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.