Inliners International Forums General Discussion Bench racing Got to meet an Aussie Inliner....

Got to meet one of our Aussie Inliner members yesterday. Ray Bell is here in the US from Oz and stopped by to check out what I have going on. He said he drove 500 miles out of his way just to come by. He is on a parts gathering mission here and has logged over 9000 miles on his Dodge van here and in Canada since arriving in Spokane, Washington about a month ago. He has already been to Maine and into Canada and Nova Scotia before heading south to me in Georgia.
Had a great visit with him and my wife enjoyed his stories. It was nice to meet another Inline member. So far I've meet Jalopy45 and Rap Rap who were passing through my area a while back and wanted to look me up. Ray reminded me of Burt Munro from New Zealand in the movie "The World's Fastest Indian", and him coming to Bonnevile back in the 60's and the adventures he had while he was here in the US.

Great!
So what did you offer him in parts?

MBHD

Nothing. I guess he just wanted to see what I have going on in the way of parts manufacturing. He wants me to make some Hemi 6 stuff. I guess i'm just such a person of interest that everyone wants to come see me when they're on this side of the country....even if it is 500 miles out of their way.
The FTF wanted to stop by a couple of Christmas' ago on his way to Florida, but his wife wasn't feeling well, so maybe next time.

I did make Ray take one of my crime novels I just got published, so maybe I can get some exposure in Oz and New Zealand.

And - we speak English.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEJfS1v-fU0

regards,Rod.

Yeah, but sometimes we don't hear in English too well. Ray is supposed to be around here in a couple of weeks. He wants to see me too so don't let your head get too big Scott. There's not much of interest here.

I'm not, i've been talking to him for a while about doing some prototype work on the Hemi 6, so it was a planned visit. I gathered from his visit that he has a lot of time to kill since he'll be here a couple of months. I think he is even planning to stick around until Bonneville in August.

I think he only has a bout a couple of weeks left. When he get this far his time is pretty tight. Quite an adventure.

I talked to Ray Bell on he phone a while ago and he is in a rush to get to Southern California and will not be staying in this area tomorrow night as we had hoped. I will meet him at a truck stop on I80 tomorrow. His truck is just not making the time he had planned on. Hopefully once over the Sierras he can make better time.

He's a real cool guy, i'm sure you will enjoy your visit with him, my wife and I sure did.

I posted this on the Hot Rod Inlines while I was waiting for this board to resurface. I was expecting Ray to show up sometime Friday and maybe spend the night. He should be on his way back to Australia with tons of US parts.

About 8:30 AM on Friday the 11th I got a phone call from Ray Bell who was broken down about 100 miles away. Ray is an Aussy Inliner here on a bit of a walk about or drive about in this case. He has crossed the country twice on this trip ocean to ocean, Canada to pretty far south. He has been in 38 states and several provinces. His problem was that the Dodge pickup he bought to fill with parts had been fitted with Ford wheels. The center hole was too small to fit over the axle hub. He noticed this when he broke a wheel stud and decided not to drive further without some repairs.

He said he needed a hammer, a file, a jack and some lug nuts. He had plenty of studs from the collection of rear ends in the truck. I filled his list plus water and beer and headed out. Two hours later upon my arrival I was delighted to learn that he does not drink beer. More for me!

We jacked up one side and I crawled under,hammered a wheel off and proceeded to enlarge the center hole while Ray replaced the stud using a couple of "spanners" , a lug wrench, a length of jack handle and a much stressed ratchet to draw the stud into place. We decided not to replace more than the broken one though neither of us were comfortable with that. It seemed like a better Idea than to break the ratchet with a stud part way in. I knew more tools are better and the right tools better yet. Remember I had beer and he was driving the Dodge. We got one side done so while I jacked up the other side and beat the wheel off Ray started making another hole bigger. While checking his progress and trying to find where more filing was needed he got the extra axle we were using hopelessly stuck in the wheel. We could not drive it out. Well, I probably could have but Ray wanted to be able to use them again. Oh well we had plenty of others and still some beer left. We just did the rear because the front seemed to be OK. When we got four wheels on the ground and picked up the mess we'd made we hit the road.

Ray was hungry so we stopped in Lovelock to eat. Back on the road after not getting much rest the night before, the heat, the sun, and a full stomach Ray was having some trouble staying awake. We pulled off at a rest stop to let him walk around and we iced him down and headed for Dayton. We got to the East 50 Bar about 5:30 and met my friend Leroy. We decided to haul the stuck axle and wheel up the canyon to Virginia City where Leroy works in the Virginia & Truckee Railroad Shop. The owner Tom Gray let us use the big press in the shop. We separated the wheel and axle in short order with rain falling on the tin roof and steam engines cooling down from their days work. We took Ray on a drive through Virginia City and crammed as much Comstock history in him as he could hold.

