The California Files

More Fun with Old Cars

I drove from the Los Angeles area down to Palm Springs to visit my old pal Paul Aragon yesterday morning. He is in town from his home in the Portland area to do some work on a vacation condo he and his wife own.

Seemed like a good time for a visit and lunch, right?

So I hopped into my car – Monday is one of my two days off every week – and headed down there.

The car, 30 years old, with more than 150,000 miles showing on the clock, ran just fine the whole way. Well, almost the whole way.

Just as I reached the outskirts of town, right on Palm Canyon Drive and the road that goes up to the tram, there's a light. I stopped.

Just as the light turned green, the car’s engine coughed and died. It flat would not restart.

Good lord, 110 miles from home, stranded in the middle of what’s basically a retirement and golf community. Who ya gonna call?

Fortunately, there is something I’ll call the “Porsche network.” It consists of a bunch of enthusiasts and shops who know everything about these cars.

One of those shops is a place called TRE, in Van Nuys. Dave owns it, Jeremy is the service manager. They have come to know my car very well indeed. I called, reached Jeremy, and told him what was going on. We figured out that we had ignition failure. No spark.

I asked Jeremy if he knew of anyone in the Palm Springs area who worked on P-cars. Luckily, he did: A guy called Steve Floyd at Desert Performance Motorsports in Palm Desert. Steve and his guy Jim diagnosed a dead ignition module, just as we thought.

That's where the car is now - I've gotta be at work today, so I rented a Mazda2 and drove home.

They've sourced a new ignition box and are waiting for that, and the matching coil, to arrive from a supplier in San Francisco.

This presence of knowledge and skill is an important reason, if you’re going to mess with an old car, for messing with one like mine.

When I bought my car a couple of years ago, I seriously considered going with a BMW 2002 instead of a 911. I really like those little cars, plus they're relatively simple and easy to work on. But the community of P-car people and service, plus the availability of parts, convinced me to go the way I did.

Because of work commitments, I won't be able to return to PS to get the car until Friday, a day I go into work in the afternoon. But when I do, I'm hopeful that the car will be good to go for the foreseeable future.

I'm just glad this happened on a trip when Laura was not along. She’s a champion person, incredibly patient, takes problems in stride. But I would not want to have subjected her to a breakdown, roadside diagnosis, a trip to a shop in a tow truck and all the rest. Plus the enormous bill, which I haven’t told her about just yet….

I just hope we have our car problems behind us for awhile. None of this is good for my confidence in this car.

Oh – in the meantime, Paul and I had a great visit – lunch at Tommy Bahamas and a visit to the Planes of Fame museum, which is packed with gorgeously restored WW II military aircraft, including a B-17, which I was able to get into and explore. A good day in spite of that danged car.

 -JFT

 

Italian Chicken

Back in the early ‘90s, I was in Rome on a job, howling around Italy on an amazing trio of Bimotas.

Gig over, I stayed an extra couple of nights. I found myself in the worst hotel room I’ve ever seen, so small that I couldn’t open my suitcase on the floor and still get from the bed to the bathroom. What there was of it.

It was next to the Termini, so the hotel entry smelled of urine.

Didn’t matter. Hell, it cost just a hundred bucks a night.

I explored the Coliseum, the Roman Forum, the Palatine Hill and more, including the prison where both Peter and Paul were held. Shot some photos. Visited the Vatican. Got the pope’s blessing. No, really!

Then it was time to eat.

I asked the hotel deskman where to have dinner. He gave me a couple of tips, then said, “Whatever you do, don’t go to this place,” and he named a name.

So I went to that place, peered in the window, examined the menu. It looked terrific. (Hell no, I’m not a contrarian! Why would you think that?)

I ordered chicken. Fabulous. A little olive oil, a little garlic, a little rosemary, a little lemon juice, a little salt and pepper. Lovingly grilled.

Best I’ve ever had.

So I came home, duplicated the recipe.

That’s what I’m grilling tonight.

It’s one of my favorite recipes. Laura likes it too.

It’s a gorgeous almost-summer evening here, perfect for grilling.

