Never the Same IC#9 Kirk's Cars: Part two

A loud old Ford Convertible, Greasy Hands with scars, Secret Codes and Crashes

 

                Cue: “Cars” https://youtu.be/LrjM8Fi7J58

                Well, the old Ford convertible sat in an outbuilding in mothballs so to speak for several months.  Mike the brother-in-law had taken the torch to parts of the front and back in a futile attempt to customize the car into what, Kirk didn’t know. Other than Mike’s hack jobs, the body was pretty solid, the car ran, or did run, and hadn’t been home to hordes of rodentia taking up residency in the upholstery, but it did smell bad from being cold and closed up. The major problem then, seemed primarily reversing the hack job and fixing a scrape that was a long sideswipe on the passenger side quarter panel. That’s the rear fender in case you didn’t know.  There was no front bumper to be seen anywhere.

                Going into this repair job on his very first car, Kirk didn’t know much about the old Ford convertible. As they say, he didn’t have “car-nal knowledge” of the inner workings of the car. Overall, it appeared sound excluding the hack job. The overall color was a light dirty gray, or maybe dirty green, or tan, he wasn’t quite sure because he’s color blind, remember? The convertible top once white was still in really good shape. He knew enough to identify that it had a V-8 engine which was relatively cool in itself. It sported a “three on the tree” shifter which meant the car had a standard, manual transmission, a three speed with a column shifter that wasn’t so cool, but at least it wasn’t an automatic. Kirk couldn’t have lived with that!  

Kirk began with the sheet metal fabrication to replace what had disappeared by his brother-in-law’s ad hoc “customizing” work. With some cutting with a torch, bending and hammering he molded the panels into approximately the right shapes. Between his dire attempts at welding said panels into place, Mike ended up doing most of the welding for young Kirk. At that time Kirk learned not to wear wide-topped boots while welding. That is, the boots formed funnels for molten metal to fall into and quickly burn holes through socks and into tender foot flesh. Kirk scarred both his insteps with hot weld or braze before he learned better. On the other hand, wearing work boots with bellbottoms, he also learned that fringy bellbottoms caught fire pretty easily as well, but he didn’t go up in flames as you might think. Generally, the fringe would burn off and shorten the pant legs’ lengths just a little.

Along the same lines, i.e. pain and injury, Kirk felt like he owed his brother-in-law for the “loan” of his first car so on some weekends, he’d help out at the speed shop in the big city. The speed shop was a feast for a young gearhead’s eyes. Outside in the parking lot sat Corvettes, Mustangs, Challengers, and all other matter of fast cars. Inside were chrome valve covers, air cleaners, headers and all kinds of go-fast parts. Kirk drooled over it all, but he had a few tasks to do mostly running for parts and non-mechanical like changing tires and the like.

One event of note was when the owner asked him to bring a Corvette differential in from his truck across the street. Well, the innards of a differential was basically an iron case with yoke for the driveshaft and the enmeshed ring and pinion gears. The whole thing weighs about sixty pounds, something that Kirk could, supposedly, handle. He found the greasy thing hard to pick up at first, but with a hand on the yoke and the other grabbing the ring gear he picked it up. Piece ‘o cake. So shuffling along across the street with this greasy, heavy iron thing, the ring gear turned a bit and jammed Kirk’s finger in the gears. Reacting to pain, he let go with that hand and the differential slipped out of the other hand, falling, squarely on his big toe. He looked around to find he hadn’t been spotted and so picked up the differential and delivered the part to the owner hoping that it hadn’t been damaged after the drop. His toe throbbed; his toenail eventually turned black and fell off. The accident apparently broke his toe because it hurt for the rest of his life. Back to work on his old Ford.       

                After returning the car from “custom” to original state or close to original, Kirk began work on the rest of the body work. The passenger side quarter panel had that crease in it from a side-swipe in its past. Down the length of the crease, Kirk drilled small holes. Then, working down in the deepest crease, he inserted metal screws and using a claw hammer he pried the metal out close to its original contour. From there, he began a long-winded process of layering body filler “Bondo” to complete the restoration.  Actually, Kirk had to do the layering process several times. Mixing the bondo with a toothpaste-like hardener and using a plastic squeegee he spread the doughy bondo out flat. He learned to love that sweet chemical smell of bondo.

