San Antonio Classic Thunderbird Club
The AirScoop
Volume 36 – Issue 6 - June 2007
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2007 Officers: President:Neal Johnston (210) 824-1257; Vice-President: Don Meynig (210) 341-1057; Secretary: Cheryl Meynig (210) -341-1057; Treasurer: Troy Rowe (210) 656-6458 ; Car Clinics: Andy Hoekstra (210) 690-8514; Tours: Buzz Durio210-213-1984; Newsletter Editor: Neal Johnston (210) 824-1257; C.T.C.I. Advisor: Neal Johnston
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T-Bird FUN RUN: 9 A.M. Saturday, June 2nd. Meet in the Luby’s Parking Lot located @ 1604 and Blanco Road - 9 A.M. Lunch at the Blanco Bowling Alley. Everyone will head for home between 2:30 and 3:00 P.M.Please contact Buzz Durio and let him know if you are going to participate. Cell phone: 210-213-1984, Office: 210-696-8900. E-mail;
MEMBERSHIP MEETING:9 A.M.Saturday, June 9th at JIM’S COFFEE SHOP, 16101 San Pedro (Between Bitters and Thousand Oaks on West Feeder Road).
BIRDER’S NITE OUT:6 P.M. Wednesday June 27th@ The Spaghetti Warehouse on East Houston.
WEEKLY TECH MEETINGS:6 P.M. the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Wednesday at I.H. 10 CHESTER’S.
President’s Message:by Neal Johnston
Well, if it will ever stop raining I think everyone will be relieved. Interestingly, by July we will all be begging for more rain! All I can say is Welcome To Texas!
Although I was not able to attend, those that did reported that Harvey and Nelle Jenkins really had a nice get together on April 28th at their home Hill Country home.
The first T-Bird Fun Run is ready to kick off on June 2nd. Buzz Durio guarantees a good time and good food at the Blanco Bowling Alley. Someone ask how can you get good food at a bowling alley, but Buzz says “No Worries”.
Minutes – May 12, 2007:
The meeting was called to order at Jim’s on 281 by President Neal Johnston at 9:05a.m.
April Minutes were approved as read, with a motion by Carole Buss and a second from Ken Rowe.
Financial Report was given by Troy Rowe. A motion was made by Lou Maulden and a second by RB Waldrep to accept this report.
May birthdays and anniversaries were recognized.
Old Business: Those in attendance thanked Harvey and Nelle Jenkins for welcoming Club members into their Hill Country home on April 28th.
President Johnston reported that the Club was out of hats but he would make arrangements to have a dozen more created for Club inventory.
New Business: Everyone was reminded about Earl Abel’s scheduled for May 23 @ 6 p.m.
Tours:Buzz Duriogave a report on the May 5th AACOG Cruise.Everyone who attended enjoyed the stops and lunch.
There being no further business, Lou Maulden made a motion to adjourn the meeting with a second by John Kennedy.
The meeting adjourned at 10:15a.m.
Respectfully submitted:
Troy Rowe for Cheryl Meynig, Secretary
June 2nd / T-Bird Fun Run / Lunch at the Blanco Bowling Alley
June 27th / Birder’s Nite Out / Spaghetti Warehouse on East Houston
July 25th / Birder’s Nite Out / El Sarcoma on Harry Wurzbach
Sept 13-16 / Denver, Colorado
CTCI Region 5 Convention / Greg Akiyama 303-680-8290 e-mail
Sept 27th / Fredericksburg
Hill Country Car Show & Swap Meet / In conjunction with The Hill Country Classic Car Auction
Contact: Ron Puts 210- 681-3313
Sept 29th / Seguin, Tx
3rd Annual IACOCCA Fall Picnic
Oct 6th / Seguin, Tx
The Pontiac Car Club Car Show
Contact: / Frank or Penny San Marco 830-386-0338
Oct 20th / San Antonio, Tx
7th Annual, AACOG Scenic Hills Cruise Contact: Buzz Durio
Oct 20th / Live Oak
Dragnet 35 Car Show Contact: Hector Martinez 830-634-2698
Oct 28th / San Antonio
SA Mustang’s Fall Charity Car Show @ The Bass Pro Shop 17907 I 10 West
Contact: Anton Gerhard 210-566-2150
Dec 14th / San Antonio, Tx
SEA. Classic Thunderbirds Christmas Party
The Barn Door, North New Braunfels Contact: Neal Johnston 210-824-1257
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SAN ANTONIO CLASSIC THUNDERBIRD CLUB
In the Beginning –
Captain Robert (Bob) Morgan is the person who started the first work on getting a C.T.C.I. chapter for San Antonio. San Antonio was the first Texas city to receive a charter from C.T.C.I. Bob remembers that it was a real struggle to get started. They needed six members to get a charter from C.T.C.I. and he said, “Mostly young people had the T-Birds and it was their means of transportation (in other words “everyday cars”) and most were not interested in restoration at that time. Also not much was known about a club. They mainly had to find people that had a T-Bird and would be willing to join a club. That’s the reason the daughter of the Service Manager at Hemphill-McCombs became a member. She had a T-Bird.” Finally, on June 25th, 1968, the club was chartered by C.T.C.I. as the 20th Chapter.
