I’m a car guy. What that means is that I have a fascination, akin to obsession, regarding certain aspects of cars and trucks.
When I was a kid, most of our cars were not new. These cars frequently malfunctioned, and at an early age I was introduced into the art of being a shade-tree mechanic. That’s a misnomer, because we mostly worked on the cars out in the dirt road. And I mean right down in the dirt, lying under the car, having oil and other fluids dripping in your face. In the winter you couldn’t feel your fingers, in the summer you couldn’t touch metal left in the sun.
During my first couple of years in college, I attempted to turn away from my legacy. I decided to pursue matters of the intellect and forsake the dirty arts. Alas, the first time my car wouldn’t start, I had three hippies trying to advise me. I had to intervene before one of them hooked up the jumper cables backwards. Thereafter, I adhered to the path of righteousness.
I bought a little ’63 Ford Falcon; 6-cylinder, three-on-the-tree. My Dad and I started tweaking more miles per gallon out of it. Play with the spark timing, adjust the carburetor float level, run a multi-viscosity oil, acquire steel-belt radial tires and pump ‘em up to the max. We succeeded in increasing the mpg from 22 to 27, which was phenomenal in the early 70’s.
Right now, I’m driving my ’83 Rabbit diesel pickup around the county with a campaign sign attached. I’ve had the pickup about nine years, but I’ve had the engine and tranny for twenty-five. I took them out of my legendary ’81 Rabbit sedan when it had close to 300k on it. (The Rabbit is now a project in progress, which means it’s parked in the weeds up in Corning.) The current pickup engine is a 1.6 liter naturally-aspirated four cylinder diesel. It has never been rebuilt, although it broke a radiator hose in 1994 when someone else was driving it, and ran it till it quit. So the cylinder head has been off a few times.
I took the truck for a test run the other day, about a hundred miles. By the way, test runs are very important. You fix or change or adjust something, then you drive the car and see what it does. On that test run, at freeway speeds, the truck achieved 40 mpg. It should do a little better at slower speeds.
Back in early 2008, when fuel prices were going crazy and apocalypse seemed near, I filled the pickup’s fuel tank as a hedge against a possible scarcity of fuel. Prior to last week, I had used possibly 5 gallons out of the 30 that the tank holds. I consulted my mentor, Willie Blakely of Chico VW. He told me that I needed to do something with that diesel, not just leave it in the tank. “Best to run it out”, he said.
So essentially I’ve got 25 gallons of free fuel, a potential thousand miles of campaign driving. It may look like I’m traveling off to far-flung parts of Butte County, but in reality I’m coming home.
