My first headlamp upgrade had been on my ’65 D’Valiant ( part I • part II • part III). By the time I got the R/T, I thought I knew all of what I thought was a very simple binary: Euro-spec = awesome superior upgrade; US-spec = poopy inferior junk. That’s wrong; the reality is a lot more complicated and nuanced—almost whatever part of the car we might care to name, both standards have ample room for good stuff and too much room for bad stuff, and “good” and “bad” are defined objectively, even in the real world—but I was in the firm grip of the Dunning-Kruger Effect; I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
So, inspired by Peter’s Saratoga—his red ’90 at that point—I trawled through the factory parts cattledogs looking for BUX items (that’s Built-Up eXport, as opposed to KDX for Knocked-Down eXport) and went on a shopping spree: left and right headlamps, left and right tail lights and the trunk lid appliqué with licence plate holder and lights, left and right sideview mirrors, left and right inner and outer front seatbelts, non-airbag steering wheel centre pad, front frog lamps. I didn’t have limitless money, so I had to draw a line somewhere; I didn’t try for export-spec glass or rear seatbelts or tow hooks. I didn’t chase after height-adjustable front seatbelts or motorised headlamp levelling.
Getting the part numbers out the cattledog was one thing, but actually buying the parts was another matter; I got skunked—sorry, I can’t order that, it’s an export-only part—until someone phrased it another way: that’s an export-only part; I can’t order that without an export-vehicle’s VIN. Oh. Okeh! I copied down the VIN of Peter’s Saratoga from his homepage and put in a call to a friendly parts manager at the nearby Chrysler dealer. Bing-bang-boom, parts successfully ordered. I thought it was funny how they came in the usual Chrysler boxes (“Contents conform to US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards”).
Some of this export equipment was markedly superior to the American-spec parts. The sideview mirrors were appreciably larger, made by a big name (Ichikoh, a major Japanese supplier of lights and mirrors), and spring-hinged. Much better than the miniature, fixed-mounted, generic domestic items. The seatbelts, too, were name-brand items—Bendix—with a considerably less primitive locking mechanism that unobtrusively grabbed the belt even during a spirited (heh) curve or turn, helping to keep me planted in the seat. Nice. The new frog lamps were glass-and-metal Marchal 150s with real (H3 55-watt) bulbs, same as had been used on ’89-’90 American-spec cars until Chrysler got Valeo to make a cheap all-plastic version with a 27-watt toy bulb inside. And I even found the part numbers for the charcoal plastic cover guards made specifically for these frog lamps, only actually shipped with early-production ’89 cars.
Chrysler being Chrysler, the headlamps were still lousy, just differently so. They were sourced from Wagner, known more for cheap than for good. Their glass lenses wouldn’t cloud up like the American-spec plastic ones, yay, but it was thin, weak, fragile glass that pitted and cracked easily, boo. A Canadian company at that time made clear PET (pop bottle type material) guards for the Spirit/Acclaim cars, so I put on a set of those.
The reflectors were hard glass-filled polyester thermoset (like distributor cap material) rather than soft thermoplastic, which at that time couldn’t be used for European headlamps because it would distort so much as it heated up that the sharp low-beam cutoff would be lost. So yay, a more thermally-stable, more precisely-shaped reflector. But boo, that thermoset stuff was brittle, yet on these lamps the bulb retainer clip—a cheap, flimsy spring-wire thing—hinged and hooked on tiny, weak, easily-broken protuberances integrally moulded as part of the reflector. This chintzy bulb retention system broke in just about every possible way over my years of owning cars with these headlamps—sooner and more often when the glass-filled polyester was swapped out for a much cheaper construction, some kind of lightweight, flaky stuff that seemed to amount to rammed papier-mâché with a coating of varnish holding it (sorta) together. The American-spec lamps’ twist-lock bulb retainer was a much sturdier design.
The export headllamps took an H4 bulb, which put out more light (yay) than the US 9004 bulbs, but the H4 system uses only about half the reflector area to gather, magnify, and focus light on low beam while the 9004 system uses the whole reflector, so that’s more or less a wash. No bulb shield in either lamp, another wash. The export lamps had been upgraded a little since the ones on Peter’s car had been made; there was a fairly elaborate vent/drain system, so yay. Both kinds of lamp produced weak and streaky low beams with too much upward stray light causing backdazzle in bad weather, but I found the export lamps’ inadequacies a little less gritching to live with: shorter seeing distance, but wider coverage. They looked meaner, too. I still wished Chrysler had, instead of such bottom-feeding, gone to Valeo (Cibié) for lamps with that company’s advanced, efficient, enormously better complex-surface reflector technology, as they did for the Dodge Monaco/Eagle Premier cars. Or really, any of the other suppliers capable of making something better than low-bid rubbish. Why couldn’t they have sought a package lights-and-mirrors deal from Ichikoh? Oh, right, because Chrysler: make ’em (1) legal, (2) cheap, (3) cheaper, and (4) no, cheaper. Grumble.
Front frog lamps are essentially useless to most drivers in most conditions, but the export/pre-decontenting front frog lamps produced a noticeably brighter and wider useless beam pattern than the plastic imitations.
