Thread: How about some great stories??

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Going thru the different post, I see some of you have some great stories your telling. I like to hear some more. I use to have a 41 Ford Truck that would be called a rat rod now, but back when I was 18 and with the money I could spend on it after working at a local gas station, it was all I could ask for. It had a hopped up 53 merc flattie with dual 94's 3/4 race cam and edelbrock heads. It was channeled 4" and the bed was cut 12". Now the funny part. I couldn't afford a new gas tank and couldn't find one at the junk yard so I used a 55 gallon drum and welded it right against the front of the bed of the truck. Now making$1.25/hr. didn't leave much money to spend on my girl so it was either the girl or gas and I voted for the girl(wrong mistake). Even though I was paying only .29 cent /gallon it seemed every Friday night I would have to call my Dad and ask him to bring some gas as I ran out. After awhile he wised up and brought just enoug to get me home saying you have a 55 gallon tank and you only put in 3 gallons of gas. Either put in more gas or don't drive. Didn't have much of an answer as Uncle Sam called the next week.

at 16 my first car was a 57 chev..Traded it for a new 1962 327 300 HP
4 spd trans....I rebuilt it by 60 over bore, cam, 456 rear gear, two fours
and raced it every Saturday Night at Beach Bend Park, Bowling Green, Ky.
for three years. Cheated and won a lot of trophies..Gas was free as dad
had two tanks on the farm, so $5.00 would run me the week end. I dragged
my girfriend (now wife) with me, then when I married her she did not think
much of drag racing. Always wanted a 30 model something but did not
work out. My present car is a 57 chev 2dr post I have had for 33 years.
Haven't raced since I was 21 but still go to the track occasionally and watch
the guys...Times have really changed...Glad I did not have to have that
55 gallon drum of gas welded to my bumper, guess I was just lucky...
Those were the good ole days...

With you and Jack telling cop stories on your other thread about the dummy burning down his own car I was reminded of an old story. Glad you started a new thread where it would be more appropriate.

When I was stationed in Victorville, CA at George AFB I bought a '55 Chev tudor sedan from a little ol' lady in Apple Valley. It came with a tired six and powerglide, but the body and interior were very nice, and with some polishing the paint came back pretty well. All it needed were some "improvements". Just so happened a guy I knew needed some money and had a fairly fresh 327 with a gnarly cam and a big 3310 on a high rise. Pretty much a 350 hp L79 clone. My room mate and I had rented an old, converted horse stall in Adelanto, a mostly rural community at the time, out on Hwy 395 where he was building a '36 ford pickup, and I worked on the '55. In addition to the V8 I had scored all the pieces needed to do the stick shift conversion by parting out a '57 Chev (a story I've posted up years ago here). The day came when all the transfer work was done and it came time to fire it up for the first time. The engine came with a nice set of full headers, but I didn't have facility to do an exhaust system so we just fired it open. It just so happened that in the nearest house (probably 100 yards or so away) lived a kid with a '58 Vette, dual quad 283 variety. A couple minutes after firing off the 327 he and his buddy showed up. I had my head over the engine timing it, but I heard his buddy shout to him "....oh you can beat him, he's only got one carb!". At that they walked back to their house. Well, it was time to see how she would run through the gears. So I backed it out, pulled out into the paved road that ran in front of the acreage where our building was, as well as the kid's house. Drove it easy down the block at first just to make sure everything was working okay. Hmmmm, seems pretty good so far, and man that nasty small block sounded great through those open headers! Turned around, stopped in front of the kid's house, pushed the loud pedal and dumped the clutch! OOOOOWWWEEEEEEEE, like runnin' at San Fernando again!!!! Got to the end of the street, big smile on the face, and putted back to the garage. Time to inspect for leaks and whatnot. While I'm under the car I notice off to the side of the car some very shiny shoes and tan pant legs. My buddy Kieth said something like "you may want to crawl out from under there Bob." Yup, a visit from the county mountie.........sunglasses, smokey hat, and all! Man could he give a butt chewin'...............would make a first sargeant proud!!! Somethin' about some woman being scared to death by the noise and all. At the end of his tirade he was good enough not to give me a ticket, but warned me if he ever got another call about me runnin' with open headers again I'd be getting a ride in HIS car.

