Far as the ‘carboulator’ goes, it probably doesn’t need a new one. Those liked to suck major air when the gasket above the throttle plate shrunk up with age and let the screws holding it to the rest just essentially fall out. So common my first reaction to one of those with carb issues was to grab the carb body and…

I will tell you one of the greatest break-down stories I ever heard, first hand, from a couple that is like my second set of parents. It’s great. They are bikers, have ridden Honda Goldwings cross-country for as long as there’s been Goldwings. On a trip out west, they fragged a rear tire in the middle of Wyoming, in…

On I-76 in Colorado, between Brush and Sterling, at night, IN A BLIZZARD...my 1974 Vega’s fuel pump shit the bed. In-tank electric pump, so after sleeping (COLD!) on the shoulder all night, I had to wake up to about 15" of snow that had drifted all the way over the hood on the passenger’s side....then get that damn…

I used to do service calls, jumpstarts, tire changes, bring gas, etc, for a company that serviced the road service contracts you can get when you buy a shitty used car from a sleazy dealer? Yeah. Found myself in all kinds of areas of STL city I didn’t really wanna be in. Helped out a nice black couple with a flat tire…

Tend to agree. What I can see of it, the pinch welds and rockers don’t even look damaged. And all things being equal, a wheel/tire doesn’t climb anything over 1/3 its total diameter. So it would have to be rammed up there with considerable force and speed, and there’d be some crushing and hanging parts evident. Based…

Maybe. Maybe some folks played a prank.

I honestly never looked into how it works, because I never had a car with this feature. But I have driven a lot of them, and yeah, I noticed the reading is kind of subjective. I always assumed it was taken from the AAT or IAT sensor in the intake path.

90's GM cars were a bit notorious for burning out fuel pumps after a run-out incident. But I’ve had a couple and routinely ran them off the bottom and never had problems. So I can’t vouch for that. This was running OUT that caused the problem. I suspect because they will run a fair distance when the pickup goes dry,…

I was there for two days a few years ago and it was 117 and 118. I still found it more pleasant than southwest MO on a 95 day with 70% humidity...

Nonsense. It’s a small Canadian plane that doesn’t cope well with extreme heat. You could just as easily say that as Bombardier sells more aircraft, this kind of thing is going to become more frequent.

Now that you’ve got me thinking on it, that period was really weird. Everybody was trying to reinvent the car to make it basically the same big car your parents drove but a little smaller and have it get better fuel mileage and still have V-8 power...and they usually failed at both. Another in that same heap of…

They are great until you have to replace that multiswitch. But most last longer than typical first owners keep them. It’s a problem for people like me that buy used and keep them until there’s nothing left of it.

I can’t really say I have a preference...but I’m so used to the GM multiswitch-type control it seems most normal to me. The ones that really fluster me are the newer Dodges and such, with that weird little dedicated cruise stalk on the right side of the column that does different functions depending on which way you…

You got me remembering things. My cousin had one of these, the epitome of everything wrong with the domestic industry at the time. “Lets just stick some cheezy crap on our biggest shitbox, and name it as one of our legendary performance models!” Yay! Even had the slant 225 you spoke of. That was actually the only…

“Unlike real rubber, this stuff will shrink, harden and curl, and pop out of its retainers before your payments end. You might as well just rip it off before leaving the lot”

All is not lost. I was doing this exact kind of hooliganism in full commuter lots every time it rained or snowed a few years back. With a 1997 Lumina. Yep. FWD baby. Even with a stomp-type parking brake. How? Simple...I disabled the pawl on the pedal assembly. Heh. I’m 50 years old. I need to grow up. Nah. That little…

I want one of these (MAZDASPEED Protege) SO bad. It’s very close to the House of Kolor Tangelo Pearl that is, IMO, one of the prettiest and most striking colors you could put on a car.

I hate to break it to you, but outside of us “car folk” probably 90% or car buyers think Alfa is some little pissant start-up from somewhere in Europe (if they’d even heard of it) and they wouldn’t even consider buying an expensive car from them. I’m 50 years old and only know of them due to being a car buff and…

When bikes go apeshit, it’s because the sack of meat on its back made a mistake and upset its balance. Problem is, that meatsack also has a totally different resonance than a bike, you (the rider) ocillate like a weirdly shaped trash bag fulla water, the bike oscillates like the rigid structure it is. So if you clap…

Yeah...if you showed this to someone transported here from the late 60s as an example of what would come to be lamented as a more user-friendly, tuneable motor, they’d punch you in the dick.