Two weeks ago, I put up a post about saving a vintage Clark Cortez motorhome. No one from CC bought it, but the owner also started an ebay auction, which was successful. The buyer wanted to drive it straight home to the East Coast. He did have it checked by a mechanic, but nevertheless shortly after heading out, it caught on fire and was destroyed, as evidenced by this video.
Here’s the full story by Jim, the seller:
Jim the seller back when he bought the Pug
I wanted to thank you for the help and encouragement you provided when I first was faced with how to advertise my ’68 Clark for sale. None of the people who contacted me from Curbside Classic panned out, but it got the ball rolling. I sold Pug on eBay for $3500. Given that there were several areas on the roof that had rusted through, as well as a few areas on the lower body, I thought the price was fair. It was the new interior plus a new drive train with only 16K miles on it that made the sale.
The buyer decided to drive Pug to the east coast, something I strongly urged him not to do without first taking a some short local trips to test systems as well as to find all the early failures that were sure to take place after 5 or 6 years of outdoor storage with only a roof cover. He did have a mechanic go over Pug from front to back over 2 to 3 days, a very smart thing to do, but sadly, Pug caught on fire somewhere on Hwy 60 while leaving Los Angeles and she was completely consumed. I included a short video of what this looked like shortly after the fire started. My guess is that the gas line in the engine compartment must have started to leak and the electric fuel pump kept spraying gasoline until a fire resulted. Oh well. Everyone should learn from this and check those gas lines. All the flammable spray foam, plastic and wood paneling on board were impossible to stop once it got started.
Sad to see Pug reach the end of the road this way.
For every story you read of old cars that come out of storage – and start right up and run with a new battery, fresh fuel, and little else – I wonder how many stories end like this one.
I guess what makes it even sadder is that the buyer did his due diligence to make sure it was mechanically sound, but then again there are no guarantees with a 52 year old vehicle.
Sigh… not all stories have happy endings…
It is good to wake up as someone who is *not* the mechanic who spent 2 or 3 days combing over that vehicle before telling the owner “Good to go!”
This was a suuuuuper depressing way to start my Saturday.
That’s a real shame it went that way. I am glad no one got hurt.
2 to 3 days spent checking roadworthiness and fuel lines were somehow not inspected?! That’s one hell of a mechanic…
Is this the same RV fire? If so, according to this report it was in the same area as a 104-acre wildfire, but I’m not seeing any mention of the RV fire being the cause of the wildfire…
https://kesq.com/news/2020/07/30/eastbound-hwy-60-shut-down-in-beaumont-due-to-growing-wildfire/
But then again, other reports are linking the RV fire to the brush fire…
https://patch.com/california/banning-beaumont/brush-fire-breaks-out-near-beaumont-badlands-blocked
“There is also an RV on fire”? Makes it sound like the fire started somewhere else
I know, that’s what I was thinking, as well. But then other reports seem to indicate the RV fire spread to the brush.
This photo on Caltrans Twitter feed appears to be of the Clark Cortez:
https://twitter.com/Caltrans8/status/1288953756353097728
Gosh, that sucks and is frustrating that a brush fire was started by this burning vehicle.
This is a rather unfortunate development to say the least. I’m glad everyone is okay and there wasn’t a wildfire like the Carr Fire from the burning vehicle.
Lots of thick black smoke in that video. That motor home has some rather hazardous and dangerous materials, er, baked in, should a fire get started.
That fire probably created more pollution than every regulation CARB has passed since 1995 has prevented.
I know what it is like to fail at talking someone out of doing something stupid. When I sold my second Audi around 1993, I told the buyer that I had a great ethical shop that took care of it, and he’d be able to get it fixed reasonably by people who only fixed things that needed fixing. Naturally, he took it to the shop that taught me cynicism instead, where they replaced all the high quality West German service parts on it prophylactically with the worst generic aftermarket garbage that could be marked up 1000%. My biggest problems with the car was the driver’s power window regulator and the climate control that sometimes tried to freeze me to death. He managed to double what he paid me for the car without addressing either issue and creating a plethora of new ones.