Back at the 50 bar we swapped out that wheel for one of the others so the rear tres matched and Ray said he wanted to see my big 413 Dodge flathead 6. So we piled in my car and headed up to my house. He took lots of pictures and was somewhat surprised that one guy could haul so much junk in only 40 years. It stated to get dark so we headed down through the deer and wild horses back to Ray's truck. We could not talk him into staying the nigh as he wanted to get farther down the road while it was cooler.I got out the map and showed him how to get to the back side of Yosemite. We said goodbye as Ray drove away and Leroy and I went into the bar and had "just one more" beer over and over till the bar closed.

I couldn't get ahold of him on Saturday but He called Sunday Morning.
7/11 I talked to Ray on the phone an hour or so ago. He made it to the SF Bay area via Yosemite and all was well. He has a few more stops to make before heading back home in a couple of days. All in all a great time!

I just realized that Ray is using a drill with a stone in the pictures. That was run by a 12vDC to 120 AC inverter that quickly over heated in the sun and under load. It was files from there on.
Ray's Rescue

I got an email from Ray Bell and he is safely back home in Australia. He said he is having a problem with the board but will post something when he can get on. I hope he adds some pictures of his trip.

I've been getting email notifications from his blog from gmail, but nothing since he left Maine. He said he would up date as he could there.

I'm able to read and post here again!

My blog is up to New York now and has been for a couple of weeks. I will be getting stuck into it at home this week to get it all along and even cover my visit to Georgia.

But I have to say that it was very interesting and informative to visit with Beater and see his place, to see Virginia City, to work together with him machining the insides of those wheels.

I am still worried about how the front wheels are, but it's waiting until the pickup makes it to Australia.

Thanks for the pics, Beater...

I wish I had taken more pictures but the memory card was full. Leroy and I enjoyed the Drive to VC and to my place. I wish we could have had more time.

Well, the pickup made it all the way home...

They had trouble getting a container out of Long Beach, it wasn't until March that I was able to go to Sydney to pick it up and drive it the final 500 miles home.



This pic was taken about six weeks ago as autumn was getting bitter. But it wasn't so bad driving it home...



In a very Aussie environment, sandstone and gum trees on the Putty Road. And on the wrong side of the road!



A bit of a hiccup... but this time I had a jack with me!

Ray, Good to hear from you. I'm glad that I was part of your trip. That was a memorable day. It's cool how car guys come together just enough to keep each other on the road. I think I recognize that lug wrench!

I'm sure you wouldn't know the tyre!

And you had such an intimate relationship with it too...

There really wasn't much about the trip that wasn't memorable. One of the real highlights was having a bath in the Salmon River, but Pikes Peak was the scenic winner. I loved that.

Missing out on going to that test and tune day at Bonneville was a real low point.

We are on a trip to Texas now. We've driven through some beautiful country to get here.

Bryce Canyon, so you're not going by the most direct route!

The most direct route? No.

But I'm making new friends.

Great story, guys! I'd love to see the whole blog for the trip.

Sometime the journey is better than the destination. I've felt that way about my Camaro the whole time I've been bringing it back to life.

It's hard to believe its been over a year ago that you were here visiting us Ray. My wife and I still talk about your visit to our farm. It seems like it was just last week or last month, not a year ago.

There were so many adventures on my trip...

Everyone I met was a highlight. Everyone. Every place I went was special. But two weeks ago something happened to change my next trip... and there will be a next one.

Early in my trip I thought I might do 11,000 or maybe 12,000 miles. But my friend, Mike Argetsinger of Chicago, and more particularly of Watkins Glen NY, with whom I stayed one night in Chicago and two at his family holiday home on the shores of Lake Seneca, almost embarrassed me several times.

Mike, when introducing me to people, would say to them, "You know what Ray's doing? He's driving that van 13,000 across America in nine weeks! Can you imagine that?" As if it was something special. I didn't think it was.

But now I do realise that I took on something big and that I succeeded. 14,400 miles in the van, 1,200 miles in the pickup, 15,600 miles altogether. I drove through 39 states and went into eight provinces of Canada, I did what my wife...

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...and I were planning to do together, to see all the states we didn't see on our first trip.

And two weeks ago Mike succumbed to the cancer that's been haunting him for the past seven or eight years. He did so much to make Janet and myself welcome on our first trip and then for me on the last trip, how can I not miss him?

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Mike and his wife, Lee, in Chicago last June. He was a son of Cameron Argetsinger, the moving force behind motor racing at Watkins Glen, on the board of the International Motor Racing Research Center at Watkins Glen, raced at over fifty circuits in Europe and America, worked for the Cooper F1 team and represented his father and the USGP in Europe for some years.

