The Dead Car Road-Trip Adventure (Part 3 of 3)

Last week, I described how, in 4 ½ days, while sleeping in the house of someone I’d met once for ten minutes, I took Louie—a 1972 BMW 2002tii that I’d bought sight-unseen in Louisville—from being dead for a decade to running, driving, and stopping. However, that didn’t mean we were ready to cut loose and head for home.

Day 6: Burning the ships

I met my friend Dave at a BMW SharkFest event in 2014. He lives not far from the pole barn where I was working on Louie, and came by to wrench with me. Although the car still had a schizophrenic temperature gauge that would alternate between a reasonable reading, an uncomfortably warm one, and pegged all the way hot, and still dripped a little oil onto the exhaust manifold, it was time for its first real drive on pavement. I drove down the dirt road the pole barn was on, turned onto the asphalt, and nailed it. Dave video’d my astonished reaction at how well the car ran (forgive my language). Even granted that it’s been my experience that vintage BMWs usually seem to want to be resurrected, Louie’s fuel injection and ignition felt as spot-on as any well-sorted 2002tii I’d ever driven. The car definitely felt like it was straining at the reins for a road trip back to Boston. I then took Jake, the fellow who hosted me for nearly a week, for a ride. He was as astonished as I was. “Damn,” he said, “I should’ve bought this car when I had the chance!”

I gave one more shot at fixing the temperature gauge. Jumpy temperature gauges in a 2002 are often the result of a bad ground of the instrument cluster through the harness. A workaround is to run a separate ground wire directly to the chassis. I did. It didn’t help. Jake had another 2002 in the barn that he let me borrow the temperature sender and the whole gauge cluster from. Neither made a difference. I was going to have to live with not knowing the engine’s true temperature. As the car was still running on its original radiator, this made me nervous.

However, the oil leak was even more concerning. It was caused by not being able to tighten down the left rear corner of the valve cover gasket due to the stud’s threads in the head being stripped. I’d installed a Time-Sert, but for some reason that didn’t fix the problem, and oil dripping directly onto an exhaust is a fire hazard. I coated both sides of a new valve cover gasket with RTV and tightened it down. This lessened the problem, but it looked like a little oil was still winding up on the threads of the one of the manifold studs.

“What do you want to do?” Dave asked.

I thought carefully. “Drive it again.”

This time we took Louie up onto the highway. Other than the steering feeling a little vague, the car felt great. And as a bonus, the oil burning displayed after startup was gone; the exhaust smoke had lost its bluish tint, indicating that the rings had freed up from the pistons. When we got back to the pole barn, I jacked up the nose, wiggled both front wheels, and didn’t feel any obvious steering play. I chalked up the steering feel to the car’s old suspension.

So, as The Clash said, “Should I stay or should I go?”

There’s a great line in the movie Mission to Mars where they’re about to make extraterrestrial contact, things get hairy, and one of the characters says “Well, I didn’t come all this way to turn back in the last ten feet.” I needed to err on the side of going or I’d badly regret it.

So I did the Alexander the Great thing and burned my ships to cut off my own retreat—I had Dave drive me to the Louisville and I returned my rented SUV, leaving me no way home but in Louie. Dave lived not far from there, so he relieved Jake and Liz of their Hack Mechanic babysitting duty. I had dinner that night with him and his wife Barbara and stayed at their house.

Day 7: Liftoff. Followed by rapid unscheduled disassembly.

In the morning, Dave and I returned to the pole barn and addressed a few of the car’s safety issues—getting the directionals to work, not being able to get the low beams to work but deciding that the car’s anemic high beams could be left on, swapping the non-latching driver’s side seat belt for the working one on the passenger side. The wipers were of some concern. They worked, but like on many vintage cars, even on high, their speed was laughably slow. And I realized that Louie was still wearing its original wiper arms that don’t accept universal-style blades. I checked the rubber inserts and they looked passible. The washer pump, though, didn’t work, making me imagine a thousand miles of smeary bug-splatter. I took Jake up on his offer to Rain-X the windshield for me.

I allowed myself one entirely cosmetic repair—rotating the car’s double kidney grille so it was correctly oriented, allowing Louie to be driven with his head held high and not be nitpicked by 2002 aficionados.

I cleaned up the mess that Hurricane Louie-Rob had left in Jake’s pole barn, shoehorned the SUV’s worth of tools and parts into the car, and had a quick conversation with Jake about what I owed him for storage. I thanked him profusely for his and Liz’s graciousness, generosity, and their absolutely essential role in the adventure, and Louie and I rolled out to meet our fate.

