Ford Ranger owners and fans, salute your taikor! This is the Ford Atlas Concept that the Blue Oval wheeled out for the 2013 NAIAS in Detroit and it gives us a sneak peek at the future of the Ford F-150. The F-Series pick-up truck has been America’s best selling vehicle for the longest time, 30 years to be exact.

“The Ford Atlas Concept previews the innovations that will transform what people expect from their pickup,” said Raj Nair, Ford group vice president, Global Product Development. “With 36 years as America’s best-selling pickup, we are absolutely committed to setting the agenda in the truck market.”

So what exactly does Atlas preview? On the work front, multiple tie-down points are integrated within the cargo box walls and load floor, along with 110-volt electrical outlets in the cargo box to charge power tools. An integrated roof carrying system and hidden extendable ramps give the truck added functionality.

Hitching a trailer can be time consuming and difficult, but Dynamic Hitch Assist helps precisely line up the truck’s hitch with the trailer coupling, eliminating maneuvering guesswork by showing visual cues in the truck’s center display screen. There’s also a 360-degree point-of-view camera, a Ford truck first.

Hidden cargo ramps stowed below the cargo box can be quickly removed and set up to assist with loading wheeled items into the bed – from landscaping equipment to dirt bikes.

The Ford Atlas Concept features a next-gen EcoBoost powertrain, which introduces truck-enhanced Auto Start-Stop tech, which suspends the feature when the truck is towing. No other details were released. Ford says that over 500,000 EcoBoost engines have been sold globally, including 250,000 in the Ford F-150.

FC is also improved via Focus-style Active Grille Shutters and Active Wheel Shutters. In the latter, automatic shutters in the wheels are hidden to improve style at rest/low speeds, but automatically close at highway speeds to improve aerodynamics. Self-charging batteries use energy from the wheels’ motion to power the shutters.

There’s also a Drop-Down Front Air Dam, which is a front wind spoiler that lowers at highway speeds to improve underbody airflow. The air dam is raised at low speeds to improve ground clearance. Auto-deploying running boards help passengers enter the truck at rest and tuck up against the truck when it is moving to improve aerodynamics and ground clearance.

The clever ideas are all good, but just look at it – macho to the max!

 The way a hockey or figure skate blade is sharpened can make all the difference in athletic performance – and Zwickers on North Road has become a local hockey institution because of the edge they give skaters.

“It’s the service after the sales that matters, taking the time to make sure the fit is right and fixing any problems that come up later,” said Wayne Zwicker, who runs the business his father, Homer, and his uncle, Robert, started in Arlington during the Great Depression.

“I was blessed, my father was a great guy who knew how to sharpen skates and was a very hard worker,” Zwicker said.

He passed both his knowledge and his work ethic on to his son, who has worked in hockey equipment rooms in 1998 and again in 2002, because there isn’t anything he can’t fix.

He works not just on skate blades, but can stitch a skate so that it fits better, as well as work on gloves and hockey pants.

And he learned those skills from the business, which his dad and uncle started during the Great Depression, when they helped support the family by mowing lawns.

“They would do any job to make a living, besides cutting lawns they also did handyman jobs and landscaping,” Zwicker said.

Because they kept their lawnmower blades sharp, people began to come to the two young men for repairs and lawnmower blade sharpening, and then began thinking that if they could come up with a winter business, they’d be all set.

“They started sharpening skates, and then they began working on making their own machines to sharpen skates, and developed their own clamps that hold the skates so you can sharpen them,” Zwicker said.

In 1936, they were sharpening skates for the Boston Bruins, Boston University, Boston College, Harvard University, Northeastern University, and many high school hockey teams, out of their Arlington store.

“If you were serious about hockey, you went to 19 Mill St. in Arlington,” he said. “Zwickers was known by visiting teams as a place you should go get your skates sharpened when you were in town.”

They sharpened Boston Bruins skates for 25 cents a pair, and his father or uncle would have to go pick up all the skates, sharpen them and then get them back for the team members to play the next day.

Eventually, the cost of sharpening the skates needed to go up to cover the actual cost of doing the work, but the Bruins refused to the price increase, and the Zwickers and the Bruins parted ways.

Robert and Homer Zwicker also chose to part ways, although not until 1968, when Robert’s son wanted to join the business after college. Zwicker’s father was uncomfortable with his nephew’s business ideas and started the store in Bedford that year. Zwicker said the Arlington store closed four years later.

“The building here had been a coffee shop and a gas station, and when we first moved out here the pumps were still here,” he said. Another uncle was contractor and redid the building, which has been added onto twice now to make enough room to showcase the skates, sticks, gloves and other equipment and still have room to work on skates.

