Dale Wilch's Man Cave is the cure for winter carlessness

You’ve seen me complain about the lack of winter car stuff to do around Kansas City before.  Well, this year, I’m doing something about it.  Wednesday night I joined the ranks of swap meet merchants at Dale Wilch’s Man Cave, a 15,000 sq/ft treasure trove of car parts and other eclectic junk located near the Fox 4 Television studios.  Once a week, Kansas City’s car community converges on this eerie underground lair, buying parts, sharing stories, and just spending time in one of the only places that never gets colder than 70-degrees.

Advertise on Hover Motor Company

You know I try to reserve these posts for car show coverage, car event calendars, museum visits, auto reviews, and automotive history.  But today, I’m going to do a little business.  Don’t be scared away, though.  I swear I won’t make it a habit.  I just don’t have a car show story lined up for today, so it seemed like a good time to bring this up.

Hover Motor Company milestones and shameless panhandling

This week, the Hover Motor Company blog hit a couple of pretty neat milestones. And while I do try and keep this sort of thing to a minimum, sometimes a guy just has to toot his own horn.

I posted the first car story here on August 18, 2010. The weekly car show calendar that went up on Tuesday marks the 400th story here on http://www.hovermotorco.com/. I can hardly believe that I can come up with one 400-word story sometimes, not much less 400 different stories!

Taking inventory of Hover Motor Company, 1942

Today I thought I’d take some time to talk about something that every visitor to this site has seen, but most of them probably haven’t thought much about.

During World War II, new cars were hard to get. In fact, toward the end of 1942, U.S. automakers quit building new cars for the general public, and converted their factories primarily to the production of war materiel. Basically no civilian cars were built between 1943 and 1945. That is a long dry spell.

Lots of old car pictures from the family photo album

This is not the normal article where I go take a bunch of pictures at a car show and tell you how the weather was. As far as I'm concerned, this article is special.

If you come from a family of car nuts like me, you’ve probably noticed that the car turns up in quite a few family photos. Heck, if you go through my old shoeboxes full of pictures, you might get the impression that my grandparents spent all their time in the driveway.

My granddad was a used car dealer in Colorado Springs, so cars weren’t just a passion, they were his life. I always enjoy the stories my dad tells about all the cars that passed through there as he was growing up. It’s interesting to hear about where they came from and what they did with them.