Vega #2

Not after my wife and I started dating I had a minor accident in my 1st car-I bumped a Nova in the rear at an intersection-and wrinkled the right front fender (which was already the wrong color-I had bought the car wrecked and replaced the rf fender, header, bumper etc. and hadn't had a chance to repaint it). A schoolmate had this Vega, another '72 model, that he'd just quit driving so I bought it for a mere $75. It smoked like a chimney and had no rear shocks or brakes. It loped down the road like a Greyhound. I put it's rf fender on my brown Vega. Then, I got to thinking. My sweetie had just gotten hired at K-Mart and was relying on me for transportation to and from work. I put the lightly wrinkled fender on this one, fixed the shocks (welded the broken mounts) and fixed the rear brakes (replaced the rinky-dink adjusters that were failure prone-I had to put them on every Vega I ever owned) and presented it to my then girlfriend as a gift. We bought oil in 2.5 gallons jugs, and I had to put the oil filler cap on a chain like a bath tub plug-she kept forgetting to put it back, and that got expensive after a few-but it was transportation. It was a barebones car. It had 3 speed manual transmission but at some point the rear end had been replaced with one with 2.7_:1 gears from an automatic car. With it's low compression, oil burning engine and those gears in the rearend, on level ground it would run faster in second gear thatn it would in third! When you had it on the mat in second at 70 mph and shifted to third it would fall back under 65 mph. On the bright side, the tall gears and low power made for a combination the really worked on ice and snow-it didn't have enough oomph to spin the tires! It came with a little blue "clergy" sticker in the back window, and I remember parking on lover's lane and leaving the back end facing the road in hopes that I might raise some eyebrows-as far as I know we went unnoticed. Right before our wedding, late the next year, my 1st car was totalled (see previous post) so we had to resort to driving thes one on our wedding day. My older brother/best man was supposed to fill it up with gas, but forgot. So, about five minutes into our chase around town-with a procession of followers blowing their horns, we had to double back to the church and steal a car from my new in-laws! The rest of the "chase" was an adventure. But, I'll save that story for another post...

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