Life is good.

-JFT

Lamenting the Electric Car's Demise

 Recently I was forwarded a tome lamenting the passing of electric cars from GM and Toyota.

 It seemed to suggest that this was the result of some evil corporate conspiracy. Or something.

That’s balderdash.

First and most important, neither corporation – and I sure as hell am not going to defend any corporation – planned for GM’s EV1 or Toyota’s RAV4 EV to be a long-term deal. They were experimental programs involving experimental vehicles with very limited life spans. When they wore out, and when the programs ended, they were done.

Just as well. The EV1 relied on lead-acid batteries. These are short-term batteries. You gots to replace them sooner or later. Probably sooner. Expensive. Same deal with the RAV4 EV. It used nickel-metal hydride batteries. Also not a lot of life, but huge replacement expense. These days, replacing them costs more than the base RAV4 EV is worth –close to $5,000. And if you do replace them, what do you do with the old batteries? This problem of battery recycling is extremely problematic, which is also the problem with current hybrids like the Prius, and with all other electric cars, no matter how advanced their battery packs.

Furthermore, the EV1 and the RAV4 EV had very limited ranges. You got beyond that range, you needed a tow truck, onaccounta back in the ‘90s and early 2000s when these programs were active, there were no charging stations. Zero, zip, nada, bupkis. Well, maybe a few, eventually. But far fewer, and far farther apart, than we have now. And even now it’s not like there’s a charging station on every corner.

If there was a conspiracy by the big companies to kill electric cars, how can it be that electric cars do in fact exist, built by those same corporations that supposedly killed them off? GM builds the Volt, Toyota has electric Priuses in fleet use prior to producing them for larger use, and Nissan offers the Leaf. If there was a conspiracy, none of these ever would have seen the light of day.

But wait, let us back up: Electric cars in the first place? Phooey!

Think electricity is generated without penalty, out there in the ether? It isn’t, you know. With the exception of the Pacific Northwest, which gets a good bit of its juice from the Bonneville Dam generation facility, that thing that has screwed up the salmon runs good and proper, most of our electricity is generated by coal-fired generating plants. In spite of what that industry says, there is no such thing as clean coal. Think heavy pollution.

Don’t believe me? Drive to the Grand Canyon. Notice the layer of haze that lies across that entire section of Arizona. It’s smoke from the coal-fired generation plants that dot the landscape there. Coal definitely is not our friend.

So no, electric cars are not the hot tip.

Also, while we’re at it, phooey to the so-called “water-powered” car. Man, we’re a gullible bunch. Think about it: We don't have enough water for drinking and crops in many parts of the country. Why would we want to fuel transportation with it, even if we could?

Then there’s the compressed-air car, which actually works. But that still takes electricity to supply the compressed air upon which it runs, and electricity is not our friend. We like it for keeping our refrigerators running onaccounta that keeps the beer cold and the pizzas frozen. But we don’t like it for this use.

Ultimately, what is? In my view, at least, hydrogen probably is the hot tip – BMW and GM both could produce cars today to use this fuel. So could M-Bz. They are absolutely pollution-free, and hydrogen is the most abundant substance on planet Earth. The problem is the lack of a hydrogen infrastructure. Can’t just pull into the corner station and fill ‘er up. And given the investment involved, such an infrastructure isn’t going to get built anytime soon.

So, where does that leave us?

It leaves us with the high mpg requirements and the internal combustion engine we know and love. Ultimately, we as a nation will use much less fuel because of them, and that’s a good thing, because the more gas we buy, the more money we send the Saudis and others, and the more of that money finds its way into the hands of people who hate us and want to use it to destroy us.

These high mpg requirements are good, and they’re why you won’t be seeing many more new generations of V8 and V6 engines. There’re why it’s not hard these days to find cars that routinely will deliver 30 mpg on the highway.

To meet those requirements, think in terms of smaller cars with smaller engines. The Europeans have lived like this for decades. No reason we can’t live without Suburbans, huge pickups, enormous sedans. We may want ‘em, but we sure as hell don’t need ‘em.

