Bobs 1968 1/2 Cobra Jet is ultraclean and today no more for sale, so don't ask Bob again. We convinced him to keep his treasure.

..when he contacted us first with a question about his 1968 1/2 Cobra Jet.

Bob had some good days at the 45th, his car catched a lot of interest. Finally he decided to rather keep it based upon our treatment:)

As a Staunton/Virgina based Harley Dealer he had made a good deal on a Harley and took in a 1968 Cobra Jet.

Trying to sell it, he asked an appraiser for some comments and learned that he did not have the right carburetor on his car. With that his car might catch about 76.000 dollar, without much less. In his websearch Bob found our club site, where we had mentioned such a C80AF-AA carb a long time ago somewhere. Unfortunately that one we talked about in our german forum was rather a typo, but we turned Bob to some sources where he might find it. 
While talking I mentioned that there would be a good occasion to sell his car at the 45th in Birmingham/Alabama. Bob thought about it and organized the long haul from Shenandoah/Virginia to Birmingham/Alabama just in time. Meanwhile he dived further into Mustangs and browsed Ponysite and www.cobrajet.org plus a few other CJ related sites to find out more about his missing carburetor just to get a good price at the show.

Bob owns not a small dealership (Shenandoah Harley) down there in Staunton/Virgina and he instantly accepted to host the next Ponydrive for a day, so getting people together through Ponysite worked again. I assume, if you as a Mustanger need a new Harley (such as Kevin Marti for his wife), your next stop will be Bob Ladd's dealership to discuss a few more options for less, when ordering your personal bike. Make sure you mention Ponysite to Bob for a special rebate.

Well, Bob is a handsome guy and found more and more fun in driving the Mustang as well in the meantime and being at the 45th - meeting lots of Mustang maniacs - got him finally into our pool. Driving his 68 CJ around, displaying it and seeing the dedication of many in the details of their cars made him feel proud of his ownership. Talking to Chris Teeling (68 CJ registrar) and 2-3 other CJ owners on the parking lot, he got sucked deeper and deeper into the secrets of Cobra jetting. Which made him miss the carburetor even more. 
Now it was time to walk the parts supplier aisles and yep, he found the right carburetor at a dealer, being on sale for roughly 4500 dollar. Not a small sum, but that would raise his cars value much more than those 4500 dollar, he had learned.  

Having turned back to this car and thinking about buying or not buying, a show visitor approached him and was listening to his thoughts about the carb. "Are you sure that is the right carb for your application?" "Well, yes I think so". "What date is it? It needs to be 3 weeks prior to your assembly date of your car!" was the conversion going on. "How would you know all these details?" said Bob and the visitor said: "Well, I am Kevin Marti".

Enough said, so Bob turned immediately back to the seller to verify the date and bought it right away, since it was just that. What a great find, even for that amount of money. And what an indicent to get the right people together in just a few weeks. All this happened and much more at the 45th in Alabama. There were so many stories at each moment going on, you just missed many thousands.

 Author: Wolfgang Kohrn