Spokane7
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It’s that time of year again – the bi-annual, trek through the quagmire of endless seas of car parts event in Monroe, Washington. You remember that my Mechanic Man gave ME a cart that I drag along with me, through miles and miles and MILES of greasy car parts with the idea that parts will jump into the cart and when it’s full, *I* will trek it back through the miles I have already walked, back to the car which is parked at the furthest end of the parking lot because so many people decided to attend because of the truly perfect weather. There were many carts – mostly pulled by women. There were many, many men, all looking quite alike with their same-colored shirts, browsing with the same focused look – staring at piles and jumbles of indistinguishable tangles of parts. But these guys can tell, like Superman with x-ray vision, they can look into a mountain of black, messy, gooey, greasy pieces of parts and determine in one nano second that THAT is a little tiny piece for my [fill in the blank year] [fill in the blank model] [fill in the blank car]. In other words, Mechanic Man spied the right lens for a 32 Model-T Ford, sitting in one of his garages, just waiting for this particular prized part (plus about 1,000 other missing or rusted-out or damaged parts). One small step for mankind; one giant leap towards a cherried out whatever-mo-beele to bring to a show-and-shine car show and bask in all its glory. This can take many hours of work, and I expect it to be ready for a car show sometime in 2025. I’ll be very, very old then.
Tell me about your favorite car (part).
Jeanie
999 W. Riverside, Spokane, WA 99201
P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210
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Cis on May 18 at 2:33 p.m.
Ah, Jeannie, don’t hold your breathe… we have been a proud owner of a 1947 Ford pick up. It came with a faded yellow paint job. It sat in a friends garage for 3 years. It has sat in our garage, and been torn into pieces, for 7 years. The box is up against the garage wall, the cab is across the garage wrapped like a baby in a blanket, it is finally…finally painted. The fenders are upstairs in the garage. I don’t know where the bumpers are, I suspect they are under the platform that the cab is on. And the flat head engine is swing on a chain from the ceiling. The trannie is on the floor in the corner. And the frame is outside of the garage. And I am still waiting. And every year we have the Lost in the 50’s, I tell him, next year, I want the truck in the parade. This year, I told him, I want the blanking truck done, I didn’t want to have to ride in the parade Grandma Clampet style in my wheelchair in the back of it, with my grandson waving my hand for me…
So don’t hold your breathe, but threaten him with bodily harm if he doesn’t get it done before you are wheel chair or walker bound.
JeanieSpokane on May 18 at 2:43 p.m.
Hey! you just described my (his) garage. Silly me, I almost said my garage. I don’t have a garage. I have a cart. We need a club. You know - like a football widow’s club - we need a jalopey-fixin widows club. I’ll be able to meet when I’m not hauling parts or cleaning parts or finding parts or … well, maybe we can meet in the feeding room at the nursing home.
Cis on May 18 at 9:01 p.m.
oh, I had a garage… we have a small one car garage that came with the house. Then he built a 24x30 big garage for him, Kept telling me when he got HIS garage, I could have the dumpy one. Made all kinds of reference about the dumpy garage that belong to Cis…. THEN the big garage was done, I could hardly wait for my garage to be empty, I had all kinds of plans. One which was parking my car in it during the winter and not have frosty windows. I waited 3 months.. things were moving awful slow. Then they stopped after 6 months. I thought what happen, didn’t seem like much was moving. Then came the bad news… HIS garage was the mechanic garage.. the dumpy garage was for wood work. Work to be done on the house. (oh, don’t even start me on that one). I told him, NO WAY… he promised me my garage. Well, he went out of town 2 years later for some classes for a week. It took me 4 days with the help of my grandson, and 18 wagon loads that went to HIS garage, and stacked in a row..8 feet long and 3 feet tall… before I got my garage cleaned out. I actually had a FLOOR… I re arranged things in MY garage.
The look on his face when he open his garage… was too funny.
I got to park my car in the garage two winters in a row… but in the summer he uses it as a catch all. As I protest, he tells me, he will move it tomorrow… you know tomorrow never comes, because it becomes today…. so every fall, I clean it out again..
ChefGus/ John Olsen on May 18 at 9:55 p.m.
so my cars have been… a 41 Packard Coupe with a six cylinder overdrive three speed.. ( still own it and have it stored).. a 1954 Ford Crestline 237 V-8.. a 1954 Austin Healy 100-4 overdrive and a 1965 Mustang that had 235,000 miles on it when i last saw it.. a Ford Falcon Station wagon 1963 and then the aforementioned Fiat 124 Sedan?aka LADA russian style…
My favorite car was a 420 SEL Mercedes of one of my high end girl friends that would rev 2500 RPM at 85 MPH so the red line at 6500 RPM could get one in trouble…
ALL of these cars require “parts” and the women in our lives should just let us have our parts and not be critical of them… trannies and rear ends and torque converters and and and… it keeps us happy… all of the above were worked upon with my original Craftsman Tools with the lifetime guarantee…. still perking along after 50 years with them at least.. the cars are ALL gone…. cept the Packard Coupe’ john
Dave Laird on May 19 at 3:27 a.m.
Good morning, Jeanie…
My favorite car parts? Oh, dear. That depends upon which favorite vehicle you or I are talking about for, over the years, I have had far too many vehicles to remember. Perhaps my absolute favorite vehicle is a 1978 Dodge Winnebago Motor Home aptly-named Beulah the Wandering Road Hog II. We purchased Beulah II off a South Hill grocery store parking lot in a dire state of affairs, needing brakes, alternator, windshield wiper motor and wiring of miscellaneous kinds. Not to mention Suzie the Marvellous Wood Woman disassembled the badly-trashed inside, replacing the internal water pump, water lines and cabinetry. We drove Beulah II to various music festivals throughout a four-state region until two years ago, but now, sad to say, we do not do that anymore.
Beulah II’s predecessor, Beulah the Wandering Road Hog, was a 1965 twenty foot bread truck purchased from the San Francisco Pie Company. The first year I replaced the drive train, and remanufactured the interior into a motor home, complete with a kitchen, wood stove and water closet, whereupon I drove the truck from California to Colorado, Colorado to Ohio, and back to Montana. It eventually ended up in Stevens County, Washington where it lives today in a pasture.
Among a few of my greatest reassembled contraptions have to be a 1949 diesel-powered Diamond-T Reo School Bus, a 1952 Ford telephone truck, purchased in Portland, Oregon, a flat-head six cylinder four-wheel-drive 1948 Dodge pickup truck, a 1968 Volkswagen Van (in which I eventually installed a Porche 911 engine and transmission), a Peugeot 504 (which had a blown engine which I rebuilt), a 1964 Corvair Corsa (which I rebuilt and sold quickly), a 1952 Pontiac Straight-eight that needed a valve job, a Borgwaard Goliath which I rebuilt and sold after several years, a Hillman Minx with a four-speed shifter on the column and a simply lovely BMW Isetta (the one where you entered the car from the front rather than the side) that got 45 miles per gallon.
There were others; far too many others. So there were also many parts to be obtained, often from yard sales, parts barns and various other unworldly suppliers of exotic parts. Of course, no telling of such tales would be complete without the stories of the various trips made in each of these vehicles, since I have always had a tendency for wanderlust.
There are many wonderful traveling tales surrounding each vehicle, travels to exotic and strange places throughout the countryside, with breakdowns along the way to make telling the tales more-enlightening.
Dave