After it hardened within an hour or so, he used a “cheese grater” to take off the high spots. From there he could tell how much more bondo the repair required. Quite a lot more was needed and he used over a gallon before he got to the sanding stage. With a lot of time and plenty of elbow grease, weeks’ worth in fact, he finally got it done. With minor imperfections, he repeated the process until, finally, he could do a final hand sanding over the entire car to prepare it for painting.  During this whole process, we need to remember that Kirk attended the Vo-Tech school for automotive training so he could actually apply some of what he learned to his repair project.

This paint job would be his first attempt at painting with a primer coat applied over the sanded car. The primer went on rather haphazardly which he wet sanded afterward to fix some of the imperfections.  Picking an original color of baby blue for some unknown reason, he painted his first car, his very first paint job. It wasn’t the best paint job by any means, but there were no runs which are saying something in itself though there were some dry areas and lots of orange peel.

                Still not having a driver’s license, Kirk wanted his car to be ready when he did have permission to drive the streets on his own. He needed to make sure his car was running right especially after it sat so long.  Having learned the basic components of an engine with a basic understanding of how it worked, Kirk thought he could take on the basic techniques of a tune up.  Present days’ cars run practically forever, or don’t when the computers fail, without any so called tune-up; however, back then a tune up was a regular required necessity or you’d be driving a misfiring, farting, under-powered car. So Kirk dove right in.

Finding out a little about the engine in a manual, he identified the engine as a Ford “Y Block” with 292 cubic inches. Not an engine a hot rodder would normally seek out, but they were solid reliable engines and the fact that it was a V-8 was a good thing. Kirk did find out one inherent problem with these engines later on…

Buying spark plugs, points, an air filter and spark plug wires with some of his hard earned grease monkey cash, he began the tune up so it would run better. With some help, Kirk learned the secret code to an engine’s ignition system and to do a good tune up you stuck to the code. His engine’s code was 15486372. Literally, the code is printed right on the engine somewhere if you know where to look! With assistance from his brother-in-law and the manual to tell him the things like spark plug and point gaps, he got the engine running, but it still wasn’t running too well because the timing was off.  To solve this problem, he had to adjust the timing, duh.

                Using a cool timing light and checking the manual once again, he fired the strobing light at the rotating balancer pulley where he could see the marks in the strobing light frozen in place. With a few careful twists of the ignition distributor, he lined up the marks at 5 degrees BTDC (Before Top Dead Center). With a needless number of higher revs to hear the engine’s fine tuning, Kirk reveled in the sound. He itched to take the car out on the road. And so he did�"illegally, of course.

Cue: “Highway Star” https://youtu.be/Wr9ie2J2690  

                Looking up and down the road for anybody, he inched out on the road and slowly accelerated in first gear, pushed the shifter up to second, and with some more speed pulled it down to third. Coming to the corner, Kirk realized that he wasn’t fully confident the brakes would slow him down. He knew there was good pedal height and the brakes worked going into and out of the garage which was all of 3 miles per hour. Gingerly, pushing on the brake pedal not much happened. He pushed harder. The corner was fast approaching. He pushed almost as hard as he could. And the car stopped pretty well enough. It just amounted to a learning curve. He drove it back to the garage a little slower.

Around this time, his sister and brother-in-law had a baby, and so Kirk became an uncle. Not a big deal in the direction of this story except that his buddies picked up that Kirk had become a proud uncle and as a result, Kirk became Uncle Kirk This nickname became used especially along the lines of automotive work and fun!  This is  a fact to remember as we venture on in Kirk’s life with cars.

                It wasn’t too much later that Kirk got his license. That meant that he had to get the car inspected which opened another can of worms. Looking at the lights, the headlights and turn signals worked which was a miracle in itself, but there were no taillights and the brake lights didn’t work. With help he solved the brake lights with a new switch, but the taillights were another whole matter that meant he had to trace the wiring from switch to lights. With a haphazard and apathetic attempt on the tracing, Kirk never found the wiring problem so he just ran a wire from the lights to a separate switch on the dashboard. Along the same lines, he found an old funky, very loud horn that he wired to an intermittent switch.           

