Next please...

When my first car was wrecked and totalled, I took the settlement offer that the other guy's insurance company gave me. If I'd've known then what I know now I'd have counter-offered. The gave me $500 (about twice my investment) and let me keep the car-why would expect more? Oh, well.

Not long after that dad was on a run through Arkansas and saw a cute orange Vega wagon on a used car lot. He and mom threw a tow bar in their truck and headed south. He bought it for me before I knew anything about it. He was sure that I would love it and he was right. He got for the $500 that I had gotten out of my old one, so I was tickled to death.

He tried to drive it home, but overheated within a few miles. Someone had dumped a can of stop leak in the radiator and neglected to let the engine warm up enough to circulate it. The result was a plug of stop leak at the bottom of the radiator tank blocking the lower outlet-a minor fix once he got it home. Luckily they had the towbar and were able to take out the drive shaft and bring it on home. It wasn't a sleeved engine (Vega engines had an aluminum/silicon block that was notorious about oil consumption-the fix was to sleeve the engine which made for an excellent engine), so it smoked like a chimney. That didn't matter to me since I had a rebuilt Buick V6 and THM200 waiting in the wings for my now totalled hatchback. Unfortunately the wagon's motor mount location differed from the hatchback (who'da thunk it?) and I had to do a bit of fabrication to get the hatchback H-body mounts that I had already purchased to work. I had to repaint the rr 1/4 panel and hatch to make the exterior up to snuff. This picture is from early summer 1982. I had just finished the swap and had dealt with some heating problems(more about that in the future) Ultimately, once I had worked out the bugs, the biggest of which was my own dang fault, it made for a cool ride. Duals and glasspacks sounded awesome, but contributed to my being the target of more police attention than I desired.

later,