Diamond bar boxes are trash

ShootingArts said:
Funny thing, you look at a Corvair compared to today's cars and it looks like a tank. Not sure what caused it but a customer with a Corvair hit the rear of another car in front of the service station eighty-five miles an hour. Sounded like a freaking bomb went off but my customer walked away, no seatbelt on either. Probably a help in that day's technology.

I owned a Corvair Monza for a few days or a week. Somebody had already destroyed the turbocharger and it leaked more oil than it burned gas. It was a kinda fun car but not fun enough. I think I paid two hundred or less for it and sold it for about the same or a small profit.

One or two years after they were discontinued somebody came out with neoprene seals that solved the oil leak problem. Besides the oil I think I didn't like a mushy shifter going back to that rear engine and four speed.

Can't really remember. Not counting the ones I sold with paperwork I had probably owned a dozen or two cars by the time I was eighteen. I went through a file cabinet that was full of titles and bills of sale in my name. I couldn't remember owning some of those but the paperwork was notarized, I must have! I flipped some within hours.

When they passed mandatory insurance in my state I owned three cars and three trucks that I ran on the road. A motorcycle or two also. Add a couple boats by the time I was seventeen. I took seriously that old saying about he who dies with the most toys wins.

Hu
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Hu, did you happen to own one of those corvair station wagons?? The 4 door job??
Personally I liked them. They sure got a bad rap in the media tho. Heck, this was B4 mandatory seat belts, ya know?? Any car was dangerous with an idiot behind the wheel. Lol.
 
Mensabum said:
Hu, did you happen to own one of those corvair station wagons?? The 4 door job??
Personally I liked them. They sure got a bad rap in the media tho. Heck, this was B4 mandatory seat belts, ya know?? Any car was dangerous with an idiot behind the wheel. Lol.
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The great Porsche 911 is still a death machine if you don't understand a lil physics and vehicle dynamics. Having all that engine weight at the ass-end creates what guys like Jewett would call a ' high polar moment of inertia' aka the car will swap ends in a heartbeat if the brakes are applied in cornering. The new models have all kinds of electronic gizmos to 'reduce' this but its still a thing. Older models were nuts. A LOT of people died or were hurt bad when the Turbo first came out in '76. If you weren't aware of how these HAD to be driven they would and did kill people. All this being said if you drove them with the loud pedal kinda like a sprint-car they were fun as shit. Power-on oversteer thru a corner at 80+ in a 911 was/is fun as hell.
 
garczar said:
The great Porsche 911 is still a death machine if you don't understand a lil physics and vehicle dynamics. Having all that engine weight at the ass-end creates what guys like Jewett would call a ' high polar moment of inertia' aka the car will swap ends in a heartbeat if the brakes are applied in cornering. The new models have all kinds of electronic gizmos to 'reduce' this but its still a thing. Older models were nuts. A LOT of people died or were hurt bad when the Turbo first came out in '76. If you weren't aware of how these HAD to be driven they would and did kill people. All this being said if you drove them with the loud pedal kinda like a sprint-car they were fun as shit. Power-on oversteer thru a corner at 80+ in a 911 was/is fun as hell.
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My brother and I were into fast cars and racing. Neither of us liked driving Porsches because they were hard to handle on the track. Believe it or not the 914-6 was the best handling Porsche and the 928 (front engine) was probably the best Porsche ever made. We stuck to Corvettes for racing. With sculpted out wheel wells, fat tires and a suspension dropping them down two inches from the ground, the Vette's were like sleds. You could slide them all around on the track and they would never flip over. To this day the best handling cars have close to a 50-50 weight ratio between the front end and back end. Mid engine sports cars seem to be the best alternative.

Of course, all the overpowered cars sold today have nowhere to go! Tell me where, outside of Montana or on some lonely highway in Nevada, can you really drive them safely (if you know how!). I love it when I see a $300-500,000 Lambo, Ferrari or McClaren stuck in traffic on the 405 Freeway out here. And I'm sitting next to them in my fuel injected V-6 Toyota Camry XLE relaxing comfortably and listening to good music. It cost a fraction of the price and is totally reliable with little maintenance required. The worst thing for all these high performance cars is to spend their lives in city traffic. Those powerful motors need to be blown out once in a while and get the revs up over five and six thousand. Such a waste of good machinery. Then again, in Cali we have the cowboys in their five and six hundred horsepower (and more) Chargers, Hellcats and the like flying in and around freeway traffic when it is flowing at 70-80 mph. They are racing around everybody at over 100 without a cop in sight. Inexperienced drivers in super muscle cars is not a good formula and the high death count on California roads is no surprise.
 
