Railroadman

Here's one that goes the other way - GOOD luck. Somewhere about 1972 a friend and I were driving in my first wife's Karmen Ghia - a glorified Volkswagen. We were probably 60 miles from home and on a 2-lane road southeast of Buffalo NY way out in the country. Cruising along and suddenly heard a noise, idiot light came on so we coasted to a stop. Lo and behold the pulley on the fan had broken in half - and that's an air cooled engine!

No cell phones back then, so we started walking to the only house in sight about 1/4 mile away. As we get closer Dave says "Hey, look out back!" There was an old Beetle rusting away. We get closer, and there were maybe a half dozen VW's lying around. We knocked on the door, the guy comes out. Yes, he tinkers with VW's, yes he has a pulley, yes we can borrow tools to replace it. I don't think we were there more than about a half hour, can't remember what he charged us for the part but it was super cheap, and we were back on the road.

How we happened to coast to a stop at THAT house I'll never know, but like the saying goes, I'd rather be lucky than good!

Rob_64-365

Love these stories!!
My friend Matt was the first one of my friends to get his license, and he came by with a couple other buddys to pick me up. I remember it being the first time ever having a friend pick me up in a car. I was 14 or 15 years old, so roughly 1988 or so.

He had a yellow 1972 super beetle, & we just drove around beeping and talking to every cute girl we saw in our adolescent ways.... anyway somehow we ended up an hour & a half north of where we lived, & in the middle of nowhere on this dirt road we came across a gravel pit, which to our 16 year old brains meant it was a dirt race track & while doing doughnuts incessantly the motor siezed... we got.out, saw no oil on the dipstick, so we walked out to the road & flagged down a landscape truck & bought some used oil off of him, dumped it in the engine, and push started it and drove it home. That damn motor ran for years after that, which still to this day amazes me!

elwood13

When I last drove this car in 1986 my brother said that I would have to add a little brake fluid occasionally. Sometimes you would get 20-30 stops before a refill and sometimes 4-5. He understated a little. I was grateful for the parking brake on several occasions. How those wheels never caught fire I will never know. I guess when they are liquid cooled they never get hot. Lol. I quit driving it, and so did he, because the cases of quart sized brake fluid bottles were causing me to go broke.

Low Rider

On the way home with my first Vette in 1968 a $650 jewel with a hole in the top, faded paint, dash pad almost non existent, and of course no plates or insurance. It was a 61 and had led a pretty tough life, ibut what the hell it was a VETTE.
I stopped at a red light and noticed a strange circle of missing paint beginning to appear on the jewels hood. It took me a few seconds to realize that we were on fire. Iran the red light and pulled into the parking lot of a. cemetery. I grabbed the hood release and pulled so hard instead of the hood opening the cable broke in two. I exited the car to contemplate my next move when all of a sudden the starter motor in gauged and the car began to move on its own , all the while the hood began to not only smoke but have A very distinct smell of bunting fiberglass. The battery went dead and the fire went out at about the same time. Turned out that the previous owner had replaced the hot battery cable and since it was way to long he sort of tucked it between the engine block and exhaust manifold. Great fist ride but the beginning of the Corvette love affair, I have had 13 of them������

Dan Hampton

Some great stories. Wow. I guess I have lead a pretty mundane existence. One high risk endeavor that has always fascinated me are the guys who own the CRB Hondas and Hayabusas. I worked with two guys who used to regularly run those bikes in excess of 150 mph. One of them was doing a "back and forth" with a Ferrari on I-90 in South Dakota for fifteen minutes at 165 mph. He said that the telephone poles were going by so fast that they resembled a picket fence. When you watch those guys at the Isle of Man TT you have to wonder if the only requirement to race is that you have to have four pounds of brass between your legs. Those Go Pro videos of those guys are insane.
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Vitaminmopar

Winter time 1977. A coworker/friend offers the use of his standard cab pickup if I could get a car trailer to transport my non-running 65 Corvette. I obtain a U haul trailer and my friend Jim along with his girlfriend and I leave very late in the day headed for Colorado Springs from San Antonio. We take turns driving Jim decides he is done driving about midnight so we change seats, his girlfriend is in the middle of the single bench and both go to sleep. About 3 AM, I begin to think it is getting hard to see, must be because no moon, a blacktop road, and in the country. About 30 minutes later I realize the headlights are barely providing any light. Stop and look under the hood, fan belt is on and good so the alternator must be faulty. I kill the lights and drive some distance to Lamar Colorado and pull into a dimly lit parking lot of a closed service station. I realize if I stop the engine it will not start if the battery is dead and we need the heat. Now the way I parked was towards the gas pumps about 100 feet distant. Nothing else to do so I go to sleep. Sometime later my friend wakes up, sees me asleep at the wheel, puts 2 and 2 together and comes up with 5. Screaming at the top of his voice "the pumps, the pumps", he jumps over the girlfriend, who now wakes up startled and starts screaming also, Jim is turning the steering wheel for all it's worth. The girlfriend and I are in a WTF moment as is my friend Jim, still yelling "turn your MF, turn you MF", he can't figure out why the truck won't steer away from the pumps. Calm eventually rules, daylight comes, we get an alternator and back on the road again. Sometimes when there is no danger you can die from fright.

Railroadman

Vitamonmopar, that's hysterical. Not to get too far off topic, but there's an old story about a railroad engineer who fell asleep while the train was in the siding one night. He woke just enough to be groggy, saw the full moon just coming up through his front window, and thought it was another train's headlight about to hit them so he jumped out the window of the locomotive.

Not sure if it really happened but as your incident proves, sometimes those half-asleep reactions are bizarre!