Memory Lane

Photo From Here

Saw this Corvair photo whilst wasting time on the computer. This one is a cool custom bodied thing from Italy as opposed to the Plain Jane version from the U.S. We went through at least three of these things in our family. My older brother had one that I managed to dent up during a little off road excursion when the back end unloaded on me. The engine in the rear thing just didn't react quite like I expected it to when I came zipping around the corner. Like a pogo stick, actually. Professional auto writer Tom McCahill had the same thing happen to him during a road test of a Corvair. Apparently, it can happen to the best of them, as well as some doofus kid taking his younger brother to guitar lessons. Maybe Ralph Nader was right.

One of the Corvairs we ended up with had belonged to my aunt. She drove it back and forth to work a short distance every day and the thing never warmed up enough to fully lubricate the rockers for the valve train. It quit on her and even though he didn't know what was wrong with it, Dad figured I could fix it, so he bought it from her. A buddy of mine and I retrieved it by dragging it home some twenty miles on the end of a chain, including about fifteen of them on US 41. You could never get away with that today. We were actually pretty good at towing things. We had a set of hand signals worked out so the slack rarely came out of the chain. The driver of the lead car would hold up a clenched fist before hitting his brakes so the guy in the dead vehicle would apply his brakes first and do most of the stopping. Likewise, prior to shifting into second or third, the lead man would throw either two or three fingers into the air and the guy on the end of the chain would tap the brakes a little to keep things tightened up while the shift was made. As much crap as we towed around, we should have just invested in a tow truck.

Photo From Here

I saw this the other day and it reminded me of my old Chevy. The photo below is a '62 Chevy Impala Super Sport. Mine was a little darker red but that's the car. It had a 327 and a 4 speed with the white ball knob on the shifter when I bought it. The shifter and knob was a common part with the Corvair, I think. When going through the gears it was like stirring soup. A Hurst shifter and tee handle replaced the stocker and then things were right with the world.

I probably spent as much time under the thing as I did in the saddle. I changed motors, the clutch and rear-end a couple of times, rebuilt the tranny, and of course just generally tinkered with the thing all the time. I had a big 11" clutch in the thing and the bellcrank broke one night on the way home from work/school, can't remember anymore. I borrowed a vehicle from the parents and went out. When I came home I had just hit the sack when I heard a noise out front. Someone had broken into it and probably would have taken it if the clutch pedal was working. That would have made the second time it was stolen. Probably the same guys who stole my little Sprint. It's good to have nice neighbors. I shoulda' kept this one. It would be worth a few bucks now. Plus a lot of good memories with this baby.

As long as I'm making the trip down memory lane, might as well go the whole enchilada and go with the first car I ever owned:

1948 Chevy Fleetmaster. Mine didn't look as good as the one in the photo but it was the only car I've ever gotten up on two wheels. Not quite like the Joie Chitwood Thrill Show but I used to run her in deep in a ninety degree corner by where I lived and I could get a little chirp off the back tire when she came back down. When I got the car the motor was junk, so I swapped in a 1953 235 CID, replacing the original 216. The car had a vacuum assist shifter, which when new was designed to suck the tranny into to gear when up shifting. Theoretically, little effort was required to change gears but the reality was that if it was cold outside you better have it in the gear you were planning on using next time you drove the car because the condensation in the vacuum can would freeze it up solid and you couldn't shift the damn thing at all until it warmed up. The car had knee action shocks instead of "airplane" shocks, as they were called back then. J.C. Whitney/Warshawsky had kits to fix both the shocks and the shifter but I never got around to fixing either of them. 

The car did have a couple of cool features. It had a heater motor under the front set that would blow heat into the back. That was pretty nice. It also had a post in the middle of the back bumper that was spring loaded so you could push the car without damaging anything. The timing mark was a little steel ball pressed into the flywheel. Since the distributor was on the side of the block it made timing the thing pretty easy. It also had torque tube drive. The drive shaft and U-joints were enclosed inside a big tube that ran from the tranny to the differential. You never had to worry about greasing the U-joints because they ran in an oil bath. It ran 16" tires on 6 lug wheels, if I remember correctly. It was a little narrow to put six people in it but you could wear a fedora without worrying about it getting crushed with all the headroom it had.

By the way, Joie Chitwood held the record for driving on two wheels. Over five miles! I saw the Thrill Show at the county fair when I was a kid. Thought it was the coolest thing ever. Saw Frank Sinatra Jr. there as well - preferred Joie Chitwood by a yard.