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Old 11-30-2013, 03:39 PM
Air&Road Air&Road is offline
Posting since Jan 2000
 
Join Date: Sep 2011
Posts: 7,166
My first car, ca. 1963 Was a 47 Chevy Fleetline. It was not QUITE in as nice shape as that one.

I was 13 almost 14 and I bought it out of a wrecking yard for $12.50. There was a catch though. There was a basic car and then I had to take parts off several other cars in order to make a complete car.

The '47 still had babbit rods and only a partial pressurized oiling system. It had a rail system underneath each rod with a scooper that picked up oil from the rail as it swung by. Most people called these "oil slingers."

IIRC the POS's still had cast iron pistons. They had lever shocks that were POS. The suspension was trash that didn't last any time at all, and if it did, that means it had seen a grease gun every one thousand miles. The brakes weren't as good as if you had just thrown the cylinder head out the back tied to a chain.

The master cylinder and brake light switch were under the floorboard and tough to get at. There were no self adjusters, so they required seemingly constant adjustment. The drums and shoes were not nearly large enough for a car of such weight.

The six volt system was total trash with a fuse instead of automatic circuit breaker for the lights. Quite dangerous when the fuse blew at 70 MPH. Experience talking.

I personally never liked the looks of them at all.

In Texas at the time, if you took drivers education you could get your license at the age of 14, so the POS did two things for me, it got me on the road and taught me how to stick with a project no matter what.

For a teenager though, it had one really GREAT redeeming feature, the back seat and back floorboard were HUGE.
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