Wayne Zwicker honed skills, and was asked to work at in the hockey equipment room at the Olympics in 1998 and 2000, an experience he enjoyed but one he no longer has the time to do. But he enjoyed working with many of the hockey players that came through, including goalie Dominik Hasek, a Czech player. Hasek was having problems with his skates, and when Zwicker and other equipment people took a look, his skates were sharpened in a way that prevented him from skating properly.

 Zwicker fixed them, and the Czechs won the gold in 1998, and Hasek signed one of the hockey sticks used in the game, which is now kept over the count at Zwickers.

 Zwicker brought computerization to the business, as well as new ideas after studying business in college, which has allowed him to make the store more profitable. There are six full-time workers, including himself, and a number of part-time employees.

Customers continue to flock to the store, particularly on Fridays and Saturdays during hockey season.

“We pick up a lot of customers who have had problems with equipment from big box stores or through buying on the Internet, and we fix them up,” he said. “Again, it’s the service, taking the time with each customer, figuring out what they need and taking care of it.”

 jordan@yesweekly.com

The future Salem Creek Connector, conceived as a “southern gateway” to downtown Winston-Salem, has moved one step closer to actualization with the NC Department of Transportation’s selection of a contractor to build the road, but the viability of a major feature, the Twin Arches, is in question.

Charlotte-based Blythe Construction submitted the low bid of $68.9 million, an amount that falls almost $10 million below an earlier engineering estimate by the department. The Creative Corridors Coalition, a local partnership, is responsible for raising funds to pay for the signature enhancement of the project — double, overlapping arches that are conceived as soaring over the interchange of Salem Creek Connector and US Highway 52. The arches were designed by Donald McDonald, who also designed the Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, SC. For a sense of the visual impact of the installation, think of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis or the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, only on a more modest scale.

The department asked vendors to submit a separate cost estimate for the Twin Arches as a bid alternative. Blythe Construction estimated the cost of the Twin Arches at $3.5 million, said Pat Ivey, who heads the department’s Division 9 office in Winston-Salem.

“The cost has come in higher, and we’re figuring out the next step,” said Russell DuBois, executive director of Creative Corridors Coalition.

Randall Tuttle, a financier who chairs the executive committee of Creative Corridors Coalition, described the Twin Arches as a “focal point” of the project in a guest editorial for the Winston-Salem Journal in October.

“We are confident that the combined costs of the betterments and the Twin Arches will be just a few percent of the overall project cost,” he wrote. “For pennies on the dollar, our city can create an iconic parkway and spectacular monument representing our city of the arts and innovation.”

The request for proposals for the Salem Creek Connector states that the city of Winston-Salem and the NC Department of Transportation have 60 days to review the proposal and decide whether or not Blythe Construction should build the Twin Arches. For all intents and purposes, the decision lies with Creative Corridors Coalition.

“The arches are going to cost $3.5 million,” Ivey said. “If, for example, they said, ‘We budgeted a million dollars,’ then they would have to come up with the additional funds. With a bid alternative, this allowed the contractor to set the price for the art, and then give it to Creative Corridors to decide if they want to accept that bid and pursue that.”

Jim Shaw, a fundraising co-chair for the Creative Corridors Coalition, said the executive committee has not met since the bids came in for the project, but he expects the matter to be discussed at the next meeting on Wednesday. Shaw is the CEO of Liberty Community Development Corp.

Prompted by the NC Department of Transportation’s plans to temporarily shut down a mile-long stretch of Business 40 between Church Street and Peters Creek Parkway in 2018 to replace aging bridges, Creative Corridors was conceived as an initiative to put an iconic design stamp on the corridor and highlight the city’s “arts and innovation” brand.

The project evolved to embrace all of the major roadways that surround and lead into downtown Winston-Salem. The coalition, which includes the Arts Council of Winston-Salem Forsyth County and the Downtown Winston- Salem Partnership, has embraced four principles: green, artful, iconic and networking. Design Workshop, a national design firm, developed a set of design guidelines for the roadways and bridges.

“These four principles really are the conceptual underpinning of the guidelines document that we want every component of this network of roads that circle downtown — Business 40 and Martin Luther King Drive, and Broad Street, along with Peters Creek Parkway and the Salem Creek Connector — to embody,” said Brian Kubecki, a Winston-Salem architect who chairs the design review committee of the Creative Corridors Coalition. “This will really make Winston-Salem an incredible place, to where when you drive into downtown you know you’re entering this place. So many great cities are built around water. What we have are these networks of roads, and we should embrace it and treat it as an opportunity to create something wonderful.”

Construction of the new Salem Creek Connector and improvements to Martin Luther King Drive comprise the first phases of the Creative Corridors project.

