Folks Of Interest When the experts chime in.

I attended a car fire a few years back: an O/T Euro thingo had burst into flames, we arrive, have the under-bonnet fire doused in short order, start looking for a cause. Our boss at the time (now out of the Fire Brigade, praise the Lord) states with great authority (ignoring me tugging at his sleeve) to the owner that it obviously backfired through the carb. The owner looks at him like he is the greatest twat God ever put breath into (which he was) and points to the fuel injection system in all its glory.........

 

OWWW! Fuck!

Try teaching gearhead students about how to REALLY build race cars. The stories start on day 1 and last about 2 weeks, until they figure out that we see right through their bullshit. Then of course you get a few that never do get it, and they crow louder and louder as the rest shut up.

The best part is when one student will call bullshit on the "never get it" guy for telling the same story the first guy told earlier on...priceless.

 

sadly enough, if you don't know one of these guys, it's probably you


a few that come to mind that i have heard,

'you don't need to know how something works to fix it'

'just redid my 350, put a 3 inch cam in it'

'aftermarket performance parts never work right'

 

Well, maybe your story was the start of the others but was there a widow whose son died in Vietnam involved anywhere in it?

 

Ummmm...not to doubt an expert....but Chevy started the "apache" nomenclature in '58

 

I do know of a silver Camaro, 68 I think that sat in a front yard here in town for as long as I remember. There were a lot of people after that one. They all got the same story, son bought it, went off to Viet Nam and never returned. The father was, I think, holding on to it in hopes his son would someday come home, but never did. Last I saw it it was down on all fours with flat tires, then it disappeared. That was about the time we had a new "progressive" mayor and he was real intense about cars sitting around even in driveways without being licensed. The Camaro disappeared about that time. I hope the city didn't take it and crush it which is what they were doing with the so-called clunkers, but I never found out.

 

Well, I could have got that one wrong, I was pretty young. I just always thought that was what it was. It had the single round headlights, was it even a 57?

 

No that story was around long before this one ever happened!Yes it was an old lady that sold this car! But that's all I know as far as to why it was listed as just a 50 something Chevrolet in the add.Before the Vietnam legend out here it was "Died in Korea"

 

'55-'57 had the single lights. I hope you dont think I was picking on you.......its' just the irony of your statement and the thread topic that made your post an easy target.

 

No, no problem. I was about ten at the time and easily could have got that wrong. I honestly thought all of that series were Apaches, so I learned something. Thanks.

 

I get "experts" all of the time trying to argue the laws of physics, or the fundamentials of materials science, often both. Not a degree among them.

 

One of the worst ones I have had to deal with was a customer. We did some machine work on a dodge 4.7 V8. Only machine work, no assembly. They came and picked up all the parts and a week later I get a call saying that the engine was knocking. I tell them that we can't warranty anything not assembled by use and they insist it was a machining error. I told them I'd come take a look in a couple of days. I went over there and in the mean time they had continued running it until it stopped, then they pulled the pan to find a destroyed piston, broked rod, cracked cylinder etc. Destroyed. As I was looking at the damage I noticed all the rod cap numbers were mis-matched. These are cracked cap rods so it is pretty obvious when they are not put together right. This "mechanic" had put them all on wrong, not one pair matched up. There were gaps I could stick a paperclip in! I said " here's the problem, you've put these on all wrong" He said " It's my numbering system, I know how it works."... after that I explained to the owner what was wrong, told him he was on his own, and never did business with them again.

 

I work at a auto tech training program, and MAN do we seem to get more than our fair share!

Thankfully the curriculum usually straightens them out, but not always.

I drove my '56 Bel Air 2 door post to school a lot last summer, pulled up in front of the building one night. Three students come up to the car checking it out, and...you guessed it...mr. know-it-all pipes up
"boy I bet this thing is a cop magnet! bet you get tickets all the time."

me (should have known better) "no, I mostly follow the speed limits, but cops are usually cool to old cars"

him- " yeah- I don't have to worry about it cuz my car is invisible to the cops."

me (oh man, this is just to good to pass up now) " yeah right. ok Wonder Woman !"

him- "no really, it has a special radar reflective coating on it..."

me- "uh huh, I bet the main ingredient in that is bullshit huh?" and walked away.

 

When Dad and I started doing Packards we had our share of experts. We've all met the guy who has that 1 "special car" that he won't let anyone see. This particular ball rubber kept telling us about his 37 12 Town Car. He only starts it early on Sunday mornings once a month and never drives it because it's perfect original and he bought it from the original owner.

So 1 day Dad begins to dig into the guy for details. He says he bought in Trenton, MI from a huge mansion right on the Detroit River. Blah-blah-bllah, lie-lie-lie, color, miles, the works. So after several minutes of listening to this douche, Dad finally tells him how well he remembered that car.

"...yeah I used to see that car in the garage. It faced out, backed in all the time, right?"

"Yeah! Yeah, that's the one! You remember it? It's mine now."

"But for as long we've known you we can't come over and see it, right?"

