Funny Car Stories

Started by EBuff75, December 02, 2022, 10:40:36 AM

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EBuff75

Just a thread to collect various vehicle-related funny stuff.

Because of the conversation in another thread about car headlights, I recalled a funny story from high school that I thought I'd share. 

Back in high school, our marching band and flag corps had an annual tradition where the week before school started, they would get together one evening and play a game of football.  This was ostensibly a touch football game, but tended toward "light" tackle as well.  The game was played without any type of pads or anything (these are band geeks, not football players) and generally resulted in a few cuts, bruises, and the occasional broken bone.  Nothing too serious - you know, 80s-style fun!

Anyway, my junior year, I'm cruising around town with some friends in my car and we realize that this is the night of the traditional game.  So we decide to drive over to the high school and check it out.

Now, this isn't any type of sanctioned activity.  It takes place at night, in the school's practice field, using whatever light there is from various streetlights and building security lights. (ah, to have young eyes again where this sort of thing is actually possible) 

The teacher's parking lot is right behind the building, next to the practice field and slightly above it, which provides a pretty good vantage point to watch what's going on.  Something to note is that at the time, there was very little lighting for the lot. This meant, that despite me driving a light-yellow station wagon, anyone out in the field couldn't really tell anything about the car, just that there was one in the lot.

So we pulled up and I shut the headlights off while we sat there.  Down on the field, people started looking up toward the car, not knowing who it was, or why they were there.  I let them wonder for a moment, then hit the lights.

My car had a somewhat unique feature at the time, and that was a momentary high beam function (flash-to-pass). It meant that all I had to do was pull back on the turn signal / beam selection lever, and it would turn on the high beams and flood the field with light.

Everyone panicked!  They assumed that it was the police checking into who was using the field without permission. 

All of us in the car burst out laughing and I hung my head out the window to shout at some friends of mine who were among the panicked herd.  They quickly realized that there was no problem and the game resumed.  We watched for a couple of minutes and then headed out, very contented and still laughing about the chaos we'd created, simply by turning on some headlights.
Information - it's all a battle for information. You have to know what's happening if you're going to do anything about it. - Tom Clancy, Patriot Games

EBuff75

My first car was a 1983 Subaru GL wagon/hatchback with 4wd (that's not mine in the picture, but it's pretty close to the one I had).  The name of the color was 'antique cream' which is a weird way of saying that it was light yellow. 

One of my responsibilities, in return for giving me the car and paying my insurance, was that I would take my younger brother to various activities, thus freeing my parents up from having to drive him.

My brother hated that car.

It was weird-looking, yellow, and was suffering from a near-terminal case of Midwestern rust, which made it yellow with orange/brown splotches.

To further irritate him, I had found a pair of sunglasses which were hot pink on one side, electric blue on the others, and were emblazoned with "Lovable" on both temples.  It was just the perfect mix of useful, and hideously terrible. 

One year, it was time for a middle school dance and I'd been tasked with delivering my brother and one of his friends that evening.  Of course, I'm driving that hated car, but I'm also a big brother who has the occasional sick sense of humor. 

The school has a loop driveway that runs about half the length of the building.  This is where the buses would park every day to load / unload students.  During the day, the parents weren't allowed to use it and instead they would drop the kids off at a cutout along side the road which was only a few feet farther away, so it wasn't an issue.  But this was at night, when there weren't any buses, so all the parents were dropping kids off right there at the bus area.

Well, parents, and the occasional older sibling...  :D

When I arrived, there weren't any cars there, but there was a large crowd of kids, milling around the entrance.  For the dances, the school used a side entrance which was closer to the gym, rather than having the kids walk all the way through the school from the main entrance.  To help keep the kids from causing problems inside the school, the doors remained closed until it was time for the dance to start, which meant there were several hundred kids gathered outside the door waiting to go in.

Cue the older brother, sick-sense-of-humor portion.

