true story
It was 1978. I was living in an efficiency apartment on the third floor of a building with no elevator in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana. I was going to school at night, working on an associate degree in electronic engineering technology. (Technology means the math isn’t as hard.)
I was driving a 1966 Buick Wildcat. It was a dependable car mostly because I maintained it on a regular basis. Cars from that era are quite simple compared to what’s made today. Despite their simplicity, they needed a lot more care and maintenance than cars made today.
There was much more to address, the brakes were drums and not disc brakes. Drum brakes were complicated to replace but not impossible. Engine coolant didn’t last as long as it does now. It had to be flushed out and replaced every year. Present-day spark plugs last the life of the car. There are no plug wires to deal with now and the distributor has been replaced by a computer. Back in the 20th century you had to deal with a lot more car stuff.
When I had to do car maintenance, I would take it back to mom and dad’s house in Findlay, Ohio. They had a garage I could use. Working on a car in a parking lot is just bad; people frown on that activity because parking lots are for parking.
On one occasion I drove home to give the car a tune up. That meant I pulled out all eight of the plugs and replaced them with new ones. You had to set the gap between the center electrode and the ground electrode on each one with a feeler gauge (I think it was 0.03”) before cranking them back in. It was best to check the spark plug wires to make sure they were in decent shape. The high voltage in the wire could arc to the metal engine parts and make it run badly.
Then it was time to pull off the distributor cap to get at the contact breaker points. That was the part of the ignition system that created the slug of high voltage from the ignition coil that fired the spark in the spark plug. There was a thing called a condenser that was there to soak up the excess energy when the breaker points opened to prevent arcing at the points and to help collapse the magnetic field energy in the coil to prepare for the next slug of high voltage to make a spark in the next plug.
The distributor in that Buick was on the back of the engine, so I had to get up on top of it to work on it. I replaced the ignition points, put in a new condenser, had a look at the cap for cracks and put it all back together. Then I drove 90 minutes back to Fort Wayne.
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A few days later the Buick started acting weird. It would run, but with a strange lack of power. It got weaker, ran poorly and then just wouldn’t start. I was on the other side of town. I had no way to get the car back to my apartment. I had to find a pay phone and use the Yellow Pages to find a tow truck to get the car back to the parking lot. Today, it would be nothing with a cell phone and the internet. Plus, I was a broke college student. Seventy-five bucks for a tow was a lot of money.
I had no idea what was wrong with the car. Because my automotive troubleshooting skills weren’t so good, I started replacing parts. I bought new plug wires — maybe I weakened them while replacing the plugs? That wasn’t it. It’s an old car, maybe the carburetor needs cleaning? That didn’t fix it. There were several more parts involved that I don’t remember because it was over a generation ago.
You know the maxim about finding something in the last place you look? I got a suggestion from one of the many people I talked to at school about this car problem. I climbed up on the engine, took off the distributor cap, and discovered that the wire to the condenser had come loose. The ignition wasn’t working right because the condenser wasn’t discharging the coil. I thought of all the money I wasted shotgun troubleshooting..
There was another time when my car stranded me, many years later. I was living on the shore of Western Michigan with a wife and two little kids, driving a 1987 Dodge Caravan. That’s a minivan by the way. One of the first ones. This one had a Mitsubishi 4-cylinder engine in it with just enough power to get the job done, nothing to spare. That really doesn’t have much to do with the point of this story, I just try to point that out every chance I get.
The four of us were coming back from a long trip to where, I don’t remember. The kids were still small. We were only a few miles from home, and I completely forgot to pay attention to the fuel gauge. There was no “low fuel” indicator on this minivan. The only low fuel indicator was the engine sputtering and then nothing. I rolled to a stop.
Did I mention that it was raining like crazy? Well, it was. I was about 1000 feet from the exit ramp and there was a gas station at the top of that ramp, so it wasn’t too far. But still, it was raining that kind of rain where the wipers are going full blast and it’s not fast enough. Plus, it was dark. That gas station seemed like it was 10 miles away.
I had gotten not far when a car pulled over in front of me and stopped. This became one of those times when I was convinced that the spirits were there to help me because the driver was a woman about the age I am now, late sixties.
“Do you need help?” Boy, I sure did. She probably sized up the situation: minivan on the side of the road with the hazard lights on, young dad filling his shoes with rainwater. She gave me a ride to the station. I bought a gas can and filled it. It was a four-lane divided highway, so she got on in the opposite direction, drove to the next exit to turn around and then parked behind the Caravan while I filled it from the can. I thanked her profusely. She reaffirmed my faith in humanity and in the higher powers for having this person appear at just the right time. It could have ended far differently.
