F-ed UP!

Since I can't eat pretty much any grain (read carbs) I get wasted at the drop of a hat. Four bottles of cider and I can hardly type. I am like Lucille Ball on meatavitavegamin. (Thank GOD for autocorrect!)

Blast from the past

I saw an orange Vega wagon gasser in  a picture on facebook today. Reminded me of my old Wagon...

My first Scout II. This picture taken in 1983. 258,3-speed, 2wd, rust, air shocks, rust, no power steering, rust, and kik I mention the rust? Dependable transportation though.


The wrinkles in the driver's side front fender happened on our way home from college classes at TRCC one day. An unisured motorist hit us on the then gravel road that went from the campus to PP highway. We didn't have insurance either. Diana was big & pregnant-she was my biggest concern.... 

Demo man

Oct. '81

'68 Olds 88 with a 455. I had the bright idea to enter a demolition derby. My first heat was the third of the night, so the track had dried out a lot. This meant excellent traction. I sqaured off across from a '67 Caddy. When the flag dropped I put the 455 to the mat and didn't let up. The Caddy had barely moved. When I hit him, the impact snapped my neck backward, flinging my glasses into the backseat area and bent the back of the car up so much that I could see out of the rear window.

When we built it I chained down the front of the hood. The hood hinges were messed up (the car had been rolled previously) so we used all-thread to bolt down the back of the hood. (visible in the picture) The all-thread didn't work. After a couple of hard hit to the front the all-thread pulled through the sheet metal. The chain in front held, so the hood ended up on the ground in front of the car, still chained to the car. So, when I tried to go forward the hood would dig in and stop me-that left me driving blindly, backward. I kept at it that way for a while, until I lost a transmission hose. Some "old pro" had advised me to cut a foot out of each metal transmission cooler line and replace it with rubber so they wouldn't kink shut in a hard front collision. That was all well and good until one blew off.

There was a mad scramble to get it up and runnig for the consolation race-my only other chance to make it into the feature. We cut the chain holding the hood and ran hoodless. I had to use the cutting torch to trim a rear wheelwell that was into a tire. It was then that I learned that it is near impossible to cut mud encrusted sheetmetal with a troch-I guess the mud sucks up too much heat. I reattached the transmission cooler line and double clamped them all. I put in every can of atf that I had brought but the car still wouldn't moved. The announcer called for all consolation race entries. In a panic I dumped in 3 quarts of 10w30 motor oil. On the "last call" I still wasn't moving so I put it on the mat and it finally shuddered to life-it must have been air locked or something.

I was a little more careful pounding on everyone this time. Eventually I lost reverse and in an effort to preserve my radiatior I start turning tight circles, clipping cars with my right rear qurater panel. This tactic was effective-I took out a couple of cars that way. I eventually got slammed into a dead car on the sidelines and got hung up. I felt like it was all or nothing at that point. I worked and worked trying to get loose and think I was close. I again had it on the mat, tires spinning like crazy. The motro was getting hot and all at once bang!-she blew. Oh, well I was a couple of places away from making it into the feature.

I can honestly say that I have not had the urge to ever again enter a demolition derby. Between the hits I took here and the hit the next December when my first car was totalled, my neck has never been the same.

Ah, but I wouldn't undo the experience or anything.

Oh! In the background you can see my 1st '74 Scout. I'll post anothe picture of it later...

ttfn,

Another shot

Here's a picture, taken in the winter of '83 near Lecoma MO, of my '51 next to grandpa's '52. Teh tan '74 Vega was dad's. It was the source of the sleeved engine that went into my first Vega. Here it was repowered with a cast-iron 151 Pontiac "iron duke" engine. He drove it for many, many miles before selling it to my brother who also drove it a bunch. between the two of them they put nearly 100,00 miles on that engine. He sold it to someone else who drove it til the car was worn out (but the engine still ran great). The engine got transplanted into a Pontiac Astre wagon (that' what it came out of in '79) and was driven for several more years. In fact that car was parked for reasons other than engine trouble. At that point the engine had close to 300,000 miles on it. 

'51 Chevy

About the time I was building the wagon, I got this '51 from my Grandpa Sherrill. At the time he was fixing up a nice old '52 to replace his worn out '50 and bought this for parts-mainly the grille. It turned out that although the '51 and '52 grilles look almost identical with the exception of "teeth", the area surrounding the parking lights is larger on the '52 so the grille wouldn't work. Brakes,tires and a carburetor kit got her back on the road after sitting for about 20 years. We drove the wheels of of this old thing. An old man kept after me to sell it to him and I finally gave in. After that, every time that I saw him he would gripe about the condition that the car had been in! Sure it was pretty rough-it needed a lot of interior work and paint-but that was all very obvious when he was pestering me. Needless to say, that kinda aggravated me. I've often regretted selling this one, but in the last few years we put my great aunt's '53 on the road and that satisfies my "stovebolt" urges (sort of). 

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, 

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...

ttfn