Well the black '64 wagon in my avatar that belongs to my friend Tracy had a little incident yesterday. She was visiting friends in the Slocan Valley and when she went to leave she didn't realize that it was left in drive. She fired the car and "BAM, CRUNCH" she drove into a parked truck. The emergency call came after she had discovered that it was spilling lots of "green stuff" then drove it for 20 minutes. Then it was kind of smoking when she got to the gas station. This was the point where I started to massage my temples. I can't help but feel partially responsible since I've done so much work on this car and didn't realize that the neautral safety was not working. It is the original trans so I really need to fix this for them. I also thought that I had educated all of my friends with old cars to always be aware of your guages (gages). I am on my way now to assess the damages. Hopefully it didn't get hot enough to warp the head or worse. It was running when parked but she couldn't get the hood up, so the latch or grill are probably askew. These things happen and no one was hurt so we'll just chock it up as a learning curve and repair the damages.

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This has been such a riveting thread so I thought I would do a little follow up for all those interested parties. I managed to limp the car back to my place, spewing water the entire way but not letting the temp gage get past 3/4. As I predicted, the rad support was punched in pushing the rad into the (four blade fixed) fan. So I used a come-along attached to my Ramcharger to straighten the rad support, plus a little hammer love and got the rad re-cored, beautiful job by a local small business. Since I was under-hood and I rarely get a chance to work on this car anymore, I took the time to solder up some broken wires and install a cool old aftermarket oil pressure gage that I had lying around. Welded a new handle on the trans dip-stick; adjusted the sloppy steering box and loose wheel bearing and ordered a new idler arm. I also noticed that the road noise and drive-line vibration were brutal due to a devastated trans cross-member mount. So next week we will tackle all that plus adjusting the brakes, valve adjustment and any other tune-ups we can think of. See, sometimes good things come from bad situations.

Plus, my friend bought me a bottle of Aberlour single malt for my troubles. No trouble I say.

End of story, return to your regular programmed schedule.

Pat

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Thanks for the follow up on this story. It sounds like it is all working out well, so not much to complain about.

Have a good day.

Linda

That is a nice little car...I hope your tuneups are cause for increased driver respect.....

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Yeah....Im the one who destroyed this rare, vintage automobile.....

Amen to that.

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It should be fairly easy. There is only one wire between the neutral safety switch and the starter relay and the safety switch grounds it when in the correct position. I would almost bet that the switch stopped working and someone connected that wire from the relay to ground under the hood somewhere near the relay.

Danny

A. single malt?
Good friends are nice to have!
robert