It had a choke problem I just never fixed, because I knew how to start the car-you simply could not give it any gas when starting it or it would flood immediately and irrevocably! But I knew that, and since the car was generally a throw away car (I only paid $250 for it) I couldn't bother myself to fix it.
Well, one day I came out of classes and went over to where I had parked on the side of a road on a hill, and I couldn't find my car. I walked up and down, thinking for sure I parked it there.
Finally, I assumed the emergency brake gave way and the car must have rolled in to the street and been towed away, but when I went to Security, they said no. I remember standing there completely puzzled, and then slowly realized...my car must have been stolen. That piece of crap car...someone stole it!
I got a call from police a few days later saying they found the car and I could go pick it up. When I got to it, I had to hot wire it to drive it away because the ignition had been ripped out.
But the thing that made me laugh was when they took me to the car in the impound lot, I looked in the back seat, and the air cleaner cover and air filter had been thrown in there. The police told me they found the car in the parking lot of a convenience store and I knew immediately and laughed aloud...
The car started just fine when cold. You could give it all the gas you wanted, but when it was hot...NO GAS! They must have stopped to get smokes or something, and when they came out, flooded it immediately. They must have put up the hood, removed the air filter to let the carburetor dry out, then suddenly realized, here they were in a busy parking lot on a busy street, with the hood up on a stolen car...they just left it there and took off!
Hehehe...it was such a beater, I just got some toggle switches and mounted them in the dash, and if you wanted to start the car, flip this switch to make power available, flip this switch to turn on the starter, etc.
LOL, one of the last things we did before that car gave up the ghost was to use a pair of dykes to carve the Boston Bruins logo with the spoked wheel on the hood of that car. It was one of those cars that if you drove it to a party, people would sit on it or stand on it..may it rust in peace!!!!
I had a 1966 Dodge van that looked almost exactly like this at my disposal during my junior and senior year in high school...
Gosh, how I loved that. It had a slant six in it, and I drove that everywhere and never once, not even once changed the oil. (That was before I became a jet mechanic in the USN, and I knew nothing about cars)
I was so lucky to be able to drive that around in high school, and also, when I came home from the Navy on leave.
But my favorite car, and the one that my nephew said "taught him everything he needed to know about cussing" when he saw me working on it (which was...constantly!) was my MG Midget I bought as a young sailor, the first car I purchased on my own.
I was in the Navy, had just finished my first Med cruise, and had saved enough on that cruise for a down payment (I did go on liberty overseas, but what the hell else was I going to do with my money?) and went to a used car lot near Jacksonville, FL (I was at NAS Cecil Field) where I saw the car.
It had 26 thousand miles. It was a completely weird greenish-yellowish color that I found out later in life was "Chartreuse". I just thought it was piss yellow, and looked brown under streetlights. It had a touch of opaque degradation around the edges of the rear plastic window. Boy, did I fall for that car (and the salesman probably steered me right to it!) I have maybe one or two pictures of that car, but this one from the Internet resembles it:
Arranged it with the bank, got the insurance set up. I must say...there are a lot of kids who find out about what it means to have to pay for something when they have to buy toilet paper themselves for the first time. For me, it was when I had to buy that insurance. I swear, I nearly fell on the floor, and I'm not joking. I was so flabbergasted, my knees nearly buckled.
I was 19, male, in the US Navy, and my insurance was going to cost me $1200 a year!!!!!!!! (And this was in 1978!)
I took that check to the used car lot, jumped in, and took off. Man, I was 19, the sun was out, and I had my first car! Driving in the left hand lane of that Florida highway, the world was my oyster!
Then in a flash, the car suddenly bucked and the engine died! I probably hadn't gone more than three or four miles, and the car died! I did a dead stick landing in the right hand breakdown lane after cutting across all three lanes, and stood there forlornly wondering why my new car was dead.
I never even thought to look at the gas gauge. Out of gas. Remember, this was during one of those Gas Crisis times, so the guy probably emptied every drop he could out of it before selling it to me! Heh, I had never even looked at the gas gauge.
