I have found this old piece among my files. Unpublished, although I seem to remember quoting from it here. It embodies a warning to Rattle and anyone else tempted to seek short-cut solutions to coolant or gasket problems.
Forgive me for this shameless recycling, but it seems a pity to let relevant guff go to waste...
LEARNING CURVE
Old news from the front line
I had the good fortune to visit America in 1973 at the tail end of its loose, lavish and graceful technical supremacy, before Japan imposed a more finicky intellectual hegemony on world automotive engineering; before Mickey Mouse pervaded Detroit (although Pintos, Pacers, Chevettes and assorted Japanese garbage were already common and Volkswagens were actually fashionable). My nine-year-old Plymouth slant six may not have been an inspiring vehicle, but it was a superlative consumer product.
On the phone Herb Broadway of Broadway Auto Parts in Trenton, New Jersey, had mentioned an Oldsmobile for $85. But the car outside his house was a bland white 1964 six-cylinder Plymouth, the sort of car William Burroughs called a "faggot Plymouth". Herb, who bore a passing physical resemblance to Chuck Berry, had been doing some thinking and refused even to let me see the Oldsmobile. "If I wanted to pink fluffy dice you, I could," he said. "Coulda put real fine sawdust in the motor to hide the knock till you got out on the freeway." The Plymouth had been his sister's car and was more suitable for my purposes. He wanted $300, which sounded a lot.
I drove it around. It was neither large nor "compact" but what was then known as "mid-size": about the same size as a contemporary Rolls-Royce. It had slippery bench seats, an oval steering wheel and automatic transmission controlled by large, stiff buttons protruding through the dashboard. A lever moving in a vertical slot applied a transmission lock. The white paint was bloomed and there were a couple of small rust spots but the body was intact and sound. The tyres were all balding and exhaust leaked into the car. The radio did not work. But new plugs, plug leads and distributor cap confirmed a recent tune and all the main running gear seemed fine. I said I would buy it if Herb would sort out the exhaust and radio.
He fitted an aerial that made the radio work, sort of - it could get country and western music, anyway - but when I went to collect the car the exhaust still needed doing. It was to be a cooperative effort. I had to drive to Midas Muffler and get them to fit a rear box and tailpipe, then bring it back to Herb's junkyard. The flange on the front box had rusted away but the box was otherwise solid. A bit of welding would do the trick.
Midas Muffler tried to force me to buy a complete system like everybody else. A character in a suit came out of the office and did a lot of intimidatory staring and shrugging, but I followed Herb's advice and was granite. Waiting my turn I observed American automotive service technology at its most efficient and consumer capitalism at its most depraved. Electric cutters zapped bolts and clamps into gobs of cooling slag in seconds, system out; air spanners whooped briefly, system in, lift down, $78.50, have a nice day.
A lot of the systems being thrown away had brand new sections in them, boxes and bits of pipe recently installed by old-style, caring auto mechanics. All usable boxes were reduced to scrap on the spot by having large holes cut out of them. When the Plymouth's turn came the staff went into a huddle, giving me funny looks, and the foreman came over and had another try: gonna leak, it's dangerous, we can't guarantee... OK, your problem. Zap, whoop, lift down, $27.35, drop dead asshole. "Ain't nothing made by the Man that can't go wrong," Herb said as his man did the welding, "but you look after this car, it's gonna look after you." I wasn't going to be Neal Cassady or Steve McQueen, but the wheels should be good for California and back.
I was about to taste the world's cheapest and easiest motoring. Petrol was 35¢ a gallon or less - only 29¢ in Oklahoma - and the pound was drifting slowly down through the $2.30 mark. A couple of yards of Green Stamps came with every fill-up. I stuck some on the offside rear quarter of the Plymouth's cabin, a sort of retail-victim go-faster stripe, but Americans take marketing seriously and didn't get the joke.
