Before I go too far, a disclaimer. This posting is about CARS. NO motorcycles were harmed in the preparation of this article.
As an impecunious college student in the early 1970’s I became very adept at fixing my cars. I HAD to become so since my extremely limited budget did not extend to paying a mechanic to do repairs and maintenance for me. Consequently, I ended up doing pretty much all the things that needed doing myself. And there was plenty of things that needed doing. Our old British cars were in constant need of fettling. My brother and I and our mates similarly developed these skills and I want to recall a few instances where the knowledge and skills developed not only saved a lot of money but also bailed us out of some difficult situations.
Let me first say that an increasingly noticeable feature of driving on the roads these days is the number of relatively late model cars broken down on the side of the road. The “experts” have been telling us that the advent of electronically controlled ECU’s and computers in cars was going to have all sorts of benefits. Better fuel consumption, better performance, less pollution and so on. All of these goals have been achieved (at considerable cost, I might add) but increased reliability has been less than what they told us it would be. Back in my day, our cars DID break down on the side of the road, yes, but usually we could FIX them by the side of the road and get going again. These days, even in an NRMA man comes, he will only be able to diagnose the problem, tell you he can’t fix it without a lot of expensive gear that is only found in a workshop, then call a tilt tray and have your broken car taken to a mechanic’s shop. Very soon the middle man will be made redundant and, if you DO break down, the tilt tray will be sent by default.
So let me tell you about some bush mechanics, pre-ECU-style.
On the June Long Weekend in 1970 a group of us went down to Bega on the far south coast of NSW to do our folk music thing at a Saturday night coffee shop run by the local church and also to sing in the Sunday services. There were 9 of us and we travelled in 4 cars. Inefficient? Yes, but we had our reasons. Paul and I both took our cars and our respective girlfriends. Bob took his wife in his car along with Blas, our 12 string player and singer, and Les drove by himself in HIS car, a very shiny Humber Sports Vogue.
Basically a tarted up Hillman Minx, it’s only pretensions to the “sports” monniker was that the engine had twin carburettors rather than a single. It DID, however, had full leather upholstery and woodgrain dash and trimmings, quite stylish, really. My car was the oldest, a 1956 Hillman Minx, already very “old skool” even then.
Paul travelled in his 105E Anglia, brush painted and a real “budget” resto even for the time. You know the one I mean, the one that had the reverse slope rear window.
This picture is NOT of Paul’s car!
Anyway, just outside of Narooma, pretty late on Saturday afternoon, Paul misjudged a sweeping left hand corner and the car left the road, taking out a guide post and a barbed wire fence and coming to rest in a paddock. As Paul, Les and I were travelling in convoy, help was at hand and we pulled the car back onto the road to assess the damage. The right front wing was crumpled but fixable, but the radiator was damaged and water was pouring out of it. Leaving Paul and his girlfriend there, we drove into Narooma, purchased some Bars Leaks and returned. While we’d been away Paul had done enough panel beating to get the car mobile so we put the mixture into the radiator and waited for it to do its thing. It didn’t. The hole in the radiator was obviously too big to be sealed. Conscious of our looming deadline we pulled the radiator OUT of the car, took it into the local garage in Narooma where a kind mechanic brazed up the hole and tested it for us. It was sealed. Not bad on a Saturday afternoon, eh? We returned to the Anglia, refitted the radiator and hot-footed it to Bega.
Not quickly enough as it turned out. Worried about where we were and under pressure (no mobile phones, remember), Bob and Blas had already started singing at the coffee shop and the organisers, somewhat harshly, I thought, were pretty unsympathetic about us arriving late and made their displeasure clear.
Music commitments over for the weekend, we headed towards home in the darkness of the winter Sunday night. We hadn’t gotten far out of town when Les pulled over. It seemed that his generator warning light was on and we had already noticed that his lights were getting dimmer. Bush mechanics came into play again. Because I had a set of driving lights on the Hillman I had bought and fitted a heavy duty 9 plate battery and it was fully charged. So, we swapped batteries. Les’s car ran on my battery while my car charged up Les’s battery. We swapped back and forth several times on the trip home before pulling into Wollongong, weary and strung out. But we DID get home and we made it by ourselves without outside help (pretty much), so we were chuffed. What bold adventurers we were.
It was also on this trip that we noticed that Les’s unerring ability to buy a lemon showed itself yet again. For it was clear from the haze of oil smoke that followed the Humber that all was not well in the engine department. Just HOW unwell it was was to become clear fairly soon but not before we had had the chance of performing another feat of bush mechanics.