So, smaller cars. Or, maybe not-so-small. The new BMW 5 Series, quite a large and comfortable car, uses a two-liter (that’s just 122 cubic inches, friends) four-cylinder turbocharged engine. It is rated at 34 mpg in the highway cycle, and makes as much horsepower and torque as last year’s three-liter six-cylinder engine. So this can be done, and is being done. All we have to do is wrap our heads around this notion.

A second option involves modern diesel engines. With these, you get the best of most worlds – great economy, wonderful power and torque, excellent fuel economy -- and the new tech being used allows them to run very cleanly. Diesel fuel tends to be a few cents more expensive than gas, but the mileage is so much better it’s basically a wash. A pal with a diesel VW station wagon gets 45 mpg. Routinely. Why would you not want that?

A third option, if a bit more extreme, is to not buy a new car at all. Keep the one have for as long as you can, drive it, fix it when you need to, keep it in top running condition. Buying a new car is very expensive, and manufacturing a new car is a very high-pollution enterprise – even the cleanest new car, like a Prius, pollutes terribly during the manufacturing phase. There are lots of environmental penalties when you’re making steel and plastic, aluminum and glass – not just scratching those materials out of the ground, but also generating the electricity to make things from the base substances.

Or, this: If you absolutely must have an electric car, buy a Volt. These things are cool, and the dealers are struggling with them, thanks to a recent scare about “car fires.” The feds have inspected this and found there to be no problem. But buyers have stampeded away from Volts like a bunch of chickens frightened by a coyote. Now’s a good time to get a good deal on one. They get about a zillion miles per gallon, and drive quite nicely, from what I’m told, even if they also have the battery recycling problem.

As bad luck would have it, we’re coming up on needing a new car. What to buy, what to buy! Undecided yet. But whatever it is, it’s going to get killer miles per gallon. Gas will not get any cheaper. And we’d much rather spend money on good wine and travel. We sure as hell don’t want to give money to the oil companies.

So the next time someone sings the praises of the electric vehicle, remember the message of this post: Phooey! There are much better ways.

 -JFT

 

Just Shoot Me, Part II

I’m still surveying this poor old wreck of a Bronco and trying to get it cleaned up a little. The more I look at it, the more apparent it is that I will have to strip it completely. I was going to just stop the decay and preserve it as it is, but I do not think that’s going to fly. The poor thing is just too far gone.

I’ve sanded the rust off the two front downtubes that had been sanded bare and hit them with a bit of Krylon that’s more-or-less the same color of the bike. Good!

Have worked with rubbing compound on the front fender, fork, and the frame main tube. They all look exactly like they did before I started. Bad.

Here are a couple of photos that provide a good look at the thing as it sits today. If you want, click on 'em to see 'em fullsize.  

Plus, there is dirt and crud accumulated everywhere – a mixture of mud and grease that probably is 40 years old, at least.

So it’s becoming clear that I’m probably going to have no choice but to strip it completely.

Much of this work I can do myself. But the left footpeg needs the attention of a welder. I don’t have the equipment for that, unfortunately.

See, that footpeg was pointing skyward. Fine, I thought, I know how to fix that. I whacked it with a hammer to try to bend it back into place. It didn’t move. No worries. I got a bigger hammer and whacked it again. Uh-oh. It broke where someone welded it on a previous occasion. So you see, this helps me decide to strip it down and renew everything.

When I move the fork around, I can feel that the bearing races are very loose. So it may just have to come completely apart. In fact, I suspect that in my race box, I’ve still got the stock bearings from the Ducati Sebring I built into a racebike, complete with killer Marzocchi fork and uprated bearings. I wonder if they’ll fit? They might.

There’s an interesting problem with the wiring loom. Here’s the mystery: The engine, out of the bike, has a lead coming from the flywheel area – I don’t know yet whether there’s a magneto in there, or a generator. This lead contains brown, white and green wires.

Meanwhile, a connecter block dangling from the main loom, which runs rearward from the headlamp, is empty on one side, and on the other side, has blue, black, green and red wires running to it. Plus there’s also a second, much longer black wire extending from that part of the loom. There’s also a long black wire extending from the brake-light switch dangling in thin air.

