History BREAK DOWNS ON THE ROAD TO OR FROM A EVENT.

A friend and I had been to the Street Rod Nationals in OKC in about 84 (?), we took my car, a 38 Chevy (that I still have). Had a good ride down , enjoyed the show and headed back to Iowa (Atlantic), about 15 miles from home the car starts losing power. He says, pull over. We pull off of the side of the hiway, pull the distributor cap (an Accel dual point unit), he scraps the points with his knife, put the cap on and we finish the trip, about a month later I put new points in

Around the same time I was on my way home from work, I lived in the country and was about to do a left turn off of the hiway and lost my steering. The crown of the road pulled me to the right and I parked on the shoulder. The drag link of the stock steering had fallen off I walked the rest of the way home (less than a half mile), got some tools and came back an reassembled it. That could have been really ugly.

I guess I've been darn lucky.

 

I guess this fits.
One year on the way to the March Meet in one of my OT cars, we were zooming through the mountains up the 5 when a piece of rebar about a foot long gets thrown up by the car ahead, smashes the grille, flies into the hood where it left a perfect impression of a piece of rebar in the metal, taking off the paint where it hit!
It goes up, hits the very edge of the windsheild trim just inches from where my wife is sitting, flies over the roof!!
We shrug, decide to carry on, within seconds, the car totally overheats! Huh?
Luckily, there is a call box very close. While I'm calling AAA, our next door neighbor , who is a bus driver, happens along in his Greyhound, full of passengers to see if he can help as he recognized our car. Stay until help comes. The CHP stops thinking there is an accident, gets the rebar out of the road, we get hauled home. The thermostat failed, complete coincidence, but we figure the cosmos is telling us something. We don't go.

 

I've also got a chevy clutch linkage pivot ball story...
My brother, Janglehead and I were cruising my nova through the local park on the first nice day of spring 1981. I had just installed a new Zoom purple clutch with a super heavy pressure plate.....cruising slowly and pushed down on the pedal POP! the ball snapped cleanly off the block. A pair of pliers got the threaded piece out and there was a city crew working there with their big orange [Omaha orange] IHC dump truck. I asked them if they had any 1/2" bolts and they had a 2.5" long bolt in their junk bin they gave me...the head slipped into the cross shaft perfectly and I screwed the other end into the block...it worked great! It was even a grade 8 bolt.

 

Don't remember the exact event we were headed to but was riding bitch with my brother. He decides to use the new pressure washer car wash and hose off the 327 in his car. Left it running if started missing when he hit the distributor. The cap was broken clean in half - and it was still running. I've seen caps with hairline cracks the wouldn't run. This sumbitch was Broken in Half. We drove and got a new cap but I was amazed, still am.

 

The same p'up, 64 Jeep with sbc power in another story another time and another place:
In the coastal area of NC, so long ago all I can remember is we were in the middle of nowhere North of Wilmington IIRC.
Truck had a hydraulic clutch release with factory master cylinder and a slave cylinder/fork setup below. I hadn't noticed it, but the line between was copper It work hardened and broke, leaving me with no clutch release.
Using the old "start engine in low and feel your way thru the gears going up with no clutch release, kick it into neutral to stop, then switch off and repeat starting engine in low and so on to go again" technique I got to the next small town with a hardware store, bought compression fittings, etc. and pieced together a line that worked and used the fluid I had with me, and off we went again.
The clutchless shifting is a technique easier done with a floor shift of the old type where the lever hooks directly to the shift forks like '39 and earlier Fords, as you can actually feel the gears meshing if you have "tickled" the throttle just right. Time spent driving the old non synchronized "crash boxes" in Model A's and old trucks with "granny low" 4 speeds helps also.

 

I'd driven my truck for 3 years on a transmission that came straight from the junkyard to my truck, changed fluids, cleaned it up and stuck it in. Knew it was going to need a rebuild, but that wasn't high on the list.
Coming home from a show that should have been a 4 hour drive I heard it chip the tires a couple times. Id ridden with a friend who blew a trans in a similar way, so I knew I was screwed. Just filled up with gas and figured I could make it quite a ways as long as the gear I was in held out. Finally had to give in and fill up, and learn I'd lost all but first gear. Spent 45 mins calling everyone I knew, nobody answered of course. So with no other real options I fired it back up and limped home in first. Made it to town just before the football game let out and dodged the traffic that was my biggest fear.
Sucks, but sometimes theres no other options than to hope your junk doesn't totally grenade before you get home

