balthazar
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Everything posted by balthazar
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Not many know that Bill spent a few of his late teenage years in a central PA asylum, where frequent electroshock treatments --tho ultimately corrective-- laid the basis for his abhorrence of electric cars today.
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I'm firmly of the opinion that people can do a LOT more than they think they can, it's an issue of application more than ability. A 2nd pair of eyes/hands help immensely, tho.
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Factory wiring schematics are not to be trusted.
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Been working steady on the old girl. Wiring is about 95% replaced now. Compare pics in post# 96 with the below : Still testing circuits but once all is done, will adjust lengths & wrap/tuck everything. So far, so good. Only area left is the motor/ignition electrics. You can see my new fuse block with the hardware transferred over. Also looked at the horn & opened it up- all 'looks' good inside, uses a metal plate to vibrate rather than any sort of diaphragm. Have a tiny bit of cleanup at the steering column, run a wire and it'll be ready to test. Just about time to buy a new battery for the truck. - - - - - Also 'learned' the key system & tested it out. The column drop (holds the column to the dash) has a key and an 'ON/OFF' toggle. Ford addressed car theft in the '30s with a locking steering column. To stop the truck you toggle to 'OFF', turn the steering wheel until it locks, then remove the key. To start, you insert key, rotate to unlock column, toggle 'ON' and press the starter button. As with a surprising quantity of things on this truck, all seems to be working well RE locking/unlocking. (And yea; big flipping deal RE the modern move to starter buttons. What's old is new again… )
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What an awesome novel cover… but I have one serious misgiving about it... …why are the valve covers so close together?
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One of Drew's better childhood photos :
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'76 Cadillac Coupe deVille, tan 1/2-top over brown body, quite minty, parked on street.
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It's not 1985 any longer. Trucks are a separate demographic, irrelevant to your attempted point. Americans do NOT like big cars, which is why all of them are gone. Regardless of the governmental entity EPA's assertions and the misleading 'interior cubic volume' metric, there are no full-size cars left, haven't been for some time. Americans like BMW/MB size pigeonholes, which is partially why those do well sales-wise and every other arm chair analyst thinks Cadillac has to match them niche-for-niche or die. Fact of the matter is, when Cadillac was still building V8 powered, fender-skirted Devilles in the late '90s (alongside the Brougham), they had vastly waning respect and decreasing sales. It's not that Cadillac was 'chasing BMW', they were building more modern versions of performance luxury vehicles- that's certainly not owned by BMW… or else MB has been 'chasing BMW" for years, too. Where I will agree is that modern stuff is too small overall, mostly in vehicle width.- 82 replies
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Seville was a K Body, not an X-body. What gets commonly repeated is that Cadillac started with the X-Body frame, as a starting point in the engineering process, but the frames don't interchange, there is on the order of 10% interchangeability in the entire car, very few direct bits do interchange, and the extensive engineering cost (and the unique frame) was the reason the Seville came out at $12K instead of the initial target of $7.5K. It was NOT a "massaged Nova frame", which is why they felt like different cars; they were.
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My God you're obtuse. 18 years before the Benz tricycle.
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I don't dream about modern stuff. That said, I do find the Sierra Elevation quite appealing, but GMC doesn't offer it on the crew cab, and a CC is mandatory. So I'd have to special order the E wheels and swap out.
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You want to redesign a sedan to cut "maybe" 2 inches in overall length off ?? WHO CARES ????? CTS isn't a Buick.
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Totals thru Nov 2015; 187446 cars, 147282 trucks/SUVs/CUVs. Yes, the Sprinter is included, it's a "mercedes" & reported on same chart, isn't it? 187446 out of 334728 is 56% cars. MB relies heavily on trucks in the U.S., and HEAVILY on fleets in Europe. It's how they pursue ever higher production goals, their #1 purpose.
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MT Tests '16 Sierra Denali. Puts Pushrods To Test. Results Astound.
balthazar replied to El Kabong's topic in Industry News
Where are these automatons who think "pushrods" somehow don't develop power?? -
Why? Buick doesn't sell any at the base/no-option MSRP. There's no point. It's not going to bump sales. It's a non-issue. Just like no one worries (Oh; I suppose there's an 'kms' somewhere who worries about these non-issues on MB boards) that the $175K s-class starts at $92K and that Daimler should "bump it up market already".
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No one buys cars like you think they do. VERY few buy based on the number of cylinders, or the overall length of a car. Performance is what counts and what is felt, performance, ride, room, features, etc etc. Not 'platforms', wheelbase, NVH and other relative intangibles. CT6 has no bearing on the La Crosse, and vice versa.
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Mercedes is 56% cars, / 44% trucks. Deal with it.
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No one buys cars like you seems to think they do. No one looks up what the base model base MSRP price is UNLESS they're buying that or that tightly budgeted. The vast majority go mid-tier, or in this case, top tier. No one buys or doesn't buy a LaCrosse at $44K sticker BECAUSE there is also a FWD base LaCrosse MSRP'd @ $32K. This never bothers you when -say- mercedees has a 50K or more swing in a model's price, here you're bothered with a 12K swing???
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Same reason the Germans siblings do; choice. BMW is planning another 4-banger 7-series...
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As was pointed out earlier in a local example, 75% of La Crosses' sold were the top trim level, starting at $40K. Base model base price is irrelevant. The issue with Buick's sedans isn't price or equipment, it's advertising. Buick need a larger & more prolific advertising effort.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXKA7jTqB2A Been into this ambient drone stuff lately, driving everyone else in the house nuts. >> Saw a comment on another vid of this 'band' : This sound submerges you. You feel like you're underwater. It doesn't scatter across a landscape. You close your eyes and let it wash you. You don't dance and move with it. You let it drown you.
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Cadillac News: Cadillac Faces A Conundrum With the Escalade
balthazar replied to William Maley's topic in Cadillac
^ Very true, thus; as the homogenization of passenger vehicles continues, these 'trends' are less and less important. ^ Very true, thus; as the homogenization of passenger vehicles continues, these 'trends' are less and less important. -
Cadillac News: Cadillac Faces A Conundrum With the Escalade
balthazar replied to William Maley's topic in Cadillac
It's not a matter of "yours' or 'my' reports; I posted an IHS Automotive chart based off of Polk new car registrations. That's "the" numbers, regardless of who quotes them. Now, what op-ed pieces do with that info, such as omit the inclusion of SUVs in that total and specifically call the percentage "CUVs", is yet again; typically sloppy 'journalistic' laziness. The bottom line is still; cars : 46%, SUVs & CUVs : 36%. Parking lot visual estimates are anecdotal, not empirical. -
A quad of '58-59 Chevy / GMC project trucks, rough, some just cabs, but have only been where they are less than a year. Here's one of 'em : http://cnj.craigslist.org/pts/5310952102.html
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Well, it's fine & well to like whatever one likes…. but in objective terms (yes; there is a degree of objectivity in automotive styling) the Citroen SM just breaks so many rules…. and I don't mean that in a good, outlaw-esque way.
