pimped out cars

Back in the 1990s, I will guess in the summer of 1992. I was living in Dallas. My Parents had a beat up old rust bucket of the Station Wagon. I think that they had paid about $300 for it up in Minnesota, which is in the Rust Belt. It was a 1977 Chevrolet Impala Station wagon, two toned rust. This thing was a beater with a big Chevy 350 Engine. The reason I mention the engine is because of the miraculous thing that this engine did this one hot summer day. I know cars pretty well, so all my senses are in action, listening an smelling the air around me. These senses I have developed, so I can detect car trouble before they happen. Well my sense of smell must have been out of commission this day because something that no engine today would recover from.

I was driving on the highway heading home. In the car with me were my brother and two of his friends. My brother said to me that he smelled radiator fluid and maybe we should pull over and check. I looked down and said, there was no dummy light on indicating that the engine was overheating, so I dismissed the idea of pulling over because we were about 5 minutes from home. I exited the frontage road and slowed down to the stop sign to make a right on to the side street and Bam! The engine stopped as soon as the car stopped.

I tried to start is and is would not even turn over the engine. Hmm, I thought, let’s push the car off into the grass and look under the hood. Well, At this point I could smell the fluid, but there was no steam or boil over. As I lifted the hood, I saw something very interesting. A broken belt laying across the frame of the car. How it didn’t fall onto the ground while driving, I don’t understand. It was the belt that drove the water pump. I said to my brother, “The engine is seized up and the car is totaled. Since the car engine overheated the pistons I think had expanded to the point where they were larger than the bore on the engine block. This can’t be good. So we all started to walk home. This was in the days before everyone had a cell phone.

It was Saturday and we stepped through the front door into my parents house and I said, “Well Dad! The Chevy is totaled. The water pump belt broke, the dummy light never came on and the engine is seized up.” He got up and said, “Well let go and see.” Nice thing about junkers is that they were cheap to begin with and wrecking one doesn’t break the bank. We went and bought a belt and drove to the location of the car. We installed the Belt. Started it on the first try and drove it home. We never had any problem with the engine, ever. All it had to do was cool down.

I love old chevy engines. They are made out of steel, not aluminum. They are virtually indestructible. Try doing that to a car today.