The Plymouth didn't have much muscle but cruised contentedly at a speedometer 85. It was the first car I owned whose maximum speed I made no attempt to establish. With its torsion bar front suspension it seemed to handle firmly, but like other Detroit products it was undertyred and underdamped, with a powerful brake servo and very low-geared unassisted steering. After one wheels-locked near-miss I began noticing the pirouetting skid-marks that decorated the road surfaces everywhere and realised I was not in Europe. Young Mansell recently had some kind of analogous experience (EDIT: went backwards into the wall at about Mach 1.5 in an indycar).
I set off for San Francisco on Route 80 and stopped for a nap 1400 miles later outside Chicago. It was August and very hot. In Middle America the nights in summer are made hypnotic by cicadas that send out rippling, overlapping waves of fat, rhythmic raspberries. In Nebraska a small stone or bolt curved up from the rear wheel of a car in front and hit the nose of the Plymouth. A minute later the water temperature needle edged towards the red. The stone had squeezed through the flimsy grille and pierced the radiator from which coolant was squirting.
Remember the title of this piece. I was in a hurry. I did not want to spend money. The hole was not all that big. I poured a two-dollar bottle of grey gunk into the coolant along with more water. It reduced the size of the hole, and a second bottle closed it up.
Back on the road the water temperature rose when the cruising speed was more than about 50, so I surrendered the wheel to my passenger - a Californian woman who drove like that anyway - and sulked for a couple of hundred miles. Garage men along the way favoured a proper engineering solution and spoke highly of the Chrysler slant six. Several told me the company had stopped making the engine because it lasted too long. The figure of a quarter of a million miles was admiringly cited. "Take it easy," one of them urged me. "It don't take much overheating to take the temper off them rangs."
By Cheyenne, Wyoming, I had become tired of mimsing and formed an idée fixe about the water pump which I changed in a filling station forecourt with tools borrowed from the Chinese manager. Back on the freeway the temperature went straight into the red: the radiator leak had opened up again. Leaving the car to cool I hitched back into Cheyenne, got drunk in a friendly bar, and next morning returned with cans of water and drove gingerly to a junkyard on the edge of town.
A Dodge Dart had a compatible radiator, one tube lower than the Plymouth's but the same width, with the same separate core for transmission fluid. The steel pipes to and from the slush pump twisted alarmingly while being detached from the original radiator, but did not break. The fitting flanges were completely different but a solid, garish-looking cobble was easily constructed from old licence plates. Chuckling, the junkyard owner lent tools and a twelve-year-old son who zapped jagged holes in the licence plates with the ubiquitous electric cutter. Every time they saw me two roaring, slavering St Bernard dogs the size of ponies tried to crash out of the flimsy shack in which they were imprisoned.
The cooling problem remained. The Plymouth was all right downhill and at night, but long up-grades in the heat of the day made cooling stops necessary. Salt Lake City, Jeddah without the intellectual flash and glitter; Reno, Skegness with conversation, a bad place for breakfast. At the next table in the diner a dishevelled wedding party was trying to sober up. Its members had reached the numb, nostalgic stage. "Reno used to be the divorce capital of the world, you know?" one said sadly.
Revived by the cool breezes of the bay area I decided to look at the Plymouth's cylinder head gasket. A tough-guy hippie lent me tools. "You gonna do that in the street? Hey, that's chutzpah," he said. He paid half the cost of a torque wrench on the understanding I would leave it behind. Another American friend, an extremely rich Maoist, was disagreeably puritanical about the whole thing. "You'll never do it," he said. "You ought to travel by bus anyway." He despised and envied the Plymouth. In London a couple of years earlier he had purchased a bicycle. His own car was a small Japanese hatchback with a crunched hatch. Carbon monoxide poisoning may have caused his tiresome attitude.
There was ample room under the bonnet and everything was a couple of sizes too big. The job wasn't difficult but nor was it the way I would have chosen to spend a day, if the automobile had not to some extent robbed me of choice. No sensitive person can cope with rusty manifold bolts, chewed-up jubilee clips, bearing surfaces, rubber hoses, clean oil and road dirt in the same operation without a moment or two of angst to go with the barked knuckles and polluted cuticles.