Oh, the kid never did come around with his Vette either.

Many moons ago when I was young a group of friends and I had started up a Hot Rod club. We where all apprentices in all different trades but all mad on v8's. One weekend a rod club in another town about fifty miles from us was having a weekend swapmeet social on the saturday night that we all thought lets all go. One our members had a '56 chevy and after seeing the gasser style cars that were been build in the USA ,he wanted a straight axle under his. Now the rest of us were into the lowered,channelled look in our cars,so Cliff got abit of a hard time from us about needing step ladders to climb into his car. On the way to this swapmeet we came pass a large sealed area used for a car park beside the main road and we all stopped and decided that this area would be ideal for some spontaneous club drag racing.. Well Cliff wanted to show everybody how well his '56 went so was first to line up and go but unbeknown to us there were some very lethal judder bars (speed bumps) placed along the car park that didn't stand out into you hid them.... Well needless to say, the '56 ended up on a trailer for the rest of the weekend with bend front axle, but Cliff saw the funny side of it and still had a good weekend.

In about 1971 we were a young married couple with two babies about a year old, and were struggling financially, as most young couples do. My Wife had a 68 Mustang that she bought new off the trailer before we were married, and it became our only car. Unfortunately, the C4 transmission went out, so I started calling around to find one. One guy I called said "do you want a 4 speed?" I told him I would love to, but they were too expensive. He said "this one is free!" He went on to explain that a guy he knew had a 70 Mach I with a 351 Cleveland, 4 speed, and 9 inch nodular rear, and he wanted to trade it in but the dealers were offering him peanuts because it wasn't an automatic. So he wanted someone to swap it over to an automatic for him. Evidently the guy liked high performance cars but knew zero about how to work on them.

I hooked up with the guy and it was true, he didn't care how I did it, he just wanted the car to end up with an automatic in it. I found a used c4 for $ 75.00 and he delivered the car to my house for me to make the changeover. Half way though I found out Ford had made lots of changes between 68 and 70 and the swap wasn't as easy as I thought, so I called him and told him my transmission wouldn't connect to his Cleveland. He said "then put your motor and transmission in my car, whatever you need to do to make it an automatic! " So I pulled the 289 out of my 68, painted the engine a nice blue, put 302 stickers on it, and put it and the new transmission into place. All I had to buy was some new exhaust parts to make it all work.

But when I took it for a drive the gears in the rear were too deep for the new drivetrain (3:90 TracLoc) so I called him again. He said "then put your rear end in my car!" So I installed the 8 inch one wheeler in his Mach I and gave the car back to him. I ended up with an almost new 351 4 barrel engine, top loader 4 speed, and 9 inch rear for about $ 150.00.

He called me about a week later and said everything was fine, but now the dealers were telling him the car wasn't worth anything because it had manual steering, would I be willing to put power steering in it for him? I had to decline, I still had mine to put back together and frankly didn't ever want to see the underside of his car again.

BTW, my Wife never forgave me for ruining her nice little Mustang and making a hot rod out of it. I really miss that Mustang.

Don

It was about 1960 in Dayton, Ohio. I was 18 and driving a '59 Studebaker Lark, 259 cubic inches, Carter WCFB 4-bbl, 3-spd with Hurst floor shift conversion, dual exhaust with cut-outs, Lakewood Traction Masters (anti-hop bars for leaf springs) and Bucron cheater slicks bought from the local Sohio (Standard Oil of Ohio) gas station. She was a legal G/Stock car, right on the front edge of the index. Hot Damn, let's go kill some Chevies.

