Item 1:
| Bay area Wheel2Wheelers:
| (Saturday, Sept 10)
|
| The Saturday before the all british car meet in PaloAlto there will be a
| party at my house. During the day we will take apart, salvage and cut up the
| wreckage of my yellow GT6. Beer will be provided. That evening will feature
| more beer and bench racing. A barbeque grill and burger makings will be
| available. Please join us for all or part of this day of festivity.
|
|
| Dick and Rochelle Nyquist
| 2021 Santa Cruz av
| Menlo Park, Ca
|
| (415)854-6702
|
| from hwy 280:
| Turn off Alpine rd, head tward the bay (away from the hills).
|
| About a mile from the freeway you will pass through an intersection with a
| stop light. A few yards later the road curves around a bend and you go
| through a second intersection with a stop light. At this point Alpine rd
| becomes Santa Cruz av.
|
| A couple of blocks later there is another set of lights at a fork in the
| road. Take the right leg. Our house is about half a block more on the right.
|
|
Item 2, bodge
While I've enjoyed the bodge theme, I've not posted any of my various bodges
but a recent posting by Ken was too close to pass up. So here goes:
In the early 1960s my wife and I were poor starving college students. The
$1500.00 a year we lived on did not allow for many car parts and our English
Ford was in dire need. ( this is the one that had been hit by a train at a
level crossing but thats another story.) We needed a temporary car to last us
a month until the other car was fixed.
A friend of mine had a 1950 Ford flathead V8 for sale for $25.00. One of the
rods was knocking but we figured it would run a month. It had a nice paint job
and a cherry body if you ignored the large dent in the passenger door.
A couple of months passed and we were no nearer to fixing the English Ford.
The knock in the 1950 Ford had become very insistant and we expected at any
time to have a rod through the side of the block. A friend in SantaCruz
county offered to let us use her chichen barn to change the bearing. I pulled
the pan and the rod cap. The crank was trashed. There was no hope that
replacing the bearing insert would "put things right". The journal was .060
egg shaped. I had to drive the car to work next morning in San Jose, 30 miles
and several mountains away.
I pulled the distibutor, one of the heads, and extracted the offending
piston and rod. A tour of the garbage heap at a friendly autowrecker turned up
a rod cap like the one from the Ford. With two long bolt I assembled the two
rod caps arround the trashed crank journal crushing a .060 under bearing
insert. The plan was to block the oil from all coming out of that journal and
so maintain oil pressure. By the time I got the head and pan back on it was
midnight. My pregnant bride dozed with her head on the steering wheel while I
tried remember which way the distributor went in. Periodically I'd awaken her
with "OK, crank it over" or "honey, try it now". As the engine was a
"flathead" I had not been able to deactivate the valves. About 1:00 am I had
after much cranking and many alternatives finally sussed out a promising
combination. Once more I said "honey, try it again". The battery tired and the
spark plugs wet. It cranked a couple a slow turns and then a five foot long
flame shot out of the oil filler tube. The explosion was deafening. The oil
filler cap missed my head by inches and then hit the roof of the barn and
several walls before coming to a rest about 20 feet away. The engine shook
itself like a wet dog and came to life.
I realized that all the cranking with no piston in number seven hole had filled
the entire rather large crank case with gas fumes. I made a note to disconect
number 7 spark plug.
Though it shook a lot, the car had surprising power for seven cylinders and
had no problem making the grade over to SanJose. Service station attendants
always tried to convince us that Bardahl would fix our problem.
We drove it that way for six more months until some one in a right hand drive
Mercedes (that he had brought over from England) ran into the dented passenger
door and payed us $150.00, which, along with the $10.00 we got from the
junkyard, was enough to by us a more practical car. We bought a Jowett Jupiter.
But thats another story.
Every word is true.
Dick
|