                About this time, Kirk began an infatuation with Volkswagens and VWs transformed into dune buggies. Somewhere one his friends saw an old beat up VW alongside the road. Kirk had to have it and so he had Mike tow it home. With the cutting torch, sledgehammer and chisel, Kirk went to work on the VW’s body. Well, the body wasn’t all that great to begin with pretty rusty in fact like the fenders for instance he could just rip them off by hand. Anyway, he got down to the body pan, basically a stamped out sheet of thick metal instead of a frame. He had read in one of his magazines about shortening the body pan about twelve inches to fit a fiberglass body on the pan. Well, he didn’t plan that so he decided to shorten the pan two and half feet. After cutting, grinding, re-welding, the cuts and then adding strengthening metal, he succeeded in his project! Being shortened so much, the open buggy ended up being about square, the same length as the width.

The little buggy needed a clutch, Kirk found out that other than unhooking wires, linkages, and cooling ductwork, which he threw away, the engine would drop right out with four easy bolts. Piece of cake! He cut the mufflers off to get that necessary noisy effect. He also cut the wheels’ centers out and re-welded huge old dirt racing tires and wheels on the hubs. Kirk had created quite the off road beast!  With no fenders or body whatsoever, Kirk would get plastered with mud on those wet days out in the fields. When winter came, the snow flew! Pulling the old VW hood that was shaped like a bathtub shaped like a banana behind the buggy, he gave the buddies quite the ride around. With a long tow rope, they could make a wide turn and the hood with a rider swung wide like a water skier.  Another case where it’s surprising no one got killed.

Well, it was after the old Ford got inspected and Kirk became more independent because he had his own wheels! The baby blue car never left him stranded, but there were close calls. About that inherent problem with these engines: If he revved the engine just a little too high, (no tachometer yet), the engine would swallow a pushrod. For those who don’t know what a push rod is, it is a long solid steel rod that transmits the action of the camshaft up to the rocker arms which opens the engine valves.

 What would happen, the pushrod would fall off the cam lifter and slide down beside it literally disappearing from sight inside the valve covers. The first time drove Kirk crazy because he didn’t know why the engine misfired. After diagnosing possible ignition problems he came up empty and dumbfounded until he looked inside the valve covers. With a collection of metal clothes hangers straightened out, long screwdrivers, and needle nose pliers Kirk would fish around blind until he located the dropped rod. Eventually after pulling it up and losing it again, over and over, he’d fish out the pushrod and readjust the offending valve. Imagine this on really cold days. Yeah, the engine would be hot after he babied the misfiring car home, but starting work right away would be finger burning. So waiting a little, he’d still be working on it well after the engine cooled off. With oily fingers and stone cold metal parts fixing the problem was no cakewalk. 

 Kirk’s friends never really commented on the old car, but he figured they were just jealous because he was the first in his inner circle to have his own car. Someone sometime nicknamed Kirk’s old car “The Blue Bomb.” Yeah, they were definitely jealous.

The car proved noisy and fast enough for a gearhead’s first car. A car equipped with just a cherry bomb muffler was close to not having a muffler at all. After school and sports, Kirk would head home which was way better than riding the old cheesewagon bus. Tthe village had a steep downhill and Kirk on his way home would rev the old Blue Bomb up in second gear to above the speed limit and then let off the gas pedal all the way down the hill. With a little system backpressure, the exhaust would howl like an enormous wolf howling at the moon with the sound echoing off the buildings like a deep canyon. This he’d do every day so it actually surprised him that the cops weren’t waiting for him because he was sure someone would eventually complain�"but it sounded soooooo cool! Kirk had a little luck in some cases because he was never caught.

