More Car Tales.

My recent post about cars brought forth some more memories and stories.  Likely a book could be devoted to this topic alone.

One story that seems worthy of passing along is an amusing but cautionary tale with several life lessons to be gleaned.  Mostly regret.  Regret at selling of a car that should have been kept.  And regret of purchasing (or trading for) one that should have been avoided.  It happens.  And any car enthusiast who tells you they have never made either of these mistakes is simply lying to you.  More often than not, we make these mistakes more than once.  It happens.  I’ve done it.  We all have.

So this friend of mine whom I grew up with ended up getting  a 1957 MG A when we were in high school.  This car was a nifty two seater sports car, a true classic of British design.  It needed work, of course, but it came with lots of spare parts and in time it received a pretty blue paint job.  A fun little car.  But not the quickest thing out there.  And teenager’s like quick.  So he traded it off to someone for a Chevy Nova.  Being a Chrysler guy who had a Plymouth Duster (which was in a similar class as the Nova, but better–at least I think so) I did not think much of it and suspected he should have kept the MG.  On a side note:  This was a car that Chevy had trouble selling in Mexico.  Nova.  In Spanish… “No va”  means “No go.”  Not good on a car.  But the Nova, with its V-8, was much quicker in a straight line than the MG.  Well.  That’s what he did.  I guess he had some issues with it and eventually moved on to other vehicles.

A few years later I ran into him and he had a Fiat Spyder (whose model year escapes me) …it was a good looking little car, and he told me he got it because it reminded him of the MG, which he conceded he regretted trading away.  True, it was sort of like the MG.  “But it’s a Fiat!”  I said.  You know, “Fiat”….the Italian sports car. …it is also a slang term in the Italian language for “broken.”  Anyway, this was a nice example, but still….they are temperamental things.  So my friend is showing me this car, all the work the prior owner had done to make it nice, etc, etc.  And it was nice.  But.  Then…  He showed me a switch, when he flipped it two lights came on.  One shined on the carburetor.  The other shined on the distributor.  He said to me, “Isn’t this great?!! If I ever have to work on it at night, I have built in lights so I can see what I am doing, no need to fumble with a flashlight in the dark!”   My reaction was, “NO!”….”This is NOT great!  THIS….this SUCKS!”…..”It means the poor sonofabitch who owned it before you spent so much time fucking with it in the dark so he could go home that he felt it was necessary to add the lights!”  I suppose I was a little harsh.  Or maybe not.  (If my friend is reading this, perhaps he will let me know if I was right or not….and hopefully forgive me if it was harsh, as it was all in good fun.) To this day, I look for stuff like that when going over a used car.  It is not always a deal-breaker, of course…just one of those little details I keep an eye out for…….mostly because it reminds me of this story and it makes me laugh a little.

Speaking of laughs, the British have always had a sense of humour (note British spelling) that has appealed to me.  But there is nothing funny about being stranded on a dark and stormy night.  (a nod to Snoopy for that one)  Most British cars were equipped with Lucas electrical system parts.  Much like AutoLite and Delco in the US, Electrolux in Sweden, or Bosch in Germany, they made a wide range of electrical parts for a myriad of applications for everything.  I’ve seen ads proclaiming them as the “Prince of Darkness”   Well.  They were.  But not for the reasons that they hoped.  You see, some of this stuff–especially from the late 60’s and 70’s, just wasn’t that great.  The earlier stuff may have been fine and on par with offerings of others, but the ones from the later years were noted for having faults.  Bad enough that a few notable remarks made the rounds that any 70’s vintage British car drivers will relate to:

Lucas.  Inventor of intermittent windshield wipers.  …and intermittent heater blowers.  …and intermittent headlights  …and …and  …and.

If Lucas made guns, wars would not start.

Lucas…  Loose Unsoldered Connections And Splices.

…and my personal favorite:

Do you know why the British drink their beer warm?  Lucas makes refrigerators too.

 

 

Joking aside, automotive electrical equipment has come a long way.  Up until the 1920’s, even the steam powered automobile was still considered a viable competitor to internal combustion engines.  (in spite of their own headaches) This is because of the electrical issues that plagued early ignition systems.  Reliable high voltage insulation materials and parts were still in their early stages of development.

Only a few short years before, stationary engines were still using low voltage make-and-break ignition systems wherein a current passed through a coil by way of a set of moveable contacts inside of the combustion chamber and when the timing dictated the ignition point, the contacts were opened.  This caused the magnetic flux in the coil to collapse and create a voltage spike that would arc across the contacts and ignite the fuel charge in the cylinder.  This was electrically simple.  But mechanically complex.  I have an old 1916 Fairbanks-Morse engine that uses this method.  It works, but it is a little tricky to set it up correctly.  High tension sparkplug ignition, once the materials caught up to the needs, proved much simpler and more reliable, even though the electrical requirements to make it work are more demanding.

 

You can get an idea of how make-and-break ignition works from the video of the engine I redid years ago, but if you take a close look at this, you may also see one other interesting detail:  There is a valve and a tube leading from the water jacket into the intake port.  Water injection.  This was done to prevent detonation if the engine was run on a low octane fuel like kerosene.  A little bit of water would cool the charge, allowing for extracting a little more power from greater compression without inducing detonation that could destroy the engine.  Anti-Detonant-Injection.  ADI.   In WWII this would become commonplace in high performance fighters to achieve “WEP, or War Emergency Power” outputs for limited times without destruction of the powerplant.  But this little 1916 Fairbanks-Morse may have one of the earliest such systems fitted to it at the factory as a standard production item.    What’s old is new.