So here’s the question – where and how does everything connect? Fortunately, a fellow Ducatisti has just this minute e-mailed me a PDF of the Bronco owner’s manual, which contains a wiring schematic. So figuring this problem out shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe. The electrics are Italian, after all, which isn’t as bad as it would be if they were British. Quite.

It seems clear that the engine, out of the bike and supposedly at least partially renovated, hasn’t been touched by the hand of man in decades. It’s now superficially clean because I made it that way, but its nooks and crannies sport the same caked-in gunk that I spoke of previously. This is why a can of mechanic’s hand cleanser is our friend.

The “shifting problem” that the previous owner spoke of – hmm, I wonder, could that have been a clutch problem? I cannot see that the aluminum lever on the engine that actuates the clutch rod actually contacts that rod. This suggests that there’s something deeply amiss inside the clutch assembly, which is housed inside the right-hand side cover. Interestingly, the Allen bolts that hold that to the engine’s case look a good bit cleaner than those on the other side. So maybe it’s been off. Maybe this has been apart. Regardless, there’s still something wrong in there, it seems to me.

No matter. All these mysteries will be sorted out.

In the meantime, I’m pondering the future of the seat and tank. The seat looks wholly constructed of leather. And I mean very thick lever, like a quarter-inch thick. I measured. It’s as though the seat’s designer intends the natural strength and springyness of this assembly – a top sewed to two sides – to do all the support.

So I think I might take it over to the saddle-makers in the equestrian area of town to see what they say about bringing it back to life. Or check out an upholstery shop, see what they say. Or maybe I’ll just wimp out and buy an aftermarket racing-style seat.

As for the tank, I’m undecided about what to do. It’s kind of a mess and decent paint is so stinkin’ expensive! At least ProItalia, the big-league Ducati dealership in SoCal, is right up the street – maybe I can just go up there, get some decals, cover the thing in those.

 In any case, this clearly is going to take a while. But at least the tires and tubes seem to be retaining air. See, you have to take these bright spots where you find them.

 -JFT

Good Lord, What Have I Done?

From the “Just Shoot Me” file, the following:

Neighbor asks me awhile back, "Hey, you want to buy my son's old Ducati?"

Naturally, I said, "Well, hell yes!" We worked out a price and an arrangement was made.  Click on the image to see it fullsize.

Naturally, I waited awhile to tell Laura about this, and when I did, I pointed out that the thing is so small, it never will leave the neighborhood. Now, I've ridden since I was a kid but pretty much swore off motorcycles after my last crash, a highside during testing for a client at Spain's Jerez grand prix track. That wasn't any fun at all. Came home, healed up a bit, then sold my two bikes - my Ducati streetbike, a big red thundering 851, and my racebike, a much smaller Ducati Sebring that I built, with the help of friends, for vintage racing.

I have been motorcycle-free for probably 15 years. Didn't like that. Feels great to have a two-wheeler back in the garage.

Today I stepped across the street finally to retrieve my prize - and yes, the cache of parts that came with it seems to be pretty much complete. This is it, a 1965 Ducati Bronco, the very most humble offering from the proud Ducati stable.

It apparently was running, but not shifting properly, when the neighbor’s son pulled the engine and sent it out to have the shifter problem solved. We shall see. Again, click to see it fullsize.

While the engine was away, he started sanding the paint from the frame and “fixing” the tank. I would have left the whole thing alone, just rubbed it out as much as possible. Again, we shall see.

Even in a machine as humble as this, the Italians sure do have style, though, don't they?

So I'm pretty stoked about this. I don't anticipate that it will be running anytime soon. But fooling around with it ought to keep me off the streets for a good long while - and keep me even broker than usual, as I chase for parts that inevitably will need. Wait, that means I'll be less able to afford bottles of good wine. What was I thinking?

-JFT

Classic Tools auf Deutschland. Or Not.

I have written here about tools on a previous occasion. On that occasion, I noted that I have a couple of sets of Whitworth open-end wrenches and a couple of sets of Whitworth sockets, three-eighths-inch drive, I think they are, resting comfortably in a drawer in my tool box.

