1958 Berkeley Special

Well, it's official. The Berkeley is listing next week in a BAT auction. Thank you everyone for your input, your PM's, and support. I hope it finds a great home with the right person. I will post when it goes live.

We had some nice weather here this week, so I took the opportunity to take it to a cruise night to show it off one last time and park it next to some much bigger (and nicer) cars. Dull and rough around the edges, it felt out of place next to perfectly restored hot rods, but it also felt more authentic.

It got me thinking about some of the other car's I've owned and looking back, I have great memories of each one, stories, adventures, failures, and lessons learned. In the end, it wasn't the car I was trying to hang onto, but that specific moment in time.

Shortened by 11 inches to remove the rusty rear floor pan. 1973 Catalina 455 (my first engine rebuild) and a 4 speed manual. Fate: Parted Out

A real clunker. Survived about 6 weeks delivering pizza. A friend had some stock car tires we stuffed onto it for this photo, but it couldn't spin the skinny tires it came with. It was much better off the road than on it. Fate: Junk yard

I had a whole fleet of Renaults that people used to give me (I'm not kidding). These two were the most abused and I took them anywhere through anything. Indestructible and under-powered both of these still ran when they went to the junk yard.

My first turbo car. I learned a lot. An oil pump failure scored the bearings and I took the engine out in a parking lot. A used oil pump, a bit of Emory paper, and some 50 weight oil got me the 400 miles from college to home. My brother continued to drive the car for several more years and gave it away somewhere down south. Fate: unknown.

Heavily abused, this car went places it was never intended to go. At 280,000 miles, the rear driveshaft came apart and I was forced to lock the center diff and drive 500 miles with only front wheel drive. After replacing the driveshaft I drove it for several more years and it was retired to the junk yard still running.

No way was it out of place with those hot rods. It is one as well just in a different guise. Sorry to have to see you sell it but it looks like BAT lately has been the go to for cars just like this to pull in some good $$$. Good luck with the sale as I'll be watching it.

The Mitsubishi Ralliart sticker on the Subaru XT6 is priceless.

crankwalk wrote: The Mitsubishi Ralliart sticker on the Subaru XT6 is priceless.

Somehow I ended up with a bunch of those and they got stuck to everything for a while. I got a parking ticket once and the car make/model said Mitsubishi Ralliart. It did tend to throw people off

Auction is now live!

http://bringatrailer.com/listing/1958-berkeley-special/

Good Luck with the sale. I hope this brings you a nice sum of $$$.

Please direct the new owner this way to continue the build thread here, so we can live vicariously, the AWESOME-ness of this car.

Auction ending soon.

I'm really glad Michigan is far enough away from me that the logistics of getting that car home prevent me from making a snap decision and getting it! Good luck - I'll follow along in the last bit.

Auction closed. Sale price $7750. What a deal! Hope you're satisfied with the sale.

I noticed the price was $4k with 50 some odd minutes to go. That's a pretty good jump in price.

Any updates? Who'd it sell to?

After 10 years of ownership (longest I've owned any car), it's our last day with the Berkeley. While I cleaned up and organized the Berkeley spares and had the cars out of the garage, I realized that I didn't have a picture with the Berkeley and the Model T side by side.

A while later, the buyer came over and we loaded everything up. The car was almost too narrow for the trailer. I think we could have fit 2 on there.

I'm happy to say that the car will be staying in Michigan and has found a great home at a price both buyer and seller are satisfied with.

My daughter and I said our goodbyes and we'll be looking forward to the new owner posting his own progress here as we pass the torch on our little Berk.

By the way there is a low priced Berkeley Roller now on BaT just in case anyone needs any bad ideas

http://bringatrailer.com/listing/1957-berkeley-492/

Does anybody know who the new owner of this is? I'd sure like to have an update. This thing is Cool

Bump.  I was thinking about this cool build again today, and checking in again to see if anyone knows what ever happened to it.

A friend of mine is in the process of moving and gave me a binder of the complete year (1958) of original Road and Track magazines.

I started thubing through one the other day and came across an ad for the Berkley. I laughed because...berkley.

Now I find this. 

Awesome.

Another has passed since the last one.....

Bumping again to see if anyone knows the fate of this car?

I should stop thinking about this car, but it's hard to forget.

In reply to Indy "Nub" Guy :

This may help, Not sure if you've seen it, etc,

Berkely

I just rediscovered this thread and wanted to let everyone know that the Berkeley Special is still going strong and loved.  I purchased the Berkeley in 2016 from its creator!  I have made some small tweaks, nothing as major as those made by the Berkeley Special creator.  I will plan on updating the adventures from time to time :)

The original water temperature and oil pressure gauges on the dwarf race car work, albeit on the dwarf dash board which is partially hidden by the Berkeley dash.  The rev counter on the dwarf dash was not working correctly and needed to be replaced.  I figured that it might be a safe bet to reunite the rev counter from a GSXR 1100, seeing as the ECU is also from said bike.  Besides I like the look of the aluminum style bezel on the GSXR 1100 instrument cluster and could make that work with the raw functionality of the Berkeley!  

Removing the front fiberglass body of the car allows easy access to everything on the front half of the vehicle.  Thanks to the previous owner for making this an option as the original Berkeley would have been a unibody making it much harder to work on the mechanicals in this configuration.  Talking of configurations, I like to call this car the "original hybrid" as it is a hybrid of a British car body with American dwarf chassis and a Japanese motorbike engine!  Next job was to remove the original dwarf dash and instruments.  I also took the opportunity to relocate one of the brake reservoirs from the engine bay to a more accessible location in the cockpit.  I will replace the old leaky reservoir with a modern one, probably from a motorbike.  It's nice to see the brake fluid level without having to remove body panels :)  

With the front off, it's much easier to get to the wiring!  Here I am soldering connections to the indicator lights so that the flasher bulbs on the motor bike instrument cluster work.  Although this car has indicators, they don't cancel out using the steering like on a modern car so it is easy to forget they are on after competing a turn!  Having the flashing instrument light is a helpful reminder to manually turn off the indicator turn signals.  

The speedometer was not connected as dwarf cars don't have them!  The speedometer gauge added by the previous owner is a nice electronic one by VDO.  The Suzuki GSXR bike used a mechanical linkage for the speedometer connected to the bike front wheel.  That was never part of the dwarf racer.  I contemplated rigging up some sort of sensor to the drive shaft but there is no easy place to mount such a sensor.  In the end I opted for a VDO GPS sender.  Although expensive, it was a much easier way to get a speed signal to the speedometer so I no longer had to guess how fast I was going!  

Great to see this come back again. Do please keep us informed as there seems to be a soft-spot for these little cars on this forum.

For once, re-reading this thread after it popped up again didn't have a sad ending.

Glad to see you are making it your own, keep us in the loop :)

Berk Yeah!