John and Melissa Dunn visited the Coker companies last week to get the tour, say hello and visit a bit with EG (see EG’s blog at dragracetires.com) and me about the new IHRA Nitro Jam racing series. Kurt Oberholtzer from IHRA was in for the tour n meetings as well. John Dunn is clearly the leader in the lineup of nostalgia funny car drivers and his and Melissa’s “Dunn and Gone” Prostalgia funny car runs in the low six’s in the quarter at well over 200 mph. He is the king of delighting the IHRA crowds with his super long smoky burnouts! The Dunn and Gone car is a favorite every time it’s on the track.

Those big meats under the back of the Dunn and Gone Prostalgia Nitro Funny Car are M&H--he got 'em from us!

Okay,…okay! Why the bringing the knife to a gun fight line on this blog!?? Just to show I was prepared and had the better equipment just this one time over John Dunn! Okay, it wasn’t on the strip and we were just foolin around a bit but we thought it made a neat photo! His Mancini Racing Plymouth Duster featuring a 498ci TFX Hemi is clearly always prepared! Big gun I say, how bout you?! Here’s their link!…………………………….

We grabbed a quick photo before our drag racing friends hit the road.

Was great to be with John and Melissa before they headed back to Illinois….oh by the way…..Dunn and Gone is also very prepared on our M & H RACEMASTERS!

You can just about have a heat stroke mowing the lawn right now. It bumping 100 degrees every day, and has been for weeks. The Portacools in the shop are running wide open and you can barely find relief. We been hitting shows, fixin’ cars and squeezing in some rallying everywhere we can. Oh yeah, and we’re trying to sell cool tires to car folks too!

It’s easy to start to fade late in the summer. So much is going on and so much work needs to be done, but as the grass turns to a crispy-crunchy toast, take the time to clean your old car and drive it into town. The heart and soul of our hobby is seeing that old car at the gas pumps or driving through town. Those little passing moments make car people out of kids all the time. It never gets old for us around here because we love it, and if you love it half as much as we do, pass it on the young ones. 40 years down the road, you’ll be glad you did!

If you follow the blog, then you know that we had a catastrophic engine failure in our GR3 roadster pickup during the Ruff Neck Rally in Ponca City, Oklahoma back in April. We were able to finish the rally with another car, but the pickup made the trek back to TN on a trailer.

Fast forward to July and the pickup sat in the corner of the shop, waiting for its fresh Flathead to arrive. As soon as it showed up at the shop, Keith and Delton jumped on it and got it running within a day or two. During the truck’s down time, Keith also swapped out the Excelsior Comp V tires for a set of our brand new Excelsior Stahl Sport Radials. The tires look just like the old bias plies, but handle much better, especially for rallying.

John Phillips is a car guy from Texas and he has a thing for Reo’s. He planned a road trip through Chattanooga, TN and decided it was time for a fresh set of tires for his 1931 Reo Royale convertible. The car had Lester 6.00/6.50-18 whitewalls on it, and he decided to go with Firestone 7.00-18 whitewalls this time around. The car is simply gorgeous with its elegant front grille and headlight treatment, and it’s now ready for the road once again. Check out the pictures of his very cool (and very rare) machine!

My name “Corky” is a nickname… my mom wanted to name me a bible name so she came up with Joseph, which means “he will have a big mustache one day”.    Although my mom named me Joseph, my dad nicknamed me “Corky”.     All that to tell you that nicknames given to us as kids often stick.   Did with me, and one of my friends too!    My friend I wanna introduce you to also has a nickname,… it’s Pinky.    Now that COULD seem like a girly kind of name sort of like the boy named Sue, but it really ain’t.  You see M. G. Randall had a brother nicknamed “Red”, and since Red’s little brother didn’t sound right and neither did “little Red” so when he was a kid, someone named him “almost red”, or ….you guessed it!  “Pinky”!   Now why is that important to me and why is Pinky Randall on Corky’s blog?   Well, he’s one of my long time friends for one thing, and it’s my blog and I can write what I wanna.  Actually, Pinky is one of the most well known authorities on Chevrolets.    Some folks call him Mr. Chevrolet.   He and his wife Joyce live up in Houghton Lake, Michigan.    Pinky was a good friend of GM’s Jim Perkins and was actually selected to take delivery of the last Chevrolet Impala back a few years ago.   He, like my pop is a Past President of the Antique Automobile Club of America (AACA).   I have known Pinky for years.   He is one of my good, good friends and is certainly a friend to anyone around collector cars.     I saw him recently in Louisville at the 75th Anniversary AACA National Meet.   Jason filmed it, so I thought I would put er up!