 

BTDT... Had a Ford truck that broke the clutch linkage a couple of times before I 'beefed up' the OEM part. Got pretty adept at clutchless shifting.... LOL. I did get 'nudged' by a moron behind me the second time it broke on the way home; he saw me start to go from a stopsign, looked to see if there was room for him, then went. My motor hadn't caught yet, he kissed my step bumper. And this wasn't one of those stamped sheetmetal bumpers either; this was one of the old-style fabricated channel-iron numbers that had zero give in it (my X backed into a concrete bollard with it once; it sheared off the bumper-to-frame attachment bolts but left no mark on the bumper other than a fleck of the yellow paint off the concrete). The 'nudger' needed a couple of headlights and a grill....

 

Danny, I had that happen on a Pontiac I once drove. Just a small rubber hose but what a pain in the ass to get up in there and change it. Bruce.

 

When I 1st move here some 18 years ago. My 1st car here was a 1962 buick electria.{that's the one that had the big black snake curled up under the hood when I went to look at it}.After I had painted it a nice metallic blue with a white top, I convinced my wife to go to a local car show with me. On the way to the show my wife says whats that smell? Then all of a sudden I felt a burning across my ass. I yelled and jumped while driving and slammed my head on the head liner. Quickly pulled off the road to find out the power seat{which was wearing thin} Had some kind of wire that burn through the seat.I unplugged the power wire to the seat and we went on to the car show. When we got home I told my wife man my butt really hurts ,she took a look. That damn wire burned right through my shorts and under ware and left a burn line across 1 side of my butt cheek. Then I happen to be looking on e bay and they were selling a almost brand new seat for my year car but didn't have the power tracks. I told the guy I had the tracks. Bought the seat for $25 bucks but cost $60 to ship it to me from Washington state. That sloved the problem. LOL. Bruce.

 

Late 70's Bill Burnam, RIP, asked me to go the LARS with him, my roadster was on jack stands so I say hell yes in a 29 hi boy topless roadster,Ole Blue, can't get any better than that, we got to LA, stayed for a couple of days then headed for Hwy 101 on Sunday to beat the heat of Hwy 5 for our trip home, things went smooth until we got to about 20-25 miles south of Salinas, Ca when steam starts coming out from the hood, no station for miles, no people for miles, so Bill whips off the freeway and down a frontage road I told him there wasn't any thing ahead but he drove to the end of the road and under some trees sat 2 Mexican farm workers shacks. He pulled the hood and found that the radiator top tank had split from the top tray so we are now screwed, Bill always said that when you took your daily driver you never took any tools so if you built your hot rod right you don't need tools, wrong, any way he goes over to the houses 2 guys were standing in the door way giving us the stink eye when Bill tried to talk to them but they didn't speak english after a while the one guy went into the house and I thought he was going for his gun but he returned with 2 half used tubes of JB weld,I didn't think that would work on the copper metal but after scrapping all the old soder away he filled the crack up with the JB and the guys at the house brought us 2 five gallons pails of water, poured what we needed tried to give them money and they would not take any. We were still 150 miles from home but Ole Blue ran as cool as it looked. A couple of years later on a roadster run Bill lifted his hood to check his oil and I saw that the JB weld was still there I asked him about it and he said if it an't broke don't mess with it. I should add that roadster was driven cross country 2 or 3 times with that JB weld on there.

 

I was at a show one time out in the country on a two lane blacktop in western OH. When the show was over the promoter announced that it would be OK to leave your mark. That's all it took; everybody was peeling out.

There were about 200 cars and I wanted to watch, so I waited until everyone was just about done. When I left, they motioned me to peel out too. SO, I DID! (Dumb move on my part!)

Now, it had a 265 ft. lb. non-world class, T-5 out of a 6 cyl. Camaro. I'd put it through some stuff already, but I didn't think about all the rubber that was just laid down and the car was loaded with all my stuff. Well, it hooked up!

The '32 Sedan weighed about 2700 lbs. (plus 2 people and all our stuff) and the motor was cranking 465 horses and 590 ft. lbs. at that time. I found out the hard way how much those stock T-5's can take!

It peeled in first, sideways in 2nd and when I hit 3rd... It sounded like and ice crusher exploded! My daughter looked over at me all wide eyed and said, "What do we do now, Dad?!" I just laughed and put it in 5th (the only gear I had left) and we drove home (about 30 miles) without stopping. I did roll through a few stop signs on the way.

