Long rambly discourse on safety and such; feel free to ignore.
When I was first out of High School, 1956, 18 years old, I bought a 1949
MG-TC for $1100. It was beautiful. Within the first month it damned near
killed me. I was tooling down the hill west of Columbia Ave. on 15th
Street in Tulsa in the afternoon traffic, hit the brakes and they went
to the floor with no resistance at all except the return spring. I tried
the hand brake, which was typical of the T-Series I've worked on in that
it didn't do much. Anybody who has ever experienced catastrophic brake
failure knows that it feels like the car *speeds up* instead of slowing
when you hit the floor with the pedal.
I'm sure it's just psychological, because one expects to feel
deceleration and doesn't, but it's a really frightening thing when it
happens. I saved my neck and the car by scraping the right-hand tires on
the curb until the car stopped. Luckily nobody was close to the curb, so
there was actually room for the MG between the right-hand lane cars and
the curb, but it was *very* close. That *really* scared me.
It turned out the seals in the wheel cylinders had little daisy-shaped
metal pieces to help keep the rubber firm. One of the tiny, flimsy
little "petals" had broken off and the seal had totally quit sealing,
causing the entire brake system to fail. I dismantled the entire system
and replaced all of these deadly little daisies with proper modern seals
& never had any more trouble. That taught me something.
I never take for granted that mechanical things are just always going to
work. When I'm in a potentially dangerous situation, I like to tap the
brakes lightly to make sure they are responding and I always try to
avoid panic stops except in competition. Murphy was right when he added
that things usually will go wrong at the worst possible time. This is
logical: maximum stress on a system that's approaching failure will
cause it to fail right then. It makes me wince when some lady speeds
right up to the stop sign and stands on the brake at the last possible
minute, with a car full of kids and groceries, never even considering
that the brakes might fail.
I have had three very good friends killed and others injured because
they were out having a good time and conversation with friends while
driving home from a gig and just took for granted that nobody would fly
through a red traffic light at 80 mph through a blind intersection. Four
separate occasions of this over the years have left distrust of other
drivers engraved on my attitudes. I don't whiz through intersections
unless I can see they are clear and nobody is approaching in an
intersecting trajectory, or completely blocked by stopped traffic.
The one that nailed the Mini a year ago suckered me; she almost stopped,
gave every indication she was stopping, then accelerated right into me.
-Rock, who got a killed Mini and 70% hearing damage in right ear from
that one.
--
Rocky, JJ Cale Band & Pratchett Books: http://www.rocky-frisco.com
Rocky's Mini Cooper Page: http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/6437/
Mini Books: http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/6437/rockboox.html
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