The relevant part of this film is 16 seconds long, so go ahead and hit Stop at 19:43:
I thought (and I still think) it’s a matter of regulatory malpractice that American regs fail to require any side-on visibility of the turn signal. Strikes me as completely obvious that the signal should be visible to those whose space you’re about to occupy. Flashing the front side markers was a halfway measure, not good enough for me (and besides, I wanted to convert those to white front position lamps because EURO SPEC RULEZ and stuff). I didn’t like the round Chrysler repeaters, which would’ve required only a simple 1″ round hole; instead I went for Saab items. They were a pesky nuisance to install, for they required a keyhole-shaped fender cutout. I tricked the Chrysler dealer into doing it by issuing a phony information bulletin on the subject, formatted like all the rest of the ’91 TSBs. They looked right at home.
The export steering wheel pad…yeah, I hadn’t yet outgrown my childish, ignorant certitude that airbgas were stupid, useless, dangerous bombs forced on us by the nanny-state government, et cetera ad nauseam. So rebel that I was, I stuck it to the man by making my car more dangerous in case of a crash. Boy, I sure showed them, aHyuck! Here’s to (eventually) growing up.
But I’d seen that non-airbag pad on a visiting Mexican family’s Chrysler Spirit R/T at a Denver gas station, and then again on Peter’s Saratoga, and in my pointy little head “export” meant “superior”. There were two choices for the pad: plain and de luxe. The plain one had the Pentastar logo moulded into the grey Medium Quartz flexible plastic material, pretty much like the airbag. The de luxe had a black-and-chrome Pentastar with a crystal-clear plastic jewel over it. I chose the de luxe one, of course, and paid for that choice every time the sun came in over my shoulder and glinted off the chrome or the plastic crystal.
The rear lights were made by the same supplier as the US-spec ones—Lescoa—but the brake lights and turn signals had a much wider visibility angle so they could be seen side-on rather than just to the rear, and there were redundant taillights and more efficient reflex reflectors. They had rear frog lamps built in, too, but I didn’t get around to hooking them up. Ditto on the reversing lights; I never got around to rerouting the wires from the US location on the trunk lid to the export location in the left and right light clusters. That detail didn’t get detected when I let a friend of mine use the car to take his driving licence test. The side-on visibility of the tail light more or less stood in for the missing side marker light, but I never added back the side reflex reflectors also absent from the export lights.
Image courtesy of Peter Wendt
Installing the export-spec parts posed certain challenges, too. The decklid appliqué with dummy-lights and licence plate holder and lamps was configured for the European licence plate, 52 × 12 cm (20½ × 4.7 in) rather than the North American 30 × 15 cm (12 × 6 in) item. I had to drill two new holes in the plate bed and square them up to accept the snap-in nylon inserts which would take the fastening screws, and shave about ¼ inch off the top and bottom of the plate to squeak it into place. And it really was a tight squeak, but in the end I made it fit without looking schlock.
The original US bulb sockets with their plastic-wedge based bulbs snapped right into the export taillights, so I figured I was good to go without the export-spec socketry for the metal-bayonet based bulbs. So how did these difficult-to-get lights work? Not very well. Kind of lousy, in fact: a tiny spot of light from the filament as viewed directly through the lens, and an occasional glitter of light from various parts of the lens as I walked back and forth looking at the light. On a wall behind the car I could see sort of a grid of red streaks rather than a concentrated oval, round, or rectangular patch of red, but I didn’t yet know enough to care or to figure out how come; I just shrugged, guessed that was how they worked, and drove off to the University of Michigan that way.
About the only things I remember from that trip are that the cruise control would sometimes just decide to cancel itself for no reason, as though I’d tapped the brakes. It would accept a reset immediately. And occasionally while cruising along at a steady speed there was a low hoooooooooot like a foghorn that seemed to come from directly in front of me (eventually I decided it could only be the brake booster diaphragm—the booster eventually got replaced under the service contract, but the foghorn noise remained). Also, somewhere in the vacuum of space between Denver and Ann Arbor, I maxed out the 120-mph speedometer. Stayed there for a brief time, observed that the car felt remarkably stable and unstressed, then backed off back down to something probably still over the limit, but not by quite so much.
A few days after I arrived in Michigan, I was backing into a parking space at night when it dawned on me what those streaks of light were all about: I hadn’t been quite so good to go as I’d thought; the domestic-spec sockets had the wrong focal length for the export lights, so the filaments weren’t where the optics were looking. I ordered the export-spec taillight wiring-and-socketry assemblies, and presto! Now I had proper brake, tail, and turn signal light performance. Good job my faulty ones hadn’t got me hit.
Not all my modifications were made in slavish adherence to a Euro-fanboi mindset. I put in Koni adjustable strocks and shuts, which made a giant improvement in handling, ride, and surefootedness.
