Why not?

So, I've been driving my scion XB for a month now, and something occurred to me this morning on the way to work: These would be excellent rural mail delivery vehicles. Factor in the fuel mileage, the fact that they are already RHD in Japan, the legendary Toyota reliability, and why not?

Probably because of some policy dictating US manufactured cars only, that's why. Good thing ou can still get a RHD, no wait, you can't get any anymore, never mind. Wonder if those policies will change after Ford and GM go spiraling down the john?

Half-way across the US, on egg-shaped tires no less

So, in August of 2001 I purchased another Opel Kadett wagon after several years without an Opel of any sort. My now ex-wife had forced me to part with all of them early on in our marriage, under the stipulation that if I found a nice one for a decent price I had carte blanche to buy it. I had scrounged one up, it was reasonably priced, and I went ahead and bought it.

The story of this car is you're typical barn find story. Guy had it, stopped driving it for whatever reason, died, kids didn't know it was even there in storage, found it years later, sold it to some guy off the street for cheap. I was buying it from that guy with weak brakes, almost no working carb passages, no fuel pump, and the same bias-ply tires that were on it when it went into storage in 1978 with 68k miles on the odometer. The brakes and fuel pump are old Opel issues, well known and easily fixed, and any carb that sits for 23 years is going to need a little love. All told, though, it was a pretty nice car for $600.

I had gone to look at it in the wife's car, because it was a couple hour drive and I wasn't sure I was going to get it initially, so I had to get a trailer and fetch it the following weekend. This was easy enough, because at the time the local MWR (that's Morale, Welfare, and recreation, for you non-Navy types) had a car trailer I could rent for the weekend for $20 with just a flash of my military ID. Trailer and truck set, I went and got the car and brought it home, getting several thumbs-ups along the way, a trend that continues to this day. (I actually avoid taking it really public places, like super stores and malls, I get inundated with folks wanting to tell me their Opel stories.)

After bringing it home, I fixed the brakes (bad front brake hoses, a very common issue with old cars that no one ever thinks of first), rebuilt the carb, and installed an electric fuel pump. I drove it the 9 miles to work a couple of times, just to make sure it ran OK, and over Labor Day weekend I set out in it for SD from upstate NY having only driven it to that point 75 or so miles. I didn't do it blindly, I had packed along all the normal tools one would need for an Opel, made sure the spare was good, grabbed a good jack and a couple cans of fix-a-flat, tossed in some replacement bulbs and some wire and was pretty comfortable all things considered.

And it was a good thing I did pack all that stuff, because I sure needed it, but not for my own car. See, when you drive an old beater you can't afford to pass up the opportunity to get some good road Karma. I'm referring to stopping to help the stranded motorist's you normally scream past on the side of the road. Being a holiday weekend, everyone was driving somewhere, and knowing I had a nice hydraulic floor jack made it really hard to drive past someone trying to use a screw jack on their car. All told I stopped 11 times before getting across the state of NY, changing 6 tires and pouring out the contents of my gas can 3 times. Every one that trip was great, particularly one family from Cleveland in a minivan with a blown tire and a flat spare that took both of my cans of fix-a-flat. They waved every time they passed me stopped with someone else, and I waved back every time I passed them doing 50 mph on the donut spare. Sure it took me a bit longer, but several people made it home easier that night and I feel good about that.

Eventually, though, the vibration from the tires got the better of me and I pulled in to a Sprawal-mart to get the tires balanced. The guy put the first tire on the balancer and it almost broke the thing. The tires were all egg-shaped from sitting all those years. I had new tires waiting in SD, so I decided I could live with it for the rest of the trip instead of buying new tires just then, besides they didn't have the right size on hand.

Somewhere in MN I decided to see if the AM radio worked, and it did, but the only thing on AM any more is talk radio and gospel. What a shame, too, as everyone should have an old mono AM station playing poodle skirt music. IT only took a few minutes of talk radio to make me turn it off again.

All told, that leg of the trip was a roaring success. No mechanical issues what-so-ever, and a good time the whole way. Got 28-32mpg even, which makes me really wonder why new cars aren't all getting 50+. After all, my Opel's 40 year old technology. The trip back, on the other hand, was a nightmare. But I'll post on that trip later, just to keep you coming back for more.

Quickie

Nothing new last night, but to get you through the day, here's a quick tip for you if you're thinking about buying a used car: Be very careful what you use to get the soaped #'s off the windshield with.