I saw that the entire loop was empty and gunned it, hurtling my ugly, yellow, rusted-out, pile of junk along it at breakneck (maybe 20mph) speeds before slamming on my brakes and skidding to a stop, while holding the horn down in the car.

Every. Single. Kid. Turned. To. Look.

My brother and his friend were fluorescent red with embarrassment as they climbed out of the car to join their friends in the crowd.

As for me, I just waved happily and drove off, content in having done my older brother duties!
Information - it's all a battle for information. You have to know what's happening if you're going to do anything about it. - Tom Clancy, Patriot Games

MacWa77ace

Back in the day me and a bunch of friends went out someplace together, but met up and parked at the church parking lot. Now back in the day was also when I was bodybuilding. Anyhow, there were probably 15-20 people and a bunch of cars at the meet up. I think we were going to a haunted house or something down in Miami but wanted to take the least amount of cars because of parking.

Anyhow, when we left Miami, the car I was in got back to the parking lot first. 'Our friend' who left his car there but wasn't back yet had a smallish wagon not unlike your Subaru. We'll we decided to play a trick on him so I lifted up the backend of his car by the bumper and swung it around so it ended up half on the sidewalk and perpendicular to the parking stripes. Not how he had left it.

We didn't hang around to see his reaction when he got back, but we were all laughing at that one.

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EBuff75

Quote from: MacWa77ace on December 06, 2022, 11:32:18 AMBack in the day me and a bunch of friends went out someplace together, but met up and parked at the church parking lot. Now back in the day was also when I was bodybuilding. Anyhow, there were probably 15-20 people and a bunch of cars at the meet up. I think we were going to a haunted house or something down in Miami but wanted to take the least amount of cars because of parking.

Anyhow, when we left Miami, the car I was in got back to the parking lot first. 'Our friend' who left his car there but wasn't back yet had a smallish wagon not unlike your Subaru. We'll we decided to play a trick on him so I lifted up the backend of his car by the bumper and swung it around so it ended up half on the sidewalk and perpendicular to the parking stripes. Not how he had left it.

We didn't hang around to see his reaction when he got back, but we were all laughing at that one.


My brother and some friends of his did a similar thing, also at a church.  In their case, the car belonged to one of the church youth group volunteers who was still inside.  The kids worked quickly to "walk" the car from one end of the parking lot to the other before the volunteer came out.  They did it by lifting and moving the front over, then the back, then the front, etc, etc.  It ended up about 150ft away from where it had started, but still in an official parking space!  That way it doesn't block anything, and just left the person thinking that they were crazy and maybe they really HAD parked all the way down there!  :smiley_clap:
Information - it's all a battle for information. You have to know what's happening if you're going to do anything about it. - Tom Clancy, Patriot Games

Rednex

Me and 4 friends were riding round the strip by the collage, we stopped for gas in his 84 ish Volkswagen Jetta. So he went in to pay for gas, we pushed/picked up the car and moved it to the next pump. That set off his alarm's kill switch and we had to sit there an hour for it to reset.

Another one

So we had a up hill driveway, i had my 87 Monty Carlo SS Areo-back  parked washing it. Well open the door on passenger side to vacuum the interior. Knocked it out of park, leg got stuck between door and bench with vacuum. Pulled me out of the car/ under the car.  Slammed it back into park before I fully ran my self over in my own car .. from the inside... while parked.   

NT2C

My first car was a wreck of a 1970 Plymouth Fury III 4-door hardtop.  My boss at the time gave it to me for my birthday in 1981.  It was his first car too when he'd bought it new in 1970 but it was beat up, sun faded (sat parked in Arizona for a few years), and didn't have a single body panel without a dent.  The seats were so caved in I had to put sofa cushions in them to drive and the drum brakes really hated getting wet.  But, it only had 58K on the clock and 318 under the hood and I loved it.  I turned that thing into the ultimate sleeper.