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Has anyone ever played on a 7' Brunswick table with SuperSpeed cushions? I have not myself. I wonder how they play. Too bad they didn't get picked up commercially.


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jay helfert said:
That was Ralph Nadar. Later on he was proven wrong on much of his negative comments about Corvairs. Turns out they weren't so bad after all. I've had two; one a 1962 with the automatic shifter on the dash. The biggest problem was the long fanbelt in back would slip off sometimes under hard acceleration and high speeds (it would go 100 mph). I had to stop, loosen the bolts and put it back on. I cranked the most out of the paltry 104 HP motor. My second one was a classic 1964 Convertible Monza. It was rated at 140 HP and ran great. I just got tired of the floor shift (manual trans).
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Well, my father and a jury disagree. A corvair rolled over and crushed him to death in '68. A jury of 12 awarded the family a sizable amount.
 
Never owned a Corvair station wagon or pick-up. In that stage of my life I never looked at anything that didn't go fast. I bought a sixty-five Mustang two plus two from a preacher. The exhause clattered like hell all the way from his house to my service station where I promptly rebuilt the engine. I spent a day or two grinding carbon out of the cylinder heads. 225 horse when I started on the engine, a bunch more when I finished. It would pick up and carry the front wheels with a 3:1 factory rear end. I never got around to putting the rear gears I had for it in it because I never got beaten street racing it against the muscle cars. I had stripped the interior planning to drag race it but NHRA had a big shake up and the only class it would fit even with a lot of work was Gas Altered, a trophy class now! That was when I went circle tracking.

Bobby Allison bought a porsche when they were using them in IROC.. He quickly decided they handled like crap! They stuck until the front end broke loose without warning. Way loose and a bad push! I was into American iron anyway. I was lucky a huge oak limb fell on the Mustang but many of my other cars weren't much safer. The 63 and 66 Corvettes were some of my safer cars.

Jay, I am with you about the 200MPH plus street cars. No place to drive them and it takes skills that toy buyers don't usually have anyway. Aside from that, drivers are overrunning their eyesight. See it all the time on the racetracks now. Speeds so high that you can only clearly see other cars moving at your speed. No chance to dodge anything sitting still or moving slowly. One reason for the death of almost no rules sprint car racing in the world of outlaws. At 150 plus on the one mile dirt tracks the reaction time became impossible. Trouble at the other end of a straight and you were in a wreck before you could react. Too, the tour cars couldn't beat the eastern big blocks!

About that Diamond table: You encounter so many in the wild these days that it's best to consider the way they bank as the new normal and make adjustments from your normal bank angles for other tables. I found that they bank pretty well in very dry climates, much shorter in very humid places even with climate control. Unless the rails need torquing down the Diamond banks very consistently which is about all that can be hoped for. I don't look forward to different tables everywhere you go. I do look forward to Diamond having some sales competition. I think current prices are very close to rape.

Hu
 
ShootingArts said:
Never owned a Corvair station wagon or pick-up. In that stage of my life I never looked at anything that didn't go fast. I bought a sixty-five Mustang two plus two from a preacher. The exhause clattered like hell all the way from his house to my service station where I promptly rebuilt the engine. I spent a day or two grinding carbon out of the cylinder heads. 225 horse when I started on the engine, a bunch more when I finished. It would pick up and carry the front wheels with a 3:1 factory rear end. I never got around to putting the rear gears I had for it in it because I never got beaten street racing it against the muscle cars. I had stripped the interior planning to drag race it but NHRA had a big shake up and the only class it would fit even with a lot of work was Gas Altered, a trophy class now! That was when I went circle tracking.

Bobby Allison bought a porsche when they were using them in IROC.. He quickly decided they handled like crap! They stuck until the front end broke loose without warning. Way loose and a bad push! I was into American iron anyway. I was lucky a huge oak limb fell on the Mustang but many of my other cars weren't much safer. The 63 and 66 Corvettes were some of my safer cars.

Jay, I am with you about the 200MPH plus street cars. No place to drive them and it takes skills that toy buyers don't usually have anyway. Aside from that, drivers are overrunning their eyesight. See it all the time on the racetracks now. Speeds so high that you can only clearly see other cars moving at your speed. No chance to dodge anything sitting still or moving slowly. One reason for the death of almost no rules sprint car racing in the world of outlaws. At 150 plus on the one mile dirt tracks the reaction time became impossible. Trouble at the other end of a straight and you were in a wreck before you could react. Too, the tour cars couldn't beat the eastern big blocks!