"I don't let anybody see it."

"I'm sure you don't. Must be a mess"

"No, but why would you say that? You've never even seen my car."

"Well you wouldn't know Chuck Fisher would you? Remember him? Used to scrap cars after the war?"

"Oh yeah, he and I were friends. That's how I found most of my cars."

He was caught right there. Chuck was Dad's partner in the late 40s and the 2 of em scrapped and burned enough cars to make every member of the HAMB cry like a baby. Yes, the 36 Packard (wasn't a 37) 12 Town Car was 1 that Dad and Chuck burned and scrapped. It was an aluminum body and a special interior in the rear. They paid an unbelieveable $150 for it, but got that back for the tires. There was a plumber who had whitewall 17" tires on his truck in the Detroit's Downriver area. He got em from Dad and Charlie Fisher. They ended up getting close to $500 as a return on their investment. As Dad told Mr. Bullshit the stroy he couldn't give up.

"Well you didn't know they had 2 Packards. The garage was so big you missed the good one."

It was a small 2 car garage under the house, and it wasn't a mansion by any means. The house is still there today, maybe under 2000sqft, nice but not a mansion. We didn't see this turd for over a year after the truth came out.

 

I met a guy outside of my local post office today that was nice, then he turned stupid. Asks me about my T and then begins to tell me what I should have done to the engine to make it faster. I explained that it was fast enough for me and I was okay with that. He insists that it needs a cam, roller rockers, etc. Finally, I tell him that running 12's is fast enough for a daily driver and ask him what's the fastest he's driven a street car. That's when he begins to tell me about his daily driven, 10 second, full body '57 Chevy. I laughed, gave him a fake phone number when he asked for mine and let him leave in his 2006 economy sedan.

Takes all kinds.

 

I worked for this one guy when I was 18, I was basically a helper and parts chaser. This guy bullshitted so bad his back teeth should have been brown.

He claimed to have built engines for Bobby Allison and never used a torque wrench since he could tell by feel what the torque was. He constantly got hounded by bill collectors, would pull the most incredible shams on customers (sell a junk battery as "new", had me paint it black and give it a charge..) and wound up stiffing me for a week's wages.

I went there to attempt to collect my last check and find the place burned to the ground. It was a deep garage with "hanger queens" in the back, his personal cars and his brother's GTO. I did notice the cars in the back of the lot, all untouched by fire. I knew on the spot that he torched the place and even took out the Western Union office next door.

Bob

 

With all the guys I met who had the [fill in the blank] car that was the fastest in town and never got beat, I apparently was the only guy to lose a drag race in the early 80s. I lost a bunch but not that many.

Around the mid 80s I was hanging out in my bro-in-laws shop in a bad part of town working on my clapped out 67 firebird when a local came over spouting off a bunch of bull about a perfect car just a few blocks over, blah blah blah. I called him out on it and he said do you want to go see it - I said yeah. We walked a couple of blocks, knock on a door of a shack, the old man comes out and opens up his falling down garage and in it is the nicest Chevy II I ever seen. Perfect. Beautiful. Probably worth more than the guy's house.

I am nice to folks because every once in a while someone may actually be telling the truth - maybe just forgot a detail here or there.

The true bs experts are easy enough to spot so I figure its free entertainment. Plus I know that no matter what they say my 55 Chevy is the fastest - I'm running a super-experimental 7/8 cam (its even better than a 3/4 race cam). Don't tell anyone, though, I race for pinks every weekend.

 

Many years ago I was gassing up my 1956 Chevy sedan, when the father and son refueling team on the other side of the pump island began talking cars. Seems they used to have a 1957 Nomad with a factory vinyl roof and factory tri-power setup. Seems like it had some kind of factory rally wheel as well. I said "Wow, that's a pretty rare optioned car for a '57". Of course, I get stuck with the slowest flowing pump at the place, so the BS continued to flow at a higher rate than my DX regular. As I was bidding them a good day, they asked "Hey man, got any weed?" I had to laugh and drive off.

 

##############################################

Quote: "ALL the Experts, Come from outta' Town "



Smokin' in Tenn.

(500 posts) hooray !

 

X-spurts

 

You see, an X is a has been and a spurt is a drip under pressure.

Doc.

 

I have a know it all for a brother, He is a handy man for a living, but yet a expert furniture maker when he walks into my furniture shop. I try to keep him out of the car shop as he knows every thing about building cars also. But the funniest one is to here him tell people that the Ford small block was designed by Studebaker.

 

I was driving my '62 Fairlane to Home Depot the other night. At a stoplight, there's a haggard older guy holding a sign begging for money. He looks over and asks me what year car it is.
"62"
"Nah, that's a 64. I used to have a 64 Fairlane, 65 GTO, 57 Nomad, 72 camaro...and I once bought a '69 Rambler station wagon for $800! Man it was perfect, like new, even had the yada yada yada..."

The green light saved me from this tale, but I had to chuckle to myself as at least 1 part of that story was true.