Mechanical Flying Goose Decorates Radiator Cap
For novelty in radiator ornaments, you’ll have to go a long way to beat this mechanical flying goose. As you speed along in your car, an ingenious arrangement of mechanism in the bird causes it to straighten out and flap its wings to simulate a real live goose in flight.
WHILE your car is standing still this wild goose isn’t so wild. He perches sedately upon the radiator cap surveying the world with a glassy eye. But as soon as you start up and shift into high he flattens out his tail, stretches his neck forward and begins to flap his wings as if he were going somewhere, and going there in a hurry.
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Jivin’ Up THE JEEP
THE front seats of the jeep are tolerably comfortable, but the shallow, flat rear seat is a notorious back-breaker. It can be improved considerably by installing two pieces of1/2in. plywood, (photo 1, above right), hinged to the bottom of the seat frame. Position the back board to about the angle shown. To the front of the bottom board, attach short wooden feet (photo 2, right) about 10 inches long. The back board can be pushed forward, (photo 3, below) to give access to the hand crank mounted against the rear wall of the jeep.
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Floating Fuel Station for SEAPLANES
IN THE future, when airplane travel comes to be as commonplace as automobile travel, we may expect to see floating filling stations, such as shown in the drawing above, dotting the airplane travel lanes of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This is by no means a fantastic project of dreamers, for already just such floating service stations are to be seen scattered along the Pacific coast; and a west coast oil company, looking to the future, has announced its intentions of establishing a chain of 99 such stations for the accommodation of planes journeying up and down the seaboard.
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MI Tests the 1950 Studebaker
“One of the best dollar values today,” says Tom McCahill. They’re not the fastest cars on the road but they’re tops in comfort and quality.
THE new, needle-nose Studebaker gives the boys of the Big Three something to shoot at. Back in ‘46, with the introduction of the 1947 Studebaker designed by Raymond Loewy, this first real post-war auto stirred up the populace. And now, once again, Loewy has set the pace with the 1950 Studebaker.
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NEW for the ROAD
Motorcycle Car was built by automotive engineer Theron Huish of Los Angeles in one year’s spare time. The body is a reinforced aircraft drop tank; engine is the motorcycle type with a fan for cooling. Top speed is about 60 mph.
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SAN FRANCISCO FIGHTS FOR ITS CABLE CARS
“Save our cable cars,” say Frisco’s citizens. But the City Hall boys have other ideas.
By Louis Hochman
SAN FRANCISCO shakes again! In 1906 it was Nature that rocked the infant town into a mass of ashes and rubble. Today it’s human nature that is giving this Golden Gate City the shakes with a wave of public sentiment that has spread far beyond the city’s own boundaries. Once again the people of San Francisco have gathered in force to go fight City Hall. It’s a battle between practicality and sentimentality and the object of this latest uprising is once again the dinky little cable car—that ding-dong relic of the Gay Nineties that continues to clang its merry way up and down the precipitous hills of San Francisco in blissful defiance of modern science and the forces of progress.
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UNDERSEA SPIES
BY JAMES NEVIN MILLER
BACK in December, 1944, Lieut. Earl E. Cook of Seattle, won the Navy Cross for a unique achievement. First, in a successful effort to locate three enemy depth bombs known to be in immediate danger of detonation, he dove deep inside a patrol bomber sunk in a vital channel off Oahu, Hawaii. Then for three never-to-be-forgotten days he directed a six-man team of divers which finally recovered the death-dealing weapons.
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