When I sold my sloop, it had been sitting in the dirt past the end of the driveway for a couple of years. The lights on the trailer had failed to the point of frying fuses in my tow vehicle on the boat’s last outing, and the tires had gone flat and rotted in the dirt. I poached a buyer on a one-design board and offered him a price that was very fair for my lightly used O’day Javelin. I told him I’d take a day to put a new lighting kit from West Marine on the trailer and replace the tires, because he was going to tow it home 150 miles and it wasn’t safe to tow to the nearest gas station. First words out of his mouth? “What’s the price if you don’t do any of that???!!!???” My answer? Probably your life and me being sued by your estate. I gave him $100 off. That wouldn’t have paid for the tires and wiring kit, not to mention the miserable day I’d have had ahead of me flat on my back in the dirt running and soldering wires while being eaten by ants and mosquitos. He paid me in stacks of Ben Franklins, signed the liability release I drafted, hooked up to his F250, and vanished from my life, never to heard from again.
When I was living in Pacific Beach, the son of a friend of mine sold his BMW Z3 or Z4(forget which) to a couple from New England. They came out to San Diego, liked the car, and bought it. Many months later, I heard that the seller was unhappy because the buyers never registered the car. That’s when he found out that the guys had rented a moving van and trailer to tow the car back to the north east. They lost control of the rig in the winds over one of the western mountain ranges and were both killed.
“I know what it is like to fail at talking someone out of doing something stupid.”
Same here; I have a story similar to the one regarding the sale of your sloop. When I sold my Corvair in 2007 – a little over a year after I’d been through an unexpected breakup of an 11-year relationship, which killed my interest in the car – the car had been in storage for at least two years, during which time the brake fluid and transmission fluid leaked out. I disclosed this in my eBay listing, along with everything else I knew to be wrong with the car, and stated that the car would need to be moved or towed to its new owner.
One prospective bidder (it may have been someone local; I don’t recall) kept messaging me to ask why he or she couldn’t just top off the fluids and drive away, to which I replied that I wouldn’t represent the condition of the vehicle as being able to do that. So the bidder comes back with, “But it might just be as simple as that, right?” I’d finally had enough after a few rounds of this and messaged back, “If it were that simple to just top off the fluids and get a 44-year-old vehicle running and going, don’t you think I’d have done that, so I could get the maximum price?”
And even after that, this bidder STILL put in a bid. Thankfully, it was purchased by an out-of-state buyer who had a car hauled dispatched to my home a few days after the auction closed.
It seems like people are so used to being lied to that they don’t have any idea what to do with the truth. If you’d said the car ‘ran when parked,’ and you thought it was probably going to be fine once he got it started, he’d have probably snapped it up before someone else realized what a bargain it was.
Not that it would have made much difference, but I assume it’s normal to carry a fire extinguisher in an RV?
Jim’s point about doing some brief shakedown runs is certainly valid, but I suspect the Cortez would still have caught fire on a shakedown run.
I assume the buyer insured Pug and will file a claim, but still. I feel for the buyer, but better him than me.
Presumably Plan B involves airline tickets or a rental car to get back home. “I went to Los Angeles to buy a Clark Cortez, and all I got was this lousy tee shirt!”
Very sad.
hate to say it, but an RV or motorhome is a purchase I’d never make. I’ve seen how shoddily they’re built (same goes for vocational trucks and trailers.) A $14,000 Nissan Versa is built with far more precision and quality than a $200k Class A motorhome. I mean, I’ve seen stuff like wiring just being taped to the inside of the body and running through holes in sheet metal with no grommets or strain relief, etc. And unlike a car, where the manufacturer warranties the entire vehicle, an RV/MH comes with a stack of warranties of varying lengths and coverages from all of the various manufacturers with components in there. One for the chassis manufacturer, one from whoever made the refrigerator, range, and so on.
never mind that whole “flammable refrigerators” thing from some years ago.
I used to subscribe to an airplane magazine many years ago. I the back of the magazine that had short paragraphs on the results of airplane crash investigations. Just amazing how many crashes were the result of not checking anything on a plane that has sat for years. Dumb, save a few bucks and lose your life.
Statistically there are hundred of fatalities each year by vehicle fires. Many, many times, it’s due to leaking fuel lines, and many many times it’s due to the ethanol content of the fuel that attacks the fuel lines. Especially, motor homes that sit a lot. My opinion is that the EPA is responsible for these deaths, because they never mandated, along with ethanol, that every vehicle has to be retrofitted with ethanol compatible components. The ethanol mandate has been one of the most stupid idea’s of all time.
What statistics are you working from, please? I’d like to see them for myself.
