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

The Dark Night Of The Soul:

The Dark Night Of The Soul: On the 25^th day of May our son Alvin Kerry Chadwick went to live with Jesus. It was an accident, a “Zip Line” that took him from us. He was a godly servant of God so we know where he is today. If I did not know that he is in heaven I do not know what I would do. Death is hard enough on us when a Christian family member dies but it would be so very much harder to have to see a loved one die and know that he or she would not go to heaven.

I am no stranger to death. I wrote in one of my blogs about the death of my childhood friend Crandfiel D. McGovern. This happened when I was very young. The death of my grandmother who I lived with in my teens was a sad and a glad experience. It was sad because I knew I would miss her but I was also glad because she was suffering so much with lung cancer and wanted to go live in heaven. My father’s death was because of a long time sickness and it was easier on me when he died. My mother was in her late 80’s when she died and she had dementia for some time before she went home to heaven. These deaths were hard but nothing like when Kerry died.

A friend who had buried his son when he was in his 30’s because of a car accident told me it was the hardest thing that he had faced in his life. He said you will never get over it. I have a settled peace because I know he served God so faithfully in his life time. The bible says: “Laughter can conceal a heavy heart, but when the laughter ends, the grief remains.” Proverbs 14:13 New Living Translation; and “For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” New International Version

I did not blame God for his accident. It was not God’s fault but Kerry’s. He was the manager of a Christian camp and they were testing the Zip Line. He said he was going to put a 300 pound weight on the line and send it down to see if it cleared the roof of the building that passed over. He put a 60 pound weight and it was no problem at all. To the naked eye it looked like it would clear the building with no problem. His daughter who strapped him in begged him not to go on it until he had tested it with the heavy weight but he was sure it would be no problem so he went down the line and hit the building roof then the zip line went crazy swinging from side to side and banging him against trees on both sides. He never did regain consciousness and died before the emergency vehicles could arrive. Human error and not God’s fault is my prognosis. Could God have stopped him? God can do anything he chooses. He made man a free moral agent and man can choose to drink and drive or text and drive and for too many it brings death. If God had made us puppets on a string then we could blame him for everything that happens to us. However, God wanted to give us choices thus He made us in His image as free moral agents.  As the people of Jesus’ day said about Jesus when Lazarus died, could not Jesus have prevented Lazarus from dying? Yes, he could have and he could have done a miracle and kept Kerry alive or he could have raised Kerry from the dead like he did for Lazarus.  It was not his will to do so.

It was said of some people in the Bible that died full of years. It could be said of Kerry that he died full of service for his Lord. He accepted Jesus as his Lord at an early age and served him in his teen years. I took him through the Billy Hanks disciple training; meeting weekly with him in a restaurant every Saturday morning for six months. In college he worked as assistant Baptist Campus Minister and pastored a small rural church in Southern NM. He went to Southwestern Baptist Seminary and pastored a small town church on the weekends. After he graduated he did Clinical Pastoral Training in a hospital in Harlingen, TX. Then he pastored a church in Deming, NM. Then he worked as a Baptist Campus Minister in Silver City, NM. He then went to Sitka, AK where he was a pastor for 10 years. While in Sitka he earned a Doctor of Ministry degree from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. In May of 2013 he came back to New Mexico to be the Camp Manager of Inlow Baptist Camp. He called it his dream job because he loved the camp that he had attended from early childhood through his teen years and had made a profession of faith and surrendered to preach the gospel. From there he went to Heaven.

ADVICE TO GRANDCHILDREN

            The biggest mistake people make regarding education is they think of education as a finished product. “I have finished my education” is an example of what you hear people say. Education is a process and never an accomplished fact. Instead of a graduation exercise a commencing exercise is better. When you finish High School you are just commencing a life -long learning process.

