I finally finished up with the fifth season of Babylon 5, so I needed something new to watch on the elliptical. The current fare is the US version of Top Gear. It's nowhere near as good as the UK version, but it's good enough to keep my mind off how much it sucks to push an elliptical machine and never get anywhere.
On Wednesday, the episode was about college cars: the old beater you had in college. Their challenge was to determine which of the three of them had the best college car back in the day, with all the inane stuff that goes with it.
Oddly enough, their college days didn't look too much like my college days. Not that it would have mattered if I were in, because I would've won their challenges, too.
Oddly enough, their college days didn't look too much like my college days. Not that it would have mattered if I were in, because I would've won their challenges, too.
Now, I did take eleven years to finally escape college, so I didn't have "a college car"-- I had more than one in that era. Mortis, the 1970 Oldsmobile Cutlass, didn't survive to the end. My '99 Dakota R/T, wasn't really a college beater. And I'm not really sure what to think of the '70 Plymouth Fury III convertible, except that perhaps it would've been a better college car had I been in Navy ROTC, where my classmates could have practiced carrier landings on the trunk.
On the other hand, the car most people think of as my "college car", that'd be Scottie, the '81 Chevy Suburban. There's a reason people think of her as my college car: unlike the three beaters the Top Gear US chumps had, I had the ultimate college car.
Now, don't get me wrong. Scottie wasn't a spectacular car by the usual metrics. The air conditioners (she had two, one in front, and one in the back) were flaky at best, for example. She leaked oil and power steering fluid. She never did actually pass emissions; I had to limp her by on waivers. Might've had something to do with the back-woods-of-West Virginia fix to her AIR pump when it seized: the shop just cut the pulley off it and installed a shorter belt.
For a number of years, I carried around a starter motor and a chunk of re-bar in the back. The re-bar was to smack the starter solenoid once or twice a week to free it up; the motor was because I had to replace it every couple months. This, as it turns out, wasn't Scottie's fault. Once I sprung for the good one (which came with a new solenoid!), it lasted as long as she did. I just didn't think to ask how much more expensive the premium one was until the auto parts store didn't have a functional cheap one on the shelf-- I was a college student, and I was doing things on the cheap. How was I to know the difference in price was a whopping one cent?
Indeed, I learned an awful lot from Scottie-- usually the hard way-- about wrenching on cars. Judging by the list of parts I replaced (and the ones I let professionals handle-- I had no way to deal with a TH350 transmission, ferinstance), you're probably wondering how I could possibly think that I had the ultimate college car. But we were broke college kids. Everybody drove a cantankerous beater; it's tough to take off points because Scottie was one, too.
What made Scottie great was all the things she did. She took me all over the eastern seaboard, and one time we packed most of a dozen people in there (including the woman I'd eventually marry... who knew?) to head out to a crab feast while I was in the DC area with friends. What more could a college student want?
She carried all manner of stuff, which meant she was great when it came time for folks to move. Since moving between cheap apartments is something college students do almost as often as they scrounge through couch cushions for change to hit Taco Bell, having insane amounts of cargo space was exceptionally handy. She also shlepped around more than a few piles of surplus computer equipment and a few arcade games, and once she even shlepped around a few kegs; her utility could also be used for fun.
She was a better off-roader than she had any right to be. I did get her stuck twice-- and both times, it took some pretty heavy equipment to get her out; the friendly passer-by in the Jeep couldn't get us out of the snow bank I put her in, and I made it far enough across the mud pit at the Cobb County dump that they brought out a Caterpillar bulldozer to pull her free. (In my defense, the bag taped over the sign that said to go that way had come loose and blown over the sign telling me to go the way I was supposed to go...)
Her 40 gallon gas tank meant I could usually get to payday before I needed gas again. Fortunately, gas at the time was less than a buck a gallon, so once payday rolled around, I could even afford to fill her up.
Aside from a few oddball design decisions-- there were, for example, exactly two metric fittings that I ever found on what was otherwise an entirely SAE truck (and they weren't even the same size...)-- she was easy to work on. You didn't need wheel ramps to get underneath to replace the starter, which I eventually learned how to swap out in less than five minutes. Parts for a Chevy small-block can be found at Walgreens next to the cotton balls.
She was even fun to drive. The V8 engine and trailer-towing gearing meant she took off from traffic lights quicker than many other college beaters. Surprisingly good brakes kept me out of trouble I might have otherwise gotten into. And when it came to handling, well, I just didn't know any better, I suppose...
She'd've probably done well enough in the contrived tests the Top Gear folks put their cars through, too, but I suppose we'll never know, 'cause those guys weren't smart enough to have an '81 Suburban when they were in college.
She carried all manner of stuff, which meant she was great when it came time for folks to move. Since moving between cheap apartments is something college students do almost as often as they scrounge through couch cushions for change to hit Taco Bell, having insane amounts of cargo space was exceptionally handy. She also shlepped around more than a few piles of surplus computer equipment and a few arcade games, and once she even shlepped around a few kegs; her utility could also be used for fun.
She was a better off-roader than she had any right to be. I did get her stuck twice-- and both times, it took some pretty heavy equipment to get her out; the friendly passer-by in the Jeep couldn't get us out of the snow bank I put her in, and I made it far enough across the mud pit at the Cobb County dump that they brought out a Caterpillar bulldozer to pull her free. (In my defense, the bag taped over the sign that said to go that way had come loose and blown over the sign telling me to go the way I was supposed to go...)
Her 40 gallon gas tank meant I could usually get to payday before I needed gas again. Fortunately, gas at the time was less than a buck a gallon, so once payday rolled around, I could even afford to fill her up.
Aside from a few oddball design decisions-- there were, for example, exactly two metric fittings that I ever found on what was otherwise an entirely SAE truck (and they weren't even the same size...)-- she was easy to work on. You didn't need wheel ramps to get underneath to replace the starter, which I eventually learned how to swap out in less than five minutes. Parts for a Chevy small-block can be found at Walgreens next to the cotton balls.
She was even fun to drive. The V8 engine and trailer-towing gearing meant she took off from traffic lights quicker than many other college beaters. Surprisingly good brakes kept me out of trouble I might have otherwise gotten into. And when it came to handling, well, I just didn't know any better, I suppose...
She'd've probably done well enough in the contrived tests the Top Gear folks put their cars through, too, but I suppose we'll never know, 'cause those guys weren't smart enough to have an '81 Suburban when they were in college.
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