Even the Ford model T, with its “buzz box” coils, can be considered to be a modern idea today.  There was a coil for each cylinder.  The distributor worked on the low voltage side and fired each coil in sequence rather than the high voltage side with only one coil firing for all and being sequenced to the plugs.  Again, it was materials technology that made this the method of choice at the time the model T was designed.  Today’s vehicles have returned to the coil per cylinder arrangement and have all but done away with what we would traditionally call a “distributor” (such functions now being timed and carried out by the computer control on the low voltage side instead of the high voltage distributor)  Like I said, what’s old is new.

Model T buzz coils found a myriad of uses after their days of driving the roads.  Early amateur radio operators used them as cheap spark coils for radio transmitters.  Ranchers used them to charge electric fences for the cattle.  They also found their way into a variety of science class experiments……and into a the projects of more than a few practical jokers bent on making the unsuspecting jump!

 

The electric car….and….any car can be a flying car.  Once.

One night, some friends and I were out on a long roadtrip…as usual, it was at night.  At some point we had an alternator failure.  But…when you are in the middle of nowhere, you keep driving in hopes of reaching a place to get help.  The car was my friend Howard’s Volvo 240.  This was a bit unfortunate.  The 240 is a great car.  But.  It has a lot of electricals in it.  Often in an older car if you loose the battery charging, you can just shut everything off and go pretty far with the only electrical load being the ignition system.  (Once when faced with this issue on my own car I told people I had an electric car that I charged up each night……what I meant was my charging system was kaput until payday and I was only driving around town and then topping up the battery for the next day.)  Of course, in this instance it was dark…so we had the headlamps on too.  Even so, you can cover some distance before the battery is flat.  Unfortunately, however, the 240 also had an electric fuel pump…and, I believe this one was new enough to have had the computer controlled electronic fuel injection rather than the all-mechanical setup.  So…lots of loads, even with all the stuff we could turn off disabled.  As such, our range was not so great and eventually the voltage got low enough to create drivability problems.  So….we turned off the headlamps.  This might have been ok, but then things also got a little foggy because we also no longer had the blower running.  At this point I decided it would be helpful to play General Patton and I opened the sunroof and stood up through it like a tank commander so as to get a better view down onto the road surface and direct.  There was one major flaw in this plan…my friend who was driving either could not hear me, or just lacked the degree of finesse required to perform his duties.  “A slight bit to the left”  or “just a hair to the right” was responded with wild course corrections that were unsuited to standing through a sunroof.  Which is to say he scared the crap outta me.  Luckily, “STOP” was understood the first time and we got the car pulled over and secured.

A short time later another car pulled up.  It was your typical smoke belching rust bucket and had dents all over it.  When I approached them and explained what happened, they offered a ride.  I was not comfortable with that but convinced them that all we really needed to do was connect some jumper cables and let the battery charge up a bit and then we could make it to the next town and get the car worked on and so I went back and told my friend that they did not look like the most reputable people.  This, coming from someone who looks like me and at 2 am on a deserted country road, scared the living crap out of my friend. Priceless. Then I told him what I had sorted out and that it would be fine.  But I got my laugh.  (payback) I guess I am a bit of a bastard sometimes.  🙂  Anyway, the other car backed up to us and after about 20 minutes of running we had the battery charged enough to get on our way again.  After that it was relatively smooth sailing and we reached the next town and got the car attended to.

Sadly, within another year or two, my friend completely destroyed that car.  There were four of us on that ride.  Splashing through some huge puddles, making giant waves of water.  Great fun!  “Safari!!”    …but, this was no trail in the Serengeti…and we were not filming a Land Rover ad……it was the city.  And city puddles hide evil things.  In this case, a partially opened manhole cover.  Once the front wheel ran across it and pushed down, the other side kicked up and caught the bottom of the car.  BANG!  Like an athlete doing the pole vault, the Volvo 240 was launched skyward.  You might have thought we’d hit a landmine.  It was a short flight, however…gravity always wins, especially when you have opted to fly a car instead of an airplane.  Within a second or so the front end crashed to the pavement, followed by the rear….our landing roll was accompanied by every possible clatter and rattle of metal that you could imagine.  When my friend hit the brakes, EVERY idiot light on the dashboard went on along with the variety of warning buzzers the car had.  We came to a stop.  Got out.  And looked.  The car didn’t “look” that bad.  But the damage underneath was severe.  A hole torn through part of the frame and rear passenger floorboard, the driveshaft center bearing carrier torn away and the now pretzel shaped shaft laying nearby, along with the severing of fuel and brake lines–and….. a dangling wiring harness.  The latter prompted a very quick request to shut off everything and set back.  Something about leaking fuel and shorted wiring in close proximity.

We discussed matters while awaiting a ride and a tow truck.  My friends expressed those “life flashing before your eyes” sorts of things.  Me?  Well, honestly, what I thought while we were in the air and coming back down (with a great view of parking lot filling the windshield) was how similar this was to that Volvo commercial where they drove one off the top of a parking garage.  Seriously.  …that’s what I thought of.  It is a real ad too.  Look it up, I’m sure you can find it someplace.  Volvo always made great cars and during the 70’s and 80’s most of their ads touted the safety features of them and often did so in spectacular fashion.  Setting army tanks atop them to show how strong the structure was.  Wrecking them in every conceivable way and then stepping out like it was no big deal.  Those sorts of ads.  If you saw them in print or on TV, you’d know exactly what I am talking about.  So yeah.  Pole-vaulting a 240 is not recommended.  But at least no one was hurt.   (well, almost…my friend was none too happy about totaling his car)  As an autoshop teacher I knew would say to his class, “I know all about fix’n cars…..and I also know all about break’n cars.”   Maybe so.  But I doubt he ever rode with anyone who pole-vaulted a 240.