Bob Morgan was the first President of SCAT. When he was discharged from the US Air Force, he left San Antonio to go back to school at AM. Carroll Brown, also a charter member, became the second President of SCAT. Carroll has been an active member in the club for the entire 25 years. According to Carroll some of the first meetings were in an upstairs conference room at Hemphill-McCombs on San Pedro. The parts manager gave SCAT members a 10% discount on parts and assisted in some things for a while. He remembers that several years after the club started, our club met the Dallas Club in San Marcos for a get together (this was before St. Pat’s).
Two other charter members, Art Keith and Jim Cline, are still active in the club today. A fifth charter member was Zane Factor. He sold his T-Bird about 20 years ago, still lives in San Antonio and works for USAIR. The sixth charter member was the daughter of the Service Manager at Hemphill-McCombs and we were unable to obtain a name or any other information regarding her.
Bob Morgan returned to San Antonio to work for USAIR in 1973 and became President of the club again. By that time the club had grown to 18 members. In 1974 John Kennedy, who had joined the club in 1969, became President with 28 members: and , in 1976 FrankiePlunked, our first woman President, took over with 53 members.
John Kennedy has been most helpful in this research. Reason being that he has been the most active member for the most years. It seems that John and Verdi were “tooling” around in San Marcos one week end in their black “55 T-Bird. They decided to stop at the chili cook off by the University. When they started to park, a young man asked why they didn’t park with the other T-Birds. They did, and Carroll Brown and some other people came to meet them. That’s how they came to join SCAT, when Carroll Brown was President. When John started in the club. In 1969, the club meeting were being held at the Officer’s Club at Brooks Air Force Base. In the early years pf SCAT, Richard Harris would let the members come to Main Lincoln Mercury for a little tire kicking, car washing, etc. He also gave them discounts on parts. John also remembers helping Jack Ralph publish a short newsletter on (In his words) a “dinky” machine where John worked.
John has been President of SCAT five different times. In the beginning, the women didn’t attend the meetings. But when the St. Pat’s event started, and there was a need for cooks, the women were involved (that’s what John said).
Speaking of St. Pat’s, John tells us that the first St. Pat’s was in about 1972. It was in the back yard of a house in AlamoHeights. The man was a new member at the time he offered his home without first consulting his wife. When they arrived, every room in the house had been roped off so that the only room you could enter was the bathroom. There was Bar-B-Q and the beer was iced down in an old bathtub. Jim and FrankiePlunked arrived with the trunk off their ’56 T-Bird and it was also filled with beer. There were around 100 people in attendance. Shortly after this event, the new member left the club and has never been heard of since. Our club has participated in the St. Pat’s parade every year since 1970.
Other Interesting Facts
The SCAT does other things in addition to the St. Pat’s Weekend event. Through the years, we have been involved in many charity car shows and benefits. Some parades we do every year are the Boerne Burgess fest, Poteet Strawberry Festival, Lulling Watermelon Thump, Floresville Peanut Festival, Pleasanton Cowboy Homecoming, the Hondo Parade, Canyon Lake Christmas Parade, and the many more. In past years we have participated in the Poncho Claus Christmas Parade, the Fiesta night parade, Paso del RyeFoe Parade, New Braunfels Worsteds, and Lampasas Spring Hoe Down. We also have a Bluebonnet Run, Economy Run, Lap Bhatia Corridor Run, road alleys, and carrying the SUAVE thunderbirds during Armed Forces week. We always try to support our sister clubs at the weekend events, Austin’s Aqua Festival, Dallas’ Memorial Day, Houston’s fall event, Tulsa’s Eureka Springs Car Show, Ark-La-Tax’s Fall Fest and the Lawton Lila’ Birds event. We support C.T.C.I. by attending the Nationals and Regional. We’ve had our cars on display at a special exhibition at the San Antonio Museum of Transportation.