Kirk’s friends didn’t ride in his first car all that many times, actually. His black friend from wrestling rode with him from time to time, but in his first ride in the old Ford, Kirk’s friend had to ask what the toggle switches were for. Kirk explained the one he purposely wired the taillights separately so if the police chased him he could turn off his taillights and disappear into the night. And of course�"beep-beep! The other switch was self-explanatory. On another snowy occasion, Kirk’s newly installed fat exhaust pipe fell off. Sliding underneath the car in the wet snow and salt, he hefted the heavy pipe and the steam from the hot pipe rolled off his gloves. Eventually he got the pipe wired back up, because that’s how he had installed it in the first place. 

Another time, another friend rode with Kirk just cruisin’ around. The conversation circled around to the story that street signs were modified recently to shear off easily to minimize damage if hit. Well, on a quiet corner, Kirk stopped at a stop sign and pondered the story. Having no front bumper, he spun the Blue Bomb around and slowly, very, very slowly, backed up to the stop sign. Tap! The bumper hit the stop sign and wham! It went down surprising them both. They sat there with shrugs on shoulders and faces. Finally, they got out and rolling down both windows they stuck the sign in the back seat with the loooong post sticking out the driver’s side window because Kirk didn’t want the post snagging on anything along the road and wrecking things like the car’s windows.  Heading out from the scene of the crime, they kept their eyes out for the cops because that would be the one rare time they’d see one�"for sure!

Ducking into their friend’s apartment parking lot because it was close by, they thought they could ditch the sign because they couldn’t ride around with it sticking out the window right? Well, pulling into the parking area which was pretty tight, Kirk pulled in along a fence and wham! In a split-second the sign’s post snagged on a fence post and the stop sign sprang up from the back seat swiveling and slicing around like a giant cleaver. It happened so fast, Kirk slammed on the brakes when the post snagged the post, but by then it was too late. The swinging blade of a stop sign had missed his friend’s head by an inch nearly giving him a haircut or worse�"and the sign had sliced up into the convertible top just above Kirk’s friend’s head.

 Turning off the ignition, Kirk put his head into his knuckles that gripped the steering wheels and took a big shuttering breath. His friend sat there with terror struck frozen big eyes. No words were spoken at the time; after some time, they just dragged the sign out of the car slowly and carefully. They deposited the sign in front of their friend’s apartment who really didn’t want it, but Kirk explained what happened and adamantly vowed not to ever put the sign back in his car. After hearing the story, the friend with the apartment acquiesced.

When the season grew cooler with autumn winds blowing leaves about, Kirk would aimlessly drive around the village and infamous park making windows rattle wherever he went, whenever he could.  One later snowy day, he pulled up nearly to a stop that afforded an almost a blind view of the street to the right because of a bar establishment sat nearly on the shoulder of the street. Nearly pausing to a stop Kirk quickly looked both ways, when suddenly a truck appeared out of nowhere making a left turn almost too sharp, cutting the corner. Snow on the road could have been a factor.

The truck headed right for Kirk’s Blue Bomb. Kirk slammed on the brakes, but far too late because the truck plowed into the old Ford’s left front and seeing it had no front bumper made quite a mess of things. Kirk sat there shell-shocked sitting there a minute before getting out the passenger side door because the driver’s side door stuck shut.  The other driver had gotten out to survey the damage to his truck which was minimal to the old iron truck bumper. Kirk couldn’t bear to look, but ascertained that the old Ford wasn’t going anywhere with a severely crunched left fender and a folded up hood. Bright yellow coolant leaked out onto the street and ran down into a nearby drainage grate. A person from the bar announced that they had called the police. Of course they did, Kirk thought. What’s going to happen to me? Jail time? Big fines? Court appearances?

The village police arrived quite expediently. Taking a quick look, the cop called for a tow truck for Kirk’s bent car while the other driver said his truck would be just fine. To make this story short, they all determined the other driver was at fault and because Kirk’s old Ford was nearly worthless, there would be no settlement to speak of after considering his deductible on insurance.  The tow truck came and hauled Kirk’s car to Mike’s backyard which Kirk felt bad about seeing the car was a loan, more or less, but there it was.

The Blue Bomb had its last hurrah in the hands of Kirk but now, it was effectively, dead.  Kirk would never be the same after the Blue Bomb crash.