In his latter years he authored books on Mark Donohue, Walt Hansgen and Watkins Glen, while his final work on Bobby Marshman will be completed for him by someone else.

As for my blog, it only reached the second day of my drive down the east coast, I completely lost momentum with it when I failed to have internet access for about six days out of eight leading up to that point.

But there's plenty to see all the same:

http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/ustrip2014/1/1399811358/tpod.html

Sorry about your friend. It is good you were able to see him again on your trip. I wish you could have continued the blog but it must have been very time consuming. You have seen more of my country than I have.

We just got home from our Texas trip last night. Nevada,Utah,Colorado, New Mexico,Texas, and Arizona. The land in Utah was so overwhelming I didn't take many pictures in the middle of the trip.
https://picasaweb.google.com/sixpics/Tex...feat=directlink

Further to that, if anyone is caring to read this...

David...



... from New Mexico was another I visited. He had cancer when I met him the first time on our 2012 trip, I didn't see him on the 2014 trip but I got to spend some time with him on my 2016 trip.

Sadly, he is another I cannot phone any longer. After moving into a nursing home, he stopped answering his phone about a year ago.

As for my blog of the 2014 trip, I did ultimately go on with that. But without pics, I simply posted that up there so I could copy it all across - and add hundreds of pics - on a forum.

So if anyone would like to follow my nine-week trip, here's the link:

http://www.moparmarketforum.com/forum/vi...0a&start=40

Please enjoy and tell your friends.

Wow, Ray it's hard to believe that was 5 years ago. I had no Idea how much country you had covered before you got here. This is strange timing. My wife and I just got back from another trip to Texas Wednesday. We enjoyed the drive and tried to vary the route some, but I'll never see as much of the US as you did. Good to hear from you. Hope to get to Bonneville in a week or so. Tom

You made a comment, Tom, about 'car guys coming together to help each other'...

At the moment the van is on a work trip. I'm right in the middle of the country at Alice Springs, but back in South Australia the semi-expected clutch problems were getting bad and I needed somewhere to instal a clutch plate I had brought along with me.

One of the places I'd called at in the course of my work was a former roadhouse at a place called Beltana, about a hundred miles from nowhere in the middle of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. The place, apart from being in a very low rainfall area, was in severe drought.

I mentioned to the former roadhouse proprietor that I had some clutch slip. Two days later, when I called back in for the second step in the job, he asked how the clutch was going. I told him it was no better... of course.

"You can fix that here if you want to," he said. And he pointed to a shed across the other side of the main road, quite a large shed with open panels front and back so you can drive through it. It was, in fact, the bar at a defunct racecourse, and it had the thing I'd told him I really needed to do the job - a good concrete floor.

So the following week when I had to go back that way I set things up to do the clutch change in the old bar:



As can be seen, using some scrap timber and a couple of old railway sleepers (ties?) I could get the van high enough to work under there. I built a small platform to roll my trolley jack on with a cradle I made a few months ago on that to hold the gearbox while I did the clutch replacement.

The generous man had allowed me to use the power in the shed, and we did a universal joint change at the same time using his equipment in his own shed. The big trolley jack under the back of the van was also his, and he topped up the gearbox oil for me from his old stocks as I lost a fair bit of oil when we took out the driveshaft.

I said to him, "What do I owe you?" and got the answer I fully expected. "Nothing!"

So I put a proposal to him. Seeing as he's hundreds of miles from anywhere and probably a thousand miles from a lot of stuff, I offered him my services whenever he needs something found and I'm able to locate it for him.

He was happy with that...

And for those wondering why I was changing a clutch in a van which was built with an automatic transmission... well, I fixed that the first couple of days I had it.

It's all in the story I linked a few posts back.

When my son was going to college in Texas we made several trips to and from in his '54 Studebaker. There were issues to be dealt with on each trip and every time we found people that wanted to help. The only ones who would accept money were the ones we were actually buying parts from. There are good folks out there we just don't hear about them much.

I guess that would be this ideal Inliner's car?



I never noticed before (or I don't recall noticing...) that it's a 2-door.

And now it's loitering, in contravention of the sign behind it.

That's Jake's car but it is not an inliner. It has a pretty hot supercharged 289 Studebker V-8. It was tough to get it all under the stock hood. Most of those were flathead sixes but his is one of the relatively few V-8. It has been down a while. He is trying to get a shop built so maybe soon. They were all two doors. Just made in "54 & '55. In mid '55 they changed to a wraparound windshield which I think spoiled the looks. The '55 grill didn't help either. I have actually seen only 2 others except in pictures.

Sharp looking car. (Jake's car)