These are of course completely useless to me because they don’t fit anything at all. Well, unless what you’re working on is British, and built somewhere between the Victorian age and the 1960s. BSA motorcycles, for example, one of which I restored and rode the hell out of back in the mid-‘80s, were held together – well, as much as was possible, given the build standards and the vibrations – by threaded fasteners using Whitworth specifications.

I long ago learned the error of ways and would rather set myself on fire than have anything British parked in my garage.

For me these days, it’s got to be German. Or, maybe Italian.

Which brings me to the set of open-end wrenches sleeping peacefully in my tool box. Here's what they look like. Click on the picture, if you like, to see it fullsize.

I have a history with these tools, and they have a history with me. I have owned them since the late 1950s. They came to me as part of the tool kit of a fabulous little German motorcycle that I wish I still had.

It was a 175cc Puch. Well, actually it was an Allstate. Back in those days, Sears licensed products from lots of manufacturers. When the suits at Sears decided they needed a motorcycle to sell Sears customers, they did a deal with Puch. Hey-presto, the Allstate was born.

But it wasn’t really German. It was Austrian. Which means it was even more German than it would have been if it had been built in Germany.

(Editor’s note: Check the run-up to World War II to divine the depth of meaning contained in the preceding paragraph.)

Anyway, Puch, or Allstate. Wonderful little device. With a pressed-steel chassis and separate fuel and oil tanks, this two-stroke wonder did not need what’s called “pre-mix” for fuel. That’s where you dump a measured quantity of oil into a can of gasoline, then shake, or pre-mix, it. You then put that mixture into the fuel tank so that as the engine runs, the gas/oil mixture automatically lubricates the moving parts so that they don’t all burn themselves up. Illegal as hell these days because engines using this system smoked as they burned the added oil. Think mosquito control. Also, advanced levels of air pollution.

Anyway: This little bike used a sophisticated system that measured the oil into the combustion chambers so that you didn’t have to run pre-mix. Pretty cool.

Interestingly, it had one combustion chamber but two pistons and two cylinders.

What?

Yep. The combustion chamber resided at the top of a pair of cylinders. The pistons ran up and down in tandem in their separate cylinders, which all together formed the shape of an inverted U. This engine was not exactly a twin-cylinder engine, and it wasn’t exactly a single-cylinder engine. What it was, was a Twingle.

It also had a very sophisticated suspension system that soaked up the bumps and provided wonderful handling and a smooth ride at the same time. That’s a neat trick, and not many chassis engineers have managed it. Not then, not now.

But these Germans, who happened to live, work and design in Austria at the Steyer-Puch works while calling themselves Austrians, didn’t miss a trick. Though these bikes were far more sophisticated and reliable than the crap that the Brits were foisting off on the public at the time (and don’t let’s talk about the Ace Café, café racers and all that unless you’re talking the great overhead-cam singles from Norton, AJS and others), they knew that the rider would need to do maintenance work from time to time. And maybe remove wheels, the better to change tires, fix flats, like that.

So on the opposite side of that pressed-steel chassis from the oil tank, they included a tool box. In that tool box, accessed by a clever little door, they included a comprehensive set of open-end wrenches.

And that’s what you see in the above photo.

Well, I rode the hell out of that poor old motorcycle, just as I did with the BSA. That’s what they're for, right? And I probably didn’t sufficiently appreciate the Puch. Oh, I certainly appreciated the BSA, along with all its flaws and limitations.

The Puch/Allstate went away while I was in college. I came home for a break and found it gone. I found home gone, too, my folks living in a completely different place. Hard times had fallen on the family and my folks, who had done so much for me, sold everything they could. OK, that’s fair.

But somehow these classic wrenches stayed behind. For that I am very grateful. Oddly, and I have no idea how this came about, this set isn’t a set. There’s an interloper. All but one of them was made by a company called Stubai. The singleton was made by a firm called Hazet. But the design, feel, look and precision is the same across the whole lot, no matter who made them.

