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Looking Smart In College
Richard
Bishop
©
Copyright 2011 by Richard Bishop
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At
the beginning of my junior year in Mattawan Consolidated High
School, Van Buren County, Michigan, I bought an
“old-timer”automobile
from two brothers who were my cClassmates. In late 1945 I turned 15
years of age and the car, a 1925 Model-T Ford Coupé, was
already 20 years old. It had wooden wheel-spokes that were painted
yellow while the rest of the passenger car was painted Mr. Henry
Ford’s color of choice: “you
can have any color you want, as long as it’s black!”
I
felt that when I later went to college I would look
“smart”tooling
around the campus in such a vehicle. This ego trip cost me $25.00.
Little
did I know just how much of my life could be taken over by a mere
vehicle (later in life, I learned that buying a computer could do the
same thing!)
I
was lucky that my Father, Elmer J. Bishop (who had the gift of being
mechanically inclined), had once owned such an automobile and fully
supported my efforts at maintenance. With his help and advice, we
installed a belt-operated generator and 6-Volt battery-charging
system complete with “ampere meter” to work around
the
original magneto, which was permanently defective (beyond repair). We
also mounted sealed-beam headlights within the headlight housings and
put an electric windshield wiper on the windshield in place of the
old hand-operated device. He also showed me how to install an air
petcock on the intake manifold (controllable from the dashboard) to
let fresh, cold air into the carbureted air stream when running
all-out at 45 M.P.H.; result, a 10 M.P.H. increase of top speed to 55
M.P.H.!
It
had a pile of negative idiosyncrasies. The gas tank was part of a
“gravity-feed” fuel system. When almost out of gas,
it
would not climb a steep hill because the fuel line connection was at
the front of the gas tank and whatever gas remained moved to the back
of the tank and could not reach the outlet. This
was solved by backing up the hill in reverse gear!
Another
negative peculiarity was encountered in the Summer time. It had a
tendency to get wet and quit running after plowing through water
puddles. The spark-advance lever on the steering wheel accomplished
its function down low on the right front side of the engine. It was a
round metal cap and was not especially water proof. Splashing through
one deep puddle of water was sufficient to flood this cap and
short-out the spark to all four spark plugs. You were lucky if you
could “coast”on through the puddle to slightly
higher
ground ---because the solution was to get out and go around to the
right side of the vehicle, going almost down on one knee, to reach
over, take off the cap, and dry it inside with your handkerchief.
Many Model-T drivers tried placing a plastic or cellophane sheet over
and around the cap, held with a strong rubber-band, but the extreme
heat softened the rubber-band and the slip-stream of air soon tore it
off.
Evidently
I was born twenty years too soon because I read someplace, that
later on, when the innovative new “silicone”sprays
became available, this problem was mostly solved by spraying the
inside of the cap. This reduced the tendency to short-out when wet.
Some
peculiarities were not design faults. The ring-gear on the fly-wheel
had a spot on it where the starter-gear once had engaged incorrectly
and chewed a few teeth out. If, on shut-down, the motor stopped at
exactly that place (which was often), then the starter motor just
whirred uselessly when trying to start it again. He showed me how to
start it in that event. The normal “trick” was to
get out
and go around front and turn the crankshaft a little
with
the hand-crank to a different place on the flywheel where the starter
could successfully engage (From
him, I learned also never to try to fully start the engine with the
hand-crank since a broken thumb was often the result of the kick-back
from a backfire). By
leaving the car in
gear and rocking it backwards or forward, the
same thing could be accomplished.
In
the beginning, the starter always was erratic in its turning when
it’s gear was engaged; varying during each revolution from
high
speed to almost stopping on its go-‘round. It sounded: Rrrr,
Rrrr, Rrrr, Rrrr (like the battery was almost dead). We detached it
and sent it to an electrical shop specializing in the repair of
electric motors. They found that the shaft was bent (probably from
the occasion where the starter gear had jammed against the flywheel
ring-gear) and its wobbling caused the variations in its spin under
load. They somehow straightened the shaft and returned it good as
new, at a modest price without any electrical work except testing!
Notwithstanding
this “fix,”on cold winter mornings of below zero
temperatures when the oil was very stiff and the starter motor just
whirred or where, under load, it barely turned-over (too slow to
start the engine), the “trick” had to be more
drastic.
Then, you jacked up the rear-wheel on the driver’s side, left
the transmission in high-gear (left-side hand-lever forward), and
spun the engine by turning the left rear-wheel by hand, counter
clock-wise. Then, after the engine caught, you jumped into the
driver’s seat with the left rear-wheel still on the jack and
spinning like crazy, pulled the hand-lever back slowly while stepping
onto the first-gear pedal. This shifted the cold and stiff bands of
the transmission out of high-gear into the low speed gear and then
finally into neutral to where the hand-emergency-brake could become
engaged gently (left-side hand-lever fully back --slowly stopping the
rear-wheel spin); too much brake here, at that moment, would kill the
engine. Then down off the jack, putting the jack into the trunk, and
off you went. I carried a special hydraulic jack with a very wide,
stable base that pumped-up fast, just for these occasions.