The back window had a mesh "Budweiser" logo in it, I added a CB (with 9' whip on the passenger rear quarter panel), told my buddies to go ahead and plaster it with shooting, hunting, racing, booze stickers (it ended up with dozens all over the body), and the hood was held closed with a length of logging chain wrapped around the front bumper after a collision with another car at an intersection with no stop signs.  It looked and sounded like a hunk of junk with a bad muffler.

Instead, under the hood that 318 was bored out .30 over and had more than $3,000 worth of love poured into it.  It was pushing ~480-490HP and would sometimes do the quarter in under 11 sec.  The tranny and rear were both replaced with racing units, the rear was tubbed to fit the widest street-legal tires that would fit, the exhaust was just a pair of Cherry Bomb glasspacks bolted right to the headers and everything under the hood was eventually either chromed or stainless.  Open it on a sunny day and you'd go blind.

Well, one day I needed gas and pulled into the local Hess station (I usually ran 100LL aviation gas a buddy would bring me from the airport but it'd run on premium in a pinch).  Hess was a full service station back then, meaning the kid in the white uniform had to clean your windows and check fluids.  When he asked if I wanted the oil checked I looked over at my buddy Carmine and grinned as I handed the kid the key for the padlock.  He got the chain unlocked, popped the hood, and just about wet himself.  He was like a puppy with a new ball.  He jumped up and down in a circle all the time hollering for the other guys on the crew to come see this.  It turned out we'd beaten a few of them in street races and they'd always wondered what the hell was under that hood.

Gawd, I miss that shitbox.
Nonsolis Radios Sediouis Fulmina Mitto. - USN Gunner's Mate motto

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12_Gauge_Chimp

Speaking of sleepers, my mom used to have a Ford Crown Victoria when I was a kid. It was an old Sheriff's department cruiser and had been modified for high speed pursuits at some point.

By which I mean someone took out the stock Crown Vic engine and replaced it with a Ford Mustang engine (I never got the actual specs of it, but that's mostly because I was only a kid at the time and car stuff was beyond my comprehension.).

The car was kind of beat up and looked like your typical grocery getter. I can remember a handful of times where my mother was stopped at a red light and some doofus in a souped up sports car pulled up next to her and thought she'd be intimidated. They'd sit there, revving their engines, acting like they were John Force ready to go down the drag strip and Mom would just be sitting there waiting for the light to turn green. Once the light changed, Mom would hit the gas like normal and blow these chumps away as she left them in the dust.

She didn't even try to race them. She'd drive off like normal and these idiots would be left behind in awe of the Grandma mobile that just blew them out of the water.

My absolute favorite time this happened was when a guy in a Corvette pulled up next to us (Mom and I were heading somewhere. I think it was to Walmart.) and he's doing the usual engine revving show off thing.

Mom doesn't take her eyes off the light and as this guy is trying his best to show off, the light changes, Mom hits the gas and off we go. Corvette Guy does his damnedest to keep up (we really weren't going that fast nor were we actually trying to race this fool.

Traffic was also really light despite it being the afternoon.) and the last we saw him, he had pulled over and was smacking his steering wheel with his hands and cussing up a storm. 11 year old me thought this was the funniest thing ever and it's one of my favorite memories of that car.

We had that car for another couple years after that and only let it go because it developed something wrong with the engine and repairing it wasn't financially possible for us at the time.

So Mom got a different car and our days of humbling street racers were over.


echo83

My first car was a 1986 Buick LeSabre wagon. Canary yellow, faux wood panels. My dad bought it for $250 cash after he saw the original owner get turned away from a used car lot when the guy was trying to trade it in. 

There's no way to make a car like that cool, so I just leaned into it. I had Christmas lights strung up inside it, replaced all the interior lights with red lights, and drove as fast as it would allow. Acceleration was atrocious, because the transmission had been replaced, but sheer mass made it sail along the highway. It felt like driving a couch.

A couple of crates of gravel in the way-back seat (rear facing of course) added additional mass, but were important to maintain traction, because the car was rear wheel drive.