And there was a modification the car made to itself. The steering column was built by Chrysler’s Acustar division, but Chrysler had bought steering columns from GM’s Saginaw division with Briggs & Stratton locks for many years, and I guess they studied carefully, because this Acustar column with its Acustar lock did a very GM/Briggs thing: it wore in such a manner that the ignition key could be removed in any switch position. I viewed this as a convenience (and another bit of rebellion against big ol’ bad ol’ nannystate ol’ government regulations, hurr-hurr-hurr) and left it “broken”. The key itself, I’d had cut on a blank intended for a first-generation Neon; it had a fluorescent yellow-green head. Obviously much sexier than the regular ol’, normal ol’, boring ol’ black one, or even the bright red one I’d found on the Ilco keyblank rack at the hardware store.
My friend the starter-and-alternator wizard built me a top-spec starter with all the best bits—metal gear track instead of plastic, etc. When I wasn’t using the downslope of a driveway to start the engine by shifting to reverse, releasing the parking brake and letting out the clutch, that optimal starter started the engine exactly the same as the original starter had, but it gave me a warm fuzzy knowing it had all the best parts in it. He built me a superior alternator, too, which kept the battery charged just like the original had done.
This kind of time and money spent on stuff that make no practical difference and nobody actually cares about feels alien from my current perspective. I guess it’s a tradeoff: being a grownup might mean losing youthful enthusiasm, and day jobs and taxes and responsibilities are a drag. But on the other hand, if y’wanna eat cookies for breakfast, can’t nobody stop ya!
And fortunately for this present story, I had other kinds of fun with the car aside from the hunt for the optimal ignition key head colour. The university, as such entities are wont to do, sharply limited where students could park on campus. For awhile I had what I considered a legitimate need to park close to a building with no nearby student parking. So I went out and bought a small red-and-white Igloo cooler, sized to fit neatly on the passenger seat, and I got me a pen and a paper sat at the computer and I made up my own little sign:
CAUTION!
CONTAINS SOLID-PHASE DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE
DO NOT EXPOSE TO TEMPERATURES ABOVE 273°K
OR PHASE CHANGE WILL OCCUR!
That translates as Contains ice; if its temperature goes above 0°C/32°F it will melt. I put the sign on the cooler and the cooler on the front seat. Never got a parking ticket; I reckon the campus cops saw the cooler in a car parked near a building where who-knows-what kind of science-y stuff was being done and decided maybe to give it a miss. These days it sounds more like a surefire recipe for the anti-terror squad to be called in.
Close by North Campus was UMTRI, the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. This was where I put in the most substantial, highest-quality chunks of my self-directed study in vehicular lighting; they had a library stacked floor to ceiling with research papers published round the world over numerous decades. I eagerly sucked up every lighting-related paper I could find, and there were a great many. I took notes as I read, then went upstairs to pester the human-factors researchers—whose bread and butter was lighting; many of the papers were their own—with questions. One of them seemed not to like me very much; I found him grouchy and prickly and terse. But the other was frequently happy to answer my questions and discuss the research at great length. He was remarkably patient with my knowitall ignorance and preconceived notions (European headlamps rule and US lamps suck, and any so-called research to the contrary is just useless lab-knowledge not applicable to driving in the ‘real world’ as I imagined it, etc) and my knowledge and understanding advanced at a galloping pace. The patient researcher and I still talk regularly; now I’m active in some of his same professional circles, helping to devise and revise vehicle lighting technical standards.
All of that makes this next kind of childish fun I had with the R/T all the more ironic and shameful: Baxter Road was about a kilometre long, tree-lined, with gentle curves and hills. The speed limit was 30, or maybe 25. Late at night I used to see how fast I could go. I think I touched 80 or 85 mph, maybe more, right past the place where all the traffic safety research happens, haw-haw-haw! Never got caught, never got crashed. What was I saying? Oh yeah: let’s hear it for eventually growing up.
This isn’t one of his shelves, it’s one of mine. I’m trying to quit; I really am…!
There was another headlamp-obsessed guy, a Vietnam vet with a home and shop/warehouse full of European headlamps in rural Plymouth, Wisconsin. We had long, extend-o phone conversations (with him there was no other kind) and he told me stories of racing his old Volvos at Road America, just two miles from his place. Late in June 1998, he told me he’d be serving as an instructor at the Track Time performance driving class to be held o’er the July 4th holiday weekend. I should register and come do the class, he said. I could stay at his place, he said.
That sounded fun, so off I went—a day or so early, to buy some shop time and work from him. I hadn’t got around to upgrading the car’s severely underspecified headlamp wiring: 18-gauge low beam feeds, 16-gauge high beam feeds…20-gauge grounds; no foolin’ and no relays. Futility in resistance! Working together, we put in heavy-gauge wires with relays, put in 100-watt bulbs (years before I learnt these usually aren’t the upgrade they sound like) and aimed the headlamps “properly” (in quotes because European aim specs are questionable even for over there, and outright wrong for over here) with his actual, real, official Hella Beamsetter. While we were at it, we put in a set of loud horns, also lashed up with large wiring and another relay. We mounted the relay bank—high beam, low beam, horn—in place of the RH airbag impact sensor, which got relocated to the trunk.
We also put in a set of (Wagner, uff da) semi-metallic brake pads, and flushed in new premium brake fluid.
