One
thing that is starting to really gripe me the trend to putting fender skirts
on any with four wheels, especially if it?s from the 50?s through the early
60?s. back in the day they were mainly worn by cars that also featured
continental kits, dual (often finned) rear mounted antennae, Appleton
spotlights and the ever popular animal tails streaming from them antennae. In
extreme cases there the headlights featured the upper half chrome shades with
of course the lip on the tops.
Many
of these cars were favored by the guys that appreciated real performance and
had the most powerful engines and heavy duty suspensions. Now tail dragging
convertibles with all this crap I do understand when equipped the base motors
and automatics but show me a good high performance model and none of that crap
was on them. Just very recently there was a 1958 Plymouth Fury with the Golden
Commando engine on eBay with fender skirts. Now I have forgotten about how
many of these cars were produced but if more than five of them had fender
skirts I would truly be amazed. And since there weren?t any convertible Fury?s
back then I seriously doubt any of them had continental?s added. There were
some that featured dual, rear mounted antennae but few of the finned
variety.
I
know that fender skirts are easily assign to the nearest trash can with no
real damage to the car itself but those connie?s required hacked bumpers at
the minimum so the work of restoring the car to something truly representative
to the era involves a bit more work. And if the vehicle in question had to
have its original bumper hacked to pieces, well that means a loss of some
original parts. A car is only original once.
Yes
I can only dream of buying most of the cars I see on-line these days but I am
surprised at how many I see that I don?t even bother to read all the
information on when I see that added junk.
John
Hagen