One of the "improvements" I made was to add a suicide knob. This was a mistake. 

One day, I was hauling absolute ass down the highway with a friend, when I decided to take an exit at the last possible second. I yanked the wheel, flew into the exit lane, and heard the tires howling as I went into the turn. 

The aptly-named suicide knob chose that exact moment to loosen, and the steering wheel whipped around in a blur as my white knuckles held onto the knob. The wheel spun until it hit the bracket, then ripped the knob out of my hand. 

What followed was one of the most memorable lessons in physics that I have ever experienced.

The car spun out, and the rear fishtailed so hard that we plowed through the exit, rear first, through the grass divider, rear first, and back onto the highway. Gravel from the back seat boxes had fanned out, flying from the back seat, peppering the backs of our heads, and landing on the dashboard. One second I was watching the highway coming towards me, the next I was watching it reverse away. 

We had done a complete 180, and in a matter of seconds had gone from about 80 mph in drive, facing forward, to a dead halt in the breakdown lane, looking out the windshield as two lanes of oncoming traffic went by. 

Needless to say, the transmission needed replacement soon after. 

When I brought it to the mechanic, an old family friend, he said,

"Between you and me, I'm not gonna tell your dad or nothin'...you been spinnin' the tires?"

I just shook my head, but he knew. 

Mechanics always know


EBuff75

When my grandma passed, my dad and his two sisters spent the evening telling secrets that they'd kept from her over the years.  Times they got into trouble in school, things they'd gotten away with at home, how they'd been forced to high their beer stash from her even when they were in their 60s and she was in her 90s, and so on.

One of the confessions from my father was that HE was the reason my grandpa had to replace the transmission in their car - twice - back when he was in high school!  My dad had been using it to drag race and otherwise hot-dog around and had killed two of them in a row.  Apparently he'd gotten away with it and my grandfather never knew that it was anything other than defective transmissions!
Information - it's all a battle for information. You have to know what's happening if you're going to do anything about it. - Tom Clancy, Patriot Games

Anianna

Back in the '90s, we lived in the Appalachian mountains.  I have a couple of stories about my little '82 Toyota Pickup from that period.

The Escape

My husband and I were in college.  We weren't married our freshman year, but we were together and we had made friends with a group of similar nerds and geeks.  This was my introduction to D&D as my parents had been taken by the Satanic Panic and I had never been allowed to play. 

Now, when the year started, we were told under no uncertain terms that the school never ever ever shuts down for snow.  It snows all the time, we still have class.  The school had never closed due to snow.

That year, we were hit by what some called "the blizzard of the century" followed by an ice storm and the school closed for snow for the first time since its inception and it stayed closed for two weeks.  We got in a lot of D&D. 

Now to the car part of the story.  There was a significant incline to leave campus and nobody could get out.  One of our friends had a dorm room overlooking the exit and that's where we were playing and also rooting for any vehicle that tried to escape up that snow and ice packed incline.  For over a week, nobody could make it.

After a week of observing these attempts, I confidentially said that I could make it out in my little rear-wheel-drive pickup, even though we had seen many 4-wheel-drive vehicles fail.  My challenge was accepted and the nerd/geek squad was loaded into the covered truck bed.  I feel I should note, at this point, that a couple of the group were sizeable individuals and I asked them to sit at the wheel wells.  I also had several bags of kitty litter back there in case I ever got stuck in snow. 

I kept it in low gear and walked it back and forth up that incline (everybody else had tried to go straight up and gun it too hard, plus they were probably driving automatics, so less gear control).  Anyway, we nerds and geeks were the first to escape and we were rewarded with pie from the local pizza shop, which was thrilled to finally get college kids in for the first time since the storm. 


The Jinx

I was not nice to my truck in regards to maintenance.  I was a college kid and unconcerned with oil and filter changes and pretty much anything else.  It was a Toyota, so it didn't need me to be nice and it never gave me any trouble and always passed inspection.  Even in the cold Appalachian winters, it never failed to start. 

