The Impala Project on a tool hunt at Spring Carlisle

Posted by Carl King - 25/04/10 at 08:04 pm

Friday in Carlisle, PA was promising to be a beautiful day, 70 degrees and sunny. I had to take the day off to go since rain was in store for Saturday and Sunday.

The line down the west bound side of I-76 leading up to the Carlisle exit was over 2 miles long. This is the first time in years I’ve had to sit in a line that long so I was anticipating the grounds were going to be packed with people.

I was right. The place was jammed. Every year I usually park at the house on the corner of Cavalry rd and Cavalry st, but this year they were sold out. I had to park an extra block away from the entrance in someones driveway who was all too excited to take my $5 to park for the day.

Even though I left Baltimore at 7:30 Am, I still didn’t walk thru the gates at Carlisle till 11:20AM.

The crowd was thick with the usual classic car guys, as well as girlfriends and kids. You usually see girlfriends on Saturdays tagging along with their boyfriends looking or hubcaps, fuzzy dice, and chrome valve covers.

There were a lot of cars for sale this year. Far more than there were last year. In fact it looked like an ocean of classic cars for sale, and project cars too. I don’t think anyone was there to blow off their cars if the price tags were any indication.

I saw a couple of 55 Chevy project cars for sale. One was mostly a shell claiming to be a rust free California car going for $5000 with a sold sign on it,  and the other was a “barn find” they were asking $16,500 for. Apparently the barn find was drivable.

My mission this time wasn’t parts. I was looking for tools, mostly metal shaping tools. I found a lot of small hammers that would be perfect for work in confined spaces or for working on trim. They were so cheap I can grind any shape I want on them to suit the job at hand, and not feel like I was destroying an expensive body working hammer.

I got the idea from watching one of the video rentals from Smartflix called Metal working basics: Hand tools where Ron Fournier was showing the different hammers he used for different types of metal shaping work. This is a beginners DVD, you won’t find much advanced information in this but it’s a great primer for anyone wanting to equip themselves to get started.

So at the end of the day, I’d spent $260 on tools, 64 Impala show room sales literature ( in really good shape), and an intake manifold, and of course food and gas.

The sun burn was free.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Automotive day. The entry is tagged under You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.