It was Sunday morning and I didn't have anything else to do, so I took off for Hamilton, about 30 miles from home. Tri-City Dragway was there and I figured there would be some easy pickins. I don't remember why, but I ended up going by myself. Usually, there was always somebody who wanted to go along. Matter of fact, there was usually a gang that wanted to go along.

Anyway, I had a good time and waded through the field one by one. Just as I was skinnin' the last one for the trophy, the throwout bearing linkage broke going into 3rd gear, so I had no clutch. I went ahead and motored on through for the win, but had to do some fancy maneuvering to get back home. When I had to stop, I would go to neutral, kill the motor and coast up to the stop sign, redlight, whatever and stop. To start off, I would pull the shifter into first gear and lean on the starter. The starter would pull the car ahead and start the motor at the same time. I would run her up a little ways in first, then pull the shifter into neutral, come back on the rpm's a little until I reached an equalibrium with engine speed and car speed and slip the shifter into second gear. Same routine for third gear. I got pretty good at synchronizing gears by the time I got her home.

Left to right in the photo are me, Lanny Davis (nobody seems to know what happened to him) and Ken Thomas (NTFDAY on this forum).

Some great stories. Malkes me want to go back about 40-50 years and relive those great days again.

there`s a few good stories there on page 7

I had a 1970 Olds Cutlas when I was in High School. It was burnished Gold with black vinyl bench seats and the Rocket 350 engine. My older brother had a near identical car at the same time except that his was a black painted roof with Black Bucket seats.

John would always get me in trouble as most people could not tell our cars apart. frustrated after getting in trouble after one of my brothers famous car moves, I decided to do one of my own.

I was out cruising with a buddy in each of our cars. I went to pass my buddy on a very steep banked curve. When I got through the corner, the car bounced some but I didn't know why. It wasn't untill we stopped that my buddy told me that I was driving on two wheels rounding the curve. I am quite surprised that I am alive to tell about it rather than the car flipping. Seems, I made a bit of car history myself that day... and yes... I got in trouble for that one too.

Jerome

Sixteen, been driving about six months and heading home one Saturday morning from an errand for Mom, driving the family's '64 Impala - maroon with silver top and bright red interior, sounds gaudy but it was sharp for a 4-door family car. 327 4 barrel, PowerGlide, driving up the street, playing "stick shift" by moving it to neutral for a quick throttle blip between gears and not paying attention let it slip into reverse at about 20mph!! That thing came to a rapid halt with me hugging the steering wheel and died! When I started it up there was an awful hissing sound coming from the glove box area and it was idling about 2500rpm - no choice but to go home and face the music. I made up some shaky story about reaching for the radio with the wrong hand and bumping the gear shift, and we were off to the dealer. Their lead mechanic listened a second, emptied the glove box and pulled the cardboard liner, and said, "There's a vacuum line back here that popped off of the heater valve. You must have put quite a pressure surge through the system to blow a line off, but everything seems fine. We were lucky this time." As we were leaving he gave me a little smile and quietly said, "It's an automatic son, not a stick shift."

I grew up in a small town in the San Bernardino Mountains called Crestline. It was a sleepy little place in the 50’s and 60’s. My father was a small business owner as well as a reserve deputy sheriff and he was fairly well respected as an upstanding citizen. As a youth, I tried very hard to live within the confines of the law and not to bring embarrassment to my father, but sometimes as kids we just don’t think things through.

