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Vintage Asylum Classic gear from yesteryear; vintage audio standing the test of time. |
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Vintage Asylum Classic gear from yesteryear; vintage audio standing the test of time. |
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In Reply to: Re: Leak Stereo 20 posted by caveman on October 1, 2001 at 05:17:47:
"Moths-In-The-Wallet-Factor", love it!
As for your comment, "Just how long can you capitalize on the genius of one man,or idea, and not be left behind?"
Well, you'd be amazed, actually. You were talking about the motor industry, and I've got a few more words on that subject, but I don't want to stray too far off topic for too long, either...
I happen to drive a motor I didn't "get" at first, I absolutely HATED the vile old crap-can for the first six months I had it. I was in a horrid accident a year and a half ago, and it mangled my right leg below the knee to just shy of the point of amputation. This was saved by putting what was left of it into something called an Alizerov (spelling is probably off, but close enough) External Fixator. It looked liked I had gotten mad at my parrot and put my foot through the top of his cage...
Anyways, I wrote off my Ford Rustang, and my other motor was this little Suzuki Turdbo thing with 3 cylinders. It was fine, actually, as it has a surprisingly airy and spacious footwell despite its utterly diminutive (at least by North American standards!) size. The problem was the thing was standard, and I couldn't drive that! I needed to sit about 6 to 9 inches further right of normal (remember, we drive on the correct side of the road over here, another reason we have our doubts about English cars...), which is kind of hard to do in a car with bucket seats, although I managed to tolerate that. I've owned an Italian car before, so retarded driving positions aren't necessarily new to me, anyways...
My right leg was happiest resting in the passenger's footwell, and I needed to drive an automatic with the "brake" foot operating the accelerator as well. A column shift, as opposed to a floor shift, was also a good idea.
So along comes this ancient (and as it turned out, justified too) 1976 Chevy No-Va, only the thing is still Va-ing, and quite happily (if rather lumpenly and sluggishly, which it no doubt did when it was new, too). It was cheap, and so am I, and I figured if I got six months out of it, it would be worth it.
I HATED it. It was big, the steering is crude & slow, the aerodynamics are non-existant and as a result the front end wanders around in any hint of a crosswind, so you saw away at the wheel like a drunk, or like an actor in a 50's American film...
Despite the size, it was an object example of retarded packaging design, with a fairly useless trunk with a really WEIRD shape (the trunk in my 1985 Civic Sedan is far more capacious, and the rear seat area only slightly less so!). It has vinyl seats, which in a twisted reversal of the natural order of things, was Garbage Machine's (GM, that is) idea of an upgrade! I later saw the cloth interior, which looks like Granny's 10-year old recycled drooping pantyhose. Yes, it was an upgrade...
The seats are nothing more than outdoor sofas, big slabs of vinyl that stretch from one door in the distance, yonder over to the other.
In the front, this is interrupted by a little fold-down lump that you can use to arrest the horizontal slide that would put you out the passenger side window when you attempt to corner (this is North America, good thing we have so few of those!) to the right. Instrumentation extended to a speedometer, a fuel guage and...erm, that's about it. There are a trio of idiot lights, and they were so old you wondered if they'd ever light up anyways (the car isn't british, so later testing revealed that they would!). I added a temperature guage, but 140HP out of a 305cu.in. lump (that's 5.0 litres to you Eurotrash) means that the only thing that might make the engine run worse would be to drain all the coolant, stick it into low gear and drive it along the highway for 3 hours in 100 degree Fahrenheit heat, with 7 of the 8 spark plugs pulled perhaps.
Nah! Even THAT wouldn't make a difference!
So here was this rotten old motor, 25 years of city use, original motor, original tranny. Original PAINT, fer chrissakes, and this is Canada! 150,000 hard-earned miles.
The point is that that motor dates back to 1955, as WAS. It lasted up until 2000, BTW, before the General had to retire it. Horsepower had grown to about 200 or so by that time...
To a European, such a motor would strike them as utter rubbish. It was a pig on gas, no surprise there. But the utter lack of apparent horsepower, the primitive valvetrain, the utter absense of anything high-tech, like aluminum for example...what was the point in continuing with the thing? Is it that Americans are just too stupid and insular to buy anything better? And wouldn't "anything" be better?
The surprise answer is: Nope!
The motor is smooth, the absense of aluminum is why it lasts, the primitive Overhead Valvetrain, all 16 valves worth of pig iron, cost a whopping $600USD to COMPLETELY rebuild. That 3-cylinder Suzuki, even the naturally aspirated version which only has 6 valves, costs considerably more to rebuild!
Despite the paper specs, the motor has all the power you need to move a 3300+lb. pigmobile around effortlessly. The tranny has only 3-speeds, no overdrive. It costs about $250USD to rebuild, contrast that with the $1500+ price of rebuilding the crap semi-automatic "Hondamatic" in my Civic!
So I started off hating this car, and thinking only classless Yankee Yahoos could love these antique roadshows, and I couldn't understand how anyone would want one as a daily drive. And I still ones like mine tooling around, most of them unrestored and clearly DRIVEN, too.
The quality of an idea is not its newness, it's its intrinsic value.
The original QUAD's are certainly OLD, as is the May head in a Jaguar. But there are things that are virtually inimitable, and that 305 and old QUAD's are some of those things. That's why there is this vintage forum! Not all of it is nostalgia, and if it was, then what right would I have to take the piss out of Leak for the Stereo 20?
