my love affairs

This is a 1934 ford. I bought one in 1949 . I was 17 yrs old and this was my first car I ever owned. It was a flat head v8 with dual exhaust pipes. It also had mechanical brakes which didn't work very well.

The first horific experience I had with it was when I was driving it down a road and a car decided to make a sudden left turn in front of me. I applied the brakes but the car did not slow down enough so I turned left and hit a curb causing the car to lurch onto someones lawn. hitting the curb caused the throttle in the engine compartment to stick open (something like the Toyota problem) causing the tires to spin on the peoples grass. It looked as though I had done this on purpose, the man of the house came out screaming and cursing at me. It took some time to convince him what had really happened. I let him know that I would come back and repair his grass.

This car had a lot of miles on it and because it smoked at the exhaust pipes my friends who were taking auto mechanics in HS said that the engine needed to be rebuilt. So we all four of us worked together on it at one of the friends who had a garage that wasn't being used.

After we reworked the engine we all decided that we should cut the top of the car off. We had seen this before and thought it would be cool. It was, their was no top at all.

The engine started but still smoked my mechanic friends said the rings needed to seat and would be OK after a while.

We realized that the steering was loose so we tried to adjust the steering box but it didn't work so we dedided to replace it with one from a wrecking yard. We could not find one the same year but found one another year and tried it. After installing it We found out that the new steering gear turned the wheels the wrong way; when you turned the wheel right it went left. We bought the wrong steering gear.

Every thing else was finished on the car but the stearing. We were so excited about riding in this car that we decided to drive it with the faulty stearing anyway for just a short distance. In those days there wern't too many cars on the road and we managed to keep it on the road pretty good.

We drove it for about 3 miles. On the way back we were on a streightaway so we decided to punch it for a minute, well that was a mistake, I lost control of the car and turned the car the right way which was the wrong way. The car started to slide on a bank parallel with the road. Now remember there was no top on the car, the car was leaning in the direction the car was sliding causing one of my friends to catapult out of the car. I could see my friend sliding and the car sliding right over him. The car stopped and I/we thought that we had killed Gilbert. We all jumped out of the car and there was Gilbert pinned under the rear tire. The three of us grabbed ahold of the car and lifted it enough to get him out from under the car. We were fortunate that all he had was some scrapes on his arms.