In the last installment of Jacob Davis’s descent into Kenosha madness, he was on the road driving a Hornet coupe behind his father’s truck, which was towing the Sportabout X wagon that he scored from a Colorado junkyard back to Georgia. The coupe has had issues…it doesn’t charge worth a damn, the starter was problematic, and the vacuum-operated windshield wipers (!) weren’t playing nice with the rime ice that was forming on the windshield, thanks to the sub-par windshield heating program going on. That, and the coupe is a base-model three-on-the-tree six cylinder, while the Sportabout is a fully-loaded V8 model. The upgrade would be a nice change of pace, and it’d be neat to see if the “dead” car could potentially live.
After convincing a friend to loan them his shop for a bit, it turns out that the 304 under the hood isn’t bad at all considering that the car has been sitting for decades. Between the fuel cap that needed to be carved off with a sawzall, a key cylinder that needed to be completely mangled in order to function, and the whole unknown aspect of a revival program, there is a ton of “what if” in this scenario. Maybe it’ll run. Maybe it’ll push a freeze plug…