They may not look as gorgeous as the latest chrome-plated, micro-finished megabuck Snap-On tools, but they are beautifully crafted of iron (hence the traces of rust that are evident), and when the mark on the wrench says it fits a 14 millimeter bolt or nut, that’s what if fits – and I mean, precisely.

Precision is good. Stuff that you can count on is good. Stuff with a history is good. Stuff based on tradition is good.

These days I drive a 30-year-old German car. And these wonderful old wrenches help me keep it in shape.

It’s probably a mark of advancing age, but small things like a set of much loved old tools are the sort of things that make me happy. See? It doesn’t take all that much.

-JFT

All in Good Time

Going forward is good, and that’s what I’ve continued to do with my 30-year-old car.

This latest improvement was accomplished as a final step in the engine rebuild that took place last September. When I picked the car up after the work was done, I was instructed to drive it for 5,000 miles, then bring it back for a valve adjustment and an oil change.

To my surprise, I’ve put a little fewer than 5,000 miles on the car in the past year. That’s the least I’ve ever done in a year’s driving. But this past week the opportunity presented itself, so into the shop the car went.

But it didn’t go alone.

I’d obtained a new alternator and had planned to install the thing myself. This was necessary because I could hear the alternator bearings grumbling at idle, and making an rrrr/rrrrr/rrrr sound, kind of a gravely oscillation, as I motored down the street. So I put a big old screw driver onto the alternator housing, put my ear onto the other end of the screw driver as a kind of makeshift mechanic’s stethoscope, and sure enough, the alternator was the source of the noise. Bearings, without a doubt.

But I got cold feet on the parts swap, for a number of reasons. The possibility of old, brittle wires and tight working spaces discouraged me. So did the fact that the alternator is hidden behind the cooling fan, above the flat-six engine, with a fairly complex aerodynamic vane attached to its nose to direct cooling air where the engineers felt it was most needed. I didn’t want to screw that up. Finally, the fan is press-fitted to the front of the alternator and I don’t possess the means to pull it off. So I put the job off for three or four months.

By the time the car went in for its follow-up visit, I still hadn’t done the alternator swap. So, somewhat sheepishly, I asked the guys at the shop to just plug the alternator in for me.

Yes, I know, bringing your own parts to a specialist shop is a bit like bringing your own wine to a wine bar. I felt a little embarrassed about doing this, but they accepted my request in good humor and did the work for their regular shop rate, which, frankly, makes it worth their while.

And now? Just the pleasing whirr of the cooling fan, and of the cam drive-chains and sprockets. Nothing but the pleasing hum of Porsche flat-six horsepower. The car sounds and runs just like it should, with no untoward noises; not from freshly adjusted valves and not from an alternator that undoubtedly is the one with which the car exited the factory back in November of 1981.

That old alternator was the last known critical trouble spot (emphasis on "known," here), so I’m hoping that the car now is good to go for the long term. For sure the air conditioning system still hasn’t received any attention, and probably needs some significant upgrading before it will work reasonably well – it doesn’t work at all, now. But that can come later, as I think I can struggle through my massive 1.8-mile commute each way to work without it for the remainder of the summer. All in good time.

Next little detail? I’ll get the new tires I put on it a year ago, right after I bought it, rebalanced. I'm noticing a little bounce felt through the steering wheel that needs to be ironed out. But once that’s done, with new tires, new brake system, new trans, new engine, new alternator, I’m hoping that things will go well for awhile. Sure, there remain plenty of things that could go wrong – most of them electrical in nature. But I’m keeping fingers crossed.

-JFT

Cruise Night!

I just got back from Cruise Night. It's one of the best things Glendale does.

It's held on Brand Boulevard downtown.

It's always fun, always dancing, always classic rock ‘n’ roll, always hot, always people, but most of all, always wonderful cars.

Fewer cars, fewer people this year, I thought, but I was there early, and this also is the weekend of Carmageddon, the weekend of huge freeway closures, so lots of people are staying home.

But I'm on my own today, since my sweetie is off doing one of her gigs, so I went.

After all, I had to get my annual Cruise Night T-shirt.

