Car stories

[unixronin]

1.  Resurrecting Rabbits

One day, my dad bought a sizeable air compressor.  We lived in Spokane at the time, and we had to drive up to Nine Mile Falls to collect the compressor.  My dad had two station wagons at the time, a diesel Buick Electra Limited and a basic Ford LTD, and we took the LTD because it had more vertical clearance in the cargo area.

So we pick up the compressor, we head back, and partway back we come across this black VW Rabbit that wasn't there when we went out.  It's pulled over on the side of the road, empty, hood propped open.  We glance around, and about 200 yards away is a woman returning down a quarter-mile driveway with her arms full of kids.  We decide to stop and see if she needs help.  Sure enough, the Rabbit just died on her, and she'd been trying unsuccessfully to find someone in to make a phone call.

Well, we make a few quick diagnostic tests, and the problem is immediately obvious:  no spark.  It's at this moment, as we go to get out the toolbox, that we remember the toolbox is in the OTHER station wagon.  The only tool we have with us is my Swiss army knife.  Using the Swiss Army knife, we strip the distributor and find that both the ground and hot leads are broken off.  The car's very poorly maintained, the engine is filthy, it's pure neglect.  Evidently the ground lead broke off first, but there was enough of a ground through the distributor body and the block for the coil to fire, but then the hot lead broke as well and that was all she wrote.

Anyway, we then proceeded to fix this woman's car with three rocks and my Swiss Army knife, as she watched very uncertainly.  I pried and filed the ring tags open and picked out the broken copper strands, re-stripped the leads, formed new crimp sockets with the pliers on the knife, then we inserted the stripped leads and re-staked the crimp using one rock as a hammer, one as a punch, and one as an anvil.  Then we put the distributor back together, had her crank it, and it fired right up.  She was very grateful, but still more than slightly weirded out....

2.  Racer Boys

When I lived in Spokane, I had a 1970½ Camaro SS350 that had been, well ... considerably worked on.  It had steel-tube headers and a low-restriction exhaust, breakerless solid-state ignition, pancake air cleaner feeding a big four-barrel, all on an R42 four-bolt 350cid V8 that shared a block with the LT1.  The distributor advance curve had been modified to hell and back -- it ran 14° of initial advance, and was fully advanced to 32° by 2800rpm.  I'd rebuilt the suspension and brakes from one end of the car to the other, and it had a set of Lakewood traction bars on which I'd lovingly hand-tuned the snubbers with an XActo knife, and meaty, sticky rubber at all four corners.

So I'm on my way home from college one day, I'm on my way down Dishman Road a few blocks before it crosses Sprague Avenue and becomes the Dishman-Mica Highway, and these two guys roll up next to me at a light in a red '68-or-thereabouts Corvette Stingray convertible with a 429, no hood, and a homebuilt-looking velocity stack and tunnel-ram setup, and they sit there blipping the engine and grinning.

Now, I know that my SS350 will go from 0 to about 40 in the width of an intersection on a two-lane street.  And I look around, and there's little other traffic nearby and not a cop to be seen in any of the four possible directions, so I think, "What the hell."  I put my left foot hard on the brake, I drop it into first, and run the engine up to about 2500rpm and hold it there as I watch the light.  The instant the light goes green, I let go the brake and drop the hammer.  The engine bellows, the rear tires chirp for an instant, and I'm gone as though the Corvette is going backwards.  I can see smoke rolling off their tires in my rearview mirror.  They catch up to me at the next light, and the guy in the passenger seat leans out over his door and half screams,

"What'choo GOT in there?!?"

I grinned, told him "Worked R42 350," and turned onto the Dishman-Mica Highway and continued on my way home.

Son, it doesn't matter a damn how much torque your rat motor churns out, if your suspension can't get that power to the road.

Comments

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

Well, my car doesn't rumble (being a Subaru) but my motorcycle rumbles a bit and has the potential to rumble even better with aftermarket exhaust. My brother says I should get a set of Bub pipes, which I'd never even heard of until he told me about them. He said he saw a Vulcan Nomad like mine with Bubs and it sounded sweet; and it wasn't too loud either. Someday perhaps....

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The VFR was fairly modded, too. It was a '91, with a Two Brothers full exhaust system with a left-side pipe, a Fox shock, CBR600F3 forks (which are an absolutely direct bolt-in replacement, aside from filing two bolt-holes on the front fender oval by about 3mm), a Corbin seat, Euro-style faired-in turn signals (an easy retrofit on the '90-'93), and the somewhat weak rear bodywork fiberglassed into a single-piece rear clip. The Two Brothers pipe sounded great, but wasn't offensively loud (and really showed off the single-sided swingarm).

I still miss my VFR. Requiescat in pace .... it gave its life for me.

Maybe I'll get another someday. A white one, if I'm really lucky.