Automobiles

What can I write about automobiles?

I could write about my first car – a 1958 Fiat Sedan that got me to a local college and back home every day during my freshman year. Except – I’ve already blogged about that car, and IMHO it was a pretty good post. It was called The Fiat. Find it here.

So I will write about my second car, a 1955 Chevrolet. It got me to a college in Richmond every week during my sophomore year and back home every weekend. The body had black paint, and it taught me never to buy a car with black paint again. Nothing shows dirt like black auto paint.

One cold, winter day Richmond got 13 inches of snow. The plow came by and buried my car. It took me a long time to dig the Chevy out of the snow. Two days later, the city got 12 inches of snow and the plow buried my car again.

The Chevy had an inline six cylinder engine. An internal oil passage was stopped up, and someone had added a length of copper tubing to bypass it. The copper tubing ran over the top of the engine, a few inches above the valve cover, connecting an oil port on one side of the engine to one on the other side. Driving home from work one day, the copper tubing broke – metal fatigue, I suppose. Oil pressure dropped to zero and the oil warning light came on. I stopped, got out of the car, and raised the hood. Oil spurted from the broken tubing, spraying oil over the windshield and across the roof of the car which, of course, was painted white.

The engine ran well but it was worn out. It burned a quart of motor oil every 20 miles. Cylinder compression was so low the Chevy could roll down a hill while parked in first gear with the engine off. The problem was not worn piston rings. The problem was a “soft block” with worn cylinders. During one summer I drove from my home in Virginia to my job in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and sometimes back home for the weekend. I always carried a few gallons of motor oil in the trunk. Not a few quarts; a few gallons. After I drove about a hundred miles or so, the oil light would come on and I would immediately stop the car on the shoulder of the road and raise the hood. I would get a large container of motor oil from the trunk and fill the engine crankcase.  At first I was careful to fill the crankcase to the FULL mark on the dipstick. After a while, I no longer cared about accuracy. I just poured in what seemed like a gallon of motor oil and put the filler cap back on. Then I had to wait a little while because the engine was so hot the starter couldn’t crank it. After that, the car was good for another hundred or so miles.

That same summer I worked in Maryland for a while. I drove to work every Monday morning and drove to my parents’ home every Friday afternoon. I was earning tuition money so, to save every dollar I could, I lived in a room with no electricity, no lights, and no hot water. (I wrote about it here.) I had to stay there during the week, but I was not about to stay there on a weekend when a house with electricity and hot water was a mere 140 miles away. So every Friday afternoon I left work and headed for the D.C. Beltway.

There was a very long on-ramp to the Beltway and on Friday afternoons the Beltway was crowded with traffic – even in 1966 – making it difficult for cars to enter. I always spent 20 to 30 minutes creeping along the on-ramp. When cars ahead of me stopped, I stopped. Every few minutes, cars ahead of me would move forward by one car length and I would move the Chevy ahead by the same amount. But a few minutes of idling had caused a buildup of oil somewhere in the engine. When I gave the engine gas, thick blue smoke poured from the tailpipe for a few seconds. Looking In the rearview mirror, I was unable to see through the dense cloud of smoke. It slowly drifted away and the cars behind me reappeared. They were far behind me. No one dared get close to my car. It was embarrassing to drive a car that produced its own smokescreen, but overhauling the engine was an expensive job and I needed every dollar.

Eventually, I reached the Beltway and headed to I-95 South, where I got in the left lane and stayed. I wasn’t afraid to give the engine gas. For the next ninety miles I passed every vehicle on the road: cars, trucks, buses. Yes, I was driving too fast – to be honest, everyone was driving too fast. The Chevy was worn out and burned oil like crazy but, when I asked, the old car could still fly like the wind.