Hah! I was so busy writing up this car story that I find we are already on a new thread.

For me the car story was 1982.

Bought a ‘73 Dart Demon with the grand old slant six. Bought it off a scuba diver. She let sand sit in the trunk lid lip. The sand held water. The water rusted through the lip and pooled in trunk. It rusted through the floor of the trunk and sat on top of the gas tank. It rusted through the gas tank. There were a few other issues like the floorboards under the driver’s side had rusted through and you could see the pavement. (I felt like Fred Flintstone.

She then sold it to me for $200.

It was a couple of weeks before I could get around to fixing it. In the meantime I drove it around and told friends not to smoke in the backseat. They thought that I was joking. Until they got into the back seat. (Gas tanks have some pressure. As you can imagine I got really bad mileage.)

Anyway, I finally rounded up the money and parts to fix the thing. In the morning I had a gas station replace the gas tank and fix the floor. Then took it to a friend’s farm and we replaced the entire exhaust system from the gasket against the engine block through to the tailpipe.

I then drove it home. And it died about halfway home. (In Monroeville.) I knew it was a problem with the carburetor flooding. But couldn’t figure out why. Eventually the tow truck came and I got it towed to a repair shop.

The problem? The float in the carburetor got ‘waterlogged’ and sunk. Which meant that the carburetor kept flooding. Replaced that carburetor and that thing ran like a charm for the the next two years.

Of course the car body, in Western Pennsylvania, rusted out despite my best efforts to putty the thing together. What passed for the unibody frame finally rusted through and it ended up on the scrapheap of history.