Back in 2008, Bill Warner, head instigator at Amelia Island Concourse caught up with my dad and I about corralling a bunch of Thomas Flyers for their annual Concourse.  The event went well as planned, and was well executed with 14 Thomas Flyers attending including the most famous Thomas (maybe the most famous American built car ever) the 1907 Thomas Flyer 4-60 that won the race from New York to Paris in 1908.    Well, since my son in law and I were scheduled to rally from New York to Paris in 2008, this Thomas reunion got us all excited about doing this rally again 100 years later also in a Thomas Flyer.   A number of folks leaned on my dad to allow us to drive his 1907 Thomas 4-60 which is actually the sister car to the winning 1907 Thomas.   He said “not just NO, but Hell NO!”   But he did come up with a plan to sell/trade me his complete 1910 6-70 Thomas engine and chassis which our crew immediately set about building up and completing so we could rally a Thomas Flyer (abeit a couple years newer) in the Centennial celebration of that first race.    Well, we built the car.   It was ready and ran like a top.   We painted it and lettered it the same as the 1908 winner, but unfortunately the promoters of the event went bankrupt so the event and our plans tanked.    Jeff Mahl is a wonderful friend who does a monologue about his great grandfather’s (the driver of the winning Thomas, George Schuster) experience in piloting the famous 1907 Thomas from New York to Paris in 1908.

Fast forward to July 2010, the Antique Automobile Club of America (AACA) celebrated their 75th year with a big event/car show at the Fairgrounds/exposition center in Louisville.   Several of my AACA friends had asked me to send up my 1910 Thomas for Jeff to have a perfect prop to do his presentation.   It is really pretty interesting to see Jeff do this presentation sitting in the drivers seat of a Thomas Flyer not to mention the fact that Jeff is the dang splittin’ image of his great grand-dad!   So, we took my 1910 Thomas to Louisville and hooked Jeff up with the perfect “set” for his presentation after Friday evening’s dinner.  There were over 1200 folks present at this event.

I dressed up as Teddy Roosevelt and interrupted the official AACA introduction of Jeff Mahl to espouse some Teddy’isms and let folks know that “I like a man who gets out and does something, …not the good man who simply stays at home! “.       I think the folks hearing the presentation had a great time, enjoyed the brief Teddy interruption.    Our videographer, Jason White filmed the complete deal, so stay tuned.   Here’s a brief clip of my Teddy ism…   We will let you know how you can get a copy later.     Jeff Mahl and I are discussing the possibility of us selling the dvd of his presentation so to help him pay for his participation in the revived World Race which is slated to happen sometime in 2011.

Car people are the best in the world, and I absolutely am convinced that if the USA would simply mandate that all citizens had to have an old car or hot rod in their garage, all of our problems would then either go away, or even if they didn’t go away, we wouldn’t care cause we’d be happy and have a passion about somethin!   I am convinced that people with passion have less problems!

From the road,
and um..oh yeah

BULLY!

Corky

from a power tour participant


Just wanted to drop a note to say hello and thanks again for the wonderful hospitality you guys showed us. Hanging out with everyone in the shop and meeting Corky was awesome and seeing all the great cars and bikes in the museum was a great kick-off to our Power Tour trip. Not to mention the “best parking spot”! We ended up getting some cool pics with the Magnuson’s and our cars nose to nose. And then the icing on the cake was a photo shoot and upcoming feature in Hot Rod with David Frieburger. It was an unbelievable trip for us! The car was so much better to drive after the new front tires were on and we made it back home with no issues. We ended up making 1350 total miles and cannot wait until next year!

I couldn’t find any of the pics on your site so if you know where they are on there let me know please. Thanks again man! And Please tell the rest of the crew we said so and hello from the Granny 5’s crew!

