Renewing Acquaintances
January 18, 2008
Attending my uncle’s wake in Westport this week proved a jolt of sorts. I talked to Salem farmer Bob Ambler for the first time in 54 years. When I told Howard Maynard’s daughter tales of hunting in their woods during my childhood, he reminded me that his mother had also kept me supplied with .22 ammunition, a practical way to cut down on the woodchuck population on the property.
Jack and Mary Dier don’t look a day older than they did in 1973. How do they do it?
A couple of people at the wake were able to identify me by the blurry photo above my articles in The Review-Mirror.
The jolt came though, when Linda Bryce told me that she had read the column about the Volkswagen Beetle to her dad just before he passed away this week. It wasn’t until a bit later that I made the connection: Linda is the cousin who bought the car from us, and her dad, Don Hannah, had replaced the floorboards for her. They would have known the Beetle even better than we did.
It’s far too easy over the years to forget the intricate connections which have made us who we are.
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Offroad Adventures with a 1973 VW Beetle
By Rod Croskery
Later on in life a man may forget the name of his first love, but he will never forget the intimate details of his first new car. Mine was a yellow 1973 VW Beetle Custom. I chose the Custom model rather than the Superbeetle, because I was skeptical of those newfangled MacPherson struts — thought they were a fad, and CV joints looked to be a maintenance nightmare.
The Beetle was a great car on the road, especially after I replaced the stock bias-ply tires with oversized radials. The thing was amazing on ice: just how amazing I was to discover one Sunday afternoon in February.
The Big Rideau had watered up in mid-winter, leaving a triangular, five-mile expanse of perfectly glare ice. This was too much to resist. Gingerly I drove on at Portland and worked my way up through the gears, getting the feel of the unfamiliar car on the unfamiliar surface. Everything seemed quite well balanced, so I got up into 4th gear and settled into a cruising speed at what I considered the limit of adhesion, 68 miles per hour.
A Ford Courier with a cement mixer in the back came up behind me and then pulled ahead. This would not do. Determined to catch this upstart, I gradually sped up. The Beetle complained, squirmed a bit, then, resigned, settled in all the way up to 80. All of the sudden everything let go at once. There was no gradually-increasing oscillation which normally leads to a spin-out with a Beetle. Nope. All of the sudden I was spinning like a top.
This was quite an interesting sensation: on a zero-traction plane, you go from a vector of 80 mph north to a similar vector counting in about sixty revolutions per minute. I’d never spun that fast or for that long. I started to worry about oil pressure, so I shut the engine off and shifted into neutral. Still spinning, not even slowing, I turned on the tape deck. It worked fine. I was still a mile from any shore and still spinning, so I just settled back and enjoyed the ride.
Eventually the back wheels caught up and the Beetle coasted to a stop. The Ford Courier was long gone over the horizon. I started up again and continued my tour. A new Corvette blew by me, and I chose not to take up the chase. After about an hour of glare-ice driving and a tour to Rideau Ferry and back I had a pretty good feel for the car. 68 miles per hour remained the optimal cruising speed on ice.
The Beetle served us faithfully for ten years and 130 thousand miles. Then it received new floorboards and lived with my cousin for another three. Its only ill-effect from its many off-road adventures was that when we sold the car it was 1 ½ inches longer than when it was new. My dad’s horses had had to tow it quite a lot, sometimes out of ditches, and sometimes like a toboggan over the snowdrifts to the ploughed road. A couple of times I buried the thing while driving on the crust. Once, disgusted, my dad made me wait until spring to recover it. I had to use my wife’s Datsun for a month until the snow melted. What a grouch!
We got rid of the Beetle when our new son arrived. The Rabbit was much safer, but useless off-road. My dad could hardly contain his relief, but two months later he bought his new grandson an army surplus Jeep to drive around the farm.
1976 Ski-Doo Alpine
December 23, 2007
This morning I decided it was time to start up the old Ski-Doo Alpine and back it out of the barn. The problem which has reduced its usage these last few years has been a series of weak priming pumps which wouldn’t work when dried out. I solved the problem today with the oil-extracting gizmo my friend Tony bought last summer at Princess Auto. When pumped, the large plastic cylinder creates a powerful vacuum which can be used for a variety of things more interesting than draining the oil from a marine engine.
A month ago it extracted standing water from two copper pipes I needed to solder in a wall cavity. This time I hooked it to the carburetor side of the primer on the Alpine and started to pump. The dry lines resisted for a while, but then fuel started to shoot around the transparent tubing and the day was won. Of course the Alpine started right up once primed. I backed it out into the snow-covered barnyard without incident.