The NC Department of Transportation expects construction of the Salem Creek Connector to begin this year and conclude in November 2016. Completion of the new road, with an interchange at US Highway 52, will provide a southern entry to downtown in the long term, along with a short-term detour to absorb traffic when Business 40 is shut down five years from now.

The Salem Creek Connector will link to Research Park Boulevard, which is already under construction in the Piedmont Triad Research Park. When completed, the Salem Creek Connector will connect the research park to Salem
College, Salem Academy and Winston-Salem State University. The
completion of the new roads, together with the build-out of the research
park, has the potential to transform the landscape of Winston-Salem by
extending the vibrancy of downtown into the east side of the city.

DuBois
said the design proposal for the Salem Creek Connector came out of
negotiations among Creative Corridors Coalition, the city of
Winston-Salem and the NC Department of Transportation. Aesthetic
enhancements to the roadway, or “betterments” in DOT parlance, will
include landscaping, trees, decorative crosswalks and lighting. DuBois
also noted that the new road will intersect with the Salem Creek
Greenway, providing cyclists with additional connectivity.

Not
counting the Twin Arches, the enhancements for the Salem Creek
Connector are budgeted at $3.2 million. The federal government has
agreed to cover 80 percent of the cost on condition that local sources
provide a 20-percent match. The city of Winston-Salem has committed to
half of the match, while Creative Corridors will take care of the other
half through private dollars.

As
work gets underway on the Salem Creek Connector, the design review
committee of Creative Corridors Coalition plans to review the Martin
Luther King Drive project next month to see if its different facets are
consistent with design guidelines.

The
Winston-Salem Transportation Department, the Creative Corridor
Committee and Design Workshop are hosting a public input meeting to get
feedback on proposed tree plantings, median treatments, history markers,
art installations and decorative fencing for the Martin Luther King Jr.
Drive corridor on Jan. 23 at Mount Zion Baptist Church. DuBois said
other possibilities for the corridor include landscaping of the Business
40 interchange, a park at the turnaround near Union Station, a water
fountain or spray-ground, and community story panels.

“It’s
kind of condescending for Creative Corridors to say, ‘You need this,’”
DuBois said. “They need to say — for example — ‘We want Dr. King.’ Or
maybe it’s the Rams mascot.”

Meanwhile, the design review committee is finding its footing in preparation for what’s considered the big
prize — the replacement of the bridges over Business 40. The committee
was created by Winston-Salem City Council after council endorsed the
design guidelines for Creative Corridors, and has met twice. At the
committee’s second meeting, which took place last week, members
discussed how they could best influence the process.

Assistant
City Manager Greg Turner suggested that the committee create a process
similar to the LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design,
certification created by the US Green Building Council, to reward
features that are consistent with the Creative Corridors design
guidelines.

“I think the tenor of this committee has to be very positive so it doesn’t come across as regulatory,” member Marty Marion said.

Turner
advised committee members that they will likely have to use the public
records process to obtain documents from the NC Department of
Transportation for state road projects, which is virtually every roadway
in the Creative Corridors plan.

Because of
federal funding requirements the NC Department of Trans portation is
obligated to hold its own public workshops. The two entities’ parallel
public-input processes have not always dovetailed perfectly.

“As we’ve
gone through this process, Creative Corridors has been an active
participant in working groups and the design of the bridges,” Ivey said.
“We told Creative Corridors that because of the federal requirements,
we can’t just go in and say, ‘Creative Corridors, this is what you want
the project to look like.’ … We told Creative Corridors they are welcome
and encouraged to come to these meetings and put their ideas out there
and to sell those ideas to the public.”

Some of the
Creative Corridors supporters that have seen renderings by the NC
Department of Transportation in response to public input, including
Kubecki, have not been pleased.

“I think
they have shown us they don’t really care what we do,” Kubecki told his
fellow committee members last week. “They’re showing results of their
public input. They’re showing they can do all this without any
additional funds.”

Other
members, such as Jimmy Norwood, said they wanted to see the renderings
for themselves and have the committee as a whole review them before
passing judgment.

DuBois said
in an interview that the success of Creative Corridors is vital to the
city’s future. He cited an employer that told him Winston-Salem ranks at
the bottom of seven cities where the company does business as a place
where young people want to come work. Pulling off the project would make
Winston-Salem cool.

“We could
choose not to do this, but there would be a cost,” DuBois said. “We
would continue to lose people, who want to move to Austin, Texas.”

WANNA go?

The
Winston-Salem Department of Transportation, the Creative Corridors
Coalition and Design Workshop host a public-input meeting on design
proposals for Martin Luther King Jr. Drive corridor improvements at the
File Goodwin Center at Mount Zion Baptist Church, located at 950 File
St., on Jan. 23 from 6 to 7 p.m. For more information, contact Greg
Errett at 336.747.6871 or grege@cityofws.org.