The ’80s was a crazy time for fashion, hair styles, and automotive accessories. Here’s an awkward moment in aftermarket shifters, the Hurst Lightning Rods.

Part of the fun in looking through old scrapbooks is having a good laugh with ourselves for the fads and styles of times past. Jeez, what we were thinking? Such could be the case in automotive fashions, too. Take the Hurst Lightning Rods, an aftermarket performance shifter marketed in the 1980s. This gadget employed three shift levers to accomplish everything that a single lever could do.

​Hurst’s inspiration for the Lightning Rods was the Lenco transmission (above) used in drag racing in those years, notably in the NHRA Pro Stock category. A highly specialized, purpose-built piece of straight-line racing equipment, the Lenco employed a series of planetary gear assemblies that stacked together in modular fashion, with an individual shift lever for each gearset—simple, positive, and utterly foolproof. Hurst took this race-only setup and adapted it to production automatic transmissions, allowing road drivers to emulate their drag strip heroes, grabbing a separate lever for each upshift.

​The Lightning Rods system was set up to work like any ordinary automatic gear selector, more or less, with a conventional PRND shift pattern (as shown in the top photo). The difference was in the two additional levers: the far right lever and release button performed the 1-2 upshift, while the middle lever and button performed the 2-3 upshift. Or the driver could simply leave the lever in D for Drive or OD for Overdrive and drive normally. In that regard, the Lightning Rods setup was not unlike the Hurst Dual Gate aka “His ‘n Her” shifters of previous years.

Hurst marketed the Lightning Rods through its regular speed shop channels in several versions, including kits for the GM F-Body Camaro and Firebird and a universal model with a small, stand-alone floor console. Perhaps the most familiar application was as standard equipment in the 1983-84 Hurst/Olds–the final iterations of the Hurst-equipped muscle cars. Some 3,001 models in 1983 and 3,500 units in 1984 were built before Hurst/Olds production concluded for good. In hindsight the Lightning Rods look like a silly idea, but often, silly can be fun.

Car audio has worked its way through a number of music formats through the years, including 8-Track, cassette, and Compact Disc. Here’s one early effort: Chrysler’s Highway Hi-Fi record player of 1956. 

Today, in-car audio is an essential part of the automotive experience, offering nearly unlimited programming choices from satellite to MP3. But until 1956, American motorists were stuck with but one choice: AM radio. That’s when Chrysler opened the door, we might say, with an in-car phonograph system called Highway Hi-Fi.

​Highway Hi-Fi was developed by CBS Laboratories chief Peter Goldmark, the inventor of the 33 1/3 rpm long-playing album format. (As legend has it, Goldmark despised the rock ‘n roll then taking over the radio airwaves and decided to offer civilized motorists  an alternative.)  After experimenting with various mediums including magnetic tape, he devised a special hybrid record format: a seven-inch vinyl disc like the RCA 45 rpm single, but playing at the 16 2/3 rpm used in Talking Book spoken-word records. Dynamic range was limited to 3,000 Hz but on the plus side, the novel format offered 45 minutes of programming per side. A five-pin harness sent the player’s output into the car radio’s audio section, while a carefully engineered tone arm with high tracking force kept skipping and skating to a minimum.

Goldmark pitched his record player to several Chrysler engineers, then to executive Lynn Townsend (who later became company president). ChryCo liked the setup and agreed to buy 20,000 units from the CBS manufacturing division, although the order was later dialed back to 18,000. The automaker created the trade name “Highway Hi-Fi” and made the made the player optional on Plymouth, Dodge, DeSoto, Chrysler, and Imperial models, all sharing the same under-dash unit pictured above. The CBS Columbia dvision manufactured the records, a mix of light classics, musical theater, and easy listening favorites, which were distributed through Chrysler’s dealer network and by mail. Perennial Dodge spokesman Lawrence Welk joined in on the marketing effort.

​Unfortunately, we know how this comes out. While the player was offered across the  Chrysler model lines from 1956 through 1959, it never caught on—due mainly to poor reliability, high warranty costs, and the limited variety and distribution of the Highway Hi-Fi record catalog. The record player was never more than a novelty, although a healthy number of the units are still around in the Chrysler collector car community.

Despite the first misfire, Chrysler revisited the auto record player concept again in 1960-1961 with a completely different unit produced by RCA and known as the AP-1 (below).  Offered by both Chrysler dealers and RCA Victor retailers, it was also marketed by Sears under the Allstate brand. This player took popular RCA-style 45 rpm singles (including rock ‘n roll, hurrah) and played them upside down much like many juke boxes of the era. As each record in the changer finished, it dropped into the floor of the unit. While the RCA player was also less than ideal, it spawned a host of copies and competitors from Philips and others, and no doubt inspired new and improved in-car musical formats, including four-track and eight-track tape cartridges.