There was no animal shelter in our area and the only hope for stray animals was one remote veterinary office way up the mountain and a network of kind people willing to foster.  I was one of those people and was decent at taming feral cats, so I as often called on to do that for a pair of feral kittens, a black one and a gray one, from the same litter.  I had decided to keep the black one and gave her a name, but I didn't name the gray one because my SIL said she wanted it once I had it tamed.

So I drive up the cold, snowy mountain to the vet's office to retrieve these kitties.  I get there and get them into my cat crates.  It's cold, so I left my truck running so they wouldn't have to suffer.  I take the black cat out first and get it situated in the cab of my truck and go back in for the gray one.  I get the gray one situated and go to get in my truck, but it suddenly dies on me and I can't get it started again.

So I take the cats back inside to see if I can figure out what's up with my truck.  It starts right back up.  So I bring the black cat out again and everything's fine.  Then I bring the gray cat out again and, again, my truck stalls.  I take the cats back inside again. 

Again, my truck starts up just fine.  I try one more time to load the cats and the truck manages to stay on.  I get a few miles down the road, almost to the only gas station for many more miles (the gas station being the only thing at all for probably about 20 miles) and the truck stalls again.  I'm going down the mountain, so I try to rolling start several times, but no dice by the time I reach the gas station, so I coast it into the gas station and into a parking space. I try several times to start it again, but it just will not. 

This was before cell phones were widespread, so I go into the gas station and begin calling every friend I have with a car (my husband and I only had the truck at the time).  I finally get hold of my best friend and she comes to pick up me and the cats.  We get the cats into her warm car and I have a go at my truck again and it starts up just fine. 

So, I have her haul the cats and we both drive home without further incident. 

My SIL ended up changing her mind, so we named the gray cat Jinx since the only time my truck ever stalled was when she was in it.  After that incident, it still never stalled without her in it and I had that truck well over 300k miles.



The Maverick and My Dad as "Mechanic"

Before the pickup truck, I had a '74 Ford Maverick - my first ever car.  My friends called it the tank because it was massive and about the same color green. 

My dad who likes to think he is knowledgeable about all things took it upon himself at one point to do some unrequested maintenance on my car, unbeknownst to myself at the time.  This should actually have been a good thing since maintenance in general was not a strong suit of my family and, as a teenager, I was wholly unconcerned about such things other than making sure it was well oiled because it ate oil like crazy.  His maintenance included topping off all of my fluids - again, I didn't know he did this.

On the way to school the next day, the brakes felt squishy and I found myself being unusually careful to let off the gas well in advance of a stop.  On the way home, whatever brake fluid had been left was gone.  I drove purely on being careful pushing and letting off the gas with my hand on the emergency brake the whole way home - a thirty-minute drive mostly on a major highway with heavy traffic.  I nearly had a panic attack trying to merge in without brakes, but I managed it.

It was harrowing and I was a dumb kid having no idea what was going on and that I really should just pull over.  It's amazing what you can accomplish when you're too dumb to realize you shouldn't.  I made it home and breathed a sigh of relief.

Turns out my dad had put the transmission fluid where the break fluid goes.  I was relegated to riding the bus until he got it sorted.
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NT2C

Ani, just an FYI, kitty litter is horrible as a winter traction aid.  It's dried clay, and it rapidly becomes wet clay... on top of ice/snow.  Just makes it slipperier.  I generally carry a salt/sand mix (80% construction sand and 20% calcium chloride) in gallon plastic jugs that make it spill-proof, resealable, and easy to spread.
Nonsolis Radios Sediouis Fulmina Mitto. - USN Gunner's Mate motto

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Current Tracking Info for My Jeep

NT2C

#11
I have my own "big boat station wagon story".  Back in 1979-80 or so my families construction company was doing some renovation work at the home of the owner of a company called Old Dutch Mustard (they're still around and based in NH now).  One day, on a break, my dad and I were trying to see in the garage to see if there was a car in it (or if it had room to put some of our equipment in) and found a tarp covered 1969 Mercury Grand Marquis Colony Park station wagon with just 619 miles on the odometer.  My dad asked Paul, the owner, what was up with the car.  Paul told him that he'd purchased the car new for his wife in 1969 but she'd hated it and never drove it.  It still had the original full tank of gas from the dealership.  A little negotiation later and my dad was the proud new owner of the car for $900. 