Your claims about fuel lines don’t square up very well with the actual history of fuel hose specifications; how much do you actually know about SAE J30 and other relevant standards?
I’m not a fan of ethanol-in-gasoline mandates. There are plenty of sound reasons to oppose them while remaining sturdily grounded in reality.
Groan.
There’s plenty of, ah, credit to go around here. Obviously a fair chunk of it goes to the buyers for seriously trying to pull off a cross-country stunt drive like this in a vehicle like that.
But some of it’s due elsewhere, too.
The original description of the vehicle—particularly the engine modifications—indicated that somebody involved had more enthusiasm and money than knowledge and understanding.
Now it comes out the vehicle had been fitted with an electric fuel pump, and there are a lot of wrong ways to do that. Electric fuel pumps and carburetors are a hazardous combination. Unlike a fuel injected application with a fully-closed fuel supply system, a carbureted application has an open fuel supply system. Let there be a problem that causes the carburetor to flood (stuck float, stuck inlet needle, etc.), and the engine will stall. A mechanical fuel pump will stop pumping right then and there, but an electric one will keep right on pumping as long as it has power; it’ll pump the contents of the fuel tanks into the carb, which will quickly overflow and spill into the intake tract and onto the (hot) engine and exhaust and the street below.
The same will happen in a crash, and the odds are against the driver being conscious, having the presence of mind, and being in position to switch off the ignition.
These hazards can be mitigated with thoughtful fuel pump control circuitry: the relay for the pump needs to get wired with its trigger circuit contingent on the oil pressure sender’s state: if there’s a ground at the sender, then the pump doesn’t operate. That way when the engine stalls for whatever reason, the fuel pump will quit running after oil pressure drops off (usually within a few seconds of engine shutdown). Easy enough to run a wire to shoot power to the relay during engine cranking, bypassing the oil pressure lockout. The thoughtful installer also puts in an inertial cutoff switch that kills power to the fuel pump if the vehicle is hit hard. Odds are the Cortez didn’t have these or any other precautionary measures in its electric pump install. And for that matter, odds are the Cortez had no need of an electric pump in the first place.
Further, if the non-stock (4bbl) carburetor installation was like many, then it, too, was done without enough knowledge or understanding of the safety issues involved. The fuel line and filter setup could very well have been rigged up in an unsafe manner to say the least; many I’ve seen have practically been fires begging to happen.
Then there’s random dude, qualifications unknown, who nosed around the vehicle for a couple-few days and gave it a yup-yup and a thumbs-up. Perhaps he was an ace mechanic. Perhaps he did a careful, dilligent job, and whatever actually started the fire could not have been detected or foreseen. But I doubt it—just the age and long storage of the vehicle would’ve warranted a whole hell of a lot more than two or three days worth of pokin’ around. Many or most of the must-replace parts would’ve taken longer than that to come in! And a real mechanic would’ve damn well known it.
Excuse me for going off-topic here, but you mention electric/mechanical fuel pumps, carbs and fuel injection. Have EFI conversions (Holley, Edelbrock, there must be others) on classic, carbureted US cars become common by now, or is it still a niche market?
I must have seen hundreds of old US rides here over the past two decades, a peek under the hood included, but so far zilch. Carbs only.
…and what an utterly sad ending of this RV story!
There are more and better options than ever before for retrofitting EFI, but it’s still a niche. Most vehicles that came with a carburetor (or two or three) still have one (or two or three).
Yes there are lots of EFI conversions in use in the US. Yea some are kits from big companies selling their own wares, however there are a lot of people who adapt the GM TBI set up to their vehicles. With the removable chip it is actually pretty easy to tune it to your application and there are all sorts of software programs to read the BLM table and help you create a new VE table and of course programmers to program the chip. Alternatively there are a lot of people who you can just send your logging results, current tune and they’ll burn a new chip for you.
Thanks, gentlemen. Never heard of adapting the GM TBI set up Scoutdude mentions, though.
I’ve been reading about the latest systems of the big suppliers and saw a few conversions done in some Discovery Channel TV car shows. You know, the typical one-hour-shows. If you deduct the commercials and all the drama, about 10 to 15 minutes of actually working on the car(s) remain.
