The crazy things done in a past life(style)

I was thinking the other day about how we look back at our lives and sometimes the strangest things pop into our minds. One thing that recently popped into my mind was when I ‘convertible-ized’ (also known as cutting the top off with an angle grinder) my 1980 Plymouth Volarie four door.

I had bought the car for only $400 expecting only to need it while I rebuilt the transmission in my 1985 Mazda Rx-7. Different story there. Maybe another blog entry.

After the car had served its purpose to me, I began to play with it. It had numerous problems, which were not at all helped by me removing a significant portion of the structural integrity of the car (the roof).

It had a major exhaust leak and sounded as much like a race car as a 6 cylinder Plymouth engine could. When you really stomped on the gas pedal the engine would jump violently (due to the broken motor mount) and then slam back into place. A few minutes later the temperature gauge would be pegged well above the ‘about to explode’ point. The fan belt had come off yet again in the violent shaking of a sudden acceleration. I got to be quite adept at putting that belt back onto an extremely hot engine not only in record time but in the middle of traffic.

As the seasons changed to fall my mom used to worry about the car getting wet inside. I told her it did not matter. She called me one day to tell me it was raining at home. “So” came my reply. I came home to find my junker car lovingly covered with a blue plastic tarp weighted down with half-filled milk bottles on the corners to keep it from blowing away.

One of my last adventures with that car was taking it to the beach for our church’s Family Camp weekend. I burned through two tanks of gas on the beach that weekend just taking people for joy rides up and down the beach and into the ocean at times. At one point we had 13 people on or in that car sailing down the beach at 60 miles per hour. The ride home was horrible though as the nearly two inches of sand accumulated over those days now blew around in swirls and into my eyes for the two hour drive home.

The car met its demise when we pulled the engine out and pulled the wheels off to put them into/on a friend’s car who had just blown and engine (and had crummy stock wheels, not the cool chrome ones I had). The carcass was towed down to the wrecking yard and a very generous $50 was paid for it by the scrap dealer.

I look back on that now and in some ways think that was the best $400 ever spent. The laughs and joy that car gave were immeasurable, not only to me but to the countless others who rode in it.