Also, I shot a few pictures. I thought I’d share just a couple of them here on the California Files. After all, what's more California than cool cars?

So here are four of them. Careful now, the last one is tight, don't miss it.

Nope, no Porsches at all. Some Jags. A Lancia Stratos, of all things. One BMC Mini. All the Chevies and Fords you can handle. One ‘30s Caddie with a flathead V-8, all original. Mustangs, a few Camaros, some fake Cobras plus one that looked to be real. All in all, pretty cool.

-JFT

Mission Accomplished!

The last time I had my car in for service, the wrench told me that the fuel pump was going to need replacement - it was buzzing loudly.

Now this shop is a really good one, but the shop rate is something like $125 per hour, or maybe a little more now.

So thinks I, “Fuel pump, eh? Hah! I can do that!”

So I ordered a pump and dipped into the vast online literature available for the kind of old car I drive. And I kid you not, it is indeed vast.

The job looked entirely straightforward, even if the pump is located in an entirely awkward position: It’s behind an access panel under the front of the car, between the front wheels, adjacent to the fuel tank.

So yesterday afternoon I got put the car up on jack stands, got out my creeper and tools, and went to work.

This was quite a simple job, but it was not easy. Those German engineers who dreamed up this arrangement must have tiny little hands, and fangers (note please that while you may have fingers, we banjo pickers have “fangers”) much more dexterous than mine.

The electrical connections required some effort, as did the high-pressure output connection. Lord knows, we don’t want any fuel leaks!

But after about two hours of work, I got the job done – and while I was under the car, lying on my back, I also tightened up the mount for one of the fog lamps, a job that must be done from under the car.

Took the car down off the stands, started it – no fuel leaks. Victory!

The photo you see here, which you can click on for a larger image, is indeed the fuel pump - it's about 6.5 inches long and looks pretty good, considing it's been in the car for 29 years. You didn’t know that’s what they look like, did you? And I warrant that you have no idea how spendy these little rascals are – depending upon where you buy them, they can cost up to $350. I got my new one for a good deal less than that. In fact, I estimate that I saved myself at least $450 by doing this job myself.

That’s just one more reason I think that sticking with an old car, even with all the problems that they can bring, makes sense for me. I can do a good bit of the work it requires my own self. I like that. And it helps me know the car better.

-JFT

Worst-case Scenario

Old cars. Man, what was I thinking?

The latest involves three problems that surfaced at about the same time:

1 – Brakes: Left-front caliper, probably never replaced or rebuilt, was sticking on. Hard braking pulled the car to the left, and that brake remained lightly engaged all the time. Not good.

2 – Detonation: Detonation is “pinging,” which is very bad indeed, because its combustion-chamber mischief shatters piston rings and melts holes in the tops of pistons. All these parts are new in my car’s megabuck engine, so its onset was – er, frightening. Onset occurred Saturday on the way back from a ship visit. A very hot and dry day it was, and coming through the downtown LA tunnels with the top off and the windows and done, it scared hell out of me because I figured something was badly wrong. Sounded like dollars escaping. Dollars I don’t have.

3 – Turn signals: They didn’t exactly stop working. But they began working erratically. Not good. Just replaced, at considerable expense, the switchgear on the steering column.

So an emergency call to Wrench. Wrench suggested a worst-case total. I became unwell. Then I took it over to the shop today to let Wrench have his way with Casper, which is of course the car’s name.   

Wrench called today. Says car’s all fixed. Brakes not nearly as bad as I’d feared. Replaced calipers, but new pads, rotors, wheel bearings and more stayed in the box – existing parts were nearly new and just fine.

Detonation? Detail adjustments to mixture and timing, detonation gone. Should be no damage to engine internals. Or so Wrench says. Hope he is right.

Turn signals? Simple: A relay was going bad. Replaced.

Don’t know what the total is yet – I’ll find out tomorrow when I go pick up Casper. But the car should go and stop and signal just fine, and for far less than I was afraid I would have to spend.

I’ll be happy to have Casper back. The rental Nissan I have just seems wrong.

So life is good. Most of the time.

-JFT