From a time when General Motors ruled the world: This newsreel presents the fabulous 1954 GM Motorama at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. 

​ There really are no modern parallels to the annual GM Motorama spectaculars of the American mid-century. As we’ve often referenced here at Mac’s Motor City Garage, the Motoramas were elaborate multimedia extravaganzas that used theater, music, even interpretive dance to present the corporation’s advanced products, from the latest Cadillac dream cars to the kitchens of tomorrow.

More than 1.9 million visitors took in the show in the 1954 season, which opened on January 26 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. In this two-minute newsreel on the ’54 show, we see a number of Motorama dream cars that would soon become famous, including:

+   The Chevrolet Nomad, which showcased the division’s sports wagon concept, on a Corvette theme in its original form.

+   The Buick Wildcat II, a radical sports roadster that still exists today at the Sloan Museum in Flint, Michigan.

+   The Cadillac El Camino, a close-coupled coupe that introduced GM customers to the El Camino name, later used on a series of Chevy passenger car-based pickups.

+   The turbine-powered GM Firebird I, which even six decades later looks more like a jet fighter than an automobile.

+   The Pontiac Bonneville, the Pontiac division’s take on the two-seat sports car category as exemplified by the Chevrolet Corvette.

See all these wonders and more in the video below.

I have to thank BangShift tipster Tony Hoffer for the lead on this amazing video of what is probably the craziest automotive engine ever actually running. This is an Adams-Farwell rotating cylinder engine. Produced for about 10 years starting in the early 1900s, the engines were powerful, efficient, and actually pretty brilliant. The company was gonzo by 1913 and there is only one functioning Adams-Farwell car left on Earth. Thankfully that car is in good care and this video is proof of that. Displacing 490ci and made up of five cylinders, we’re pretty sure this thing was rated at either 50 or 75hp. The performance of Adams-Farwell cars was as good or superior than anything else on the market back in those days. Like today though, it was a tough sell to take an idea as wild as this one and make a go of it.
As you will see in the video below, the crank is solid mounted to the frame and the engine spins around it. It seems like the whole thing would be impossible but when you see it working, the engine is almost beyond words in tis cool factor. The Adams-Farwell slogan to describe the engine was, “It spins like a top!” The man in the video does a far better job explaining the car than we ever could and we’re going to let him do it.
Along with all of the other stuff happening in the early 1900s, the range of options for people (who had the money) in the automotive world was completely insane. From engines that spun around their cranks to cars with toilets installed in them, the sky was the limit during this time in motoring life. Yes, these were basically hay wagons with engines in them but we’re sure glad that this single car survived all these years and can still fire up and show us all how wild those days really were.
PRESS PLAY BELOW TO SEE THE AMAZING ADAMS-FARWELL ROTATING CYLINDER ENGINE RUNNING

Photos courtesy The Henry Ford.
One of Henry Ford’s odder inventions—and one that certainly challenges the notion he only ever wanted to build Model Ts into perpetuity—will get its moment in the spotlight next year as the subject of a talk in the Gilmore Museum lecture series, which for 2018 will include more automotive topics than in years past.
Ford’s interests in the X-shape engine, which essentially uses two 90-degree V-4s turned on their side and mated on a common crankshaft, dated to about 1920, when he filed for his first patent on the design, noting its compactness, relatively high power-to-weight ratio, and suitability for air-cooling as its advantages. Indeed, according to The Henry Ford’s page on the X-8 in its collections, pictured above, it measures just 17-inches wide, 17-inches tall, and 14-inches deep.
The L-head example above, however, is far from the only X-8 engine configuration Ford experimented with. As pointed out in a 1973 Special Interest Autos article, it was one of seven experimental X-8 engines—and 58 experimental engines total—once left to sit in a sugar beet mill building on the Greenfield Village campus. While records for the experimental engines were incomplete, the seven X-8 engines include both air-cooled and water-cooled L-heads as well as at least one aluminum air-cooled overhead-camshaft version.

Ford might have conceived the X-8 concept, but he trusted development of the engine to Eugene Farkas, who worked on it for the next six or seven years, until it became evident to those surrounding Ford—and eventually to Ford himself—that the X-8 would never replace the Model T’s four-cylinder engine (due in no small part to reports that the lower spark plugs fouled often). Ford instead turned his attention to developing an inexpensive V-8 and abandoned the X-8 altogether.
Auto historian Don LaCombe will expand on the X-8’s history late next month as part of the 2018 Gilmore lecture series. Other lectures in the series will focus on the Can-Am racing series; art, architecture, and the automobile; Jaguar, slot cars, dune buggies, and abandoned gas stations.
The 2018 Gilmore lecture series will run from January 7 to April 29. For more information, visit GilmoreCarMuseum.org.

Article courtesy of Hemmings Daily, written by Daniel Strohl.