With
this automobile, the saying: “get out and get
under”
became a repeated routine. Once, when I had the cylinder-head off of
the 4-cylinder engine of the Model-T for the purpose of grinding the
valves, I noticed that one piston had a 2”long hair-line
crack
in the top and black carbon marks on the inside . . . indicating some
leakage during combustion. At the time Sears, Roebuck & Company
still provided many kinds of parts for the ancient Ford, but a piston
was not in their catalog. I had noticed that there was an old,
abandoned Model-T Sedan chassis in the woods on a boyhood
friend’s
farm with grass and bushes growing up through it. My friend arranged
for his father to give me permission to
“cannibalize”a
piston from it. I did this in about an hour by jacking it up and
removing the oil pan from the motor for access to the piston and
connecting rod. Inside, it was still covered with old oil and had not
rusted in all those years! Despite being reasonably worn, it
substituted perfectly for the damaged one, rings and all. This was a
tribute to Henry Ford and his innovative mass-production system; the
heart of which was the complete
“inter-changeability”of
parts so machined to fine tolerances that they would substitute and
fit exactly!
I
was also greatly indebted to my friend and his father, as well, for
helping me keep my “old-timer” going.
The
four pistons got to making a lot of
“rattling”sounds
which my father diagnosed as excessively worn wrist-pins.
Surprisingly, he was able to locate a machine shop that was willing
to re-bore out the horizontal holes across the pistons to a specified
size. Sears, Roebuck & Company still provided oversize
wrist-pins
of stated sizes in their catalog to fit newly machined pistons (as
well as the tops of the connecting rods). So it was “get out
and get under” again. While the motor was torn apart, I also
tightened the lower ends of the connecting rods. This was necessary
because the bearings were fairly soft, poured
“Babbitt”
and would get worn (pounded) loose by the crankshaft. This required
filing off the rod-caps after every two or three months and using
“shims”for the right tolerance. For a Model-T Ford,
the
motor became unusually quiet-running after this dual treatment (for a
while)!
On
the plus side of its peculiarities, it had high wheels with narrow
tires which made it a natural for bucking snowdrifts on the narrow
country roads. The wheels gave it high clearance and with chains on
the rear wheels and its light weight it would go through almost a
Foot of snow with relative ease.
It
also had more negative “peccadilloes.” In the very
cold
winter of 1946/47, late one afternoon, a buddy and I were coming back
from a shopping trip and were cruising down the country road near his
home at 20 M.P.H.
It
had just snowed and was still blowing small drifts angled across the
road. I said: “Watch me plow the edge of that snowdrift there
on the left side of the road.” Now that was a big mistake
because the Model-T Ford had a direct-drive steering wheel --no
worm-gear or comparable system to take up the road shocks --just a
short lever to force the front wheels left or right.
The
resistance of the snowdrift immediately caused the steering wheel to
be ripped out of my hands in the direction of a hard left-turn; the
car whipped to the left and the drifted snow kept it from skidding;
making it flip over instantly onto its right side --its forward
momentum caused it to start sliding and it finally came to a halt
cross-wise to the road.
One
moment I was driving and enjoying the trip while
“showing-off”
and the very next minute I was sitting on top of my
passenger’s
left hip (who was still sitting in the normal position relative to
the car) and he was laughing almost hysterically. We extricated
ourselves from the tipped-over car and walked the half-mile to his
family house. His father was nice enough to drive their Farmall
tractor
to the scene and pulled it back upright. At first, I didn’t
think it to be very funny but when I saw that there was virtually no
damage of any kind, I began to loosen up and saw some humor in the
situation. His father also laughed and made a
“crack”about
our becoming “drifters.”
During
my first college days, the car that I thought would make me look
“smart” wasn’t the instant hit that I had
foreseen.
The college girls didn’t chase me down for a ride in the
“quaint” automobile because the “rides of
choice”
were the college boys and Ex-GI’s who were cruising around in
shiny, late-model convertibles. It may be remembered that from 1941
to 1945, no brand-new automobiles appeared on the U. S. market and
who could blame the poor starved public if they saw a juicy new model
of automobile “to die for.”
The
mature WW II veterans going to college on the GI Bill were accustomed
to strange military vehicles of transport and were now too
sophisticated to “take notice” of such an ancient
civilian contraption. So, after a while of driving it around campus
(without much notice) during my Freshman year in college, I sold the
Model-T Ford Coupé to an old friend from my high school
class
of 1947, for thirty dollars.
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