Automobiles I have owned continued - 4

            The worst deal I ever made on an automobile was when I purchased a Hillman. I am not sure of the model but I know that it was a small foreign made auto. The picture at the left is a Hillman. While mine was not exactly like the one pictured it was somewhat similar. Mine was most likely a later model than the one pictured.

            It sounded real good when I drove it off the lot in the Los Angeles area. We were still living in Riverside Ca. at the time. It still was running like a top when I got home with it. A few days later I had agreed to go on a trip to the south desert to shoot doves and my friend and I started in my new auto. Pretty soon after we started it started making a knocking noise. The further we went the worse it sounded. As I remember there were some others going with us in another car so we parked my car and went on our trip with the others and picked up my car on the way back home.

            A few days later I dropped the oil pan to have a look for what I thought was causing the knocking sound. I found that the inserts that go between the piston rods and the crankshaft were badly worn and that was what was making the noise. The reason that it did not make noise when I first began driving was that someone had put tinfoil material between the inserts and the crankshaft. It took several miles for this to beat out so that the noise could begin. This could have been remedied by just replacing the inserts, but I also discovered that the crankshaft was cracked; A job that was beyond my skills then and now.

            I think I had paid around $1600.00 for the car. After tax and license was added and I paid a down payment I owed about $1400.00 on the car. I was still in college and had gone in debt for clothes and school expenses so in the early part of 1960’s this was a blow to us financially. I took the car back to the lot that I had bought it from and they told me that used cars were sold as is and no guarantee came with it. I went to the company that had loaned me the money to buy the car and asked for additional money to get the needed repair. They would not loan me any more money. I gave them the keys and said to them the car is in your parking lot it is yours and I left. They sold the car for junk, a little over $100.00. They came after me for the difference.

            Credit was easy to get in that era and I had gone in debt up to my neck. I needed a car to get to work and to school so I went to a lending company in Riverside and tried to consolidate my debts. This company told me they could not loan me the money but if I would go bankrupt they would loan me the money I needed to consolidate and buy another car. I talked to the people who were clerks at the bankruptcy court and they told me I did not need a lawyer. They gave me the papers with instructions on how to file. Two of the companies I owed money to came to court but told the Judge they were there only as observers. Out in the hall after the judge ruled in favor of my petition I signed a new contract with both companies. The next day I went to the loan company and they loaned me money to consolidate my debts and buy another automobile. I am sorry to say that the company who loaned me the money to buy the Hillman car was the only company to not in the consolidation loan. I did not pay them anything I felt badly about that years later but at the time I was angry with them for forcing me into bankruptcy.

            On a good note by the time I graduated from college in June of 1965 I started to seminary  debt free.      

Automobiles I have owned continued

Another automobile I bought during my college years was a 1949 Ford. I don’t know when I bought it or how much I paid for it. It served me well. Coming back from a vacation in Arkansas we spent the night in a motel in Needles Ca. The next morning we got up and left going to Riverside Ca. where I was attending College. By ten o’clock we were well out in the desert when a clicking sound started to get louder coming from under the floorboard of the car. What I did next confirmed my suspicion but I should not have done what I did. Had I not done it we most likely could have limped into Barstow where I could have had a chance to buy the part I needed to repair the car. You see, I thought that it sounded like a U-joint problem. That was the problem alright. But when I pushed the clutch in and released the clutch at highway speed it blew the U-joint. Then with every rotation of the drive shaft it slammed the drive shaft against the floorboard of the car making a banging noise that was deafening. I applied the brakes and pulled off the road and surveyed the problem under the car. The picture on the top is the U-Joint. The picture on the bottom is where it fits on the drive shaft. On the four ends of the U-joint are bearings. The U-joint itself has four shafts that fit into four bearings. What you see in the picture on the top is the casings that hold the bearings. The bearings are not round like a marble but round like a pen is round and about a half inch in length. There are a whole bunch of them in each casing. The casings have these elongated bearings that are packed with heavy grease around the four shafts of the U-joint. The four pieces that you see in the picture on the top are metal locks. These locks are made of spring material. They fit into a groove in the drive shaft and hold the bearings in place. You take a pair of needle nose pliers and squeeze the spring and place it into the groove made to receive it and let go and it snaps into place. The dark part on the inside of each casing is a hard rubber that is there to keep the grease in place.

What happened to my car was the grease escaped and the bearings got hot and over time wore out. It was the looseness of the worn bearings that was making the noise I was hearing and when I put in the clutch and released it threw the shaft end of the U-joint against the end of the bearing casing and knocked it out of its place.

