Last week; was it last week? Was it more than a week ago? No, I think it was last week – I was in Los Angeles, and I got to spend a little bit of time with David and Laurence as they were building that WWII Jeep from eBay parts. Well, like 99% eBay parts: there were some little bolts David needed, so we ended up at a hardware store. It was one of those that has those rows of little drawers full of small nuts and bolts and ball bearings and wire terminals and all kinds of satisfying little bits. I always love these parts of hardware stores.
I hid David’s phone in one of these drawers and then called it, too. It was fun watching him confusedly scan the whole rack of drawers wondering where the hell the sound of his phone was coming from.
Anyway, some of these drawers had little springs in them, and when I looked at some of the labels that showed pictures of the springs that lurked within, a couple of them reminded me, strangely powerfully, of certain car faces. There was one that had two springs that felt like very specific cars:
Sure, that top spring just feels like a spring, but the other two? They’re triggering some car-focused pareidolia in my brain, especially that middle one. Let’s start with the bottom one, though.
It’s kind of a more generic-seeming round-sealed-beam/vertical slat grille setup, though finding exactly what fits this look, with the right proportions, isn’t as easy as you may think. At first I thought maybe an International Scout was the right choice:
…but that divide in the middle of the vertical-slatted grille sort of breaks it. It’s close otherwise, with the headlight-to-grille ratio being pretty close. But there’s others that could work, too. Like the variant of the Suzuki Samurai with the vertical-slot grille:
That’s pretty close! I can live with that!
Strangely, the second spring, which may actually seem less car-face-like at first glance, actually conjured up a much more specific car:
A 1970 Mercury Cougar! The proportions aren’t exactly exact, but it just feels like the face of this cougar, and fired some Cougar-related brain neurons when I saw it almost immediately.
Personally, I think it’s almost uncanny: can you have a small spring that looks more like the front end of a ’70 Cougar?
I don’t think so.
The proportions are very 1958 Ford rear
The bottom spring of the head shot reminded me of a spare tire cover on a Jeep CJ-5 that had printed upside down the phrase “if you can read this roll me over.”
The bottom spring is a Mk1 Austin Maxi. All the options Torch suggested have square surrounds to the round lights, but the Maxi doesn’t.
I looked at the picture and headline before I even clicked on it, and just saw all three springs together as a single face of an old 60’s/70’s Land Cruiser. After looking up photos, the hood doesn’t stick out to the sides quite like I remember, but I still maintain it’s a good match.