Monday, March 28, 2011

I Used to Love Roller Coasters

Saturday evening was our church’s annual spaghetti dinner and since I was helping prepare food, I’d driven Lucy to the event early snagging a prime parking spot near the front door. Later, during the mealtime, one of the diners stuck his head in the door and asked for me. He was a guest of a church member, so I’d never met him before. He’d been asking around trying to find who owned the red Corvair, and someone had finally directed him to me. We chatted for a few minutes about the couple of ‘vairs he’d owned many years ago, then he asked me if I had one to sell. My first response was no, but then I thought, what the heck, if he offers me enough, I’ll sell him Lucy. So I told him that, for the right price, I’d sell the red one. He asked me what the right price was, to which I did some VERY quick mental math before blurting out, “Five-thousand dollars?” His reply was, “Okay, I can bring you cash tomorrow. Do you want to sell?” I told him I needed to sleep on it, but would call him in the morning. He gave me his business card before blending back into the crowd.

Well, I slept on it, and I decided to sell. While I love driving Lucy and I love the way I’ve got her looking, there are so many other Corvairs out there I’d like to own before retiring to a sailboat with the lovely Loriann. After church, I called the number on the card and was connected to his voicemail. I left a message before heading out to the driveway. There were some items on Lucy I didn’t want to part with, so I swapped the LeMans’ seatbelts from the backseat with a couple sets of red ones I’d pulled out of an early-80s GM vehicle. For that job, I enlisted Mikhaila to hold the wrench inside the car while I undid the nuts on the underside. It took no time at all to get the replacements installed, and they don’t look too out of place. The red on the black vinyl actually looks pretty good. Then I removed the last two belts to my harnesses – the crotch belts. With those swapped out, I vacuumed the entire inside, wiped down the vinyl with Armor-all, and re-glued the Velcro along the lower edge of the backlight. The Velcro holds the piece of carpet over the package tray area.

With all that complete, the last task was swapping out the racing carburetor for Ringo’s original one. A few months back, when the TEMP/PRESS light was coming on, I fixed the problem by replacing the right side carb with one of the carburetors I’ve had modified for racing. After investigating that carb, I felt the problem was a bad hose to the choke pulloff valve. With that replaced, I pulled the racing carb and installed the old one back on yesterday. After starting the engine, I noticed the right side did not appear to warm up while idling. Pulling plug wires on the right side plugs didn’t result in the desired drop in rpm, so it appeared there was still an issue with that carb. To make a long story short, I tried many different combinations of carbs and I can’t get the engine to idle. This evening I’ll be back out there again searching for what I feel is a vacuum leak.

Throughout the afternoon, the prosepective buyer never returned my call, hence the roller coaster of: I’m gonna’ sell Lucy, Lucy's giving me problems, will the guy call me back, etc. Another strange thing was that throughout this past weekend, I received more compliments about how nice Lucy looked than I’d ever remembered. Hmm. What’s going on?

So what will I do if I sell Lucy? I'll save that for another post.

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