, so I guess the trend will continue...... South African weather is awesome - coupled with great roads, fantastic scenery, great people, and cheap prices make it well worth visiting. LongnLow Right now fuel is around R7/litre which makes it about $3.00 a gallon if my calculations are right. Does fluctuate a lot though Kevins89notch5.0 That's some good stuff!! We have some really good wine (I live surrounded by vineyards) Unfortunately some of the high end stuff is priced way out of our reach! 2manytoys Strictly speaking it is illegal here too. Like many things here, enforcement of the rules is where the problem lies. It does have an upside though, in that there are still many places where you can do some "top speed testing" on public roads without any risk of being caught......not that I'd ever do that you understand.... Fish Tank Amazes me too Jef!! Great to be able to share in this hobby in our own way! Barry
No it wasn't, but the owner was!! Jacques had the "rat" truck on the trailer. It was driving, but overheating and a little shimmy so he didn't want to do 2000 miles in it. The '34 ( on edit: now that I think about it it's a '33)was his fall back position if he didn't get the truck done on time. He also has a really sweet 2-door Nova in the works and a couple of other projects happening. It's a small world down here - how do you know the car? Barry
We used to sell quite a bit of early Ford T, A and V8 parts to builders/restorers in South Africa and also bought our early V8 exhaust pipes, crossover pipes, mufflers and tailpipes from a S.A. COmpany called Bosal Pty. They moved their production of our stuff to Canada in the early 80s but for some reason they never could get it right so we dropped the stuff. It was almost as if the drawings and manufacturing prints never got to the Canadian facility because evrything they sent as samples was horrible.
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