The class was pretty cool; I had great fun driving around the track. At the time I felt like I learnt quite a lot, starting from scratch, about driving technique and car control, though I don’t know that I’ve retained much of it. I also put a pretty serious dent in my unrealistically high opinion of the Spirit R/T. The mushy, disconnected-feeling brake pedal and its sluggish return to the up position after pressed made it very difficult to get any real practise in at threshold braking, for example. I missed the no-booster brake pedal feel from D’Valiant. But I surely didn’t miss D’Valiant’s bench seat! The Spirit R/T-exlusive buckets weren’t quite Recaros, but they were very supportive, quite a bit better than most any other seat Chrysler ever installed in a car.
This is me leading (i.e., holding up) a new C5 Corvette through a turn…
…and here’s me in the way of a Viper.
But even so, I was hitting around 115 on the straightaways and 55-80 through the corners by the time I began to get the hang of things. Of course, several areas showed up as needing improvement in my driving: shifting coördination, picking and executing proper lines through corners, and driving closer to eight-tenths than to five—even then, I had this irrational thing about not wanting to roll or crash the car.
The exhaust system hissed at high engine speeds, indicating a need for attention (which was eventually given, as described in part I). I averaged 9.8 miles per gallon on the race track.
The headlamp-freak/instructor took me out on the track in his ’82 Volvo 242 turbo. He put the car into a perfect 4-wheel drift through the Carousel (bounded by turns № 9 and 10); I was duly impressed. On the straightaway I noticed his speedometer was hard against the stop. “Why did you leave in the 85-mile speedo?” I asked. He said “I’m going faster than 85; why should I care how much faster?”. Fair point.
On the drive back to Michigan (average: 25.2 miles per gallon) I took to laughing my head off when I’d come upon someone in the left lane going slower than I wanted, give a brief tap to the high beams, then another, then leave them on until what I perceived as the slug moved over. Hey, I know! Let’s be a complete jackass and throw klieg-light high beams in other drivers’ eyes on the public roadways! Those high beams really were insanely intense; they made reflective road signs pop in broad daylight; at night the high beams “burned out” those same signs (made them too bright to read). Day or night, if I pulled smartly out the right lane and into the left while blinking the high beams rhythmically, often whoever was ahead would pull over all the way to the right shoulder and stop, thinking I was in a police car. Neat party tricks, I guess? In retrospect I’m disamused.
I wasn’t done with modifications, of course. I put in a reprogrammed engine computer to increase the car’s performance (um, why?) and I’ll save those details for a forthcoming non-COAL post. That computer brought operational problems, almost as though he who reprogrammed the computer maybe hadn’t put quite as much effort, time, and money into R&D and testing as Chrysler had on the original. The new module’s built-in voltage regulator’s temperature compensation circuit went haywire; in cold ambient temperatures with a cold battery, line voltage rose to 16 volts or so. The turn signals flashed extra-fast, and I had to be careful not to turn on the high beams until the engine bay had warmed up, or they’d pop like flashbulbs—fed full line voltage as they were by my fat-pipe wiring and relays. The low beams weren’t immune, but they were somewhat less prone. Still, I bought bulbs by the boxful from the guy in Wisconsin. White ones and yellow ones in a variety of wattages—more about those yellow headlamps in another future post. And there were other issues with that ECU, too. I no longer recall them all, but I think one of them was that at random it would react to what it perceived as an overboost situation by momentarily cutting power to the fuel injectors…and blowing that fuse I’d replaced the fuselink with. That was always worth a chuckle when it happened.
In 1999 I moved back to Denver because my father was busy dying of cancer (and I sensed, correctly as it happened, that if I didn’t spend time with him I’d forever lose the chance) and my mother had to be propped up—a toxic, severely corrosive, impossible task that fell to me because my sister was busy having a life of her own, off in New York, and she for some reason was deemed entitled to carry on doing so. One day (of many) while leaving the hospital, I absentmindedly picked the middle lane of 9th Street, rather than the right lane that would allow me to turn North onto Colorado Boulevard. The light was red and there was nobody behind me, so I shifted to reverse (reversing lamps still nonfunctional), meaning to back up far enough to put the car in line behind an early-’90s Chev Suburban already in the right lane.
I was deeply and constantly in psychoemotional debt during those awful months, living well beyond my mind’s means. I didn’t adequately control the car on my way rearward, and made scraping contact with the edge of an outsized metal mudflap thing on the Suburban. Crap. We both pulled over and got out. The paint had been scraped off the crease of my right rear wheel arch—down to primer, not bare metal. Zero damage to the Suburban, but the woman who had been driving it went what we nowtimes call full-on Karen. Screaming and hissing at me that I could have killed her (…what?) or somebody else (…who?), blaming me for old and imaginary damage on the front, rear, and opposite side of the Suburban, giving me smarmy lectures about how driving is a privilege and a responsibility, threatening a lawsuit, the works. She called her husband, who eventually arrived, took a look at the situation, said “He didn’t damage your car at all”, spent 10 or 15 minutes walking around the Suburban with her going “No, he wasn’t anywhere near that…no, that was from the garage door last year, remember? No, that was there before”, and eventually came back to me and said “We don’t have an issue here; feel free to go ahead and leave”. I filled in the missing paint with a red Sharpie; it did about an 80% job.