A couple of days later, he and I went for a drive down to Kiama; quite why I don’t know, we could have been looking for another car that Les wanted to buy. Anyway, just after we wheezed up Bombo Hill, the engine died and we had just enough momentum to coast down the slight rise and turn right into North Kiama Drive where the new Kiama Downs suburb was being built. No matter what we did, the engine would not fire so we went into bush mechanic mode. Top off the distributor and check the points. Odd, the engine was turning over when the fan belt was turned by hand but the distributor shaft was not turning correspondingly. We pulled the distributor out (yes, on the side of the road) and found that the pinion on the bottom of the distributor shaft was spinning freely. Maybe a piccy will help.
The pinion engages in a gear on the camshaft and this provides the turning motion. As you can see from the picture, the pinion is secured to the shaft by a metal dowel that holds it in place. The dowel in Les’s distributor had snapped off and hence no spark. The rudimentary tool kit Les had in the car would not be sufficient so, while I waited with the car, he hitch-hiked back to Wollongong to get his Dads’s FX Holden and a more comprehensive tool kit. While he was gone I busied myself trying to find something that could be pressed into service to effect a repair. Luckily I soon found a 3 inch carpenter’s nail in the gutter. I checked the diameter of the dowel hole, it was a PERFECT fit!
When Les returned we cut the nail off to length, using a set of vice grips, a hacksaw and the Holden’s tow bar as an anvil. Then we hammered the nail in place, driving the flared head flush with the shaft and then burring over the other end, again using a hammer, punch and the tow bar as the anvil. The distributor was refitted and we adjusted the points, did a rough static timing job on the ignition and the car fired up and ran first go! Whoohoo. All up we’d probably taken 2 and a half hours to do the repair, most of that time being taken up by Les’s trip to and from Wollongong.
I MUST add that every young (or old) bush mechanic back then always carried a lady’s metal nail file in his pocket. Not only was it perfect for cleaning the points when they got dirty but the back end of the nail file was exactly 25 thou thick, close enough to most manufacturer’s recommended points gap.
Sadly our bush repair never got the chance to prove its longevity or how clever we were. Just a couple of days later, while driving up Keira Street, in the middle of Wollongong, closely accompanied by an increasingly thick cloud of smelly oil smoke, the Vogue expired in the MIDDLE of the Crown Street/ Keira Street intersection. It was late in the afternoon, steelworks traffic and the middle of the city. After about 20 attempts and with the battery slowly dying from trying to turn the engine over, it caught and I lurched my way up the hill, over the crest outside the Regent Theatre and coasted the car down the street and down Victoria Street and into Les’s driveway.
The next morning I came back to Les’s place to see what could be done. Pronouncing the last rites would have been appropriate. The oil smoke was not a symptom of worn rings and bearings as it usually was in the day. #4 piston had a hole in the crown and the spark plug had been igniting the oil in the sump. The car ended its life in ignominy, sold for a measly sum to the local wrecking yard. Not long after the Hillman joined it in Ron Thorp’s Bargain Barn at Yallah, not a victim of mechanical failure but the increasing effects of incipient rust that affected all British cars in the humid and pollution-laded atmosphere of Wollongong in the 70’s. When Ron came to collect the car he handed me $20. I was considerably miffed and told him I didn’t think that was really that much for such a good car. Ron, ever the businessman, replied, “Well, they don’t give you much money for dead bodies, do they?” I can smile about it now, but it was a bitter pill at the time.
In conclusion I never regretted the many lessons that trying to keep an old car on the road at minimal cost taught me. Apart from anything else, the exercise sure provided a great fund of stories so it was worth it for that, if for nothing else.
ozemarketeer says
Gee Phil. Your writings scare me a little! Didn’t fully appreciate the long forgotten memories of working on FJs, Ford XLs and the like, until this missive! And hitchhiking!!!
I regularly hitchhiked between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Never gave it a second thought. And in uniform!
The Series 1 LandRover that pulled my 30′ caravan all over South Oz, out the back of Hawker, Lyndhurst and the Strzlecki was an excellent candidate for road side repair lessons. It never failed to deliver. Bought it because I believed the Alloy body was rust bullet proof. Pity about the chassis and associated steel bits.
Thanks for the journey mate 🙂
Phil Hall says
Glad to be of service! I hitchhiked a lot when I was in the service. I found that people were far more likely to pick up a guy in uniform than one in “civvies”