Magdalene Island Tour

At our February meeting, there was an expression of interest in the BATANS organized August Magdalene Island Tour that we (John B. and Curry A. and spouses) are participating in and which I had mentioned in the past. I have been advised that through a cancellation there is one position available to complete the 20 car limit that the tour organizer had set and is available to FABAC if we have a member that is interested. Of course additional cars are welcome to join in but the ferry and motel rates are negotiated based on the 20 car number at this time. If there is any interest from our FABAC group, please call Curry to discuss further.

The tour dates are arrival Monday, August 27 and depart Friday, August 31 (4 nights in motel). We will travel to PEI on Friday, August 24 and stay at Green Gables Cavendish with a larger BATANS contingent and attend the BMAPEI car show in Rustico on Saturday. This will be a great weekend and great tour with a fine group of British car enthusiasts.
- Curry

Something I missed from 2011

Chris Lawrence passed away. Engineer and racing driver behind Morgan's 1962 Le Mans victory.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/sep/18/chris-lawrence-obituary

Save the date, August 24/25—British Cars are returning to Rustico!

It's no longer a rumor, folks. Start polishing your cars. PEI, here we come!

Are you getting enough zinc dialkyldithiophosphate?!!!

Maybe I have been living under a rock, and you people all know about this, but oil companies have been reducing the amount of zinc in motor oil over the past four or so years. So who cares? Well, anyone with flat tappet lifters in their vintage cars—me and probably YOU! So, no more off-the-shelf motor oils for me. I am going to do some extensive research on the Web. I haven't taken my prize Morgan highly-tuned engine all apart to put it back together and have almost instant wear because of the wrong oil. Join in on the discussion!

The Value of the Classic Car Movement to the Economy

The March issue of MG Enthusiast magazine cites the following:
A recent survey from the British Historic Vehicle Clubs reports that the historic vehicle movement in the UK generates ₤4.3B annually, ₤1B of that is export business. Over 28,000 people are employed by the movement. 52% of the businesses involved are expecting to expand their businesses in the next 5 years. Remarkably, 57% of the businesses are over 20 years old. In the UK some 850,000 vehicles  are part of the movement, 2/3rds of which are valued at less than ₤10,000. Of all these vintage vehicles, 82% are run no more than twice a month and so the movement is responsible for only 0.24% of the traffic on UK roads. The attendance at events totals 4.5 million people annually and the events are organized all or in large part by volunteers.

I'd love to see the Canadian statistics. Bottom-line, we are an important contributor to the economy and by God we are having fun doing it.

Dwight

Take the next left, Dear.

Click on image for enlargement

Thought FABAC might get a kick out of this.

http://db.auto.sohu.com/model-3106.shtml

Dwight

Report on FABAC February Meeting

While we may have had only a modest turn out (22) for our meeting we certainly had a significant amount of discussion in the agenda.

We were all glad to see Lise and Alex with us. Our group is just not the same without you. Welcome back!

Our party whip Jim B couldn't make it to this meeting as the cold flu got the better of him but he promised to be back real soon. Get well Jim we were lost without you.

 On the agenda side we discussed several interesting issues:

• 2012 British Car Days in Rexton. This is now scheduled for Aug 10-12 this year.  Show organizer Brigitte Vautour recently sent us an invite to attend as well as provided a detailed list of nearby lodgings. You will remember Brigitte as the person who came to our last Christmas Party and presented us with last years "Club with the most attendants". She as well presented Currie and Sherry with the numerous awards for their Austin Healey. We had a very good discussion about making this one of the "significant" events that this club should attend in greater numbers. As a result of these discussions we will continue to promote it within the club. Please give this some thought. It is the only New Brunswick British car show and it really does need our support in terms of our attendance and support.