Halloween was a real treat for us kids. We would really raise havoc by doing all kinds of things that would normally get us sternly disciplined but somehow on Halloween, everything seemed to be okay. This particular story starts with the construction of a “tennis ball cannon”. Now some here may not remember the days when soda came in tin cans and you used a “church key” to pierce the lid and enjoy a Pepsi or a Hires root beer. Well, it just so happens that if you remove the lid completely (with a real can opener), a tennis ball fits nicely inside the can. By removing the ends of several cans and soldering them together (remember, they were tin) you could make a tube – better known as the barrel of your tennis ball cannon. To complete the cannon, we took a can (the “firing chamber”) and punched six or seven openings and placed that side toward the tube. On the other end of the last can, a few small holes were placed to allow the introduction of the propellant as well as allowing some of the spent gases to escape. So picture a tube about 36 inches long that a tennis ball is placed in and rolled down against the last can. Squirt a bit of lighter fluid in the firing chamber, light a match and viola – instant cannon. In the event some fluid got on the tennis ball – it was a ball-o-fire that exploded about fifty feet out of the end of the barrel. The tube gets real hot, so we fabricated a handle for this thing and it looked like a miniature bazooka.

Here comes the car part of this story. A friend had a Willy’s Jeep that we had put a 327 Chevy in. It was a screamer and man could that thing lay rubber. So it only seemed right that the Jeep would be our commando car as we set off Halloween night to terrorize the town with our tennis ball cannon. We were well equipped – having asked the girls tennis coach to keep all her old balls the previous year – and set off dressed as Army men (it was Halloween) and began to shoot people with this cannon and scare the living bee-jee-bers out of everyone in town. Just as we were getting pretty good with our aim, I had a “mis-fire” and this thing let a ball (on fire of course) go into the other lane of traffic. The ball hit the back window, started across the roof of the car and stopped as it hit the light bar at the precise time the sky lit up with flashing red lights – I had inadvertently shot the sheriff. Now the Jeep was mighty quick, but no match for the 427 Ford. John Law whipped that Galaxie around in the street and I still hear that four barrel coming open.

Our salvation came in the form of a dirt road that quickly turned into a four-wheel-drive track, allowing us to barely escape and we took back roads to the safety of my buddy’s house. Sensible kids would have stayed home, but we hopped back into the ’47 Chevy Roadmaster and ventured anew – only to be immediately pulled over and have our cannon, our tennis balls and the one gallon can of naphtha we were using as fuel confiscated. We got a real tongue lashing and ended up having to pay to have the sheriff’s car repaired (seems the tennis ball melted into the roof!)

Years later my dad told me the sheriff reserve had never had so much fun as they later had firing up all of our “ammo”.….

My wife would not let me show my son how to build a tennis ball cannon. Go figger?

I love this site..
Glenn

Originally Posted by glennsexton

.........., but sometimes as kids we just don’t think things through.


Glenn

You have a flair for understatement...........

And I take that as a great compliment from you, Uncle Bob! BTW - I have relatives that live up your way - do you know Jack Sharick, drives a green 55 Chevy?

Sorry, the name doesn't ring a bell Glenn.

BTW, if you were ever around E Street in early '67 you might have seen my '55 from the above story (not that I'd expect it to be memorable). I had a girl friend in Berdoo for awhile.

I do recall some misspent youth.

Schenectady NY used to be a bustling city in the late '60's and many an evening was spent doing the State St run. Inasmuch as I wasn't the only one with a devious need to exercise the back two barrels of a high performance car, met with up with my buddy Len at the traffic light in the very middle of the shopping district at about 10:00PM. Of course, one revved motor led to another then the green light came on. Now, picture a '67 Fairlane 390GT (his) and a '68 Torino 390 GT (mine) neither stock plus both with glasspacks, high buildings on each side of the street to concentrate the sound. Engines roared, tires smoked........a siren wailed ....oh c@#p, it's the county sheriff (the big guy himself) across the street, but hidden from sight behind another car. I went left, my buddy Len went right and so did the sheriff. Len got a written warning (knew the sheriff), me, I had to stay out of town for several weeks - by a special request of the sheriff to Len that my azz could become grass if seen.

Lots more good times back then. Schenectady NY has shrunk from 100K population to maybe 60K and become a slum town and a way point for drugs and other criminal activities since GE has moved most of their operations and 35,000 people out and American Locomotive went out of business