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…
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