Bradley GT - Not your Hasselhoff's Kit.

What? A weekend post? Freak ouuuuut! Anyway, the Cars and Gearheadedness team dropped this 1974 ad for a Bradley GT on my desk late last night. Early Saturday edition time! It's from the December 1974 issue of Car and Driver. What's a Bradley GT?

It's a kit car. What's  a kit car? It's almost always a VW Beetle with it's hat pulled off, and a new fiberglass hat in the shape of something different bolted in place. This one's a Bradley GT, whose Wikipedia page exists as five rough paragraphs and some iffy grammar. Here's a sentence with so much to tell you, it can't remember what it wanted to tell you...

"The production run of the Bradley GT was from 1971 to 1981 according to the BradleyGT.com website and owners of the last GT II vehicles to be produced although many of the parts for the vehicles may date back to Volkswagens, Chevy Corvairs and other vehicles from the 1960s."

Fiberglass contains epoxy, kids. Don't forget to wear your respirator. Or, just go out for some fresh air before updating a Wikipedia page about your exciting new project car.

Anyway, Bradleys look pretty good in the flesh, and gullwing doors will always be cool, even if the car carrying them is just a VW Beetle underneath.

Here's a Rude Finger Graphical Gift for all both of you Bradley GT collectors out there. It's a clipped-out PNG of this car on transparency. Big and small, left and right just like always. You can add them to your growing P.A.G. multi-car pileup by right-clicking with your rude finger and saving.

Incidentally, matting out dot-pattern images is just for pros who are pen tool ninjas like me, people. Don't try using your magic-wand auto-selection device on pictures like this or your sanity will break in half. Even with pen tool mastery, trying to make out the edge of the tire in those shadows under the car was super-squinty work. Now my pen tool hurts. You're welcome.

UPDATE! Wups! I just noticed that the rocker panel decal on the right-facing PNGs was backwards. They're fixed now. To avoid mangling the pixels, I grabbed the decals from my own super secret high-rez version of the image and shrank it down into the PNGs and skewed it to fit. If I'd edited the pixels on the smaller images, it would have become blurry. Just saying. And, to anybody quick enough to download the cars with the backwards decals in the ten minutes they were posted before correction: congratulations. You now own two internet collector items almost assured to skyrocket in value, just as soon as easily duplicated PNGs become valuable somehow.

Owens-Corning Fiberglass Curtains - Look. Don't touch.

Time for another fiberglass post, everyone! Today, we're admiring some wonderful fiberglass curtains, which were described by the unbiased observers at Owens-Corning as "the perfect drapery fabric" because it "never needs dry cleaning, never will shrink, sag, mildew or burn." All true, except for the "perfect" bit, which is subjective, obviously, and can't be proven or dispr... Hey! a picture!

In the fifties, asbestos was starting to get a bad reputation for making people hideously sick and dead for several thousand years. So, everyone was looking for a new fire-retardant fabric to make everything out of. Owens-Corning stepped up to the microphone and shouted "fiberlass!", then absently scratched at some little bumps on the side of it's neck

In this ad, we see some curtains made from fiberglass, but not for long, because the pattern on the curtains will make your eyes cross if you look at it for more than a second or two. The curtains were definitely good at not burning, shrinking, or wrinkling. But, there was the  strategically glossed-over feature that, if you touched them too much, or a little bit, you'd probably get something called fiberglass dermatitis. See?

Dermnet seems really scared that somebody will steal their pictures of skin diseases, so they've watermarked the hell out of them. If "the skin disease image atlas" sounds like a party to you, then by all means zap on down to Dermnet.com and whoop it up. As for me, after finding these pictures I am-scrayed, for fear of a total breakfast reversal (TBR).

Fiberglass dermatitis isn't a disease. It's just a condition, caused by little glass shards stuck in your skin. It will go away, if you just get all the fiberglass out of your skin. I was always told that cold water and scrubbing will take care of it (hot water will make your pores open up, causing the fibers to bury themselves even deeper). Here's a case study on Pub Med. If you tried to wash fiberglass curtains in your washing machine, the glass fibers would be released into the washer, where they'd deposit themselves in all your other clothes forever, because they're almost impossible to get out of the machine. Fiberglass curtains should be washed by carefully hanging them over a tree limb and gently setting the tree on fire. Or, spray the soiled curtains with a warm soap-and-water solution, then jettison the curtains into space. If you don't have access to a space program, spray the curtains with whatever you have, and scrub them with your face. Wear gloves.

