Restoration Is A Work In Progress

This article appeared August 15, 2007, in The New Mexican.

The way Andrew Baron sees it, there are four kinds of car collectors: There’s the artist at heart who loves the car’s design and can discuss how one piece flows into another, the mechanical engineer who can recite every specification, the industrial historian who might not even own the car but knows everything about it from conception to introduction, and the history buff who wants to own a piece of the past because “there’s something about having your hands on that original walnut wheel.”

Baron — meticulous, determined, precise, a perfectionist who admits only to being “odd” and a “detailer” — is all four.

At 45, he is one of few “paper engineers” in the world — those who design and bring to life pop-ups that move mechanically by pulling a tab or opening a flap. Pop-ups usually appear in children’s books, and the award-winning Baron has collaborated with some of the best illustrators in the industry and received critical acclaim for Knick-Knack Paddywhack, published in 2002.

With cars, what can be more pop-up than a convertible?

Home-Built Hot Rod

This article appeared August 8, 2007, in The New Mexican.

It took three years of weekends, but David Faubion finally has the car of his dreams

It could be that, when it comes to building hot rods, it’s the old guys who have all the fun. The young ones can’t afford them these days.

David Faubion, 59, keeps himself young by tooling around in what’s close to a fire-engine-red 1934 Ford coupe — complete with a chopped top and a chromed 355-cubic-inch small-block Chevy V-8 that can whip up 320 horsepower. He put the car together himself and once hit 130 mph in it.

Faubion, who builds houses as well as cars, lives on five acres across the road from Eldorado, where nearby U.S. 285 gives him space to roam. With a four-speed automatic transmission from a 1972 Corvette, his car regularly gets 22 miles per gallon on regular gas.

Guys — it’s usually guys — build or buy hot rods and vintage cars for different reasons: to race, to show, to drive occasionally and love as part of themselves. Some cars are what Faubion calls “trailer queens, the ones guys will take to shows and never drive. Those kind of cars are [worth] over $100,000.”