Tara and I have been going to the local Summit Racing (McDonough, GA) every Monday for their weekly show-n-shine just to park up and open the Wagon trunk and shamelessly promote a couple of our pedal cars - namely the red fire truck pedal car and the orange Champion fifties-style pedal car.

We're getting a great reaction from people who seem to globally love these and hate the plastic pedal cars you can buy in the toy stores. But no sales as yet. :(

Still, you get to see a little bump in the web traffic on Monday night & Tuesday, so people are at least looking. If you see us there, drop by and say hello. If we're not with the car, pick up a card and call us and we'll come running!

Yesterday Jasmine died at a traffic stop. Everytime we put it into Drive the engine would stall - but Reverse worked just fine. Conclusion?  The transmission is messed up internally and I'll need to find a local expert to fix it. That's not going to be easy or cheap I suspect.

In the meantime, I have a wagon with a crummy engine and great transmission and a convertible with a great engine and crummy transmission. Which one will win?

After a little bit of thought I'm going to sacrifice the convertible and swap its engine into the wagon. Tara will get a fun car to drive and the convertible will be off the road until.. well, further notice.

Reason being, I want to drive around the pedal cars to local events like Summit, HAMB & Grits and get the work out. I got the first one, a fire truck pedal car (shown here) yesterday.

This is an interesting experiment, just to keep me busy after the failure of Royal Tiki.

You'll find a description of this quick process over at lowhum, but for now you can visit the squidoo page about Cordless Tool Combo's and Cordless Combo Tools now.

P.S. This is far too simple to work I think, but It's fun nonetheless.

P.P.S. Thanks Howie.

On second thoughts, perhaps I should link to ebay from here too?

Cordless Combo Tools.

For a variety of reasons this blog will be leaving the Royal Tiki site permanently in the next few days.

It will reopen on my personal website in March when that site is updated.

See you on the flip side...

You may not have heard of a donkey jacket in the states, but I've always loved them since having one as a teenager in England. A few years ago now!

Anyway, I got inspired by all the recent talk of car club jackets on the HAMB so I tracked down someone who imports them over here. I could only find one importer, and luckily he was only 45 minutes away in downtown Atlanta!

I just picked mine up early this morning (gotta love that 7am traffic) and thought some of you might be interested. It's thick wool with PVC on shoulders and top of back.

Best part? $65!!! www.crashandburnatlanta.com

I'm no model, sorry

I was looking at my YouTube favorites this evening and found an old gem that I still love. Taken from the Nicolas Cage movie Gone in 60 Seconds - I think it was on the DVD under special features - you can find the music video here on YouTube.

Looking on iTunes came up empty though, and although Amazon lists it, it's out of stock.

Of course, Google is now completely overrun by spam-like sites that display the lyrics of songs so little joy to be found by searching for the name.

Does anyone know if it is available somewhere?

This weekend I got a few hours in the garage so I worked on my dry sump tank, water header tank and both catch cans.

I had one small setback where I put the header tank too close and forgot that the rocker covers are on studs so I needed more room to remove them, but at the second attempt I'm happy with how everything fits.

Now I have to start planning the hoses and hose ends to plumb them up.

I got $50 from the in-laws today (my birthday) so I think a trip to Summit is in order for hose ends!

Sorry about this folks, but starting tonight (Friday, January 18th) I am going to be renaming the categories on the site.

Inevitably this will cause some broken links for a few days. The site itself should be fixed up overnight, but Google will update its links "in due course" as always.

I know this reflects badly on us, but it's important enough that I felt it should be done sooner rather than later. In the big scheme of things, it's no big deal. As I get older I'm trying to not stress the little stuff. That said, I wanted to at least post an apology for those of you that hit a missing page.

To try and distract you, here is a picture my kid drew..

Yes, it's that time again - join us at the Southern Skillet on Sunday at 9am. We'll be the bunch of guys at the back talking hot rods...

Read more on the HAMB

Continuing on my journey through tiki world, today I am listening to the syrupy tones of Vegas Vic in his Tiki Lounge podcast.

I use iTunes to listen to music while at work, so I simply subscribed to the podcast using this iTunes link and got all episodes.

I'm currently on episode 3, back from June 2005