But it's not like children, pets or humans ever brush up against / hide behind curtains, right? Well, there are reasons fiberglass curtains are hard to find now. Fiberglass fabrics have been supplanted by other fabrics that can be made to be fire retardant. Jury's still out on fire retardant chemicals for now. Stay tuned!

In later years, Owens-Corning produced these curtains in magic-eye versions. This example is from their Rock Legends collection. Allegations of Sudden Explosive Aneurysms are largely unfounded.

Skin irritation is definitely better than cancer, which is what you got from asbestos curtains. My curtains have always been cotton, I think. They burn more easily, but that's why I've made an early warning system with bowls of methyl ethyl ketone, which burns quite joyously. The smell of burning MEK should wake me up long before any fire gets out of control. (It stings the nose, donchaknow.) So far, I have yet to percieve any negortrive shide orffertcsrahh.

Fiberglass House - Just be careful not to touch it.

Joke #1 This year, instead of building your own house, why not save money and get "groovy" at the same time by purchasing the former set from The Monkees?

Joke #2 Flesh-eating virus: The only real threat to the house made from flesh!

Joke #3 Bobby had to take a time out by the refrigerator. He should have known better than to misbehave today. Daddy was always like this after he'd had a few furnace filters.

Joke #4 Bobby, you really ought to play nicer with The Hulk. You wouldn't share your train with him and now I have to repair the wall.

Joke #5 "Son, you're almost four now. You're nearly a man. Soon you'll be wondering about girls and things like that. I think it's time I teach you a little about fiberglass."

Joke #6 "Look what I got, son! It's a new furnace filter. Ssssh! Don't tell mommy. It'll be out little secret. Let's hide it here in the fridge where she won't see it. This is going to be the best Valentine's Day ever!"

Joke #7 "Becky, you finished your homework early today. As a little treat, how about if you feed The Giant Cone some fruit and maybe the teapot?"

Joke #8 The least popular tile pattern in history: Giant College Ruled Loose
Leaf.

Joke #9 "Becky, you finished your homework early today, so why don't you pick what we have for dinner? ... as long as it's fiberglass."

Fiberglass - May be hazardous. Have your daughter do it.

Fiberglass is weird stuff. It's still debated whether or not it's a carcinogen. Mostly, the anti-fiberglass people are bothered by it's similarity to asbestos fibers. The difference is that, when glass fibers break into smaller particles, they only break across the fiber, giving you little crumbly bits. Asbestos fibers can only break longditudinally, or along the length of the fiber, resulting in ever thinner, pointy little spears. When inhaled, your body can't shake them loose. You can't cough them out, and they stay there forever, irritating your lungs and possibly killing you as a disease called mesothelioma. Glass fibers can be expelled from your lungs, and as of yet, fiberglass is not considered a carcinogen.
Yeah, great and all that. Fiberglass still has lots of other unpleasantness to offer. Fibers can lodge in your skin and cause irritation. Inhaled particles can cause coughing and nosebleeds. OSHA guidelines recommend wearing a respirator, several pairs of gloves, a space suit, and a backup spacesuit in case you snag your first spacesuit on a nail crawling around your attic, which you will. Of course, the sticker on your hammer insists that you wear goggles and a hardhat every time you even look at the thing. So, grain of salt.

Apparently, in 1958, the hazards of fiberglass weren't understood. At the time, fiberglass had been on the market for twenty years, but apparently everyone blamed their itchy skin on communism or something. Until I saw this ad, I didn't even know fiberglass was used to make air conditioner filters. That's kind of horrifying - blowing air through fiberglass to distribute fibers into your house for easy inhalation all summer long.

In panel three, they show the little girl (with the creepy retouched eyes) holding the filter with her bare hands. Yikes. When I insulated my attic, I wore a bunch of clothes to keep from touching the stuff, and when it accidentally brushed my wrist, it brought on a barely suppressible attck of the heebie jeebies. After the attic ordeal, I had a cold. brutal shower like in Silkwood.

Incidentally, if you get fiberglass in your skin, it's better to wash the area with cold water. Warm water will open your pores, encouraging the fibers to work their way farther in ...unless you're a darling little girl, I guess. Then it's okay to have an Owens-Corning sandwich for supper and sleep under a blanket of R-30.