Not long after that I was at a party at my dad's house and he asked me to take the car and run get a few bags of ice from this 24-hour bakery a mile or two away.  It was just around this time of year so my dad had put brand new big ol' Firestone Town & Country "L" series snow tires on it and it didn't take me long to discover this beast of a car could smoke those on dry pavement through all three gears.  A little look under the hood when I got to the bakery revealed possibly the biggest hunk of Detroit iron of that era.  Stickered right on the air cleaner was "Ford Racing - 429 Cobra Jet" and I fell instantly in love.

I borrowed that car every chance I could, and had a standing offer to my dad to buy it if he ever got rid of it.  I blew away so many Chargers, Road Runners, etc with that thing!  There was a local performance shop in the neighborhood that happened to sit right at the end of a very empty and seldom used 4 lane street with a half mile of perfectly straight pavement.  I lurked at that shop as much as I could and had some awesome races with guys who came there with their hot cars.

Sadly, one year the wagon dropped the drive shaft on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at 60mph, got pole vaulted, wrapped the shaft around the rear axle and nosed into a retaining wall.  My step-mom who was driving got out of it okay but the car was totaled and dad junked it without telling me or giving me a chance to see if I could salvage the engine. 

:gonk:

Edit: Not the actual car but same year/model/color.  The only difference is we removed the woodgrain vinyl and it was just a solid dark green.



Nonsolis Radios Sediouis Fulmina Mitto. - USN Gunner's Mate motto

Current Weather in My AO
Current Tracking Info for My Jeep

MacWa77ace

Quote from: Anianna on December 08, 2022, 10:52:57 PMThe Maverick and My Dad as "Mechanic"

Before the pickup truck, I had a '74 Ford Maverick - my first ever car.  My friends called it the tank because it was massive and about the same color green. 

My dad who likes to think he is knowledgeable about all things took it upon himself at one point to do some unrequested maintenance on my car, unbeknownst to myself at the time.  This should actually have been a good thing since maintenance in general was not a strong suit of my family and, as a teenager, I was wholly unconcerned about such things other than making sure it was well oiled because it ate oil like crazy.  His maintenance included topping off all of my fluids - again, I didn't know he did this.

On the way to school the next day, the brakes felt squishy and I found myself being unusually careful to let off the gas well in advance of a stop.  On the way home, whatever brake fluid had been left was gone.  I drove purely on being careful pushing and letting off the gas with my hand on the emergency brake the whole way home - a thirty-minute drive mostly on a major highway with heavy traffic.  I nearly had a panic attack trying to merge in without brakes, but I managed it.

It was harrowing and I was a dumb kid having no idea what was going on and that I really should just pull over.  It's amazing what you can accomplish when you're too dumb to realize you shouldn't.  I made it home and breathed a sigh of relief.

Turns out my dad had put the transmission fluid where the break fluid goes.  I was relegated to riding the bus until he got it sorted.

My first car was a Maverick too. A 'hand me down' from my Grandfather. '77 Ford Maverick 4 door coupe, two tone, with  soft top.

The master cylinder went bad, or was going bad for a while and finally it was bad. Which meant that one push on the break pedal and it went to the floor without even slowing the car. So I had to push it down at least three times to get the pressure up enough to stop the car.

Well I got really good at 1, 2, 3'ing the breaks, so I just drove around with it like that for over a year.

