My Cars in Storage Are Revolting (Part I)

I’ve written numerous pieces about storing five of my cars in a warehouse in Monson, on the Massachusetts/Connecticut border. The advantage is that it’s cheap—$70/month per car. But the disadvantages are substantial: It’s an hour and ten minutes from my house if there’s zero traffic (which is rare); I have to coordinate access with the owner; my cars are blocked in over the winter by RVs, boats, and trailers; there’s no electricity; and a particularly rainy summer last year caused mildew problems. Last fall, I did a full-on desiccant attack, putting two DampRid containers in each car, plus an industrial desiccant brick used on cargo vessels to help prevent “container rain.” I hadn’t been out there since November and was waiting for the big rigs to vacate the premises so I could deal with the fleet.

At a bare minimum, all five of the cars needed inspection stickers and the desiccant refilled. I expected them all to have needs. I didn’t expect what was perilously close to a full-on revolt.

First on the list was “Lolita” the ’74 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special. She’d actually been sitting out there since September. I’d finally gotten the car registered in Massachusetts (a long story I’ll tell another time) and was anxious to get her inspected and back home.

The lack of electricity in the warehouse means I can’t put the batteries in the cars on trickle chargers. I used to pull the batteries out and bring them home for the winter, or move a good battery around between cars, but my back no longer allows that. However, my experience has generally been that if I simply unplug the negative battery cables, when I return three months later, the cars usually start up, and if not, I have a battery jump pack I use. The hour-plus drive home usually does a decent job of recharging the battery, and if not, I have chargers and battery testers at the house. Of course, when three months turns to six, things can be more difficult, but the Lotus started up fairly easily.

While the car was idling, I put it through its inspection paces and found nothing wrong. But inspection notwithstanding, part of my post-storage procedure is to check all fluids as well as look under each car for leaks, both stationary and running. I shined a flashlight beneath it and saw fluid dripping into a spreading puddle. I shut the car off and swiped a paper towel through the puddle.

Gas. Damn.

Even under the best of circumstances, fuel leaks are something one should have zero tolerance for, and things are worse on the Lotus, because any leaks from the Stromberg carburetors or the lines feeding them drip directly onto the starter motor, which gives me the heebie-jeebies about restarting the car until I’ve waited long enough that any fuel has evaporated. Plus, for all the just-in-case stuff I’ve accumulated in the trunk of my BMW Bavaria in Monson (tools, paper towels, oil, coolant, jumper cables, starter fluid, etc.), I didn’t have a fire extinguisher. So, everything ground to a halt, especially the idea of getting the car inspected.

If I couldn’t diagnose and repair the source of the leak there, I’d need to tow the car home. It turned out to be coming from the two plastic plugs in the bottoms of the Strombergs’ float bowls. I did a little searching on my phone and learned that the leak is fairly common in Stromberg-equipped British and Swedish cars and can be stanched by simply replacing the O-ring. I unscrewed one bowl, gently squeezed the plug’s plastic prongs together, and popped it out. Suddenly, it seemed that I could rescue my get-the-Lotus-inspected-then-drive-it-home plans by going to a nearby hardware store and matching up the O-rings. Unfortunately, when I tried to pull the 50-year-old O-ring off the 50-year-old plastic plug, one of the prongs broke off in my hand.

Okay. No inspection for Lolita today. There were still four other cars in the queue. I turned my attention to “Sharkie,” the ’79 BMW Euro 635CSi. Like Lolita, Sharkie started up easily when I reconnected its battery. Unfortunately, when I went through the inspection checklist, I found that something was wrong in the handbrake lever’s ratchet—it wouldn’t stay seated. A non-functional handbrake is a certain inspection fail. I pulled up the rubber boot and found that the anchoring bracket for the ratchet had broken off from the transmission hump.

I decided to cut that day’s warehouse adventures short and beat it home in Sharkie, where I had the equipment necessary to fix the handbrake ratchet.

I thought about welding the bracket back in place, but although I own a welder, my skills are poor, and I wasn’t certain if I needed to pull up the carpet, which would be fairly involved. So instead, I settled on pop-riveting the bracket. Three drilled holes and three rivets later, and the job was done, and I got Sharkie stickered.

The plugs for the Strombergs were plentiful enough online that I searched for the lowest-cost vendor (about $18 per plug), clicked, and waited for the shipping confirmation. Unfortunately, the following day, the vendor called me to say that the plugs were out of stock. I then stepped through four vendors in increasing order of cost, calling each one, and finding that they too were out of stock. I eventually climbed to the top of the cost curve and called the venerable Moss Motors in Virginia, from whom, shipped to my house, the two plastic plugs and O-rings set me back 80 bucks. As they say, sometimes you just have to pay the man (or woman).

With float bowl plugs and a fire extinguisher in tow, I piloted Sharkie back out to Monson and again had at Lolita. I snapped the first plug into the already-removed float bowl and reinstalled it.

Since there was no downside if I broke the second original plug, I pried it out of the second bowl without needing to drop it. It came out easily, and I replaced it with the second new one. I re-checked the fuel lines, and with the fire extinguisher at the ready, started the car. No leaks. The Lotus appeared ready for inspection.