The set-up: I was borrowing a friend's wonderful V-10 dodge truck because it was deemed slightly more reliabile than my own and I was fetching a Firetruck from several states away and needed the hp. Besides, he couldn't afford to fill it with gas, and I always returned it full, so he made out like a bandit. He was trying half-heartedly to sell it, and had "for sale" and such soaped all over the front windows with a product called appropriatly "windshield chalk." Since the fire truck rescue was going to involve some quasi-legal towing techniques anyway, I figured it best to remove the attention-drawing markings before I set out on the trip.

He had said it would come off with water and a little elbow grease, but after half an hour or so my arms were tired and I needed something a little stiffer than the stream from the hose. I went inside the house and got what we in the Navy called a "green scratchie," one of the products typically made by 3M or an imatator that's a stiff green plastic material as often as not bonded to one side of a snonge and in pretty everyone's kitchen already. I even remember the conversation in my head about whether or not it would scratch the windshield, and it being plastic it was determined that it wouldn't.

I started scrubbing, and spraying with the hose, and mere moments later all the offending used-car lot/ autocross style markings were removed. Unfortunatly, as the glass dried, I realised just how very wrong I had been. Everywhere the greenie had touched the glass it was scratched, including the tempered safety glass side windows.

What to do? I ended-up ordering a scratch removing kit from somewhere, a product designed for old windshields that have been sand blasted by time, and it did a decent job of cleaning up the damage. But how do you bring a truck back to the owner and say "Uh, sorry, I seem to have destroyed your glass?"

Like I needed more stressors that trip, anyway. Anyone else changed a Budd 20" tire on the side of the road with hand tools and a Hi-Lift jack? I don't recommend it to my friends.

Lesson learned: Green plastic scratchie pads have some sort of fiberglass impregnated in them that will, in fact, scratch your glass. Now you know too.

Rest Areas

So tonight I don't really feel like a story, per say, but instead a bit of a rant on one of the things I feel strongly about as a frequent driver of the US Interstate syste: rest areas. Lately I've seen more and more exciting features in rest areas, some great, some just plain wrong.

Great as in Iowa's installing free wireless Internet access in almost every rest area they still have open. What a great idea, and why didn't I think of that? Of course Iowa's also shut down over half of their rest areas, and blocked them off so you can't even get onto them. Don't worry, though, you can still stop every 70 miles or so as you cross their desolate wasteland of nothingness. Just keep reminding yourself that you're only 45 minutes away when the need to use the bathroom comes upon you.

Great as in the rest areas on the Ohio Turnpike, where you can get your Starbucks and Popeye's conveniently every 40 miles or so. Of course don't try to pull in with a gasoline-powered vehicle pulling a trailer, because you won't be able to park on the "car"side and there's no gas on the "truck" side, just diesel.

Great as in the scenic views available in almost every rest area in Kentucky, though don't plan on doing any actual resting there, as even a short nap in the car can yield you a nice ticket.

Great as in NY's policy on 5 minutes maximum idle time for semis, but of course then you're girl friend will wonder what she did to make you mad enough to stop as soon as she sets foot in the bathroom.

Here's my take on the rest area. By definition, you should be able to get into a rest area and safely park your car half asleep, eyes yellow from "holding it," with your wife giving birth beside you, and generally in no condition to drive. After all, that's why you're stopping. What kind of idiot designs an area where you have to take the off ramp, stop at the top, figure out which direction to turn, wait for traffic, make the turn, figure out on which side of the road the rest area is on, find the entrance, turn in to the area, troll around through a maze of curbing, and then hunt for a parking space? If I need to stop, it's because I'm having trouble handling driving straight at a constant speed witht he cruise control on. How could anyone expect me to survive all that?

Also, in the same vein, you need to be able to take a nap if you need to. I'm not talking about plugging in a motor home and firing up the grill, I'm refering to climbing in the back or folding the seat down and crashing long enough to become a safe driver again. This has to be legal, as it's the whole point of the things. Add all the lights you need to to make people feel safe, up the police patrols and everything, but if I'm in no condition to drive, isn't it a lot better for everyone if I'm not hurtling down the highway at 75 mph?

Bathrooms should be clean, at least better than Walmart and movie theatre bathrooms (the lowest rung on the bathroom evolutionary scale). I'm a guy, so it's not quite as important, but I'd like to not get glared at by my gal when the trip resumes. I do have to admit, though, that whenever I use the stainless steel trough urinals in IL I feel the need to wipe my feet on the sidewalk outside the bathroom before I get into my car.

