Posted on 06/14/2019 8:08:35 PM PDT by Army Air Corps
Much time has passed since I last called FReeper motorheads together for a good garage chinwag.
Tonight's discussion: Your first motor vehicle project. When was the fist time that you got your hands dirty working on a car, truck, motorcycle, etc.?
Those are neat cars. I have known more than a few British car fans who have cut their teeth on an Austin Healy Sprite.
Choice was bus or car to get to school...a car wins.
‘69 Chevy Nova 2 door. Businessmens special. Inline 6, 2 speed powerglide, no radio, no air conditioning. No nothing. Black vinyl bench seats that would blister your butt if you sat on them on a hot summer day. Bought it for $300. Went through the basics: cap, rotor, points, condenser, coil, plugs, fluids. Scraped 2 inches of sludge from inside the valve cover. Didn’t realize how sludged up that powerglide was until one day the trans shifted 20mph quicker. Never shifted at the higher speed again. The body was rust city. But you just could not kill that driveline. Wish I’d kept it.
CC
I am duly impressed. A real homebuilt car.
Bicycles, Gocarts and then the
Old Man taught me to drive a
Stick Shift.
I was 12.
I was Off to the Races!
Building motorcycles, Baja Bugs
and now Killer Drones!
I’m a Cable guy more than a Mech.
For me it was putting a set of headers on my 1969 Camaro. I was trying to get a little more power and sound out of my 327 engine. The problem was that it was in the winter time with temperatures in the low 20’s.
That is usually how it works: it is the quirky cars tat we loved the most. One of my high buddies bought a second hand car from the grandmother of another mutual friend. It was a 1980 Olds land yacht. The car had some quirks, but my buddy still says that he misses that car.
;o)
Summer of 67, my cousin and I (ages 14 and 13) built a mini bike from a 26” bicycle frame. We rebuilt the middle part of the frame, and used 20” wheels to give more room for the 3 1/2 hp Briggs. A jackshaft was mounted just ahead of the rear wheel with the original sprockets trading places. On the left side there was a belt drive centrifugal clutch, and a slightly larger pulley on the jackshaft. No brakes, but we didn’t care. We had a lot of fun with it that summer, and then sold it to a neighbor farmer’s son. They kept it going for another year or so.
That sounds like a sweet set-up. If I had something like that at that age, I would have spent my summers wandering all over creation!
Changing the oil in our ‘63 Beetle. I was 12. At least the bug had a gasoline-fired heater, run ya outta the car in 5 minutes or less!
Yeah, that can be taken a couple of ways...
Funny how that works, eh? :)
Me and Mike built lots of goofy stuff as kids. We used to put on a carnival in the neighborhood. It started off with a “Kit” from Muscular Dystrophy or something the first year - but then we just figured we would do it ourselves and keep the money! Had to pay to enter, and then tickets for the various events. Mom’s would bake cakes for the cake walk, etc. It was probably 10 of us neighborhood kids working on it, and hundreds of kids would come every summer.
Rigged up the garage as a haunted house with strings to dummy’s arms and coffin doors. Made a roulette wheel out of a bike wheel mounted on a piece of plywood.
For the pond we built a raft out of four pallets, two sections of plywood, and then stuffed full of wood inside the pallets! It was so heavy we put the sections together in the pond. It survived about 5 Minnesota winters stuck in the ice.
We built a pinball machine out of wood. To get the marble started it was a bolt on a spring. I forget how we operated the “flappers” - just two of them right near the bottom of the exit. Maybe with bolts on springs? I do recall the flappers had rubber bands around them.
The wood base had holes in it with the point values written for each hole. Various walls and obstacles were made with nails driven into the wood floor and then wrapped with rubber bands.
We sure had a lot of fun with that stuff.
Rest in Peace Mike!
I had a 65 Buick Skylark. The local U-pull-it had a wrecked 65 Grand Sport. I had the bright idea of making a GS clone out of it. I got as far as putting in the bucket seats and bolting in the center console and hooked up the shifter, then the timing gear jumped a tooth and flames started shooting out of the carb. Those old 300 cu in Buicks were good engines, but they used plastic timing gears that were prone to doing this. In a fit of frustration I told my brother in law, give me $20 for it and get it the BLEEP out of my sight! To this day I still kick myself whenever I see a nicely restored mid 60’s Skylark, but soon after that I got a great deal on a 68 Dodge Charger. not an RT, but I put a low res exhaust on it and hauled ass for a 318. I do miss it but I’m happy with the 64 Chevy. I told my daughter it’s hers when the time comes, she’s very careful when she drives it and I gotta admit she has a much cleaner driving record than I did at that age. :)
But it makes for a great story!. :D
It was a Renault Daphine,,
Wow.
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