The steel glove box in my friend’s new 1969 El Camino is what kept me from getting drafted and going to Viet Nam when a guy ran a red light and hit us.
And it just happened to occur at 9 one night and I was supposed to head for the physical at 6 the next morning.
My right knee caved the glove box lid in about 4 inches which a month later led to major surgery and 2 weeks in the hospital a month after the rescheduled physical. The 3 Army docs had a 20 minute discussion (pre-surgery) before deciding to send me home. What a horrid stroke of luck…
The roads around here get cluttered up quite a bit with truck tire scraps. Mostly due to overloaded grain and oil field trucks combined with high heat and possible underinflation.
Went into town a month ago and (seriously) there was a string of truck tire scraps for almost 15 miles. I was dodging them all the way. He must have been shredding almost everything on that tractor/trailer. My assumption was that one gave way, others were having to work harder, and they were progressively giving up one by one as the load increased on the others.
I sat next to two guys that were twins on that hard cold bench. They had real tears as they talked about shooting a toe off or other ways to flunk the physical. Always wondered what happened to them. I’m sure the drill sarges had fun with them.
Yeah I think the radials was the reason for no recaps now that I think about it.
You need to take a much closer look at the two photos. The steel dashboard of the Plymouth was “indented” almost to the level of the windshield once it got past the instrument cluster, while the Chevy had a fairly sharp, pointed edge directly in the path of an unbelted passenger’s head. Both were unforgiving if your head hit them, but the Plymouth’s dashboard design made it much less likely that you would hit it.
Our 61 Chevy had that dash. I’m not sure but I think the impala actually had some padding on it. Not ours though. Yeah dashes were bad but a lot of folks by passed the dash and just went through the windshield.
Yup!
Without any kind of restraint, the dashboard design almost didn’t matter when passengers were launched through the windshield.
Shortly after my father bought his '63 Plymouth, he took advantage of Chevron’s offer to install lap belts at a very low cost. Those lap belts were nowhere near as effective as the shoulder harnesses that came later, but at least they were able to keep passengers from coming into contact with hostile projections, such as the one on the '62 Chevy’s dashboard.
The most popular tires to retread nowadays are Medium Radial Truck tires - you know, 18 wheeler variety They’ve been specifically designed to be retreaded. Just looked up one of the warranties and the warranty covers up to 3 retreads.
What makes this work is that trucking companies have a lot of trucks all using the same size. It’s easy to set up a program to retread tires if you have a steady customer with a continuing supply of suitable casings and a continuing need for retreads.
Passenger Car (PC) and Light Truck (LT) tires are a different story. When radials were introduced back in the 1960’s, tire manufacturers needed new equipment to build them. Needless to say, they designed building equipment using the latest technology. That made PC and LT tires cost a lot less to manufacture - to the point that retreading a PC or LT tire was nearly the same cost. Why buy a retread when the price of a new tire is nearly the same!
So they aren’t designed to be retreaded. Plus, there are a lot of different PC and LT sizes, so it just doesn’t work.
I remember seeing tire grooving tools in the JC Whitney catalog years ago. Turns out they’re still available. When are they used? I had visions of somebody regrooving bald tires.
Not really. Without seat belts, you would hit them. They were actually a greater danger to children (all dashboards back then) because as pointed out earlier, the adults just went through the windshield.
… which is why my father had lap belts installed when Chevron was running a special promotion. They weren’t nearly as effective as shoulder harnesses, but at least they kept one from being launched through the windshield.
I saw the jc ads in the catalog too. This may have sprung up during the war when tires were rationed. Just having a bald tire was not justification for a new tire. My dad had to get special permission from the military officer in charge to be able to buy a tire for a trip home. So if you had a bald tire in the snow in Wisconsin, adding a little tread was better than nothing. Trucks and buses same way. You usually had some rubber left until the threads came through. People did what they had to do, like now. Maybe now they’d just break in and steal them.
