Yooper Tales: Old cars...

Summer is a time for camping, canoeing, and wandering around the countryside. Today I spent a few hours wandering through a vintage salvage yard. Mostly cars from the 40's and 50's... what a treat!

That got me thinking about all of the cars I've owned over the years... So here's a post dedicated to a lifetime of driving.

The first car I ever owned... a 'big block' Pontiac Ventura

Woohoo, I was in high school working odd jobs and manged to paint this thing RED, swap out the factory manifold with an Edlebrock 4bbl 'high rise' and of course - headers - which I had to literally hammer into place because they shared the same design space with something else... I don't remember what, but I do remember the problem went away after borrowing my dad's sledge hammer and adding a little dent in the right spot... Ahhh, I can remember turning the ignition off and letting the engine pump a little unburned fuel into the glass packs, then flipping the switch forward and BLAM, spectacular at night...

Then came this rag top... finger numbing cold in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in February!

The un-stoppable CJ-5

Yup, this thing could go anywhere - and I did. It had a habit of blowing off the distributor cap when horsing your way through mud, swamp and river crossings. So I got used to jumping out and putting the cap back on after a high rpm slog through the mud.

So now we go to college, and of course we sell the toys and knuckle down to practical transportation...

Uninspired Iron Duke blandness with a story...

So as an engineering student, this got great mileage, blah blah blah... so what do you do with cheap wheels, a young curious mind and maybe a bit of adventure seeking? Hmmm, lemme see, the first thing I did was to water inject it to try to boost octane. I remember showing my father how I cut into the air pump smog thingy to get pressure to pressurize a water tank that went to a spray nozzle into the carb. I opened the hood very proudly - explaining all the chemistry stuff I had just learned at college then flipped the carb throttle plate and (I had watched the 1 gallon gas tank I was using as a surge tank blow up like a balloon lots of times... never bothered me) as the little 4 cylinder smog pump inflated the 1 gallon gas tank that was holding my water injection supply - my dad bolted from the scene. Holy cow, "that could explode..." Hmmm, I hadn't taken a machine design class yet, so that part of engineering was still pretty much a mystery to me!

Anyhow, I used to drive this thing on hard packed snowmobile trails in the winter, I managed to float it across the Montreal River 'many' times F=ma man! and it did float - once - at a boat dock.

The next machine in the stable was a Ford 4x4...

It had a 360 CI V-8 and I could watch the fuel gauge drop as I drove it.

I'm not sure what the inspiration was for this behemoth. I suppose it drove well in the winter?
Sold it and a canoe, worked in the computer lab and managed to pay for college.

So after I graduated and went to work at Bell Helicopter, what did I buy, but this whacky thing. What was I thinking? Somehow a bit of a lapse in judgement brought me to the Oldsmobile dealership and I bought one of these.

I think it was the 105 F heat and the food poisoning...

Next came this very practical vehicle...

You can fit a lot of stuff in one of these!

Hooper Stanaway Ford... Les and Gar, yeah, practical.

Oops, I almost forgot about this one... given to me along the way. The K-car was pretty indestructible.

Then came a spark of the old me...

The T-Bird

A little more interesting. I remember how tight the steering was on this car. Kind of twitchy on ice, but a really nice ride.

Then there was the Toyota...