Machine Work

My dad got his Studebaker back in 1993. A bit of the back story on it is as follows: He had found an old basket case Ford, a '50 I think, for a good price, I think it was $500 but might have been $1,000, that he had wanted to buy. Naturally, it wasn't in running condition. He ran it past my mom, and I think it would be an understatement to say that she was less than enthusiastic. He'd probably mentioned it to me, but I don't recall. My mom talked to my older sister about it, and she had a different point of view. I don't think she was especially crazy about it, either, but she told my mom, “He's a good guy, always works, doesn't drink or do drugs, doesn't gamble away his paycheck, doesn't chase tail, you should let him have something for a little fun!!!” So she had convinced my mom, who reluctantly agreed, but in the interim, my dad had talked himself out of it, thinking it could become a constant bone of contention. He said he wasn't going to get an old project car, “Unless a Studebaker Hawk comes up for sale”!!!

I didn't know that part at all. I was working as a machinist at the time, making tooling for sheet thermoforming, and the other machinist would often look through the classified looking for any interesting classics. He reads one day right around then that there's a '62 Studebaker Hawk, 289” (no, not a Ford motor if you didn't know) and automatic transmission, runs and drives, $1,400. Wow, that sounds like a decent price for just about any running and driving classic to me!!! I knew nothing of Studebaker for the most part, other than that some of them had come with factory centrifugal superchargers, but gave my dad a call anyway to let him know, since I knew he was kind of looking for something. It must have sounded just like what he was thinking. It was up at or near the Van Nuys airport, and I don't remember how much longer it was after that, but he had me come along with him one evening, and it was in pretty good original condition. The passenger side fender had been crunched so bad it had torn the metal, and welded back together and roughed out back to close to the original shape, and there was a big scrape on the passenger side quarter panel ahead of the back wheel. Worth the asking price to him, and he drove it home that night.

Since I was employed as a machinist during a lot of the time that my dad was doing various things on the Studebaker, I ended up making a lot of custom machined items for it!!! I feel like I don't have a lot of items (other than my two 512 keychains) that I machined, but there are several on the Stude!!! Since I recently did a post about license plate frames, I'll start off with this!!! This was one of the few frames I made up with my CNC program. I think I did two 512 frames, a Chicago Cubs frame for Sammy, and this one for my dad that I gave him for Christmas in 2005 (incidentally mentioned on my 100th post!!!). One of my neighbors thought it was a great idea to have it on there, since most people have no idea what it is!!!

Around that same time, I think my dad must have asked me about making caps for the lakes pipes. I wrote a program for the outside profile, then made a couple of designs. On the drivers' side, I did the Studebaker “Lazy S” logo.

On the passengers' side, I did the Hawk logo. They are fairly quick to make, and I think my thought was to see which he liked, or if he'd like to come up with something different. Also, the cap I had been measuring off to make the outside profile apparently is just a bit smaller top to bottom that the actual flange, so these have a bit of the pipe flange showing. I would have corrected this and whipped out a pair of matching ones, but they axed me before I was able to get to that point.

His original vision for the Stude was to keep it fairly factory original, with the original engine and transmission, and have his custom body touches “bolt on”, so the body could be easily returned to stock. He designed custom tail light housings, and custom headlight bezels, and a custom grille shell. Then, while they were heading out to some far flung event, the 2-speed automatic transmission went out. He called me up to see if I'd get my mom's Cadillac drive out to get them, and he'd have it towed back, which we did. He found out it was going to be over $2,000 to get the transmission rebuilt, and around the same time, he had a guy who owed him that totaled his Chevy truck with a V8 and TH700R4 overdrive transmission. The overdrive it a huge plus for something you're going to be driving any distance, and Chevy small block engines are a hot rod classic. He decided he would be better off updating the drivetrain. He wasn't the first to put a small block in the Hawk body, but a lot of people end up mounting them high in the engine bay to clear the crossmember. He thought, since he knew a machinist, he could get a reduced size crank pulley to clear it, and put it in the original's position. This was well before I was running a CNC, and this was just done on a lathe. I don't remember exactly how it worked out, but the bolt circle to the balancer was wide enough that I wouldn't be able to make it as small as he wanted and have deep enough grooves, so I made it as a 2-piece unit, with the pulley portion bolting onto the balancer mounting portion.

Not long after, he was having issues with the accessory mounting, and had me make up this bracket for the power steering pump. This was done on a vertical mill. It's seen better days, but it may just clean up nicely.

This isn't anything I did, but I discovered or re discovered that he'd added a Moon Equipment temperature gauge to the intake manifold. Wouldn't be a hot rod if it wasn't running hot!!!

As a tooling designer, we also did pattern work, and would send them out to be sand cast in aluminum. The aforementioned custom tail light housings needed an end piece for the trim that runs the length of the car. My dad made up the pattern, and we sent them out for casting. I cleaned up and polished the castings. He also made up the pattern for the custom headlight bezels. They actually have a portion with negative draft, which most casting shops can't do as loose patterns, but the place we worked with is pretty good. They came out with a lot of casting flash that I had to machine off, and cleaned them up. In the original configuration, they were both just bolted on, but for the current final iteration, they both (as well as the custom grille shell) were all molded in.

