In the late 1950's and through the '60's a lot of interesting cars were on the street. There are a lot more now than ever, but in my 40 plus years of driving I have owned and driven some nice cars and some real dogs too. Lifes circumstances sure can dictate what you might end up with, but in the long run, being able to get from point A to B and back again safely and reliabley is what it really is about. So bear with me as I ramble along and try to share with you some of my cars and thoughts about them.
That was in 1964. The upholstery was terrible and it could have used a new paint job. But that old car had a Flathead V8 in it that had been rebuilt by a company called "Valley Ring and Rebore". My 1946 Ford ran like a top. Everything under the hood, through the tranny and the closed driveshaft to the wheels worked like a charm. I learned a lot with that car. I broke it and fixed it several times and learned something new every time I had to fix something I had messed up. If you needed to put in a new clutch, you had to pull the engine or drop the rear end because of the Closed Driveshaft that was a popular design for those years. I learned the hard way that dropping the rear end was easier than pulling the engine. In what I thought at the time was some unfavorable circumstances, I had to get rid of the car. I wished many times I had kept that car. But that is life.
My'62 Vetwas not my second car, but it sure was exciting for me to have such a car. The car was only 7 years old when I bought it for $1800. I was in my early 20's, it was 1969 and I was stationed in Yokosuka Japan. I was having a lot of fun with that car. Me and the police could never agree on what speed the vehicle should be driven. I was always being challenged by other drivers for a hot run. That is when I learned that tickets are like savings bonds, the longer you keep them, the greater they mature (unlike the driver). The opposite sex seemed to like the car a lot too. Of course that thought never crossed my mind while I was thinking about buying it. But alas all good things must come to an end. I had duty Christmas Eve in December of 1970. When my watch was over the next morning, I went down to the Operations Department on my way out to town for Christmas day. They had a surprise waiting for me. My orders for my next duty station had come in the message traffic the night before...I was on my way to a tour of duty in-country on the river in Viet Nam...Merry Christmas. Probably a good thing I sold that car even though it broke my heart.
Wow what a nice looking and nice riding truck. When I bought myTundra, it had less than 10,000 miles on it. It still smelled like it had just rolled off the assembly line. I have had a lot of old beater trucks in the past, so it was really special to get this shiny silver/gray beauty with a 4.7 liter engine. I put XM radio in it, a chrome brush guard and roll top bed cover. All kinds of nice little goodies. I used it as a truck though, not an all the time show piece. But I kept it clean and polished up from day 1. Everybody said it was a nice looking truck. Then one day just over a year ago somebody ran a red light and T-Boned, me on the passanger side. A Tundra is not a little truck, but the other vehicle was an H2 Hummer. It hit me so hard it totaled my truck. Had I been in a little car, I would not be here now. So, my most favorite vehicles all ended up going away under less than favorable circumstances.
A good car to learn a lot from is one that is easy to work on and parts are readily available at a very cheap price. My 1953 Fordwas just that kind of car. The engine was a V8 Flathead with lots of room around it in the engine compartment. The 3 speed manual transmission was very light and was held to the bell housing by a total of 5 bolts. After my 3rd or 4th transmission, I got to where I could change a tranny out in less than 45 minutes with no one helping me. I bought almost all my used parts from Paul Paulson's auto wrecking yard in Newbury Park and any new parts I usually bought at Pepboys. A 2 barrrel rebuilt carb cost $35.00. Sounds cheap, but that was nearly a weeks pay for a 19 year old in 1965. I used to brag about the Two-45 Mk1 air conditioner that it had. Nobody seems to remember what kind of unit it was... 2 windows down and 45 miles per hour, that was my air conditioner. The shift linkage on the colum was worn out, so I took it out. I cut a whole in the floorboard just above the tranny, pounded a 3/4 inch socket onto the shifting arm of the tranny and put a 12 inch 3/4 drive extension from my tool box into it. It worked great and I considered it part of my security system. You couldn't shift the car without it. So I would just pull it out and put it in the trunk. It was a fun car, kind of breezy though with that whole in the floor.
This was one of my nicer cars (or at least I thought at the time). It had an electric antenna for the radio, the radio had an automatic station "Seek" button and it worked. Power windows, powerful engine. All the upholstery was in good condition and the exterior was in great shape. It had an automatic transmission and a closed drive shaft like my old '46 Ford which made it difficult to work on. The 1956 Buick was a classy car and it was ahead of it's time it seemed to me.
The 1972 Campmobile was a fun car. We went to the beach a lot when I was home ported out of Pearl Harbor. The kids were small then and all 4 of us could sleep inside until the oldest reached about age 7. It had everything except a shower. The typical VW air cooled 4 banger engine was realitively easy to work on. The hardest part about doing a tuneup on it was the 2 spark plugs on the forward end of the engine, they were really hard to reach.
I have had a lot of other fun and interesting cars and stories to go with them, but I gotta get this assignment done. So from this point forward I need to use a bunch of filler text. Maybe when I have more time I will finish this up the way I wanted to and put it on a family website. So bla bla bla and at urna sit amet est mollis commodo. Nam nec mi ut lacus pretium tristique. Vestibulum sit amet erat. Vestibulum tincidunt, ante pharetra tincidunt facilisis, nisl pede volutpat sem, eu gravida purus turpis at quam. Nunc magna nibh, auctor a, luctus et, venenatis sit amet, magna. Vestibulum dui. Ut elit tellus, iaculis sit amet, pellentesque non, pharetra eu, quam. Quisque rhoncus, sem id varius molestie, velit libero convallis nisl, id tempor sapien ipsum nec libero. Etiam non lacus. Aenean condimentum, dolor sit amet auctor auctor, elit neque vestibulum est, non sollicitudin tellus urna quis mauris. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Mauris dapibus condimentum est.
I mentioned buying car parts at PepBoys stores which are all over the country now. But you can also buy almost anything online now. If you elect to do that, just be sure that you remember the things we talked about in the assignment for Week 2.
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Experiment 1 Experiment 2 Lesson 4 Lesson 5 Lesson 6 Index
