Upper Middle Petrol Head:

This is Mark B's magnificent 1969 Pontiac 350 Firebird , freshly imported into Tasmania from Karratha, Western Australia.  It's a striking - and quite unique - version of the model, featuring a revised nose cone, heavily swaged front and rear guards and and a set of purposeful looking vents just aft of the front wheels.  I've inserted a few pics from the UMPH archives to demonstrate how Mark's car differs from the vast majority of Firebird / Camaro twins that we see here in Oz, although I'm not suggesting that there aren't any others like it anywhere else in our vast brown land. Is it just me, or is this Firebird  very, very  l o n g  ? This one's stumpier, for sure! Mark has helpfully provided some specs and a bit of background to get our collective motors running, as outlined in the following few paragraphs:   The Firebird was manufactured in Norwood, Ohio, and is a fitted with a 350 cubic inch GM V8 engine, a Super T10 Borg Warner 4 speed manual tr...

  Mrs UMPH is warming to Italian cars.  I can tell.  Why else would she have taken the time to capture this gorgeous Fiat 500? She's got an eye for them, too, her other contributions having included a fairly rare Lancia Fulvia and a lovely Alfa GT Junior.  That's three from three and ample evidence - if it was ever needed - that she's a woman of discernment and good taste!    Coming very soon to UMPH:  February, 2022's, instalment of Classics by the Beach; South East Queensland correspondent Pete R's pics of a very tough XC Falcon hardtop and an immaculate FX Holden ute; and we preview Mark B's recently imported to Tasmania Pontiac 350 Firebird .  Stay tuned ... !     U M P H (uppermiddlepetrolhead.blogspot.com.au.) iPhone images.

If you remember back to Part 11 of P3P, headlight restorer does not double as 46 year old Fiat 128 gauge lens restorer.  It was worth a try! Above and below:  UV-damaged and cloudy A-F! As I indicated in Part 11, I consulted with The Keeper of The Cache - a well-known local Fiat, Alfa and Mercedes guru - to see if he had anything even vaguely less hazy than was fitted to my car.  He didn't.  However, what he did have money can't buy:  knowledge and advice!  According to this sage of Italian and German marques (come to think of it, he's got a bit of a thing for Citroens and Peugeots, too), the plastics used by Fiat and Alfa in the mid-'70s, just after they ditched glass-lensed gauges, were particularly susceptible to UV damage and no amount of cutting and polishing will have even the slightest effect on them.   Too bad I didn’t think to ask the question before  embarking on my fruitless quest! But that's where the advice kicked in:  The K...

  I post this lovely circa 1950 Morris Minor "Low-Light" advisedly, knowing that it may well give my mate Cliffy* a st🍆ffie!  What the heck?  We'll give him a thrill, eh! It's certainly not the sole Morrie to grace the pages of uppermiddlepetrolhead.  However, being an earlier - and thus rarer - version, it definitely deserves its moment in the sun.  According to Wikipedia, Low-Lights were produced from 1948 to 1953 and were powered by a piddling 918 cc side-valve engine.  Please refer to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Minor for further details.   For those not acquainted with the side-valve, much of their componentry was incorporated into the engine block - rather than having the valves, tappets, rockers and, sometimes, the cams fitted above the head - as in the case with overhead valve, and single and double overhead camshaft engines.  As a result, a side-valve head is little more than a cast iron lid designed to maintain compressi...

The short answer is n o!  However, in fairness to Turtle - whose products I've always found to be very, very good - they never claimed that you could.  The product is called Headlight Lens Restorer , not 46 Year Old Fiat 128 Gauge De-Hazer , which might have been a clue. In my defence, contemporary headlight lenses are usually made of polycarbonate - a plastic - and the gauges are mounted behind what's likely to be perspex, which also belongs to the broader plastics family.  Couple this with the not unreasonable theory that the degradation often seen on headlight lenses and similar transparent items is due largely to the ravages of ultraviolet light and it doesn't seem too far fetched that the one product - headlight restorer, in this case - might be able to kill the two birds, as it were. Anyway, I've now debunked that bit of wishful thinking.  I happily admit that I was wrong.  30 minutes' of slavishly following the directions failed to so much as slightly mi...