Thread: Your First Car!

Originally Posted by mapleleafalumnus

I'm amazed no one's owned up to having a Chevette or a Pinto!

I knew a guy in high school that had a '73 Pinto Squire wagon. (wood panel look, no less - UGLY!) Serious driver, though! He could do donuts in that car and spin it all the way down the street. Most of the guys in school had pretty serious cars, though. A lot of late 60's/early 70's cars and trucks tearing out of the parking lots every day. The Chevette had just come out and what a ridiculous pooch that car was. My best friend once accidentally backed over one that belonged to some other kid's mom in his '69 Chevy truck. He had 42" Swampers on the back, so he was up on the hood before he even realized anything was behind him.

Here ya go Wullie ...An old pic from my youth '77 or so

Another pic with a diff paint job....454 w/ 2 holly 600's 4:56 rear end 5.45 lift cam 296 duration..... 1/4 mile et @ 12.69 ..108.88 mph. Drove it to the track and drove it home...a daily driver. That was in 1979 with reg leaded gas too !!! also had an under dash AC !!!

Talk about Pintos, if you're old enough you'll know what I mean ..... if you bought someone a Pinto with firestone steel belted radials they might think you were out to kill them.....

Originally Posted by mapleleafalumnus

I'm amazed no one's owned up to having a Chevette or a Pinto!

Time to introduce the sordid history of the Cangooner family's car-owning history:

When I was a kid my folks had not only a Pinto but also a Vega (!), not to mention an old Beetle that would shoot flames out the tailpipe when it backfired. Hours of fun.
My first car: Pontiac Acadian. Sold that to finance first trip to Europe, returned to Canada and bought friends' Chevette for $1. They were about to pay someone to tow it away and so I 'rescued' it. Some of its finer features included a *completely* rusted-out floor. The front seats slowly sank as the carpet stretched. Got that fixed right away to prevent any possible Fred Flintstone-esque driving moments. Then there was the impossible timing conundrum. When it was damp (i.e. most days in St John's) I had to get my 13mm wrench, turn the distributer cap about 1/8" ahead to start the thing, tighten it, start the car, get back out, loosen the cap and turn it back 1/8" for it to run normally, tighten it back up, and get on my way. The passenger window occasionally fell out of its regulator, so in winter especially it was handy to drive with a friend to hold the window in place. Oh man, what else... For a short while I had the passenger door held closed with a bungee, so it had a tendency to fly open on a hard left turn.

Good on gas though...

Happily my crappy car run came to an end with John Lee (it was named for John lee Hooker: old, kind of funny looking and really, really cool), my 83 Saab 900 GLS. Man, that was a great car! I bought it for a couple bottles of nice whisky (Oban and Tallisker if I recall correctly) from a friend of a friend in London, and drove it up to St Andrews with only 3rd and 4th gear and no reverse. Once I fixed that problem (all caused by a tiny little £2 hunk of cheap plastic at the base of the shifter wearing out), it was hands-down the most enjoyable vehicle I have ever owned - and that includes the two Jeeps I have had along the way, and let's face it they are fun.

Here is the late, GREAT John Lee by the West Sands just outside St Andrews. To your left is the beach where they filmed that running on a beach scene in Chariots of fire, straight ahead is the Royal Borough of St Andrews (and my university which just celebrated its 600th birthday), and to your right are more golf courses than are reasonable for any town the size of St Andrews to have.

Anyone remember Top Secret?

Warning: it's a bit loud

Originally Posted by Wullie

Can't argue that, BUT, I can still work on that old iron without a having to have a fancy COMPUTER to tell me why that fancy little engine has the hiccups. I could set the points on my old shovel head with a matchbook cover for a feeler gauge. Try that with all this NEW stuff.

My boy and his first car.We've rebuilt the front end, brakes, carb, windshield wipers, and bunch of other little stuff. The old 289 is long in the tooth, but the compression numbers are OK and it doesn't burn much oil. Tranny is tired, but it gets it down the road. AND is doesn't require a bunch of METRIC tools!

If you ever feel the need to adopt another son, I'm your man, dude. Glad to see you're training him right. In my experience Ford men are fairly rare in Texas. The Pinto and the Vega were icons of American automotive excrement. My parents bought a wood grain panel Vega station wagon brand knew in 75. My Dad would cuss a blue streak every time he attempted to accelerate to highway speed going up an on ramp. Apparently 0-55 in the Vega took at least a day and a half. It was their "lets save gas" initiative before that him and mom were both MOPAR freaks with real nice muscle cars. He drove a 67 Cuda and Mom had a drop top 67 Fury III that would pass anything on the road (except for a gas station.) Didn't take long for both of them to be over the let's drive a roller skate experiment.

Pathetically my first car was a 1976 AMC Gremlin in screaming yellow with black stripes. Lol!

Great thread!



A TC Cortina, 2.5L engine (six cylinder) with a Toploader four speed gearbox. Extractors (headers). Rust. Won a drag race with a Chevy Impala once. You could zoom along at 70k's and drop it back into second and drop the clutch and do excellent diff locks. I broke the rocker shaft doing burnouts up in the hills. I had some great times in this car listening to Led Zep on the tape deck. Once when doing a burn out the whole right hand side of the exhaust, including the muffler, fell off. I casually got out, picked it up and drove off. It was a while before I fixed the exhaust, mainly because I liked how it sounded with only one muffler.

By the time I had finished with this car I had smashed up all four corners, and paid the insurance fees to have it fixed, it was full of 'bog' when I sold it; even the chassis was rusted. They are quite rare now.

I don't have a picture of the second car; that was a Chrysler Valiant Charger. I took that up the freeway the week after I got it 'to see how fast it would go' and shredded the back tire; I didn't have a spare. After I got it towed home it sat on bricks in the street for a few months and then I sold it and got this next one.



The Holden Statesman was a V8, 308 I think, automatic. A bit slow on the uptake but once you got it going it'd move along very nicely. Once I accidentally went straight through a round a bout when someone was chasing me (we used to like hassling people, getting them to chase us in their cars). As you can see by its wedding photo, it had a hard life. It was all downhill from there, really

Originally Posted by earcutter

Wait for it....

.

..


...



....


Attachment 116455

In my youth I was a danger to both myself and everyone around me - and I knew it too! Hence I didn't even get my licence till I was 25, and my first car until I was 27 or something like that. Thank goodness I lived in a city that saw me not needing one.

So when I did need a car (bought a house in the burbs), I bought the most "practical" car I could lol. It was a three banger and cheap on gas.

Then I got a job that saw me given a company car. I bought a car once so I wouldn't be beholden to my employer (bad idea - it just sat in the garage), but until I moved to KS, I had never driven a car I had personally owned other than that... ^^ thing ^^^ lol .

Now THERE is one good reason for an unlike button! What a girly first car!