In the process it dawned on me that Webers and machined alloy cam boxes aren't everything. The Plymouth's engine was a thing of beauty, all-iron but with a thin-walled pressure-cast masterpiece of a cylinder block. Aluminium cups sealed with rubber O-rings protected the plugs where they passed through the pushrod cavity. The head gasket too was a minimalist pressed-steel item of great aesthetic merit. More importantly, it seemed to reveal the cause of the overheating.
The slant six engine was made in three capacities of which my car had the middle one, 225 cu in (about 3.7 litres). The external dimensions were the same, and one gasket would fit all three engines. The gasket I removed had no hole corresponding with a big water passage in the middle of the engine, between cylinders 3 and 4. Close examination showed that it had been pierced in the appropriate place with a drill, but the hole was so small that the radiator sealant had closed it. Bingo!
Just to make sure, I consulted the shop foreman at the Chrysler dealer in Berkeley where I went to get the new gasket. The new gasket had a pressed sealing circle in the right place for the water passage, but no hole. Should I make a hole there? The foreman frowned in a sincere, puzzled way and gazed out of the doorway into the sunny street. Why no, of course not. Remember the old flathead Ford? Useta have all kinds of holes in the head but hardly any in the gasket. They need holes, gonna put'em there, right? Etcetera.
A trusting nature is sometimes a great burden. Perhaps this piece should have been called Thicko among the pink fluffy dice. It did not occur to me to doubt the veracity of the service foreman of a main Chrysler dealer. So although disappointed I installed the gasket intact, adjusted the valve clearances, restored the fluids and did a road test. pink fluffy dice! pink fluffy dice! I had lost my cool and things were happening in the wrong order. The next day I went to a radiator shop in Oakland and did what I should have done in Nebraska: took the radiator out and gave it to two blokes who melted it apart, rodded the tubes, sealed the leaks (there weren't any) and soldered it back together again in 20 minutes for $20. It was a pleasure to watch but there were no other benefits.
I couldn't face taking the head off again and had got used to mimsing which is respectable in America, especially California. I was running out of time and money. A few days in Hollywood and back East along Route 66 with frequent pauses for breath during the long climb onto the high desert. Hitch-hikers all the way from whom I tried to bum petrol money. Albuquerque's psychopathic cops... Flagstaff, Arizona, (couldn't find Winona)... Oklahoma City looked like crap from the freeway... Pancakes and chili, chili and pancakes, Nashville and Memphis, Bristol, Virginia, up through the Carolinas along Skyline Drive and round the Baltimore Beltway back to New Jersey in the hot and knackered dawn.
Herb Broadway didn't sound too keen on the Plymouth so I took it to a garage in Hopewell, near Princeton, and explained its history. It had not been allowed to get really hot or short of water. It had used no oil whatsoever, not a drop, in 8,000 miles, and the oil had stayed clean and golden. Everything worked and the body was still undamaged. During its enforced 50-limit it had been remarkably economical, getting well over 25 miles out of a niggardly American gallon. All it needed was tyres - two were showing canvas - and that hole in the head gasket.
The garage men listened carefully and walked round the car. One got in and drove away, foot pressed to the floor. In two minutes he was back, giving the boss the nod. "Gonna need some rubber on there and the engine work. I can go a cee and a half." It was a bargain and we both knew it, but pressed for time I took the dog-eared notes and came back to London. For years I rabbited about internalisation of the capitalist waste ethic by people who in Europe would behave thriftily, like workers; about the Chrysler foreman's foul-minded manoeuvre to bring me back into the fold as a dependent consumer while junking one of the irksomely durable slant sixes. But no one wanted to know. Car enthusiasts thought I was being paranoid and my left-wing friends found these anecdotes, and the behaviour they described, distastefully working-class.
ends
{post needed a fewpink fluffy dices adding}
Edited by Dynamic Dave on 09/02/2010 at 19:20
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