Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike D
Yeah and before you guys go waxing all nostalgic about those '60's and '70's chunks of Detroit iron remember;
Ignition points which broke, burnt or slipped at the most inconvenient times.
Drum brakes on performance cars  ,
20K miles on a set of plugs? Forget about it!
"Automatic" chokes which "automatically" decided WHEN they were going to work.
100K on an engine? What are you smoking? Yeah, yeah, I know, "My Uncle Harvey had a '52 Chevy which went a bajillion miles". One out of a 1000 cars, maybe.
10-12 mpg on most of those "performance" cars.
Carburetors, carburetors, carburetors. Did I mention carburetors?
"Quadra-floods", "Auto-light on fire's", "Thermo-burns", "Holey shyte, it's on fires".
Distributors precisely engineered to funnel any bit of moisture into the cap shorting it out, at 3:00 AM, in your girlfriend's parents' driveway after sneaking her home three hours after her curfew.  |
I don't disagree with much of the above. 20K out of a set of plugs in a battery ignition car would make it hard to start and it would run like crap.
I religiously changed points and plugs and set everything properly at 10K mile intervals in those days. If you didn't change points and plugs at the same time, you were asking for it.
The first cool morning of the late Fall, early Winter had seemingly half the cars on the block not starting. I'm sure if you had done some research, you would have found that the ones not starting had seen points and plugs in awhile.
Of all the modern automotive technologies, electronic fuel injection is at the top of the list IMHO. Once we got away from carburetors we did away with the washing of the oil off the cylinder walls during cold starts. This decreased engine life pretty seriously.
Most any car today is capable of 300,000 miles with reasonable preventive maintenance. In the sixties, 100K miles was about par.