Dave followed me to a gas station at the entrance ramp to I-65 for the launch. There, things unraveled with astonishing rapidity. I filled the tank, and while Dave and I were saying our goodbyes, I saw fuel streaming out from under the back of the car. I surmised that, when I cleaned the tank, I didn’t get the o-ring on the top sealed correctly. I didn’t relish pulling everything out of the trunk to expose it, but I got in the car to move it to a less-visible corner of the lot to do so. However, when I put my foot on the clutch pedal, it flopped right to the floor. Since there was still fluid in the reservoir, my suspicion was that the clutch hydraulics had failed. So much for a smooth launch. But hey, better here than 50 miles up the road.

I started the car in gear, coughed it into forward motion, beat it back to Jake’s pole barn, and called him to let him know what was going on. Dave and I tore into it and diagnosed that, although I’d replaced the clutch slave cylinder, the master cylinder was bad too. The odds of finding one of these for a BMW 2002, much less a 2002tii which uses a slightly different part, in stock at a big box store or dealer are zero.

I sent up the “Hack Mechanic down Hack Mechanic needs tii clutch master cylinder” signal on Facebook, and to my astonishment, a fellow named Lance—a BMW enthusiast a hundred miles north of us in Cincinnati—said that he had one and could meet us halfway. Dave drove me up there, and we did the deed in the parking lot of a McDonalds. So, yet again, I was saved by the generosity of someone I’d never met.

Dave and I returned to the pole barn and replaced the master cylinder. This is a difficult job under the best of circumstances, as access to the nuts is so obstructed that you can’t get a standard box or open-end wrench on them. We had to run to a nearby Harbor Freight to pick up a set of crow-foot wrenches. We also pulled everything out of the trunk and reseated the seal, but the cause of the leak was an old hardened o-ring. I resolved to not fill the tank up again. Exhausted and cold, we drove the again-functional Louie back to Dave’s.

In the morning, I hit the road for real, hugging right so if need be I could coast into the breakdown lane. The rain steadily picked up until it was obvious that I’d underestimated the importance of fresh wiper blades. I stopped at the first auto parts store, bought a set of universal 13-inch blade assemblies, zip-tied them to my existing ones, drove a few miles, and found that this worked about as poorly as you’d expect.

I toughed it out until I arrived at Lance’s shop in Cincinnati. He looked at the wiper blades, laughed, and said “We have a no-zip-tie policy here in the shop.” He then painstakingly threaded the new rubber inserts through Louie’s 50-year-old wiper arms while his mechanic Safet put the car up on the lift. Other than the smell of gas from the leaking tank, he found nothing glaringly amiss.

Safet asked me “Any other issues?” I mentioned the “brake turds” incident (finding rubber chunks in the brake lines that were possibly deteriorated rubber seals from the master cylinder). Safet said “I think we have one of those we can loan you in case you need it.” I breathed a sigh of relief.

I had no planned destination for the evening, figuring I’d continue north until either the car hiccupped or I got tired. The former happened first—I abruptly took an exit when the car’s bipolar temperature gauge rose steadily toward the red as opposed to jumping into it. It was good thing I did—the nut on the back of the alternator pivot bolt had vibrated off causing the fan belt to slip again. As a hedge against cooling system concerns, I ordered a radiator for overnight delivery to my friend Paul’s near Pittsburgh.

Day 8: Rain. Lots of rain.

The unseasonably warm winter weather continued, but unfortunately the rain increased to the point where it streamed in through Louie’s hardened, shrunken windshield gasket, forming a sizable puddle on the driver’s floor. I knew that the lack of heat and defrost would be an issue, but this was a surprise.

The car had another belt-loosening episode, this time caused by a rubber bushing I’d forgotten about—in addition to the ones on the alternator, there are also bushings on the adjustment bracket. I didn’t have any, so I made one out of a cut-off section of fuel hose. (You see why I list “belts” as one of my Big Seven things likely to hiccup during a road trip in a vintage car?)

In addition, Louie’s ancient exhaust had gone from throaty to snotty, but that’s not a reliability issue. In fact, the sound only added to the sensory pastiche of what I was experiencing. As I was nearing my friend Paul’s house in Harmony, PA where I’d stopped on the way down, I had my moment of Zen where the whole trip came together. My engine hadn’t detonated. The differential wasn’t making loud crunching noises. I was no longer hugging the right lane like it was going to save me from something. The car and I were just flying along. I was the guy living out his odd dead-car-road-trip fantasy in a 1972 BMW 2002tii that sounded like it was straight-piped. I was so happy that I began crying. Then I saw the sign on I-79 that said “Harmony” and I felt like I was in a movie version of my own life. That’s what they’d do, right?

When I arrived at Paul’s, I bounced the issue of the jumpy temperature gauge off him. We tried grounding it a different way, and it made no difference. During the test drive, though, the muffler hanger was kind enough to break, causing the exhaust to drag on the pavement. Fortunately I had a coat hanger in the trunk (the only item that’s a tool and a part). Unfortunately, the radiator I’d ordered hadn’t arrived.

