The '52 Buick Super 8. Oh yeah.
A project car if there ever was one. It needed an engine, engines need motor mounts, motor mounts come with frames. So the best thing we could come up with was a 1973 Chevy truck frame, cut down to fit inside the body of the Buick.
This lifted the car pretty good. Something up that high deserves a cherry glow, so a few cans of light grey primer and it was all set for a paint job... that never came. Ever.
But it looked pretty awesome.
The windows were able to roll down, and the doors worked. The paneling inside was pretty wore out, and the seat fabric ended up getting covered by horse blankets. Maybe the AM radio worked.
It was sturdy enough to tow a travel trailer, both the boxy type and a popup trailer. The popup came in handy as we camped by the side of the road for extended trips. The big one ended up being my bedroom one summer where I got to listen to Larry King's radio show and found out about Sig-alerts from the KNX 1070AM California radio station.
But I digress. Another pertinent detail is that my dad was interested
in the road less travelled. (Currently his fascination is
Route 66 and all of the old, old-old, and old-old-old sections that the current highways have bypassed.) So we would tend to take the side highways rather than the interstate. You could see how he really enjoys theme and story elements of the movie
Cars.
For this episode, we had increased the family size with another sister, maintaining the dog. Taking interesting trips to New Mexico and So. Cal. As mentioned in
Snow Days, we would leave from Flagstaff (7,000 feet, rather cool). Heading south into the Phoenix area, we travel part of one of the interesting features of Arizona: you can start at nearly 13,000 feet in elevation and go to near sea level traveling through numerous climate and vegetation zones, all within the borders of the state. I think my 9th grade Biology teacher said Arizona is the only state that has this many zones in its borders.
Anywho, we tended to end up in the desert region, essentially the bottom half of the state, and most of New Mexico, and parts of California.
Let's see where we're at.
Dad is cheap, we drive a cobbled together Frankenstein's monster of a jalopy stuffed with a family of 5 including pet, tow a rectangular gas mileage-killing anchor behind us, in the desert, where it's hot. So hot, in fact, that the car overheats. If you've seen
Gumball Rally,
you know that the way to fix an overheating car is to turn on the heater, full blast, in the desert,
where it's hot. This takes the heat that would be dangerous to the engine and routes it to the passengers faces and feet. Of course, when it's hot inside the car, you open the windows (since the A/C wasn't purchased as an option for this 1952 chariot). This allows the 120 degree desert air to mix with the 300 degree engine heat to produce a blast of air that idiots would call "balmy".
For some reason this wasn't working (i.e. keeping us from complaining), so we broke out two handy items
to ease our mild discomfort. The first was a "water cooler". This modern marvel was truly an amazing invention. One would be hesitant to imagine that a slighlty porous canvas bag filled with water, and then hung on the front of this vehicle could cool water just by travelling through the desert at a highway pace. And this clever individual would be right. It doesn't
work, it doesn't cool the water, it tastes like you've filtered the water through an Army tent, and that's when you've drank it soon enough after filling it so that it hasn't leaked and evaporated until empty.
Next invention, perhaps from the same geniuses that invented the magic water bag, was the window-mounted air cooler. It looked like a rocket motor with 50's
Jetson's styling. Now, my HOA doesn't allow window units because they look bad, but the desert VOA either doesn't police these sections of roads or they don't exist. So we gave it a try.
For this to work, you have to mount it to the passenger window, and everyone else's windows have to be closed. This allows the air forced through the mini turbine to blow through another reservoir of water, pushing that air through a tiny little slit and distributing the frigid air to the interior of the cabin. You probably see where this is going, it didn't work. But we sweated it out while we gave it a chance, which was the instruction from the front seat; for several hours.
The passengers are hot, the car is hot, and we need to make this travel trailer slice through the air to help us get where we're going more quickly. So we do what any normal family does:
we remove the hood of the '52 Buick and strap it to the front of the towed trailer. Engine gets more air, trailer gains the aerodynamic profile of a stealth fighter, fuel mileage rivals a
Prius.
I think I passed out around this time, because I don't have any recollection of whether this REALLY improved our gas mileage. My memory picks up as we continue the drive at night, when the textbooks report that the desert is cooler.
Don't believe everything that you read in books. Unfortunately, the photos below don't come close to replicating these adventures, but you get the idea.
