Hot Rods Repairing On The Road...

Everyone Thinks They Are A Mechanical Engineer Until You Are A Week Late To Start Your 18 Year Olde College Life And Cross Thread A Water Pump Bolt On Your 1948 Mercury Coupe In Dunphy Nevada When It Is 103 Degrees....True Story...

 

Here's the story I always post on threads like this :

"In the early sixties, I was going to the University of Minnesota driving a '61 Corvair Monza. I was coming home right through downtown Minneapolis, and I heard a horrible noise and the car ground to a halt. I got out and looked at it, and the back of the engine was literally lying on the street; the real wheels had a funny camber to them too. Turns out, the engine in a corvair is suspended from the car at three points, two on each side in the front, and one in the middle in the rear. The nut had worked off of the rear bolt, allowing the engine (which was put in from the bottom), to fall down. After looking at it, there didn't appear to be anything else wrong, so off I go, walking back a couple of blocks, trying to find the missing nut. As you would expect, I couldn't find it. When I got back to the car, there was a crowd of 6 or 7 people standing there looking at it and commenting that it couldn't be fixed. After looking at it for a while, I got an idea. I removed one of the lug nuts and lo and behold, it was the same size as the missing nut. Luckily, the Corvair had a scissors jack, and I was able to get it under the engine. I jacked it up, and the hole in the mount went right over the stud. Once it was jacked up all the way, I put the lug nut on flat side up, tightened it up with the jack handle, made sure the 3 lug nuts on the wheel I robbed were tight, and put the jack and handle away. I started the car, checked everything which seemed OK, got in the car and drove away, much to the amazement of the crowd that had gathered. It was to my amazement as well."


You may think that this story is not HAMB friendly, but it kinda is. At that time, I owned a '51 ford that I was working on. When I got home, I put the jack under the engine again, removed the lug nut and put it back on the wheel. I then went through the extra nuts and bolts from the Ford I had in a coffee can, found a 7/16" fine thread nut, and put it on the engine mount and tightened it up (with a lock washer). That was probably the only Corvair in history with flathead Ford parts on it.

 

Who took the pic?

 

A couple of problems on the All Deuce Run, Harry had a distributor failure, a local guy pulled over and ask us do we need any help, we told him the problem and he said he had a new on on the shelf at home, 30 minutes later he was back with a new distributor, we switched out the coils and we were back on the road.

 

Another problem on the all Deuce run something broke and we needed a welder, in the middle of nowhere the brake down happened where a gentleman was mowing his lawn, he just happened to have a welder on his truck, another 30 minute repair and we were off again.

 

And then it was my turn, we didn't have the luck of the Irish, I ended up on a rollback and the car was repaired a few days later, thanks to my pal Dave that came and picked us up.

This one wasn't solved on the road.

The pivot ball for the clutch arm had snapped. HRP




This one wasn't ether, 140 miles from home a crossfire distributor let me down.