I'm keeping the old Nova, I LIKE it! It's a pig on petrol, and every cent I give to the Arabs is 2 cents I'm not giving my local shyster garage mechanic. And filling up is far less hassle than making service appointments, and taking time off work, and running back and forth for drop-offs and pickups of same...
And the few times the Nova has needed a part, as long as its not been a trim item (ahh, there is always SOME tradeoff!), the price of spares is ABSURDLY low by comparison. The sheer primitivity of the beast works FOR it, when you'd have thought it should work AGAINST it. There is nothing the least bit tempermental about the beast. You twist the key, and it stalls. Every time.
So you try it again, and it catches lumpily, and if it doesn't die again in 10 seconds, it will when you try to put it in gear, and it will bang as it engages and immediately stall. So you try a third time, and that one's a charm...
That's it for its bad habits, although in the depths of winter it needs an attentive 5 minute warmup, with a ready foot on or near the accelerator pedal to keep it on the boil.
It needs the carb adjusted. There are three little slot-head screws holding down a little round plate about an inch or so in diameter. The screws need to be loosened, the plate rotated slightly and fiddled with to find the exact position. If that sounds like a pain in the arse (and it is), then the alternatives are far worse.
If this was an injected car, say a BMW, I can imagine what I would be facing. "Oh, your computer's gone, squire, but we can replace that for $3000..."
My idle went to poo, and the car started to overheat a tad and run worse. It needed something called a vacuum advance. I went to my local auto parts place, ordered it in the morning, had it by afternoon. Cost me about $12USD. I had never installed one before, so it took me 15 minutes to do it myself. It would have taken me less than 5 if I knew...Anyways, that cured all the problems. Even fuel economy improved, but 20% better than zero is still zero...
So what is this, then?
A decrepit example of why a once dynamic industry was brought to its knees by foreign competition and superior technology developed elsewhere? No, it was the predecessor of the whole SUV craze, since (and let's face it) everyone prefers big cars over small ones. I don't, but then, I'm a weirdo!
Which to me, makes the whole adventure even more amazing. I like the car, but DESPITE its size, not because of it! I like it because it seems like a bad idea, and I kept waiting for this old rustbucket to leave me stranded and waiting for the motor league, waiting for the dreaded moment when I had to make that call to the wreckers to get the hunk of junk out of my driveway.
Not only has that not happened, the darn thing is the most reliable thing I've ever owned, ON TOP of having absolutely the least expensive parts. Parts that don't break, mostly!
Visibility is good, compared to today's cab-forward rubbish it's golden! The weird rear-fan demister (no coils!) works just as well as anything I've ever used, the climate controls are far better, even for 1976, than anything Japanese or European that I've owned from the 80's, and they still work, which is something Honda has yet to figure out, never mind Peugeot & Hyundai...
The motor/transmission combo is SPECIAL. Invisible, seamless, effortlessly horizon-swallowing despite the laughable paper specs. Even the chassis isn't half bad. I drove it all winter this year, which is a crime to the old body, but I only once got stuck. And that was because my cold tires slid across an icy roadway into a ditch on the other side, and ANY car would've suffered the same fate. I didn't take the hint, and went onto work, and made it. Most other sane folk had stayed home...
At the end of the year, I looked at the situation.
14,000 mostly troublefree miles, I had to replace a rad, and both headlights had burnt out from age over the course of time. I set the timing myself, and the transmission pan was loose and dripped fluid.
Together with that vacuum advance, I figure I spent about $200USD to keep it going for the whole year and 14,000 miles, in all sorts of weather. Oh, and it doesn't leak much water, either. The rubber door seals are completely rotten, and even then only one window leaks very slightly. Of course, it's the driver's window, so I get dribbled a bit on my left arm on a long trip on the highway...
I've never had a car that cost me only $200 to run for that kind of time, that kind of mileage. Not even close! I'd only paid $650 to buy the thing, too! As a result, despite the miserable 20mpg it gets on the highway, and all the driving I do, it STILL is about as cheap to run as one of those 3 cylinder Suzukis! I had gotten used to having to bring my cars in for service every single month, or two at the most. This experience was a blessed relief, long may it continue...
There is a moral to this story. And that is, you can have a crap idea, and if you build it well, it can still become a charming classic. On the other hand, you can be British, have a mind-altering and utterly and wholely superior idea, build it badly, and it will quickly become a lemon that everybody is happy to bad-mouth and run well away from. Heck, I don't even see many old British sportsters that were once so popular, like MG's & Triumph Spitfires. Too lousy to be worth the time, and by the time you've ironed out all the problems accumulated from winter storage and British build, the season's over and you're broke, anyways...
No, it's not the age of the idea that works against it. Nor even the singularity of having but one good one. It's trying to do it so cheaply as to be criminally irresponsible, to ensure that there is absolutely no way in hell that it can possibly work properly anymore, and then treating your admirers like the fools they surely are...Colin Chapman, where are you when we need you least?
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Follow Ups
- Re: Leak Stereo 20 - Joe Rosen 10/4/0102:48:27 10/4/01 (2)
- Re: Leak Stereo 20 ???? - caveman 07:54:12 10/5/01 (1)
- Re: Leak Stereo 20 ??????????? - Joe Rosen 00:46:02 10/7/01 (0)
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