• Saturday March 10. Mark this date down in your calendar as yet another fun and entertaining event to attend. Jim and Lorraine Woodford have once again invited us along with other friends to attend a fun event, as they always are, at their place. It promises to be fun with much musical entertainment, and we all know how Jim and Lorraine like to host and entertain. This will be a pot luck event so please post your contribution to this site so Jim and Lorraine can prepare. This will replace our regular March meeting. More details to follow.

• Magdalen Island tour. This came up in one of our earlier discussions and Danny wanted to know if there was still interest. After some discussion, it became clear there was significant interest in pursuing it as a possible tour. Curry mentioned that he was participating in a larger BATANS tour which actually included the Magdalen Island. He volunteered to look into seeing what opportunities there might be for us to tour this wonderful spot and will report back in April. Stay tuned!

• We did a bit of "blue ski" discussions around tours and several ideas came up that included interest in possible tours to : Gaspé, PEI, Windsor, Grand Manan. At that it was decided that this year was coming up on us quickly and we needed to focus our attention and actually do some preplanning. With that it was proposed that we put some thought into focusing those ideas into a plan. So we agreed to make our April meeting one that we actually make some tour decisions for the upcoming summer. With that in mind, please give this some serious thought and please be prepared to discuss it at our April meeting.

• Offering our cars as prom drivers: The idea of offering our cars to high school prom students not having the means to acquire a vehicle was discussed. After much debate around the criteria and potential issues, it was decided this would be better left to the individual driver initiative whereas many of our members are already doing it. This actually generated other discussion about offering drives in our cars for a special charity that would see us charge a nominal fee that we would collect in support of that charity. We left the item open for future discussion.

 Please jump in and add anything I might have missed as our usual scribe Bob who is much more thorough in reporting our minutes was not at our meeting.

 Take care everyone—warmer weather is really just around the corner.

   Gary

Dave:
Here are some interesting photos of a winter rallying marathon in vintage cars in Europe.
Phil

http://www.classicandsportscar.com/news/historic-motor-sport/heavy-snow-produces-best-ever-winter-marathon

February FABAC Meeting

Confirming we will have our February meeting at McGinnis Landing on Wednesday, Feb 15. I've made reservations for 25-30 for the "Library" room for 5:30. I've confirmed also that they will have their $9.99 steak special.
 Hope to see you all there,
    Gary

The West Yorkshire foundry

(  http://www.xj13.eu/XJ13/post/2012/02/12/The-West-Yorkshire-Foundry.aspx )
 The engine block and head of your LBC was made here.  An interesting
bit of history.
(submitted by Bob E.)

Hi Dave:
Me again!  I came across information on a project for anyone interested in vintage racing.  Being a person of a certain vintage myself, I’m in that group.  I don’t get the opportunity to attend races much now but have spent a lot of time at Mosport in the past and spent an exciting long weekend at Virginia International raceway for the
Heacock Classic Gold Cup Historic Races a couple of years ago………...two VIR photos attached.

Here’s the link to the Vintage Racing Today site.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1657954692/help-save-vintage-racing-today?ref=live

Regards
Phil

A good link

Hi David

Long time no chat. I just wanted to share with the group this great website I have been following for the past year or so. I do not remember where I first saw it and it may have been thru FABAC but either way it is worth sharing again for new members. They send out a weekly newsletter that links to articles of automotive interest and in particular vintage cars. Barn finds, restorations, Auction sale highlights, company mergers, and people of note in the racing and automotive world. Really very interesting stuff. No spam or evidence my email address has been sold to another party after a year so no risk and it is free.
http://multibriefs.com/briefs/vrl/index.php
All for now. Cars on the road in less than 2 months
Ralph

Hi David,
Interesting video about old tires sold as new, thought it would be educational for our club members. Hope everyone in the club is keeping well.
                   Regards Rob and Nettie.
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4826897

Hi David,
This week’s video on Jay Leno’s Garage is about a 1956 Austin-Healey 100 BN2 – thought the FABACians might be interested.
http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/
Regards,
Danny

AND WHAT is going on here?

(Click on the Morgan for a very detailed view)