This is it exactly. All my friends called it 'The Horsepower Sales' car because the only customization I did to it was put a Horsepower Sales front signature plate on the bumper [the local auto parts store] and then put white raised letter tires on it [got rid of the white walls, they weren't cool]. Still to this day if I run into someone from high school that I wasn't even friends with, they would say, 'oh yeah, you were the guy with the horsepower sales car'.  :rolleyes1:   

It looked soooo fast with these exact dorky hubcaps and those raised letter tires.  :awesome:

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echo83

Quote from: NT2C on December 09, 2022, 03:36:12 AMI have my own "big boat station wagon story".  Back in 1979-80 or so my families construction company was doing some renovation work at the home of the owner of a company called Old Dutch Mustard (they're still around and based in NH now).  One day, on a break, my dad and I were trying to see in the garage to see if there was a car in it (or if it had room to put some of our equipment in) and found a tarp covered 1969 Mercury Grand Marquis Colony Park station wagon with just 619 miles on the odometer.  My dad asked Paul, the owner, what was up with the car.  Paul told him that he'd purchased the car new for his wife in 1969 but she'd hated it and never drove it.  It still had the original full tank of gas from the dealership.  A little negotiation later and my dad was the proud new owner of the car for $900. 

Not long after that I was at a party at my dad's house and he asked me to take the car and run get a few bags of ice from this 24-hour bakery a mile or two away.  It was just around this time of year so my dad had put brand new big ol' Firestone Town & Country "L" series snow tires on it and it didn't take me long to discover this beast of a car could smoke those on dry pavement through all three gears.  A little look under the hood when I got to the bakery revealed possibly the biggest hunk of Detroit iron of that era.  Stickered right on the air cleaner was "Ford Racing - 429 Cobra Jet" and I fell instantly in love.

I borrowed that car every chance I could, and had a standing offer to my dad to buy it if he ever got rid of it.  I blew away so many Chargers, Road Runners, etc with that thing!  There was a local performance shop in the neighborhood that happened to sit right at the end of a very empty and seldom used 4 lane street with a half mile of perfectly straight pavement.  I lurked at that shop as much as I could and had some awesome races with guys who came there with their hot cars.

Sadly, one year the wagon dropped the drive shaft on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at 60mph, got pole vaulted, wrapped the shaft around the rear axle and nosed into a retaining wall.  My step-mom who was driving got out of it okay but the car was totaled and dad junked it without telling me or giving me a chance to see if I could salvage the engine. 

:gonk:

Edit: Not the actual car but same year/model/color.  The only difference is we removed the woodgrain vinyl and it was just a solid dark green.




I would kill for one of those. It didn't have the power window option on the tailgate window, did it? The one where you put the key in the rear door lock and turn it to raise and lower the window? For some reason, I thought that feature was totally badass. 

NT2C

Quote from: echo83 on December 10, 2022, 10:00:57 AMI would kill for one of those. It didn't have the power window option on the tailgate window, did it? The one where you put the key in the rear door lock and turn it to raise and lower the window? For some reason, I thought that feature was totally badass.
Yes, it did have that feature.  :awesome:
Nonsolis Radios Sediouis Fulmina Mitto. - USN Gunner's Mate motto

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EBuff75

There's been a picture making the rounds recently of a Dodge Ram dually with the frame broken in the middle due to a huge slide-in camper which overloaded the truck.  While I was looking around online to see if I could find any more info, I had a bit of a flashback to something from my past.

*Cue the harp music and mystical fog of memory*

After college, my first job was working in a call center for a car company.  Anything from people wanting to know where the local dealer was, to detectives looking for information on cars with red interiors (for a kidnapping case - true story!), to used car lots needing to know the exact date/mileage the warranty started (called the "in service" date).  But the bread-and-butter of the call center was people calling in to complain about things that had broken, particularly when it happened while the warranty was still in effect, but the dealer wouldn't cover it.