I was a jet mechanic, but I learned every single thing I knew about cars on that car. And I learned every cussword there was to know, too. (My nephews tell me that they learned all they knew about cussing by watching me work on my British Sports Car in the driveway.)
Weeks after I got it, I had to replace the tires, which I couldn't afford. $400. Then, trying to do my own maintenance, I contaminated the clutch with gear oil. That cost something like $600! Flabbergasted, I asked why it was so expensive, and the guy said they had to pull the engine out of the car to fix the clutch...something I found out for myself a few short years later.
But the most annoying was a series of alternators I had to replace, with were something like $75 a pop! Then a battery. And when I replaced the battery, I saw a huge amount of corrosion and residue in the battery area. I didn't click with me, because I still didn't know much about cars. On one of my trips up the East Coast when going home on leave (a 24 hour drive which I would do straight through) the noxious gasses from the overcharging battery made my eyes and throat sting, and I could taste it in my mouth, until the car died in a rest area.
It turned out the entire problem was due to the battery cables, which were simple caps. Not a lead thing you clamped down with a bolt, but...simple lead caps. They didn't fit snugly, came loose, had corrosion, so the problems ended up with an overcharging battery that erupted acid which ran down into the battery compartment. I later heard that some people who used that idiotic cable-cap system simply drove a wood screw through the top of the lead cap into the battery post!
Well, I learned how to fix that car, and for the next eight years I drove it through New England snowstorms, and while it only left me stranded once, that was simply because of the inordinate amount of time I spent working on it.
I had it repainted, replaced the convertible top and the carpeting, took out the crappy stock radio and console and put a new radio and customized the console with new oil temperature, ammeter, and other gauges that matched. I replaced the springs with stiffer ones, shock absorbers with stiff ones, replaced all the front end bushings and added an inch thick sway bar. I replaced the single Zenith carburetor and manifold and put twin stromberg carburetors on, put in electrical ignition, put special cool looking mags on it that looked like this:
But the customization I loved most was a really cool looking dual exhaust system that was jet black and had four chrome tipped pipes that peeked out just under the bumper. I don't have any pictures, but when I searched the Internet, after all these years...there it was!
I could never determine if I got a single extra horsepower out of that car with all those things, but boy, was it ever fun to drive, and sounded great! 
That car went everywhere. Never got stuck in the snow. I actually had radial chains for it. Put about 130,000 miles on it before I sold it to buy a reliable car after I got married...:)
One of my favorite stories: I had a great aunt who lived on Cape Cod, my Aunt Sally. She was an 88 year old irish woman, thin and short, and had absolutely no governor on her mouth. She said anything that came into her mind...today, she would turn even the staunchest Social Justice Warrior into a quivering mass of indignant outrage. She was blunt to the point of absurdity, and our family, even decades later, still tells stories about my Aunt Sally. Conversations usually included at least one low-voiced admonition from a relative "Aunt Sally...you just can't say things like that..."
So, my father told me to be a good grand-nephew and visit her where she lived alone on the Cape, so I went down there to take her out to lunch.
As I pull up, she comes outside in a long, heavy overcoat, old fashioned hat on top of her head, huge, sky-blue purse dangling from one forearm (the kind that resemble a foot tall Isosceles triangle when viewed on end, and could probably have been used to storm a castle under a rain of arrows) and she peered at me and my piss-yellow sportscar from behind her Cat-Eye glasses.
"Are we going in that?" she asked suspiciously.
When I said we were, she paused dubiously, then got in as I held the door open for her.
I walked to the other side of the car and got in, and was starting up the car as I noticed her furiously digging away in her giant purse for something. She pulled out something and slapped in on my side window.
It was a "St. Christopher Help Us" sticker! I very nearly burst out laughing, but she was all set to go after that. I left that sticker on my car until I sold it...:)
Yes. I got bitten hard by the "British Sports Car Disease", but I had so much fun with that car!
At the DCI finals in Birmingham around 1979, some kids liked my car...that's my hat the driver is wearing!
Here is my buddy who went into the Navy with me, we took it up to Nova Scotia on vacation around 1983 (and yes, we did get stopped at the border, and yes, my car did get dismantled)
