I caught up with a few mates just before Christmas. And, as you might imagine, the vast majority of them are car nuts of the highest order. The rest of them we allow to hang around because they buy the beer.
Anyway, we managed to find ourselves a nice house down the coast that had enough bedrooms, party decks and fridges to keep us all happy for the extended weekend, and then all agreed to meet up on the Friday afternoon.
Which we did, but what I wasn’t expecting was that everybody would decide that a stinking hot day in December was a great time to dust off the old classic car and drive it through peak hour, Christmas traffic. By which, I mean I thought I was the only one stupid enough to do that. Turns out I was wrong. As you can see from the driveway shot next morning, at least three of us were daft enough to tackle this mission.
To be honest, Stu’s Alfa 105 GTV was probably the most likely to make it without hassle, since the car has just been treated to a complete rebuild thanks to the work of a bunch of vandals who shall, when we catch them, be hung from their dangly bits until we’re satisfied they won’t do it again. May take some time.
The other thing in Stu’s favour was that the GTV does not run to air-conditioning, so that free-spinning little 1750cc mill stayed happy and cool. My W124, on the other hand, does have the (recently regassed) A/C option but, in the manner of all things old and European, the air-con action is pretty lame in the first place, more or less doubles fuel consumption and will cause the temp needle to head north when sitting in traffic.
However, being the mechanical sympathist I am, I figured out that if I turned the air off in traffic and switched it back on once we were hauling down the freeway at 100 kliks, the car stayed happy. The Speaker, not so much.
But poor old Mark wasn’t so lucky with his Volvo P1800. In fact, Friday arvo had become late Friday night before he finally limped the P1800 into the driveway, still hissing and spitting coolant and clearly not happy with his treatment of it. At least he was smart enough to pull over periodically and let the little pushrod B18 simmer down. Clearly, Mrs Mark is a patient woman.
Come Saturday morning, we lifted the bonnet to look for the source of the overheating. Pretty much straight away, I discovered a loose battery terminal and then, seconds later, noticed that the car wasn’t running a fan shroud. Which meant that the standard Volvo fan was probably pulling air from around the radiator, rather than through the fins where the all-important heat exchange takes place.
Looking online in the days afterwards, I found a few pictures of P1800 engine bays that didn’t feature a shroud, so I don’t know if Mark’s car started life that way or not. And, if it did, maybe that’s okay for Sweden where shovelling snow to clear your driveway is far more common than the 36-ambient we all saw that weekend. But I’m inclined to think that even if it was an aftermarket job, a shroud would definitely help keep Mark’s temp gauge in the green zone.
Experience has taught me that a shroud is the first thing to check when trying to find the cause of hot-running. Standard OEM fans tend to be pretty good and efficient, but without the right ducting, they can’t hope to do a proper job in trying conditions. And when chasing cooling issues, I’d definitely fit a shroud to a stock fan set-up before I forked out for the expense of electric fans. Because if it works, it aint stupid.
The Godfather 4
I’m pretty sure my mate regrets ever asking me to be godfather to his newborn son many years ago. As a god-anything, I am spectacularly under-resourced. And as an example of how a young man should live his life, er, I’m probably not most people’s number-one pick.
In short, my efforts (and results) in this task almost certainly owe more to the Michael Corleone version of the job description than the type of godfathering my mate probably had in mind.
The result of all this of course, has been the development of a young man who has the usual young-man vices, including a love of motorcycles. Not that I didn’t try to warm him of the perils of a life on two wheels, but when his own godfather has ridden murdercycles all over the world and is only too happy to recall so many moments of sheer wonderment as a result, well, what hope did the poor little bugger have?
Anyway, he arrived at 13 Struggle Street yesterday, partly to say g’day but also to show me his new bike; a 650cc Honda which, apparently, he, as a P-plater, is legally entitled to ride even though the bloody thing looks like it could outrun a juicy rumour.
But one thing I noticed was that it had a dirty great lump of something ugly hanging off the right-hand side of the motor. And the clutch lever felt weird with a slack action and no feedback.
The hangy-off thingy turned out to be what Josh called an E-clutch. And fundamentally it means you can take off from the lights on a hill without slipping the clutch. In fact, without touching the clutch at all. It works a bit like a car’s dual-clutch system where a computer controls a robot that dips the clutch for you. So, in the case of a motorbike, you can shift gears without clutching and take off from a green light by simply twisting the throttle.