Sandwiched in between all this fun we find time for our first love. That is to restore Thunderbirds. Most of the T-Birds in our club have been restored by the men with a little help from the women. And we all enjoy it. We have annual work sessions and informal ones all the time.. Much of the work has been done in the garages of John Kennedy, Andy Hoekstra and Jack Ralph. The result has been a collection of beautiful T-Birds in the San Antonio Classic Thunderbird Club.
NOTE: This information was complied in March 1993 for the program of Scat’s 25th Birthday Party through the efforts of Mary Lou Hoeskstra who mentioned that what started out to be a “few phone calls and a couple of hours of putting together facts turned out to be a lot more involved than originally planned.”
What Is Horsepower?
The definition of horsepower is the ability to do 33,000 pounds-feet of work in one minute. The measurement of horsepower was invented by James Watt when he replaced horses turning a water pump with a steam engine and wanted to know how many horses the engine could replace in order to rate the engine’s power. He figured that a horse could pull with 180 pounds of force. The horse traveled in a circle with a 12-foot radius, and could make 144 complete revolutions in one hour. This means that the horse traveled 181 feet per minute. Multiplying 180 pounds of force times 181 feet would equal 32,580 pounds-feet of work in one minute. Watt rounded that up to 33,000 pounds-feet of work in one minute.
Watt’s definition of horsepower is a horse pulling on a lever, so the power was applied to the lever. With an engine, the power is made at the crankshaft. So to know the horsepower of an engine you will need to imagine a one-foot lever at the crankshaft and figure the circumference of that one-foot lever and how many rotations per minute it is traveling. A one-foot lever will have a circumference of 6.2831853 feet, so the formula for hp would look like this: HP = (6.2831853 x RPM x Torque) divided by 33,000. And it can be simplified to HP = (RPM x torque) divided by 5.252.
By using this formula you can see that HP and Torque curves will always cross at 5,252 rpm. If one engine makes 300 lbs-ft of torque at 3,000 rpm and another makes it at 6,000 rpm, which one makes more power? It’s the one cranking at 6,000 rpm because the same amount of torque is being used twice as fast. Gearing the engine down to the same 3,000 rpm will double the torque at the final drive making it 600 lbs-ft. If both engines had the same final drive, they would be able to do the exact same amount of work (300 lbs-ft worth), but the 6,000-rpm engine will do it in half the time.
Torque is simple. Imagine a one-foot lever with a one-pound force pushing on it. That is one pound foot of torque. The formula to figure torque from a known HP is torque = (5252 x HP) divided by rpm.
A dynamometer measures the “bop” of vehicles by measuring torque with a “brake”. Brake torque is simply a measurement of how much resistance is needed to hold the engine at a steady rate of speed. Brake horsepower (bop) is then figured using the above formula. With an accelerating engine you want to measure power as the engine is accelerating. You don’t only care how much power the engine has, you also want to know how fast it can rev up. This will take into account all of the inertia of the rotating and reciprocating parts. So instead of the brake holding the engine at a steady speed, the brake holds the engine at a steady acceleration rate – 300 rpm per second and 600 rpm per second are commonly used.
Phenomena Hits Jimmy Dowda
Long time member Jimmy Dowda was recently in the hospital for three weeks after doctors discovered he had double phenomena. He also had to spend quite a bit of time in rehabilitation. Jimmy ask that everyone pray for him to have a safe return to good health and looks forward to the day he can join us on a cruise in his T-Bird.
Boyd’s Out Of The Country
C.E. and Del Boyd have been spending the last few weeks with their grandchildren in Canada. Between going to the “kid’s” soccer games and enjoying the scenery they found time to watch the Spurs wipe out all competition. They’ll be back on June 3rd.