I'm about to acquire my sixth M.G., and am planning it partly as an
anniversary gift for my wife of almost 20 years. She's been through a
great deal with my passion for hopelessly shot old British sports cars,
though one story in particular stands out.
I'd just finished replacing a blown head gasket on my '71 MGB and had
taken our oldest daughter out for a test-drive. It was a sunny Sunday
afternoon, the car started right up and ran SO much better without an
inch-long gap in the gasket around the #3 cylinder, so rather than just
go up and down the block, we went off for a longer tour than originally
intended.
As the water temp rose, I smelled the unmistakable aroma of glycol and
realized something wasn't as tight as I thought. At a stoplight I
couldn't see any steam, and it was running too well to be a loose head
gasket, so I decided that the right thing to do was to drive the
remaining half-mile or so to my friend Miq's house -- Miq has a gorgeous
Bugeye and at the time had a Spridget autocrosser as well, and a good
selection of tools.
As we pulled into the driveway of Miq's house, I saw him walking out the
driveway with the remote phone in his hand. "It's Kim," he said,
handing me the phone as I was climbing out of the car.
"Did you make it there before you overheated?" she asked, as I
blathered, more than a little dumbfounded, into the phone.
"Whuh-huh-I-uh, yeah, we're fine," I said. "Why did you call here?"
"Well," she said, "when you drove away I saw something dripping from the
car. I tried to yell at you to stop but you were already down the
street and didn't see me. So I touched the leaking stuff on the ground
and could feel it wasn't oil, and then I smelled it and knew it was
coolant. So I got the jug of Prestone and started getting the baby into
the GTI to follow you, and then thought that if you did stop somewhere,
you'd call here to give me directions to where you were and what tools
you needed. And when it was a few minutes after that, I figured you had
probably gone to Miq's, so I called him to check."
This is just one reason why I've had 20 or 30 various cars over the past
20 years, and one wife.
Oh, the leak was from where the heater hose peels back off the
water-pump hose and connects into the metal tube leading back to the
heater. Very silly of me to overlook that one (I mean, it's only right
on top and right up front), but it was literally a 30-second fix with a
screwdriver in Miq's driveway.
--Scott Fisher
Sunnyvale, CA
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