BTW - 3rd gear is the T-5's weak point. It breaks the bearing retainer on the counter shaft on the back of the case. However, I had a stock world-class trans out of an '88 V-8 Camaro waiting in the garage. We spent the next couple of days changing it and waiting for a different clutch disc.

Now I have an A-5 from Astro Performance rated at about 450 torque in it and haven't broken it yet, but I don't drive it like I used to either. But once in a while...

 

Going to the Golden State Chevy Parts pickup show in Ogden, Utah one year in my ol chevy pickup. My kid was 16 and he and his buddy were with me and my brother in my kid's identical black primered chevy pickup. We were coming down Echo canyon in Utah when I started getting coolant on the windshield through the hood louvers. Up ahead I see that big rest stop 1/2 way down and I pulled in...kid follows me in and as I stop there is a little stream of coolant pissing out through the grille bars...a pin hole in a radiator tube! We had no stop leak so I asked my son for 2 cigarettes....emptied the tobacco into the radiator and as we stood there with the old 292 idling the leak stopped....I made a mental note to fix it when I got back to Omaha but never did and 3 years later when I sold it, the tobacco was still sealing off that pinhole.

 

On our way to Nats North in Kalamazoo several years ago, we smelled something burning, I quick hit the kill switch and coasted off an exit ramp. Made it far enough off the ramp to stop & safely get out of our car. The large hot wire to the alternator had fried. A young lady stopped and asked if she could help, so she took our extra passenger to the parts store for an assortment of wire and connectors. We rewired everything and it took care of the problem. Just to play it safe, we bought a Haywire kit while at the show and used it on another '40. Of course my wife took this picture while we are accessing the damages and what we needed. (I wasn't happy, she's making a Kodak moment out of my misery... Yes, we're still married...) lol

 

A while back, I swapped out the stock "divers helmet" distributor, on the '40 stake truck, to a '42 "crab cap" distributor with a Pertronix in it. Two nights ago, as I was leaving the house to get some dinner, the cap came loose and broke the rotor in half. Fortunately, I had another rotor in the glove box, so I was able to do a quick repair.

Yesterday, I ran out to a buddies house, about 20 miles north of my house, and as I was leaving, I heard a pop and the engine died. Sure enough, the cap came loose and broke the last rotor that I had. After inspecting the cap, I found that the spot that holds the clip, on the driver's side, was broken. I had ordered a new cap and a couple of rotors from O'Reilly, but they were coming in from the warehouse and wouldn't be here until Tuesday.

After a couple of phone calls and discussion, my buddy drove me back to my house, where I gathered up my old distributor, caps and wires, and I swapped it back out in his driveway.

Once I get the cap and fit the new rotors for the other distributor, I'll more than likely just put it all together and leave it under the seat as a backup.

 

On the way to Fall Wildwood a few years ago I nailed a bridge plate on the Pa. Turnpike that had become dislocated and launched my roadster a good 16" off the ground at about 70! When I came down the only thing I broke was the damn headlight stems. A guy in an early 'Vette in front of me had a roll of electrical tape and some sticks off the side of the road and I was back in action.

When we arrived there the search was on for a Mig and my wife located a lady in a Chinese restaurant who's husband knew a landscaper that had some kind of welder....... Next morning they hooked me up and I proceed to lay some beads on the broken stands with the best running Miller I've ever had the pleasure of using. Mild steel wire on stainless stands, so I just layed some fins on about two inches on each side of the breaks. Two years later I sold the car with the same stands on and I saw the car about a year ago and yep, there still there.

 

On a trip to Louisville KY to the NSRA nats in the late 90's I was about 50 miles from Louisville noticed the temp gauge going up. Pulled to the side of the interstate shut my 39 deluxe coupe of and investigated all the belts were loose tightened belts ready for the rest of the drive and the car wouldn't start. It appeared to have no spark called triple A had it towed to Louisville when friends arrived later in the day checked further and the rotor wasn't turning. Called triple A again had it towed to the fairgrounds to the rod repair area. Next day started tearing the 400 Pontiac engine apart. The harmonic balancer had broken and piece of it broke the timing chain. Found a used balancer new chain and gears put it back together and drove it off the fairgrounds that night. I don't want to go through that again

 

<'S'posed to PEE in the tank, not PUT peas in it!>