            When you are born the first four things you learn are the most important to you. They are foundational to you as quality of life issues. The four vital lessons are:

1. Learning to talk

2. Learning to walk

3. Learning to feed yourself

4. Potty training

           

            There are four learning issues that are vital to you as far as eternity is concerned. Without a proper relationship to God all learning will be of no eternal significance. These four are:

1. Learning of your need for salvation

2. Learning of God’s love for you

3. Learning of God’s provision for your salvation

4. Learning the proper response to receive God’s salvation

           

 This general advice I give to you:

1. Be a lifelong learner.

2. Learn from others. It is said that experience is the best teacher. This is not true. I don’t need to break my leg to know that it is not a good idea. Learning by experience is the most painful way to learn.

3. Learn to postpone pleasure. You do not need to have all the latest gadgets today. If you cannot pay cash wait until you can make the purchase with cash.

4. Pay your tithes and taxes first. Divide the remaining money into a ten-twenty-seventy plan. A. Save ten percent. B. Save twenty percent until you have an amount that is six months of your yearly salary. Invest some of the twenty percent.; then save the twenty percent to buy the things  you want to purchase – go on a cruise, etc. Bless others with some of the twenty percent. C. Live on the seventy percent. Never buy on credit anything except a house to live in and no more than one automobile at a time.

5. Live today for life does not allow practice days in preparation for future days.  ^"This is the day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. (Psalm 118:24, NKJV)”

MAKING DECISIONS

            Sometimes when you make a decision you don’t know you are making a change for all time. At other times you know you are making a decision that will not be revoked. When I went to California I thought that I was going there to work for a time and did not know that I would not return to Arkansas to live. When I committed my life to Christ Jesus I knew that that would be a permanent decision. Of course I did not realize how it would affect every area of my being. I did not think this will determine where I work, what kind of work, where I would live or even what amount of money I would receive for my work. But all of these things were affected by my decision to make Christ the Lord of my life. You cannot say truthfully say, “No Lord”. You can tell God no. However, if God is the Lord of your life, you can only truthfully say, “yes Lord.” The reason is simple when you say “no” you are denying His Lordship over your being. By saying, “no” to the Lord you are saying, “You have no right to tell me what to do.”

            When, as a young boy, I repented of my sin; I confessed to God. “I am a sinner; I ask you to forgive me of my sins and come into my life and be my Lord”. I gave up my right to direct my life. The bible says that if you will confess Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved. Sometimes we say to someone you need to accept Christ as your Savior. The Bible never says that. The Bible says you accept him as Lord. The result of accepting him as Lord is that He then becomes your Savior. There is something fundamentally wrong when you want to be saved for all eternity but not want to have to love Christ enough to accept his Lordship over your life. What woman or man would accept a marriage proposal when the proposal was “I want you to be my lifetime mate but I also want you to know that I will have sexual relationships with other persons when I have the opportunity?”  No one in his or her right mind would consent to such a proposal. God offers salvation on his terms and not ours.

                  I came to Christ as a sinner. Even the good things I did were sin because I was a sinner by choice. My nature was that of a sinner. When I accepted the Lordship of Christ over my life I became, in the Apostle Paul’s words, a saint. This did not happen overnight but the instant Christ entered into my life I became a saint. Paul writes in 1Cor 1:2, “Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours…” (the underlined words are my underlining) As you read the book of 1 Cor you became aware of the sins that this church was struggling with, but Paul did not write to the sinners in Corinth.  He wrote to the saints. He did not call them saints because they lived perfect lives, but because they had been, “sanctified in

Christ Jesus.” There is a difference between a saint who commits a sin and a sinner who can do nothing to please God because of his sin nature. I am a saint who sometimes commits sins for which I am sorry and for which I repent. Our problem with someone saying he is a saint is because of the modern day definition of the word saint. We define the word today as a person who is perfect is his actions. The biblical definition is a person who has been sanctified in Christ Jesus. He is not perfect in himself but has been declared perfect by God because of what Christ did on his behalf.