Anyway, relate your favorite rest area tale if you've got one. Comments are still free-ish.

Let's start at the very begining... Or at least very near there

Every car owner has to have had a first car. Some came with cool stories, passed down through the family or what not, others were lame-o graduation presents given to children of parents with a lot more $ than mine. Mine was, of course, an Opel.

To truely appreciate the story you need a little more background information. First off, I grew up in SD, where until some time in the early 90's a child with a rural address could get a restricted (to daytime hours only) drivers license at the ripe old age of 14. You also need to know that my Father was at one point a high school shop teacher and at other points ran his own foreign auto repair business, so there were always cars around as well as the tools to work on them. Even at age 5 when I discovered that a borrowed crescent wrench could successfully disassemble a tricycle in a single afternoon, it was obvious that the tools fell easily into my hands. (Dad did the right thing there, by the way, insisting I put the tricycle back together, by myself, and make everything work before he would get me a real bicycle.) So, at age 14 I was waiting in line for the magic picture to be taken that allowed me to become a dangerous weapon of automobile carnage.

Shortly thereafter, my Father and I went to the first farm auction of the spring season. If you're from rural America you've surely been to one of these events: men clad in overalls milling about, shaking, prodding, and abusing everything they can touch to decide if they really want to bid on anything. Some days the bidding is furious, and the prices reach obscene levels, other times you get just what you needed at pennies on the dollar. This was a pretty middle of the road auction, and there were a couple of farm trucks dad was interested in and a silly '74 Opel Manta all by itself off in the corner. I thought the Opel was sort of neat, and my Dad made some comment off-hand about how he had had one and thought it was a pretty decent car overall.

When they got to the little Opel, the bidding started at $200. With no bites the auctioneer dropped the first bid to $150, then $100, then $75, then $50, then $25, and at that point I couldn't take it any more and I forced my Father to bid on my behalf. "Twenty-five, going once, going twice, any other bidders?" and an old codger stepped up with a $30 bid. Drat! Well, how about $35? "Thirty-five, going once, twice, sold!"

And just like that I was a 14 year old driver who owned my own car. Sure it "needed a clutch" and the "starter didn't always work" but it was mine! We waited until the end of the auction to pay for our things, loaded up all the little stuff in the back of Dad's pickup, and freed the tow strap from it's usual hiding place behind the seat in the cab. Dad and I were expert tow strap operators, having successfully covered several hundred miles in several cars over the years, and the 11 miles home was going to be no big chore, as long as the brakes worked in the Opel. We waited for the crowd to disperse a bit, the proceded to start the trip home with my new treasure in tow. Everything went pretty well until Dad stopped about 3/4 of a mile from the house and climbed out of the pickup.

"How's it feel, sloppy steering, brakes OK?"
"No, good brakes, seems to be fine."
"You know I'm not going to let you tow your first car home, don't you? Besides the principle of the thing your Mother would kill me for dragging it home. We need to see if we can get it to start and you can drive it on in or we might as well keep going to the junk yard."
"Uh, OK I guess."
"Let's pour some gas in the tank and down the carb, then you drop the clutch and well see if we can't pull start it."

And we did. And it did start. And I drove it on into the farm and up on a set of ramps. We then found out that the "bad clutch" was really a case of all 4 bolts that hold the tranny to the bell-housing being MIA. Four bolts were promptly scrounged, with 3 different sized heads but the right threads, and the problem fixed. Then the car was re-started, backed down the ramps and taken for it's proper "maiden voyage" that evening as darkness fell, just me and my Father. Sure the tranny had bad syncros between third and fourth and would need to be replaced with a junk yard one for $50. Sure the starter eventually did give up the ghost and require a $15 junk yard replacement. Sure I spent countless hours waxing and polishing to try and get the car back to it's former glory. But it also got me to and from work that whole summer with 28mpg and a ride that was the envy of everyone who drove it.

That $100 car was my introduction to all the things that endear old cars to the hearts of gearheads everywhere. It ran good, handled better, needed more love than it should have, kept my fingers mostly dirty, and introduced me to the feeling of freedom that has characterized the personal automobile from the very begining. I became mobile that summer, the world shrank, and 2000 miles later I was a changed man.