The car was approaching the expiry mileage of the service contract, and I knew I didn’t want to be on the hook for anything like the long list of repairs Chrysler had picked up under that contract, so it was time to sell. I placed ads in the newspapers—I don’t think online car sales were much of a thing yet, but I advertised it on the relevant enthusiast forums. I even made a homepage about it. Zero bites, even as I periodically dropped the price lower and lower in the newspaper and enthusiast-forum ads.
Eventually the car did sell, and generated one hell of a dramatic story in the process. That story really belongs in the post about the ’63 VW, though, so…stay tuned!
You forged a bogus factory service bulletin that was so good it convinced a dealership service department to carry out the work specified? Did I read that correctly?
Yep. Put it on official-looking “Chrysler International” letterhead, with formatting cribbed from the few/sparse export bulletins and service manuals I managed to acquire. I think I put it in terms of a lighting modification required for vehicles being taken by their owners to markets where repeaters were required. Some time later when I brought the car back to the dealer for some other work, the service writer said “I thought you were taking that car overseas!” I shrugged and said “Deferred! After all that!” and laughed.
Daniel, this brings me back in a lot of ways, especially 1999. I was dealing with that without any siblings so I get where you’re coming from.
As for faking the FSB… back in the 90s (and I’m thinking right now, should I post this under my real name? It’s been 25 years) we had a fake university department called the Office of Cabratic Studies (Cabratic from cabra or goat) that we used to get tons of discounts and ins. Had a fake university letterhead and everything. Even other departments of the university were fooled. One time we got a hundred bucks from some student fund and decided to spend it on hot dogs and spent a night just handing free hot dogs to students. They tried to shut us down claiming it was too dangerous at night so we spent more of their money on a shop lamp to keep going. There really wasn’t a reason other than we were idiot undergrads.
Hah! Love it. I’m not done telling stories of this general nature, so keep eyes open.
Not sure how Chrysler operated in the beginnings of the interwebs, but something like that from about ’92 or ’93 on wouldn’t have gotten past a warranty administrator at Ford. By ’94 or so every writeup generated an OASIS report (online automotive service information system) specific to the vehicle and would list any open recalls. TSBs were also searchable and VIN specific. Did you create a complete TSB, with instructions, parts call out and labor times? As a flat rate tech back then I wouldn’t have touched it unless I knew exactly what the job was and how much I was getting paid.
Chrysler published various categories of TSBs. Some of them described procedures to be billed to the company, or on a goodwill basis. Some of them described procedures to be done if a customer wanted to pay for the work. Some of them described new parts or repair techniques, or running changes in production, or things to check on certain cars as they came in. Some were purely informational.
The one in question here was an informational bulletin, not vehicle-specific, describing a procedure to be done on a customer-requests/customer-pays basis.
(to be clear, I paid the dealership for the work; this was not an effort at getting work free of charge)
Ahhh, now I see. Well done, sir.
Portrait Of The Smartartist As A Young Man, (Stern, D., 2021)
Yet again gotta admire your pluck, Mr S. Excruciatingly honest.
I’ve vague intimations from memory of doing stuff just about as bad, but I am (secularly) blessed and thus protected by the fog that has descended over the details since. Poor wiring, I imagine.
I’d go a fair bit saltier than “smartartist”, but you’re not wrong!
There are certainly times I could do with some of that fog, but it doesn’t seem to be user-configurable.
Thanks for another enjoyable Saturday morning read, Daniel.
Justy called it “excruciatingly honest”. That fits perfectly and I can’t say enough about how I appreciate and enjoy that aspect of your writing.
I used to try hard to not appear pretentious. Better now I think.
You’re welcome, and thanks!
(having looked at it from both sides now, I think that particular attempt is doomed to fail; the harder one tries, the more pretentious one appears!)
Gotta say I admire the bogus technical bulletins to get things done, full points for creativity.
When my mother was busy dying of cancer she had a lot of anger, and somehow I (the unreliable middle child) became the voice of reason in our family. Sorry you had to deal with that all at the same time, it’s not easy or fun.
Fraud? Social engineering? The line got a little blurry.
(thanks for the commiseration)
Another great entry, Daniel.
Youth is truly wasted on the young.
I’ve thought that, in its many variants (if youth but knew; if age but could, etc) but I’m not a hundred per cent sure the math is quite so simple as it seems.
I must say that you got a lot of life from your cars. Not so much the car’s life, but your own.
I join the others in saluting you on the service bulletin. But every time I am convinced you have learned your lesson on the modifications (like, oh, say a performance chip in a car the factory has already hopped to the outer limit of a sane man) you present another surprise. 😀
Oh, we’re nowhere near my having learnt that and other basic lessons. Not even close to the perimeter of the country containing the ballpark.