About that Diamond table: You encounter so many in the wild these days that it's best to consider the way they bank as the new normal and make adjustments from your normal bank angles for other tables. I found that they bank pretty well in very dry climates, much shorter in very humid places even with climate control. Unless the rails need torquing down the Diamond banks very consistently which is about all that can be hoped for. I don't look forward to different tables everywhere you go. I do look forward to Diamond having some sales competition. I think current prices are very close to rape.

Hu
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I talked to D'mond about pricing and they said they kept them as close to same as long as possible. Small bumps in price but reasonable. Then came covid and everything changed as well all well know. They told me every single part/component price skyrocket as did shipping/ins/etc. Didn't seem to hurt their biz any, you gotta get in line to get new ones and used ones can be hard to find.
 
ShootingArts said:
Never owned a Corvair station wagon or pick-up. In that stage of my life I never looked at anything that didn't go fast. I bought a sixty-five Mustang two plus two from a preacher. The exhause clattered like hell all the way from his house to my service station where I promptly rebuilt the engine. I spent a day or two grinding carbon out of the cylinder heads. 225 horse when I started on the engine, a bunch more when I finished. It would pick up and carry the front wheels with a 3:1 factory rear end. I never got around to putting the rear gears I had for it in it because I never got beaten street racing it against the muscle cars. I had stripped the interior planning to drag race it but NHRA had a big shake up and the only class it would fit even with a lot of work was Gas Altered, a trophy class now! That was when I went circle tracking.

Bobby Allison bought a porsche when they were using them in IROC.. He quickly decided they handled like crap! They stuck until the front end broke loose without warning. Way loose and a bad push! I was into American iron anyway. I was lucky a huge oak limb fell on the Mustang but many of my other cars weren't much safer. The 63 and 66 Corvettes were some of my safer cars.

Jay, I am with you about the 200MPH plus street cars. No place to drive them and it takes skills that toy buyers don't usually have anyway. Aside from that, drivers are overrunning their eyesight. See it all the time on the racetracks now. Speeds so high that you can only clearly see other cars moving at your speed. No chance to dodge anything sitting still or moving slowly. One reason for the death of almost no rules sprint car racing in the world of outlaws. At 150 plus on the one mile dirt tracks the reaction time became impossible. Trouble at the other end of a straight and you were in a wreck before you could react. Too, the tour cars couldn't beat the eastern big blocks!

About that Diamond table: You encounter so many in the wild these days that it's best to consider the way they bank as the new normal and make adjustments from your normal bank angles for other tables. I found that they bank pretty well in very dry climates, much shorter in very humid places even with climate control. Unless the rails need torquing down the Diamond banks very consistently which is about all that can be hoped for. I don't look forward to different tables everywhere you go. I do look forward to Diamond having some sales competition. I think current prices are very close to rape.

Hu
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Diamond prices are still cheaper than Brunswick prices.

Too bad there weren't more access to tables like Gabriels and some of the other European tables.
 
TrxR said:
Diamond prices are still cheaper than Brunswick prices.
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Unfortunately, the wait for them if they don't happen to be in stock at the time is horrendous. Don't be in a hurry and order a diamond, you will not have a good time.
 
Badpenguin said:
Unfortunately, the wait for them if they don't happen to be in stock at the time is horrendous. Don't be in a hurry and order a diamond, you will not have a good time.
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I would like to try a Gabriel or a table like Karl Boyes has but there is no North American dealers. I'm not prepared to buy at this moment anyways. The closest dealer for any major table is a Rasson dealer and even it is 12 hours or so away.
 
alphadog said:
All in all worst tables I have ever played on. Shoot soft so you dont over run position. Shoot hard to get around the table and come up short.

9footers blue label / red label are serviceable but Brunswicks are still better.
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you bet
 
garczar said:
The great Porsche 911 is still a death machine if you don't understand a lil physics and vehicle dynamics. Having all that engine weight at the ass-end creates what guys like Jewett would call a ' high polar moment of inertia' aka the car will swap ends in a heartbeat if the brakes are applied in cornering. The new models have all kinds of electronic gizmos to 'reduce' this but its still a thing. Older models were nuts. A LOT of people died or were hurt bad when the Turbo first came out in '76. If you weren't aware of how these HAD to be driven they would and did kill people. All this being said if you drove them with the loud pedal kinda like a sprint-car they were fun as shit. Power-on oversteer thru a corner at 80+ in a 911 was/is fun as hell.
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I've never been fortunate enuf to drive one. Do they really hug that tight?? Can you accelerate coming out and grab traction or will it break loose??
 
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