Then I tried to shift into forward. No such luck. Neutral was as far forward as the gearshift would go. Not wanting to do all of my season’s snowmobiling in reverse, I took the hood off and had a look. It turned out to be a linkage problem left over from the time I broke the shifter (and two ribs) on an adventure on Scott Island and had had Larry Sargent weld it on the way home. After a bit of creative bending it reassembled with the proper clearances to shift well.
The next hour went into carburetor adjustments. This involved many loops around the barnyard and adjoining field. Eventually the engine ran strongly, so I headed back to the woods to investigate Mom’s report of trespassers on snow machines the night before last. Turns out the only tracks I could find were from the resident coyote and a few squirrels, but if another snow-mobiler should decide to follow my tracks, he’ll soon regret it. Last winter’s loggers left me with a trail through the southern quadrant with bends I can barely navigate with a golf cart. On a twin-track vintage snowmobile they are plain impossible. Several times I had to back and fill in the deep snow in order to make my way through. In one section I gave up and bashed through the undergrowth. It takes a sturdy 3″ tree to deflect an Alpine and substantially more than that to stop it. I wouldn’t care to follow that track on a conventional machine with twin skis.
Carefully avoiding last year’s cherry and oak seedlings, I ricocheted my way through the new trails and gratefully rejoined the track in the more open section of the property.
Man, is driving that machine hard work! The pull cord on a 640 Rotax engine is a challenge when cold, a near-impossibility when warm. Even turning the front ski requires about all I can manage. Enjoying legroom on the long seat is out of the question: if I don’t perch right on top of the engine the thing won’t turn at all. The first launch off a snow drift each year once again reminds me that legs have an important job in protecting the rest of the body from spine-crunching impacts on an old machine sprung for heavy loads.
It didn’t take long to burn a quarter-tank of gas, but by then I was soaking wet from sweat and ready for a nap. What a workout! The Alpine’s all set for another year of trail maintenance around the farm. I’m not so sure my body is ready for the machine, though.
(Note: For some reason this is one of the more popular articles on this site, so I added a second part to it yesterday. You’ll find it under the category “Offroading” in the directory. Rod)
(5 January, 2009: The Alpine figures prominently in The Heroic Winter Assault on Schooner Island, also in this blog.)
Golf Carts in Winter
November 24, 2007
A good golf cart can go head-to-head with an ATV in summer and win most rounds. In the winter it’s a different story. Although my machines have made many epic voyages on the frozen lakes (and occasionally snowmobile tracks), everyone will admit that the golf cart is not designed for winter.
My first machine, a Yamaha G1, had a reversible 2 cycle engine, so it started and ran well regardless of the temperature. Various bits would ice up, though, and require a defroster hose run from the tailpipe of my truck to the underside of the cart. With snowtires it had traction to rival a VW Beetle, though, so I got into lots of mischief with it.
A 2 cycle EZ-Go had a transmission whose cable would freeze, so it worked as long as you wanted to go forward.
When those two died I went with some trepidation to a four cycle EZ-Go. The first two winters with it were a write-off, as it would start fine and then starve for gas as it warmed up and not revive until the next thaw. Then on the Buggies Unlimited Forum last winter EZ-Go Mike, a contributor from Minnesota, told me the problem lay in the hose that runs from the crankcase to the fuel pump. Seems each piston stroke fires an impulse through the tube to power the fuel pump. He told me if I re-routed the hose so as to leave no place for moisture to accumulate, there’d be no more ice blockages shutting down the cart. After several tries I managed to twist the hose just right, and now it starts and runs fine in the cold weather.
The 4 ply trailer tires I use on the cart are useless in snow or mud, so today was the day for the winter tires. On they went and out I went to play, though to be truthful the snow was a little too deep for the EZ-Go. I had to stay on the flats or face a walk home.
Few things in life are as much fun as driving a VW Beetle over frozen snow into areas where one should not go. One of my old stories deals with this impulse: http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/vwbeetle.htm
A golf cart offers much the same sensations, though dulled somewhat. But then I’m not as keen on long walks home as I used to be.
UPDATE: When Charlie and his pal Shiva hit the farm on Christmas Day with bags of camera equipment and mischief in mind, the EZ-Go received quite a workout. They drove/pushed it through a foot of snow back to the woodlot, then mounted a remote-controlled camera outboard for some stunting shots. http://gallery.shivamayer.com/d/2599-1/20071225-161921.jpg
the Walnut Diary 