I was very much on the anti-airbag side of things for many years; I still daily my 89 E30. I remember well that one of the main selling points for me when my mom got her 94 Passat wagon was it was the last without airbags. At the time, in the mid-90s, the healthy skepticism of airbags was probably not all hype, as those first-gens were known to hurt ppl with glasses. That said, I would very much like to upgrade to a ten-airbag car as my daily at some point. That said, when the airbag recalls began (Jfc, almost ten years ago?), I remember being grateful for my skepticism.
The first-generation US-spec airbags were dangerous to small, short women; I met none of those criteria.
Yep, those of smaller stature were at risk then, but for the rest, sans airbag in a frontal collision would often result in an introduction to the windshield, especially when seatbelts were not properly worn.
Another great Saturday morning episode! I too went through an anti-airbag period, and was glad that our 1993 Land Cruiser had no air bags, and our same year Corolla only had a driver side bag. Come to think of it, I think both had only lap belts in the center seats, probably the last year or so that was legal. And, to show that the CC Effect extends beyond cars, our local radio station played “Signs” by The Five Man Electrical Band yesterday.
I remember the fellow in Wisconsin, but not his name. Duane something, maybe? In addition to lighting, he was a somewhat famous builder of Volvo pushrod engines. I sold him a 1975 Volvo 245 with the desirable(?) “metric” B20 pushrod engine along with the long block from one of the first 242s sold in the US.
And yes, there was no such thing as a 5-minute conversation with him.
Not Duane, David. And it appears he’s still at it.
Kind of astounding, if so. I’m not done writing about him.
A little Google searching brought enough memories back to dig further. Found the satellite view of his place of business – it still appears to be full of “parts cars”. Maybe that ’75 245 I sold him is still there.
As a writer and an editor, I often see and use sneer quotes. Yours here around parts cars are some of the most applicable I’ve seen in quite awhile.
My ’90 Daytona ES (not *nearly* so hopped up on goofballs as your cherry red Spirit ride) also had the Ignition Key Convenient Removal-While-Running feature. Very nice way to warm the thing up in a Finger Lakes winter. Valet key, who needs a valet key?
It’s amazing what one can accomplish with a decent copy of Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, a decent technical style, and a detailed knowledge of corporate internal regulations.
I remember a classmate, who was gifted with a new Neon junior year, who was terrified of the airbags because she was four eleven in stocking feet and scared of decapitation.
Did you ever have wheel bearings done on the Spirit?
I want brownie points for having done it all with MS Word and Graphic Converter.
There was definitely at least one front wheel bearing, as described in Part I. Don’t think the rears ever gave trouble.
Ah. I had to do both front bearings and a full front brake job on the Daytona at around 115k. Brrrup-Brrup-Brrrup.RMRMRMRMRMRMRMRMRMRM – until Dave Patterson explained to me what would happen if the bearing pack failed at speed – and then showed me the bearings he pulled, after ten winters in the Catskills, Berkshires, and Finger Lakes. Car drove great for another four years, until I donated it to the Atlantic County Chabad. (I always chuckle to imagine Shmuley Rapoport in that car.)
It was the airbag issue that doomed the penis car, as my sisters called it. One airbag, two front riders engaged to be married, one lane of NJ70 in Lakewood, two ranks of Jersey concrete barriers eliminating breakdown lanes, two pairs of parallel head-on approaching high beams – direct head-on collision averted at the very last second when the attempting overtaker swerved back into his lane. two weeks later, I had a new car.
In a comment of yours on R. L. Plaut’s post on his then wife’s Eagle Vision, you mentioned that it used to be possible to get Chrysler export parts until Chrysler boarded up the loopholes. I was curious to know more about that; now I do.
The holes got boarded up very quickly once Daimler took over.
So much of this rings true to my own experience, observation, and evolution as the years have passed. Once upon a time nothing could be left stock, altered with “upgrades” of shocking expense and very dubious, at best, results. Do I miss that drive and obsession? Not in the least. Hours spent pouring over various catalogs filled with exotica that would often require re-engineering in order to function at all.
In the same vein, the lust for speed has passed, thankfully. It is only by those spirits that guard (some) young idiots that nothing tragic ever happened.
Yet another fantastic article Daniel.
I used to live to drive; now I drive to live.
I watched the entire cycling safety video, partly as I love old street footage, and partly to see what was said about in-period cycle safety. Not one mention of cycle helmets! I guess they didn’t go with 70’s big hair or hadn’t been popularized. I was biting my nails to the quick with all those folk cycling through medium density traffic with no protection. That said here in South Africa headrests were considered luxury equipment way past when they were mandatory elsewhere.
Thanks for a great read. When I look back at some of the driving ‘skills’ of my youth I’m ashamed, and when young drivers pull those same tricks on me today it’s hard to get upset.
I first encountered that video when it was the subject of a CC post in 2016.
It’s 1975: Helmets? What, you mean like the ones fraidy-cat motorcyclists wear?
I believe the Bell Biker came out in 76, the first popular and reasonably effective bike helmet.