How to buy your very own Opel

Opels are interesting cars. They were imported and sold through regular Buick dealerships all over the US from about '57 to '75. That's a pretty good run, all things considered, roughly equivalent to how long Hyundai, Acura, Lexus, and Kia have been selling now. That's long enough to have purchased one as your first car going off to college, then as your second car because of brand loyality when you needed something bigger for your new family. As they were pretty solidly engineered cars, with decent features and in the last few years excellent handling, there's a few of those folks still aroud. They are all by now 50-somethings set in life with the kids out of the house and some $ to spend these days bringing back a long lost friend from the dead.

But the also sold a lot of them, and they are all 30+ year old cars now, and new they were the cheapest cars GM sold here in the US and advertised everywhere as such. Which means they aren't particularly worth a lot. That brings an entirely different demographic under the "Opeler" umbrella, the folks who have an Opel strictly because it's cheap. These are the folks who squirm at the idea of an "expensive" $500 paint job or $800 5-speed transmission upgrade. (Well worth every penny, by the way.)

So what do you get into when you join the Opel community, then, with these two completely different demographics dominating the scene? Strangely enough, unlike most other similar marques you get an amazingly open, helpful, friendly group of folks that'll usually give you the shirt off their back if you really need it. See, unlike the MG, Triumph, Corvair, Jaguar, Fiat, Morris Minor, Etc... groups, the Opel community was all but abandoned for the better part of 20 years here in the US. In 1975 you could get parts at any Buick dealership or parts store. By 1995, I had to drive all over Houston to find a valve cover gasket on short notice, and to get the "good" ones I had to agree to buy all 50 of the minimum batch Fel-Pro would make to get them ordered for me. We would have all given up on our Opels and tossed them into the crusher if it weren't for the internet and the new-fangled shrinking of world economies it provided. This orphaning, though, made for a remarkable tight group of old-timers, and they smack the kids into decent people before they associate with them.

So, now maybe you've decided you want to look into buying an Opel yourself? How does one go about doing it these days? There are club listings, and E-bay, and the like, but they do occassionally show up even in the local paper. Here's how my last purchase went:

Looking through the paper, stumbled across an "1975 Opal wagon for sale, $250" add. The obvious (to an Opeler) mis-spelling of Opel was sure to keep the usual Opel vultures away, and the price was so low the car was obviously junk or the seller didn't know what they had. Either way, well worth the look anyway just-in-case. Called the seller, set up a time, and went to look at the car. Those of you familiar with the ritual of buying an old car know all the usual stuff that happens during that first meeting:

-"Is this the car for sale?"
-"Yep, that's the one"
-"Have you had it long?"
-"No, not long, only (yada, yada, yada) Got it as a project and not going to get around to it."
-"I see, did it run well when you bought it?"
-"(It doesn't really matter, just trying to see if they feel bad for it going down the tubes or good for restoring it some.)"
-"It looks like just about what I was looking for, I was hoping for (whatever) though." (sigh)
-"That would have been nice for sure."
-"Is $250 your bottom dollar?"
-"I could probably let you have it for $200."
-"Thanks, let me go get the $ and my trailer."

Next thing you know you'll be bringing home a car in need of some work for sure, but worth more to your friends in parts than what you paid for it complete. Sure $500 would have been a bargain, but no arguing that $200 is a lot better, right? Besides at $500 you might have to consider the Karma check and the rest of the VW Idiot's Guide's pre-buying techniques, wheras at $200 you can take your chances and give it a once-over at home. What am I saying, I always mash myself into the seat and do a quick "does this car feel right?" check.

Allow me to introduce myself

So here I am starting up a blog of my own. While not entirely new to the blogging scene, this is a first for me so bear with me if there's some growing pains. Those of you that know or knew me will recognize me right away, and I'd love to hear back from the "lost" friends from way back when.

Now, why would you want to read my blog? Well, simply, for the stories. I'm a 31 year old nut for old cars, mostly stuff most people have never heard of. And I drive my cars. Everywhere. Can you even imagine setting out on a 1600 mile trip in a 1970 Opel Kadett you've only had for 2 weeks? How about driving a similar Kadett 600 miles sans brakes, because you had to and no one had any parts? Have you seen both US coasts, by car, within 6 days of each other, while living in rural SD? These are all easy stories, the bread and butter if you will. The humdingers are what you need to stick around for.

I'm also a damn decent guy, and I'll bet eventually after a while you'll find yourself drawn back whether you really want to come here or not. Maybe I'm wrong, but only time will tell.