This is one entry point into the DIY EFI rabbit hole, but there are many that lead you to the 7747 and how to make it work on just about any engine with 6 or 8 cylinders. GM used that same computer for 4.3 5.0 5.7 and 7.4 engines. The basic algorithm is the same so they adjust injector size to cylinder size and the look up tables that are stored in a replaceable chip. There are also people who have done conversions for 4cyl using setups that started life on a GM 4cyl.
Lots of guys go the full junkyard route, other than the adapter and get everything needed for $2-300.
http://www.gearhead-efi.com/gm-ecm-pcm-conversion/tbi-efi-conversion.html
I don’t know that I entirely agree with Scoutdude that there are “a lot of people” putting GM TBI in place of a carburetor. It’s a swap known beyond just the Chevysphere, and a relatively easy and inexpensive way to upgrade from a carburetor, but I doubt if even one per cent of carbureted vehicles owned by American enthusiasts are converted to any kind of fuel injection, let alone one per cent of carbureted vehicles still on the roads.
I never said anything about percentage of cars that have been converted just that a lot of people do put EFI on their vehicles.
The evidence is all the companies and forums to help you out with that GM based swap who have been around for a decade or more. They are still operating because someone is buying their wares or working on their junk.
It also depends on the type of vehicle. The JY DIY EFI is probably most popular in the 4×4/Off-road circles where the improvement in high angle and rough conditions can really be appreciated and the owners are more likely to modify their vehicles.
Well fact is that most modern cars lack a fuel pump inertia switch, but you will find them in every Ford. Of course most EFI systems don’t run the pump if there is no signal from the crank position sensor so they will stop if the engine dies. The problem is when the leak is small enough that the engine keeps running.
For the oil pressure switch that was pretty common on US built vehicles with a carb and electric fuel pump. They typically did not include a starter bypass. That was always a problem with my old F-350. It frequently sat for weeks or occasionally a month or two at a time. So of course the fuel would evaporate. So the question was would the oil pressure build enough to close the fuel pump contacts in the oil pressure sender before the battery got too low. If I used it frequently enough it wasn’t a problem.
I have to disagree that 3 days isn’t enough to do a proper inspection of a vehicle like this, well at least the mechanical side. Yes if parts needed to be replaced chances are you would have to wait for some of them.
Yes, that fact you mentioned is a fact. It goes very well with that fact I mentioned—the one about closed fuel supply systems. 😉
An alternative to a starter bypass is a pump control circuit that runs the pump for a second or two at key-on.
3 days is indeed plenty to do an inspection; that’s not in debate. There is no “if” about extensive parts and work being needed before an elderly RV that’s been sitting unused outdoors for years is driven across the continent.
Yeah unfortunately I think the buyer was a little naive. Really I’m quite good at mechanicals, but buying a vintage vehicle sight unseen to drive cross country isn’t something I would comfortably tackle, there are way too many variables that would take way too much time and depth to go through inspecting whilst I’m thousands of miles away from home, have limited tools and parts availability to maintain something this old and obscure, and have a place to comfortably do all that. He must have watched one too many barn find rescue TV shows. And even taking it to a mechanic to give it a once over isn’t going to guarantee trouble free motoring down the road, I don’t care who it is, and it’s only mentioned he went over it, not necessarily fixed anything, but looked for problems, disclosed them to the owner and may or may not have addressed them as “urgent” problems. Also possible the opposite, maybe it was perfectly fine and preventatively the mechanic started running new hoses and fuel lines every which way and forgot to tighten a clamp in the convoluted expanse of this vehicle, who knows.
It’s too bad about the RV but I’m glad nobody was hurt.
While it was most likely that the fire was started in/by the engine there is the remote possibility that it was something else.
https://www.kiro7.com/news/trending/scented-candle-burning-inside-car-causes-vehicle-fire-florida/R67RKVY3NFBOZPPXYI22VVZR74/
What would it cost to ship a vehicle like that cross-country? It’s running $1800 for an ordinary car via open carrier these days, which was enough to deter me recently from buying a $3500 ish car that I would probably have snapped up in the proverbial New York Minute if it were offered in my area. And I didn’t have the inclination to take a week off and chance the drive back right now, going through multiple Covid hotspot states, with at least three overnight stops and all kinds of roadside restaurant meals.
On the other hand, the Cortez was an RV, so you’ve got a place to sleep, and a kitchenette, making a drive home perhaps seem more attractive compared to likely astronomical shipping costs. Although I wonder where they were planning to stop, as I understand many RV parks would turn away a rustbucket vintage vehicle like that.