They certainly have evolved quite a lot. The first helmet my folks made me wear effectively sapped the joy out of cycling. It was bulky, heavy, uncofortable to wear, almost completely unventilated and so hot and sticky. To be completely fair about it, that helmet was an off-brand cheapo I think they bought at Target. Today’s helmets are vastly better on all those counts.
But their safety performance might not be what we’d like to hope it would be. Last time I went shopping for a new helmet, in 2012 (I’m probably about due again), I did some close looking into the various helmet standards round the world. Theoretically the US and EU standards aren’t very different. The US standard promulgated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission is slightly more stringent than the European CE standard (EN-1078), but compliance with both is self-certified by the manufacturer.
That’s a problem for me, because it is a backward-looking system: no 3rd-party checking until there’s a pile of dead and maimed people suggesting maybe the maker (or it might be more realistic to say the importer-and-brander) was telling fibs when they crossed their heart and swore the helmet meets the standards. Because there’s no requirement for any pre-sale testing and no conformity-of-production verification, there’s nothing to assure compliance but the fear of lawsuits after a helmet fails to do its job (and that can be got around by declaring bankruptcy on Monday and opening up on Tuesday as a “new” company with the same name).
There was a very stringent standard out of the US-based Snell Foundation, but it was never mandatory and the industry disliked it because it contained rigourous type-approval and conformity-of-production (COP) testing and reporting requirements, boo hoo hoo. So last time I looked, there were no Snell B95-compliant helmets on the market.
The exclusively mandatory Australian standard (AS/NZS 2063) is not only more stringent than the US and EU standards in terms of actual safety performance, but also has rigourous type-approval and COP requirements. Moreover, the Australian standard requires that each tested helmet meet all the safety performance criteria. The US and EU standards call for a fresh test sample for each criterion, which makes the tests meaningless, because a real crash involves multiple impacts and forces—I don’t get a new helmet between the first and second or second and third impacts!
Australian cyclists sometimes bitch and moan online about it, mostly because rather than learn what they’re talking about they prefer to carp about market protectionism and whinge about not being able to buy as wide a range of helmets as they’d prefer. Me, I would like to have an Australian-spec helmet!
Daniel isn’t only one to convert the American car to European specifications (as much as possible).
When I got 1986 Chevrolet Celebrity through the fleet sale for $900 in 1989 (thanks to my father who was the regional manager), I got fed up with the lane-changing jousting and near-miss collisions so much. I installed the Lancia-Maserati side turn signal repeaters on my Celebrity. They instantly showed the others my intentions of changing lanes or turning and commanded them to stay out of my way (not always).
Next, I reconfigured the taillamps so that the turn signal indicators and brake lamps were separated. Really easy-peasy work. The 1987–1989 didn’t have the export taillamps with amber turn signal indicators. The 1981–1986 had completely different taillamps and wouldn’t fit my Celebrity. I didn’t have the Dutch courage to try cutting the holes on the outermost section and pouring the amber-coloured plastic to fill in.
I drove a lot in the rural areas outside Dallas so the “100-mph headlamps” (as advertised many times in the Road & Track classified sections during the 1970s) were next. I upgraded the headlamps to Hella 165x100mm H4 and H1 capsule headlamps. That improved the night visibility enormously. I did something illegal here so psst! I upgraded the H4 bulbs to 100/130 watts and H1 to 100 watts. No one dared to stay on the left lane in front of me. I had to use the high beam sparingly because I didn’t upgrade the wiring and relay for higher watt bulbs.
I hated the “comfort feature” of seat belts. The “comfort feature” allowed the shoulder belts to slack more and more as the drivers and passengers lean forward slightly a few times. You have to pull the shoulder belt down quickly to retract it back. I looked into the seat belt mechanism and removed the small part that allowed it. Presto! No more flaccid shoulder belt!
Those GM “comfort” seatbelts were not only UNcomfortable, but also unsafe. Even as Motor Trend fawned and gushed over the new ’77 Caprice, they bitched about those belts with the stupid windowshade-type mechanism—”awful: loose and uncomfortable”.
As to those adverts in the magazines: they were…adverts. There is nothing such as a low beam adequate for anywhere near 100 mph. It is a physical impossibility.
Yeah, I was just being bit sarcastic here about the “100 mph headlamps”. That’s why I put the quotation marks…
Well, like I said before, we travelled between US and Europe many times in the late 1970s and during the 1980s. We hired different types of cars every time or borrowed ones owned by our relatives and friends. That included the 1999 Chrysler Voyager that we drove to Waldshut-Tiengen on a very early January morning for my grandmother’s funeral.
Back then, many Autobahnen aren’t illuminated by the street lamps unless at some exchanges, close to the cities, etc. You’d be surprised at how “adequate” the low beam headlamps, namely H4 ones, functioned during the 100-plus mph drive on the Autobahnen at night.
This is called real-world driving experience that cannot always be neatly replicated in the lab or controlled settings. One look at the data doesn’t always translate into the real-world driving experiences and abilities of many. Germans don’t drive like Americans and vice versa. Believe me, I’ve been there many times. So, don’t underestimate the Germans when it comes to driving.