So here we are in the middle of the dessert with two kids and it is ten o’clock and the day is getting hotter by the minute with a car that is going no place. This was in the day of no cell phones. I had a tool box with all the tools that I needed but no part. I had worked on U-joints many times in the past and had parts that fit other cars but none for a 1949 Ford. I even had a can of bearing grease. I tried to find a bearing casing that would fit; they were almost but not quite hardly. The bearing casing did have the barrings in them. Since the bearings themselves were OK the problem was the casing that held them was a tad too large. I could get it started but it would not quite go in, so I turned to an old Arkansas remedy; if it won’t fit get a bigger hammer. I hammered the bearing casing into place. It was like I welded it into place. You would need a blow torch to get in out of that drive shaft. I didn't even need to use the spring locks. I never did have a problem with it again.

To be continued…

Automobiles I have owned -- continued

Sometime along the way I purchased a 1950 Cadillac. I don’t remember what I paid for this car but it was not very much. It had a broken piston pin. See the picture below. In this picture you have two pistons. The round part on the bottom is the piston itself. The rod going up is the piston rod. The rod is connected to the piston with a pin. The pin is a metal piece that has a hole through it’s center. Some people call this pin a wrist pin because it permits the piston rod and piston to move like a person can move his fist and arm. Hold your fisted hand out in front of you and with your arm still move your fist down and up. This is the action that the wrist pin enables the piston and piston rod to do. The car can run on all eight cylinders but every time the spark plug fires that piston, the rod hits the piston and makes a noise like banging two pieces of metal together because that is what is happening. Eventually you would expect that the rod hitting the piston would break the piston. When that happens it will ruin the engine by sending the piston through the side of the engine. At slow speeds it was just ‘bam’ ‘bam’ ‘bam’ but at high speeds It sounded like what I think a drive by shooting would sound like if those doing the shooting were using automatic weapons. I did not have the money to pay for that kind of repair and my wife was, for some reason, embarrassed to ride in a car that called that much attention to us as we motored down the highway. We drove this car for several months before I sold it to someone who had the money to get the necessary repair done. Aside from this minor problem this was a good smooth riding machine.

Automobiles I have owned

I already told you about my first car a 1939 Chevrolet. It cost $59.00. I kept it for 3 years, give or take, and I sold it for $30.00 and a Willis car. I sold the Willis car for $20.00, which means that the car cost me $9 dollars plus upkeep. That is not bad for three years of driving and dating and wooing the girls.

I bought a Studebaker car from one of my professors in college. It was a much more modern car and looked much better but it was not as easy for me to fix when it developed transmission problems. It had an automatic transmission with way too many parts, not simple like a standard transmission. It cost me a lot more to buy and I did not keep it as long.   

During my 8 years of working my way through college I had a series of different cars. I don’t remember the sequence of them. One was a 1948 straight eight Buick. A strait eight is a car that has the eight cylinders in a straight row and not four cylinders side by side; that is called a V8. Ford motor company was the first company to build the V8. The straight eight was a heavy car so it was a good ride and served me well. There was one problem. It was hitting on only 7 cylinders. It still ran good so Barbara and I went on vacation one summer to El Paso TX in my car of 7 cylinders. My brother was living in El Paso at this time so he and I took the tappet pan off to discover that one of the push rods had the piece right at the top broken off. The push rods control the valves. There are two valves for each cylinder, one to let the gas fumes into the cylinder and one to let the burned fumes escape as exhaust. First the valve opens and the gas fumes go in and then the cylinder closes and the piston comes up and compresses the gas then the spark plug fires the gas fumes and the explosion slams the piston back down and the exhaust valve opens to let the fumes escape. If ether one of the push rods is broken that cylinder does not function. One was broken so I needed another to replace it. We started with Auto Part stores with no luck. Next we tried the Buick dealership. They told us the part was no longer manufactured. Then we tried every Junk Yard place we could find in the phone book. No luck.

I was ready to put my tappet pan cover back on and continue with my 7 cylinder Buick, but then I looked at the socket that I had in my hand and inspiration hit me. The end that the socket wrench fit into was about the size of the push rod and only the end was broken off so I got my trusted hammer and forced the socket over the end of the push rod. I dropped the rod back into its slot and adjusted the tappet bracket and I drove my 49 strait 8 Buick back to California. I don’t how long I kept that car but it was still an 8 cylinder car for as long as I had it.

TO BE CONTINUED