Venn Diagram

This is coming up in a couple of weeks. Two of my favorite artists are having a concert together!!! The Counting Crows and The Gaslight Anthem!!! The two most recent shows I've seen were Brian Fallon and The Gaslight Anthem, and prior to that I've seen the Counting crows nine times, so when this show was announced (and on a night that works for me) it was an easy sell!!!

I'm putting this post together as a way to chronicle the times I've seen both groups. I had to go through some of my previous posts to get it all together.

I've previously made mention that the first time I saw the Counting Crows was in November 16th, 1995 at the Hollywood Grand with my brother in law. It was before they came out with their Recovering the Satellites album, and it was a lot of their new songs, so it wasn't stuff that the small crowd that was there was familiar with, for the most part, but it was a great show, very intimate. I'd heard that there was a bootleg of the show entitled “Launching the Satellites”, and just recently found someone had published it on YouTube!!! I converted the audio, and have it saved. It's all as one track, and I want to break it up into the individual songs. This was the set list:

1. Catapult

2. Angels of the Silence

3. Daylight Fading

4. I'm Not Sleeping

5. Miller's Angels

6. Another Horsedreamer's Blues

7. Wiseblood

8. Rain King

9. Ghost Train

10. Chelsea

11. Margery

12. Have You Seen Me Lately?

13. Suffocate

14. Goodnight Elizabeth

15. Children in Bloom

16. Round Here

17. Good Luck

I have recordings of Chelsea and Good Luck that I'm pretty sure were from this show, and possibly others (I have a lot of live recordings of their stuff).

I fell off for a while after that, and didn't even pick up the This Desert Life album, but was getting back into them when the Hard Candy album came out, and I went to see them again on December 10th 2002 at The Gibson Amphitheater, right by Universal Studios, and I was reminded of what a great live band they are!!! Toad + The Wet Sprocket opened for them. The show started with all the lights down and went right into “Have You Seen Me Lately”, and on the third singing of the line “Have you seen me lately?”, they put on all the lights on the audience, it was very theatrical!!! At some point around halfway through the set, the drummer Ben Mize had an anxiety attack or some kind of breakdown, and was unable to continue. Adam pulled out his song book and they played a couple songs as acoustic versions, then the drummer for Toad + The Wet Sprocket took over for the rest of the show. I was hooked again!!!

I think the next time I saw them was July 17th, 2003, at the Staples Center with John Mayer. This may be the worst show I've seen, the acoustics there aren't great, and there were a bunch of really annoying John Mayer fans there. I don't beleive I'd made posts about either of these shows.

The next show I saw, I'm not 100% sure of the date, but it was December 2003 at The Wiltern. The Wiltern is a place that's general admission with no seating whatsoever, which I didn't much care for, but it was a great show, especially compared to the previous one!!! The Wallflowers were the opening act, and I enjoyed them. They opened the set with Adam and one of the other Crows with an acoustic guitar off on the side playing “Blues Run the Game”, which I'd not heard before. Later on in the show was another first for me, they played “August and Everything After”, and not long after the show I found a bootleg from the same tour, possibly from the show I was at, of that song.

The next time I saw them was October 25th, 2005 at the Disney Concert Hall with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra (I've previously had that as Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, please update my flaky brain error). Awesome show!!! I took my firstborn to this show, and made a couple of posts about it. Great show, great sound (and different from the standard versions of their songs), and we had what could have been terrible seats, but Adam turned around to be able to watch the director for most of the show, and we ended up with awesome seats because of that!!!

The next show I saw was September 12th, 2008 at Irvine Meadows Amphitheater with Augustina and Maroon 5 (I'm pretty sure it was the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater at this point, but it'll always be the Irvine Meadows Amphitheater to me!!!) I think I've seen 4 or 5 other shows at this venue, and this was unique among them (besides being the last show I've seen there) for being the only one I ever had general admission tickets on the field for.

The next time I saw them was July 24th, 2009 at the Greek Theater with Augustina and Spearhead. “The Saturday Night Rebel Rockers Traveling Circus & Medicine Show”, this was, and it was a great show. One of the main recollections I have from it is when the treacherous starter on Janice went out again!!! Oh, and Spearhead had offers to download audio from the show if you signed up with them, and I still get emails from them!!!

Next up was October 1st, 2010 at the Ford Theater for the Freeloaders screening. Great weather for seeing a movie under the stars, the first time I've been to the venue, and it's a great theater, with good acoustics for a great listening experience!!! The Ford is across the freeway from the Hollywood Bowl (another venue that I haven't been to) and Tom Petty (possibly with the Heartbreakers) was playing that night. You could hear them during some of the more quiet parts, it's the closest I ever got the seeing Tom Petty.

It almost doesn't seem possible, but the most recent time I saw them was November 24, 2012 at The Wiltern, this time with Mean Creek and Tender Mercies. Good show, I enjoyed Mean Creek more than Tender Mercies, and Counting Crows did not disappoint!!! I remember between the acts they played Black Keys' “Gold on the Ceiling”, and sure enough, I looked up, and the ceiling of the Wiltern is indeed gold!!! Another thing I remember is for both shows at The Wiltern, while we were waiting to go in, a couple of girls were going down the line and trying to drum up business for a vegetarian place down the street from there.

After that, it seemed like every time they were playing locally, it was on a day that wasn't good for me, or in one particular case, they were playing at a casino with a small theater, and the tickets were quite expensive. I would have liked to have seen them more recently, but it just didn't work out.

Not like this upcoming one, it's come together about as good as I could ask for!!!