Oh, fer sher—it was a common advertising trope. Look, here we see Lucas exceeding it by 50 per cent! In fact, low beams (of any description, with any kind of light source, meeting whatever which regulation) provide adequate seeing distance for between about 25 and 45 mph, tops. Above that, you have to hope there are streetlights or cars in front of you to light your way, and lean on luck and the nature of controlled-access roadways.
Anyhow, Oliver, thanks for demonstrating exactly what I was talking about. 🤓
That mirror is almost, if not, an exact duplicate of the stock mirrors on my 61 626 right down to the blue color.
Perhaps a ‘91 626? I bet they’re also Ichikoh items; duck down and look at the underside. Most all suppliers had a portfolio of modular mirror components: various shapes and sizes of mirror head, hinged and fixed, heated and non, manual and cable-remote and electric-remote, flat and convex and aspheric, untinted and tinted, with/without objects in mirror advisory, etc. Then all they had to do was engineer, tool, and produce the model-specific mount base and put the appropriate connector on the wire or cable ends.
Bluish? Funny, they don’t look bluish! (these Chrysler items were black plastic; the camera flash might be playing tricks)
A dark navy blue looks almost black when not in the correct light or not next to something that is pure black. So the upper rim of the mirror gives off a bluish cast under the flash reflection.
(Also, Chrysler used mirrors similar to these on the US-market ’91-’95 Caravan and Voyager.)
Signs. Nice memory from the end of my senior year in high school.
A hoarder of parts too. I would guess mainly lighting and yet you have only one car or two at the time of the picture? Try 10 cars. These boxes store many NOS car parts all the way down to service parts. Oh, and I am not near reforming if you saw what came in this month…
The other side has various tools like torque wrenches, power tools, heavier items like alternators, distributors, carbs, and containers full of correct hardware for my Fords and Dodge. Need the correct bolt then go to the containers. Far end, which can’t be seen, has six large clear plastic containers two of which contain automotive paints, body fillers, and the tools of body work. Above would be ignition parts, brake parts, and so forth. If I see a ridiculously cheap price on eBay for good old USA made part I add to the mix.
A MIG welder is now near the front of the Cougar.
Can never have enough detailing chemicals, fluids, and oil filters. Just ordered 8 more Motorcraft filters as I used four last week. Oil stash below in cabinet. Fire extinguishers are by the garage door into the house. Now to go out and make a brake line… again! That is a story unto itself.
At the peak (or depth, depending on who’s counting and how) of my elevated collecterall, I had an enormously redundant parts store and literature library for my…I think I topped out at five simultaneous cars. I knew it wasn’t sustainable for many years before I actually put push to shove about it and started de-accessioning (i.e., selling off) the stuff I was never actually going to use. It’s undoubtedly nifty to have a wall of NOS carburetors, but stuff is expensive and cumbersome to keep. I now own very few car parts and only one car, which is both weird and historically anomalous.
Lighting parts…well, a fair chunk of that collection had to go away, too, but there’s still too much of it. One addiction at a time.
(To you and tbm3fan) I’ve never lived anywhere I could have so much stuff… and I think I dodged a bullet because I almost certainly would have.
I grew up in the suburbs: plenty of room to spread out and accumulate stuff. I no longer live in such a setting. Aw well, better I should deal with it rather than leave a mess to be cleaned up by others after I’ve gone.
Thanks for confirming my deduction, after having owned two cars so equipped, that fog lamps are largely ornamental. Yet, so many continue to use them ALL the time with their low beams when there’s not a wisp of fog in the air…
Yup. In fact, more people use their frog lamps in clear, dry weather than in inclement conditions—not a guess, that; it’s a well-researched fact. For a handful of false reasons, people misuse their frog lamps. They think they can see better in general, they think the fog lamps will let them see wildlife before it runs into the road, they donno what that switch is but they paid for it so by golly they’re gonna turn it on, they think their lights are fashion toys, they think someone (anyone) cares what their car looks like, etc.
Perhaps there *is* a valid reason for the existence of those cheesy “fog lamps” with 880 series bulbs after all… sorta like they have toy chainsaws for kids, that let them be a Real Logger! without landing in the emergency ward.
I like fog lamps and the idea of having them on the front of my vehicle, ready to light the way in adverse weather conditions, but the truth is that there have been about three days in the last five years that they would’ve been useful for their intended purpose. There are a couple of “off label” uses I can think of where fog lamps come in handy: navigating in very tight areas off road, usually at a crawling speed… those times when you’re sitting bolt upright, straining to see over the hood, or peering out of a side window trying to get a glimpse of what you’re about to run over. Or occasionally to kick out some light to the sides to help define road edges, obstacles, etc- similar to function provided by cornering lamps. Even though I have some extra real estate where I could mount ’em on my truck, I just haven’t been able to build a business case for doing so.
As far as wildlife spotting duties? Good for highlighting turtles, frogs, pet rocks. I think “frog lamp” is an apt descriptor. Dig it!
I really enjoy your writing.
And…”aHyuck!” is absolutely the chef’s kiss. I use that neologism all the time. I’ve never seen it in written form.
Thanks for the great read!
Thanks, Nate, and you’re welcome!