Day 9: More rain, and the last 600 miles

I had no intention of making it home in a day, but that’s what happened. I actually got a late start waiting for bands of rain to pass and for the radiator to arrive (it didn’t), and I stopped in Scranton to have coffee with a friend, but Louie and I just kept going. The longest leg was the least eventful. There was another belt-slippage episode that caused me to begin tightening the thing every time I stopped for fuel, but that was it. My remarkable little green 2002tii rolled into my driveway at around 9:30pm. The Dead Car Road-Trip Adventure was over.

[insert pic: img_0316. Caption: “Home, home again… I like to be here when I can…”]

Epilogue

This was, and still is, the most exciting thing I’ve ever done with a car. After I got back, the rhythm of life felt a bit bland. Food didn’t have as much taste, colors weren’t as bright. But there was a lot of risk in it. I look back with amazement that I didn’t go down there with an entire new cooling system. The jumpy gauge notwithstanding, the car was fine during unseasonably warm but still cool winter weather, but the result probably would’ve been very different had I tried this in summer. Likewise, my timeframe-dictated approach to the brakes (replacing the front calipers and hoses but leaving the rears alone, and driving on a possibly compromised master cylinder) carried risk, but the brakes performed fine, and I had the spare master with me in case they didn’t.

I had a number of people tell me “No one could’ve done this except you.” While that’s not true, it took—to quote Liam Neeson—a very particular set of skills. When you’re not only away from home but trading on someone’s hospitality—sleeping in a borrowed bedroom and working in someone else’s space—the pace at which things need to happen are completely different than at your house where you might mosey into your garage for 30 minutes a night. “Do it once, do it right” is replaced by “get it done.” My “particular skill” was that I avoided slippery slopes, and was absolutely merciless about not working on things that weren’t required for the drive home. I’ll freely admit I got a few things wrong, but the approach was still utterly necessary.

In the months after I got home, I prepared Louie for its next adventure—the 2,000-ish mile round trip to the BMW event “The Vintage” in Asheville. The heater box was pulled and overhauled, a new windshield gasket was fitted, a new exhaust was hung, a new radiator was installed, and a second more systematic pass was made on the brakes (including, yes, replacing the master cylinder).

But it was preparation for the trip after that—a stint in the BMW CCA Museum as part of the “2002 Icon” exhibit—that I found something eye-opening. While adjusting the valves, I looked closely at the part of the head that the always-loose valve cover stud screws into, saw that was cracked, and realized that tightening the valve cover on the stud only made the crack yawn open, which is why it always leaked from that corner. Further, I saw that someone had tried to seal the crack with blue RTV, meaning that someone knew it was there. I doubt it was the guy who sold me the car; he was a 2002 newbie.

From the “ran when parked” standpoint, it made perfect sense. The previous owner was probably told “cracked head,” given a repair estimate of thousands of dollars, and parked the car. And there it sat for a decade. In the short term, I addressed the crack by using Permatex “The Right Stuff” (a cement-like adhesive) on the valve cover gasket, but then, on another road trip, the crack yawned open enough that the leak came through the crack itself. I fixed it with J-B Weld and drove the car that way for another 2 ½ years until I had reason to pull the head and get it welded.

In the past few years, Louie has gotten a full suspension system and an air conditioning retrofit. Two years ago I drove the car to MidAmerica 02 Fest in Arkansas—a 3,000-mile round trip. So my relationship with Louie is still going strong. If you think about it, the relationships we have with cars are the deepest and the most long-lasting when we have experiences and adventures with them. I can’t think of a more bonding experience than what I did with Louie.

I have had the hankering to do it again. The following year, I bought a running 1987 BMW E28 535i five-speed sedan in Florida and had it towed to a friend’s house. He’s not a mechanic, but his drive around the block revealed more problems than I expected. I did the math on ship-versus-road-trip, and opted for shipping. Good thing too—the engine turned out to have a broken rocker arm. But as I enter my Social Security years, the odds of my prioritizing this kind of adventure instead of, say, something involving my wife and nice hotel rooms, steadily drops. So the Louie adventure may have been a one-off.

The biggest take-away of the dead car road trip is that what began as my imagining pitting myself mano a mano against the car, using my wits to bend it to my iron will, instead became a story of the kindness of strangers. This never would’ve happened, much less succeeded, without Jake and Liz opening their homes, Dave and Barbara’s help and hospitality, Lance producing a clutch master cylinder out of thin air, and help from others as well. So, like so many things in the car world, it may start out being about the cars, but eventually it’s about the people. And it can still be about the people without this kind of risk and craziness.

Oh look! Here’s a ran-when-parked ’63 Studebaker Avanti four-speed with factory air and good hog troughs in Iowa City for short money. I have a college friend there who owes me a favor. Wait. Maybe I owe him a favor. It was a long time ago.

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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.