If you do want to use the clutch manually, you can do so and that will lock-out the E-clutch for about four seconds. Or, you can do what Josh does, and turn the E-clutch off permanently (or, at least, until you next key the ignition). And that’s because Josh is smart enough to know that operating a clutch lever is part of the art of riding a motorcycle. And the joy. Maybe I’ve managed to teach him something after all. (He also demanded a manual transmission – not negotiable – in his first car, so I’m claiming that one, too.)
Honda will also tell you that it’s convenient to shift up through the gears in traffic without using a clutch. But guess what? You can already do that on most bikes anyway, because a motorcycle has a constant-mesh gearbox.
Meantime, the concept of needing to possess fewer skills to ride this particular motorcycle makes me wonder about the sort of person who needs a bike with an E-clutch. I mean, anybody who lacks the coordination and sensitivity to use a conventional clutch lever to get a bike rolling and shifting, surely cannot reasonably expect to successfully operate the rest of the machine.
He – or she – who cannot walk in a straight line, for instance, is unlikely to get the most from a treadmill.
I can understand why mainstream carmakers insist on removing the necessity to display skills to operate their products. Most people are lazy, don’t like driving and will be happier with less to do behind the wheel. Enter the automatic transmission, cruise-control and self-parking functions.
But bike people – by and large – aren’t like that. Big bikes are far from cheap to run ($500 rear tyres last about 5000km on a typical sports bike with 100-plus horsepower) you place yourself in mortal danger every time you hop on, and when the weather is cold and wet and miserable, so are you. All of which suggests that you really need to love the art of riding to put up with the downsides. And part of that love has a lot to do with mastering what is often a very potent machine and riding it skilfully.
And that’s the important word: ‘skilfully’. As in, you need to develop skills that many other people don’t have and, for the sort of person who rides a motorbike, there’s pride to be had in that. Which is another way of saying bike folks don’t want the machine to take over those skills for them. It’s why some of us still drive cars with manual transmissions. Because we choose to. Because we enjoy driving that way, even if there’s more to do. In fact, because there’s more to do.
I reckon the most misguided example of technology diminishing the art of driving was the invention of auto-blipping of the throttle when you change down a gear. This, of course, removes the need for the driver to heel-and-toe when downshifting. But, ironically, it’s only the type of driver who loves driving that would ever bother to learn to heel-and-toe. Which means the sort of person who would welcome auto-blipping is the same person that would never value it in the first place. Did nobody run this past marketing?
Meantime, I get that motor-scooters are often twist-and-go machines with no clutch lever, but that’s purely down to the fact that nobody rides a scooter for anything other than convenience or because they can’t fit a car in the hallway of their inner-city terrace house. Besides, there’s not much cool factor involved in fruzzling along at 45km/h on a 15-horsepower bar stool. So pride doesn’t come into it, even if the sheer absurdity of a scooter means that perverse entertainment will often get a look-in.
So here’s the recommendation I would make: Anybody lacking the skills to operate that same manual clutch lever we were talking about, would probably be best off by not messing with the rest of the motorcycle in the first place. You could get hurt, you know …
Raiders of the lost manifold
I recently discovered that the ancient Incas used small-block Chevy V8s to help build Machu Picchu five or six-hundred years ago. And here’s proof. Because if this 350 cube intake manifold hasn’t been buried in a jungle for at least that long, I’ll go hee.
Okay, so the real story is that it was part of an abandoned rebuild that started in a bloke’s front yard. By the time he figured out he was in too deep, rust had wrecked the rest of the car, and the rotting hulk was towed away. But the scrappy that took it, missed the manifold, so it sat there. For years.
At first, Old Mate simply mowed around the manifold, but eventually, it sank into the earth beside the driveway and was reclaimed by nature. And then forgotten about. Until some drainage plumbing was being done and the manifold was unearthed to amazed looks all-round.
As well as decades-worth of crud clinging to it, weeds and roots had actually grown in, around and through the runners. How it hadn’t rusted away to nothing is a bit of a mystery, because the ground it was buried in was certainly damp. Chevy must have been using pretty good cast-iron at the time, we reckoned.
Of course, it ended up at Eastern Hydroblasters, mainly out of interest, to see if we could blast it back to anything useful. So we threw it in the blast cabinet, turned the compressor from Stun to Kill, and gave it our best shot. Literally.
And here’s what we ended up with.
As you can see, the decades of grunge came off, but it also quickly became very obvious that this hunk of iron’s days as a manifold were over. There’s a huge amount of pitting around where the water gooseneck would need to seal and pretty much every other mating surface is kaput. Interesting science experiment, though.
