My latest creative collaboration

Over the “off season”, I agreed to do the graphics for a car show sign for Marshall. His yellow feature car is pictured in front of a jet in the post I wrote a few months back. Way back a long, long time ago I did my own sign and I have also done one more for Mike a few years ago. I redid mine for last years Carlisle event due to a typo.

I think my graphics skills have evolved since those first attempts. Here is end result of what I produced for this one.

Graphics for Marshall's sign

Marshall and I went back and forth for several iterations until the details were just right. Stripes were removed from the pavement, the antenna was left intact, windows were tweaked and so on. It was nice to work with Marshall as he is just as detail oriented as I am.

I sent Marshall a file and he had the finishing done locally. Here is what he told me about it:

As you can see I went with an aluminum frame with a marble or speckled looking mat with black and silver. I felt this looked nice with the print. The print was printed at Staples for $24. They laminated the print and put it on black foam board for me to the size of the frame. I also used an anti-glare glass so folks wouldn’t be blinded from the sun when walking up to read it. You can also see that I used the smaller file as a cover for my book with the car info/story and other memorabilia that I have found pertaining to Feature Cars.

Completed sign

Marshall received compliments on his sign and even placed first in the class he entered (“Original Mustang 1974-1998”.)

Web site availability today (04/20/2008)

In my area, it was way too nice out today to be surfing the web but, while I was having lunch, I was trying to catch up on things related to this site. I am readying a second email on the plans for the 2008 Carlisle All-Ford Nationals, I had a bunch of new registrations to process and general email to reply to. The forums have also been very active. I have hesitated to mention my pleasure in seeing that recently as it will probably doom their popularity. I’m superstitious like that.

While I was online I noticed that a large portion of the site went offline as I was using it. Continue reading

1993 Ford Motorsport Nationals in Maple Grove PA – Was Your TWF There?

The large number of triple white feature cars present at the 1993 Ford Motorsport Nationals only recently came to my attention via the comments on a recent post. Ken (cobra2top) was kind enough to capture some of the images from his VHS recording of the event.

Maple Grove line up

Ken shared:

They had approx. 50+ triple whites there. It is pretty amazing seeing a long line of them. At the end of the show they all drove down the drag strip. I remember they put a sticker over the 5.0 badges with the FMSN logo on all of the cars.

Maple Grove Decal

I suspect that many of these cars still are wearing their decals. One appeared on ebay in June 2006.

Surviving Motorsport Nationals Car

Whenever I see cars on ebay claiming to be “such and such” I always get suspicious. And, that is the main purpose of this post. Most times there is no documentation proving the claims. Heck, we even have trouble producing official documention that our cars are special for being feature cars. Now we know that the presence of this decal does mean that the car was part of something special.

If you have any information on these cars or this event, please share! I will pass along any information I gather as I continue to look into this.

Achieving a balance with nature

I have a lot of respect for nature and our earth. I have written about preserving our earth for the future as well as responsible outdoor lighting. But, this isn’t about that at all.

I took my son to a birthday party over the weekend on Saturday. It was at a local farm. They had a petting/feeding event with a variety of animals as well as a hay ride. Good outdoor fun on a really nice spring day. Except, I was dissed by a llama. I took this picture about 30 seconds before this little ba$tard spit in my face!

Spitting llama

That’s my three year old son in the picture. He was going to put some food in that bucket but got understandably spooked when these guys quickly started moving in. So, he backed off. I guess this upset the one in the center because I then heard a hissing sound and was sprayed with…who knows what. I didn’t know what happened but a nearby mother heard my gasp and said “I heard that llamas spit but I’ve never seen it happen.” Until now I guess. I wiped it off my face and shirt and moved on.

That evening, I had an opportunity to take the Mustang out for the first top down drive of the season. It was awesome! About 10 minutes in, as it was nearing dusk, I noticed my windshield seemed to be much hazier than when I started out. I realized that I hadn’t washed the car after taking it out of storage and the windshield was covered with some of the overspray from the conditioner I used on the top before storing but it seemed odd.

When I got home I was shocked to see the carnage on my front bumper, hood, side-view mirrors, windshield, A-pillars, basically every front-facing surface. I think I must have taken out 1000 mosquitoes!

Bugs

Bugs

I originally thought that this was about balance. I am a firm believer that things always even out. I liken it to the amount of energy in the universe; none gets created nor destroyed. It just gets transferred from one place to another. Do something nice for someone and something nice will happen to you. Nature got me and I got it back.

But, this Sunday evening I had to clean off those bugs.

Nature 2, John 0.

92 Feature Car Literature Update

Ryan (Rare_92) scanned the Vitamin See article from the November 1992 issue of Mustang & Fords. I have updated my ’92 article page to include it. I previously just had a really bad picture of the article that I grabbed off of ebay. This is one issue I don’t own yet so I really appreciate Ryan’s effort to get this to me.

I also did some slight updates to the index of articles to include the magazine covers for the issues. Even though the covers don’t include feature cars, I thought they were valuable because if you are looking for these issues on ebay these might be helpful to you. I know they help me. Sellers don’t always include the issue contents that allow you to confirm you are looking at the right issue but they almost always include the cover.