The Spruce Goose

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The H-4 Hercules was an aircraft built by Howard Hughes during world war 2, The idea behind it was to ship large amount of cargo across the Atlantic safely above German war ships. The whole project ran overtime and over budget and by the time the only prototype flew in 1947 the war was over and funding was cancelled. The media nicknamed the plane the Spruce Goose because of this and the fact that it was made of wood as there was no metal available because of the war. Howard Hughes hated the nickname and set it out on its only flight just to prove a point, amazingly for a prototype aircraft of its age and huge size it remain cared for and in hidden storage until 1980 where it spent some time next to the Queen Mary. Since 1995 its home has been the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon which is an hour southwest of Portland. The museum has a good range of other aircraft that are well worth checking out too.

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How would your car go in a crash test

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At one stage not long ago car manufactures could pump out any old box of bolts and people would buy them and not care what would happen if they ever crashed them. Thankfully today cars are designed with computers and the manufacturers can try crash testing them over and over without even building their first car, this means that cars today are much safer than those built in the trail and error days. Today cars are built to bend and crush in certain ways but not in other ways to keep the passenger compartment (and you) in one piece. In some cars this works better than others and this is why there is a star rating given to the cars on today’s roads. The standard crashes in the video above are performed by Euro NCAP at 67klm into an offset wall, what we are looking at are 5 star cars compared to 1 star cars where you would not be healthy after the crash.

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Russia’s Konkordski

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The Concorde is often regarded as the pinnacle of aircraft design, its supersonic speed outstrips any passenger aircraft built today. There was also a Russian version that the media dubbed KonKordski, allegedly built from stolen plans the Russian TU-144 was very similar with a few changes like its mini wings known as canards near the front of the craft. In some respects it was better than the Concorde as it beat it to a maiden flight, was a tad faster and held a few more people. It suffered a bad reputation after crashing at the 1973 Paris airshow, a 1978 crash sealed the fate of the aircraft and permanent passenger service never resumed despite TU-144’s still being built up until 1984. Today a good example of the TU-144 can be found at the Auto & Technikmuseum at Sinsheim in Germany sitting next to a Concorde, hit the next page for a video of the plane being transported to the museum.

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Liberace’s car collection at the Liberace Museum

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Liberace was well known for collecting high priced toys like pianos, jewellery, fur coats and exotic cars. He generally liked to make a grand entrance on stage in one of his fancy cars with most of them modified to give it that Liberace touch. The one in the video above is a rare Rolls Royce featuring thousands of mirror tiles across its body. Today this car along with a hand-painted red, white and blue Rolls-Royce, a roadster covered in Austrian rhinestones as well as cars from a London cab to a heavily modified VW Beetle feature in the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas.

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The British Commercial Vehicle Museum

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The British Commercial Vehicle Museum is a museum celebrating the once great British motor industry. The museum is located in the town of Leyland, Lancashire, England, it is this town that gave its name to the bus and truck manufacturer that became the UK’s largest motor manufacturer after acquiring most of the British motor marques. At one point British Leyland enjoyed 40% of the British motor industry but those days are long over. One part of the Leyland group that did survive was the truck manufacturing operations, its no longer British owned and now builds trucks for the DAF brand so if you want to see Leyland or Foden buses and trucks from the glory years of British motor industry head to The British Commercial Vehicle Museum.

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Citroen GS Bi Rotor

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When you think about the Wankel Rotary engine you instantly think about Mazda, some of you may also remember NSU the German car company that went broke after sinking a lot of money into the Rotary. There also was a third company who thought Rotaries would be good under their bonnet and that was Citroen with their GS Bi-Rotor. Between 1973 and 1977 a luxury version of the Citroen GS was sold with NSU’s rotary engine under the bonnet but when NSU fell in a heap Citroen were left with 847 cars on the road without a source of spare parts. Citroen’s solution was to recall them and buy them all back to be crushed and never mention the Rotary again. A few still survive as some customers loved them to much to sell them back to Citroen, the video above is a Citroen promotional video showing how Citroen did love the Rotary once too. It’s in French but the animations of how the rotary works is pretty cool if you don’t understand the language of the cheese eaters.

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Toyota IQ

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The Toyota IQ was a concept car first shown at the Frankfurt Motorshow in 2007. At only 3 metres in length it will be one of the shortest cars about when a car based on the concept goes into production around 2009. The majority of sales are expected to be in Japan and Europe where kei class or city sized cars are popular. The IQ should make some good competition for the Smart ForTwo, its hard to believe but it does seat four people…well two adults and two very small kids. Watch the short video above for a rundown of Toyota IQ. 

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My other tractor is a Porsche

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A lot of people have heard the famous story about how tractor manufacturer Lamborghini started to produce sports cars after he had a tiff with Enzo Ferrari, but not many people know that the Porsche name can also be found on tractors. It all started around the time Ferdinand Porsche was developing the VW Beetle and the German government asked him to work on a peoples tractor to go along with the peoples car. To cut a long story short it was a pretty good design, WW2 got in the way but after that several companies licenced his design and Porsche badged tractors were built until 1963.

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