Jason Fiveash

We ran across a very cool story of hot rodding, and it’s actually a modern day scenario instead of old school stuff. The guy’s name is Will Davenport and he’s from Birmingham, Alabama. The following text is a great piece of writing about building an old hot rod and Will just happens to be using parts from Honest Charley Speed Shop and Coker Tire. Check out his adventures so far…we can’t wait to hear more about the buildup and see pictures of it!

“A couple of years ago I got a harebrained idea that I wanted to build a hotrod in the style of the 1950’s. This naturally leads to thinking of the ’32 roadster (unless you’re an American Graffiti fan, and then it’s a coupe), so I started buying magazines and “how-to” books to get an idea where to start. The heart of the ‘50s rod was a flathead engine, and I was fortunate in having a friend who gave me a ’52 flatty and transmission that had been in his father’s car. Mind you, they had sat in a barn since Vietnam, and I never would have thought you’d use a sledgehammer to disassemble an engine – the pistons were that frozen.

From that point, a road trip to Honest Charley’s in Chattanooga yielded a Pete & Jake’s ’32 frame, dropped front I-beam suspension, and a narrowed 9 inch rear. This next bit isn’t a marketing plug, but an honest statement – you will not find finer people on the planet to deal with than the guys at Honest Charley’s. Plus, if you go, it’s like the pilgrimage to Mecca for a car guy – parts, cars, car guys, and Corky Coker’s car collection. Anyway, when the suspension parts came in, I got the frame and 9 boxes on a pallet and thought “is that it”? It was, and I’m not kidding to say if you’ve got a set of socket wrenches, screwdrivers and a hammer, you can build a rolling ’32 chassis from Pete & Jake’s. Coker Tire supplied the ’40 style front wheels and rear Gennies, all wrapped in bias ply Firestone rubber. Running the big & little combo gave me a 5° rake – perfect for my plans.

I took the engine block to PSI in Fultondale, and if you’ve never been – GO. These are three retired guys who’ve been drag racing forever, and they have fun toys in that shop. Laying around were a built 409, 389 with 3 deuces, piles of small and big blocks, and more engine parts than you can shake a stick at. Plus lots of greasy old machining tools. Cool. And the guys are great just to hang out with. They’ve vatted the block, and fortunately everything was copacetic, so the boring and align honing have begun. They’re also replacing the ring gear on my flywheel, and polishing the holy grail of the engine – a ’50 Merc crank with a 4” stroke (yes, I’m building a stroker flatty). That part came from a great guy in California who’s built hotrods since the ‘50s. Once PSI is done, the block is coming home and I and the fellow who “donated” it will build the engine.

My thought is to get the frame and driveline buttoned up, and then head back to Chattanooga and drag home a Brookville Roadster steel body. I’ve already come up with a ’40 Ford column with the shifter, ’49 Merc gauges, bomber-style lap belts (I’m not using bomber seats – those look ridiculously uncomfortable), and a bunch of other small parts to make the car period-correct. The overall goal is to build a car that looks like what a guy would have done in his garage in 1952 – not a ratrod, just a cool old school hotrod. I’ve learned one thing about the dangers of hotrodding. Not long ago, I was standing in the barn with the ’56 Caddy on one side, and the ’29 Model A roadster on the other and thinking, ‘wonder how hard it would be to drop the Caddy engine in that thing….’” –Will Davenport

We joined the power tour in Bowling Green, KY today. Ricky and the boys have have had our trailer with the whole trip (we cheated a little) and have been rocking tires and memorabilia. We rolled in and checked out all the cars, and let me tell you there were a bunch of them. We’re fired up about tomorrow’s early start and ride down into Chattanooga,TN. We’re convinced they’re going to find out it’s the coolest stop on the trip. Don’t miss us at the evening block party downtown at our headquarters wed.night!!! Great roads ahead!

Chad Caldwell’s 1931 Auburn was awesome when it got here. It was drop-dead gorgeous when it left with a big ol’ set of Excelsior Stahl Sport Radials on 20″ custom rims built right here in our shop! That’s right! His old set of 17 inchers just didn’t do that big old speedster justice and after a few pow-wows we had a plan in place to get that car’s stance where it needed to be. Chad’s car is a beautiful rolling billboard for what a collector car should be…. ON THE ROAD!!!!