I took the car to a nearby inspection station and parked it in front of the service bay like you’re supposed to. The six-foot-tall inspector came out and stared suspiciously at Lolita. I ran down the car-specific details: “The horn button’s not in the middle of the steering wheel; it’s under the dash and to the left. The headlight switch is to the right. You have to pull it out and then turn it clockwise. The wiper and high beam stalks are very fragile. Oh, and you literally need to take off your right shoe to move the car, otherwise you’ll hit the gas and brake pedal at the same time.”

The inspector in this very small town, who, to put it mildly, doesn’t see a lot of Lotus Europas, was not happy with this. He barked “I don’t even think I can get in the (bleep)ing thing. Just drive it in and do the lights-wipers-horn for me.” They’re supposed to drive it in, not you, but I complied. Then, for the jack-up-the-front-wheels-and-check-for-play test, I handed him a hockey puck and told him exactly where to position it and the jack so he didn’t tear up the fiberglass, but advised that the car is so low that if he didn’t have a low-rise jack, he might not be able to get it under the car at all. Rather than take my head off, though, he seemed to warm to my thoroughness and my knowledge of my own car, and offered that they have a similar issue with Corvettes. The Lotus emerged without damage and with a Massachusetts inspection sticker. I celebrated with Lolita’s first-ever fully-legal drive—five miles to the CT border and back.

With Lolita finally stickered, I turned my sights on the three early 1970s BMWs in the warehouse. First was “Louie” the ’72 2002tii (the Ran When Parked car). Its reconnected battery barely had enough juice for two cranks, but the jump pack got it started. While warming it up, I didn’t see any leaking fluids but was astonished to find the brake fluid reservoir essentially empty. The level was down past the feed to the clutch cylinders, so any leakage had to be coming from the brake hydraulics. I crawled under the car with a flashlight and double-checked to see if any fluids were leaking down the tires, and found none.

Then I remembered: This same thing happened last year. At that time, I refilled the reservoir, hammered on the brakes, took the car for a short drive, found no leakage, carefully drove the car home while stopping several times to check, made it without incident, and tried to diagnose the problem. Leak-free vanishing of brake fluid typically means that it’s going into the brake booster, but I dipped a long zip tie down into it and it came up dry. At some point, I put the car back in the warehouse. Here I was, a year later, faced with exactly the same situation, reinforcing the adage that problems like this rarely cure themselves. For now, I did the eyes-on-the-prize thing and simply got the car inspected. The vanishing-brake-fluid-mystery will again have to wait.

Next was “Bertha,” the heavily patinated, massively modified ’75 2002 that my wife and I drove off from our wedding. Even with the negative terminal disconnected, its battery was drained down to 10.5 volts, so the starter solenoid didn’t even click until I connected the jump pack. As I thought about it, I realized I hadn’t rotated Bertha out of Monson and brought it back to my house in a couple of years, so the car didn’t have the benefit of a highway drive to recharge the battery, just an annual run to the CT border and back, so the dead battery didn’t surprise me.

The low brake-fluid reservoir, however, did. This one was down just slightly below the clutch line, indicating that the leak was likely in the clutch hydraulics.

As with Louie, I didn’t see any evidence of fluid beneath the car, so the issue wasn’t acute. It was probably coming from the clutch master and going into the pedal box, but post-1974 2002s like Bertha have a one-piece carpet, so peeling it back to check isn’t trivial. So, as with Louie, I left the mystery for another day. I filled the reservoir, made sure the car wasn’t peeing fluid, and got it inspected. The inspector had warmed to me to the point that he was kind enough to leave Bertha running during the inspection so I wouldn’t need to re-jump the car. Then I tried to take it for the same five-mile-to-the-CT-border run I did with the Lotus, but I quickly found that it ran absolutely horribly. Whenever I bring Bertha home, I may need to do so on a rented U-Haul auto transporter, which would be good in that it’ll help justify the existence of the Nissan Armada.

That left just the ’73 BMW Bavaria. Its battery was the deadest of the bunch, discharged down to a damaging 9 volts. Like Bertha, this was due to the car not having been driven further than to the CT border and back last year. The Bav has typically been hard to start after a winter-long sit, as the original mechanical fuel pump takes a while to fill the Webers’ float bowls. I usually go out there with an electric fuel pump I use to prime the bowls, but I’d forgotten it. No matter, I thought—I keep a can of starting fluid in the trunk for just this purpose. Unfortunately, when I tried squirting it down the throats, I found that the can had no propellant left in it.

I could’ve run to the AutoZone one town over for starting fluid, but I elected instead to put the time into changing the DampRid in all five cars. This process—bringing the two containers from each car outside the warehouse, dumping the water and the desiccant, cleaning the containers, and refilling them—is surprisingly time-consuming. By the time I was done, it was almost 3 p.m., and any window I had for driving the Lotus home before rush hour had vanished (hey, you drive a car with all the crashworthiness of a Pringles can in stop-and-go traffic and see how you feel).

So the Bavaria’s inspection and Lolita’s long journey back home would need to wait until next week, during which I could do some serious thinking about why I continue to own these cars that I’m not driving further than to the inspection station and a 5-mile romp into Connecticut and back.

Of course, it doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

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