Usually, this was wear-and-tear items, like brakes or tires.  Sometimes it was gross stupidity (blown engine at 30k due to never having had an oil change).  Other times it was roll-your-eyes ridiculous - "my transmission failed and the car is only 13 years old with 340,000 miles on it!", or "I want you to replace a piece of trim that fell off my ten year old car."  But then there were the "professional" complainers; people who believe that the universe owes them everything they want and more, regardless of the circumstances.

I get a call routed to me for a man from the NYC area, who has a cargo van with a failed rear-end in it.  He's within the warranty period/mileage, but the dealer is refusing the cover it under warranty and this guy is pissed.  I take down all his info and then put him on hold to call the dealer to see what's going on.

The service manager was expecting my call and just sighed before explaining everything.

The customer had a specialized sewer cleaning business which used a remotely-operated power-washer.  Basically, hook up a water hose and then drive this thing right into sewer tunnels where it would spray clean the walls using high-pressure water.  It had tracks and was able to drive right up some ramps and fit into the back of his van to take it from place to place.

"I'm not a tall man, I'm 5-foot, 8-inches," the manager tells me.  "Right now, I can reach up and put my hand flat on the roof of the van, because the suspension is so beaten down.  He always leaves the robot at his shop before he comes in, but it's obvious that he's overloaded with it."

Basically, his robot was thousands of pounds over the cargo capacity for the van.  So much so that the springs were bent and the shocks had failed, causing the van to just about scrape the ground as it drove (I think it was down by something like 4-6 inches from the normal height).  The strain of carrying all that weight, potentially coupled with the change in driveline angle, is what had caused the rear-end to fail.  The dealer wrote it up as misuse/abuse and refused warranty coverage for it, with notes in the paperwork detailing their findings.

I thanked the service manager and switched back to the customer, where I delivered the bad (for him) news.  He was still pissed, but there wasn't much he could do about it (even at the time, warranty write-ups were computerized and centralized, so even taking it to another dealer wasn't going to work).  We basically told him that if he tried to fight this in court, that we'd ask that the judge to make him to bring the robot along so that it could be weighed. 

Apparently he'd been a pain in the dealer's ass for a long time, with him insisting that all the problems he had with his vehicles had nothing to do with the way he abused them.  It was obviously the manufacturer's fault, because the customer couldn't possibly be wrong!  This was one of the few cases where they could absolutely point to the way he used his vehicle as the reason for the failure, and the service manager seemed to be a bit gleeful that maybe now the guy would leave them alone.  With any luck, he'd switch brands and go annoy some other dealer for a while now!

*****

On a related PSA note - if you ever buy a customized van, make sure that it's built on at least a 3/4 ton (2500 series) chassis.  We used to get calls about those all the time as well.  Sketchy conversion companies would buy 1500 series (half-ton) vans and then add thousands pounds to them during the conversion with lifted fiberglass roofs, TVs, power-reclining leather seats, thick carpet, mirrors, lights, tables, woodwork, game systems, vacuums, VCRs, multi-speaker stereos, curtains, refrigerators, etc.  Often times, the finished vans would be near (and sometimes over) their GVWR (gross vehicle weight rating) before you put any people or things in them.  If you loaded it up with your family and their luggage, you could be thousands of pounds overweight, making them dangerous to drive and causing premature failures in the driveline, suspension, and brakes.
Information - it's all a battle for information. You have to know what's happening if you're going to do anything about it. - Tom Clancy, Patriot Games

EBuff75

More info about that Ram pickup with the failed frame.  Dodge has denied his warranty claim and he's trying to get his insurance to cover the repair ($17k).  It appears that the analysis was correct - he was likely well over the payload capacity (not to mention that the camper's center of gravity appears to be behind the rear axle) and that was what caused the failure.  https://www.thedrive.com/news/broken-ram-3500-dually-shows-a-camper-can-still-overload-a-big-truck
Information - it's all a battle for information. You have to know what's happening if you're going to do anything about it. - Tom Clancy, Patriot Games

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