Oh, the stories I’ve got that involve cars and the situations I wish I had never been a part of. I’ve got a laundry list that rolls out like red carpet for a celebrity…let’s see: there was the hood flying up on the girlfriend’s newly-acquired Dodge. There was the night that I wound up forty feet down from the roadbed after letting someone else drive the car so I could sleep, only for them to pass out with the cruise control on. There was the day I had to ask my dad, hat-in-hand, to please bring his car and a tow strap because my 1978 LeBaron was buried up to the rockers in the muddy riverbank and was quickly heading to China, and the day I had to ask a cousin to help me chisel off my battery from where it tack-welded itself to the hood because I wanted to go drifting in the ice and snow of a parking lot and didn’t think once about a battery tie-down. Now that I’m thinking about that one, it was the same LeBaron. Or we could count on the day before yesterday, when my wife came home and wanted to know why there was tire marks in the otherwise pristine snow in our front yard. (Sorry, honey, it was the Mustang. It begged me to.)
All of these stories have the same basic principle: I had the best of intentions, but no matter how prepared I thought I was, I wasn’t. No matter how good I thought things would go, they would immediately fall apart, and no matter how many warnings I got from people who weren’t suffering from the same illness I do, I had to twist the key, find a gear and go find out for myself. And if you’re a reader here you surely have a story like that. Maybe you decided to drive home that $500 crapcan because who needs to rent a trailer? Maybe you thought your significant other wouldn’t mind it if you dumped the clutch and grabbed rubber in second gear and wound up getting a solid earful? Tell us about it!
Hmm, I’m sure that there were lots. Know that if you dump the clutch in reverse with a trans that has the idler on the right (passenger) side, said idler gets kicked away from the mainshaft and may split the case wide open.
geez,where to start?—one that pops up is as a feckless youth,driving around in my buddy’s 66 ss impala—283/4 speed—out in the boonies—come to a complete stop,1st gear and about 11,000 rpm’s and dump the clutch—-saginaws blow up real good!–cost me my first income tax refund!
1st car, 64 Falcon, 6 cyl 3 on the tree. Put in a 289 four speed. Drive shaft to long. Cut it, welded it, made sure it was balanced. Nobody mentioned the 6 cyl rear end was not stout enough. I did a 6000 rpm clutch dump in front of 10 friends with not good results. learned how to replace rear end
Had a flat road w/ two big humps in the area – After smoking a few my friend
and I decided to ‘ see if I can get this thing airborne ‘ – yep ’64 Galaxie 500
caught some air – no damage but it made a hell of noise touching down .
Suprise hood up ? yep 60’s Peugeot on a 2 lane stone walled bridge
but that wasn’t planned ….Winter doughnuts that ended up on the wrong side of a snow bank – someone in the house called the cops THEN looked out side and
said Oh Shit I just called the cops on XXXXX – she told me that later
getting married the first time ,getting married the second time . The third time is working out real well. O and yes there were cars involved ,always cars involved.
Pulling a 64 New Yorker with a 63 Bel Air trying to get it started, went around a curve too fast and both wound up in the ditch. It ain\’t easy to drag a 4300 lb car out of the ditch with another car but if you get up enough speed it can be done.