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I take to the road daily behind the wheel of a "beater" level classic. These usually aren't cars that win prizes at shows, but hey, I'm havin' fun. Choose a car from the index to learn more, or start with Background to find out why I do it.
The Beater Du Jour: a 1974 IH Scout!
Send e-mail to the Beater Master: park@mphinteractive.net
Index to the beaters...
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| Background | 1974 Scout | 1962 Dart | 1960 Rambler | 1960 MGA | 1948 Plymouth |
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"Trailer queen" is the colloquial term for an old car kept perfectly polished and only driven on and off the trailer at car shows. There are a number of these in the old car hobby. These vehicles are dead objects, little more than statues. What fun is a statue?
On the road, though, old cars come alive. The personality of an automobile is the sum of its history, engineering, styling, and road behavior. If you don't drive it, you're missing out on the quirks and pleasures which define these classics.
I practice what I preach on a daily basis. Aside from philosophy, there are some very practical reasons:
I usually have two old cars, one which is more of a "driver" and one which is more of a "show car." If one is feeling cranky, I drive the other. About once a year I sell off a vehicle and try something different. Not only have I experienced quite a diversity of vehicles, but I've also had some wonderful adventures.
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If International Harvester hadn't thrown in the towel about two years too soon, we'd all be driving these today intead of Explorers, Cherokees, and Blazers. Jeep had a lock on the 4x4 market until the early 1960s. IH decided to come out with something a little bigger and more powerful and accidentally invented the sport utility.
Those early Scouts were crude, but they sold well enough to attract the big guns: Ford came out with a Bronco which was almost identical to the Scout, and Chevy followed with the Blazer. In the early 1970s, International released the steroid-enhanced Scout II.
The fuel crisis did bad things to Scout sales, but the company plugged on until 1980. Although styling prototypes were prepared for new models, a long-running strike at the Fort Wayne assembly plant convinced company officials that the light truck line wasn't worth the hassle. IH had many other businesses with many other financial problems. If they'd hung in there a bit longer, the sport-ute boom would have saved the day. Ah, hindsight.
This '74 model features a bruiser of a 345 cu. in. V-8, driving two or four wheels through a Chrysler 727 automatic transmission. The frame, suspension, and other components are super-heavy-duty, which was always a hallmark of IH vehicles. They might rust like the dickens, but they never, ever broke any critical components. For this reason, Scouts are still competitive in offroad racing.
Straight line performance is impressive, especially given the bulk of this heavyweight. The IH V-8s (304, 345, and 392) weren't high-revvers, but they made up for it with unholy amounts of low-end torque. Stomping the gas on this sucker is strictly a "yee-ha!" proposition.
Handling? Uh, if you have to ask... The high center of gravity makes a really rapid turn a potential Suzuki Samurai-style hari-kari maneuver. Ride is awful with those live axles and leaf springs front and rear. The big tires grab any little bump in the road and yank the whole truck that direction, making steering a handful.
But these brutes weren't really designed for sports car handling. In the bush, you want that height for ground clearance. The short wheelbase makes u-turns possible my wife's Honda Civic wouldn't be ashamed of. And once you develop callouses on your butt, the harsh springing isn't such a big deal.
My favorite feature is the removable hardtop. It takes two strong men to get it off, but then you've got a bad-dude convertible. The rear seat is also removeable to increase the very limited cargo area. An optional Terra version of the truck came with a cab like a pickup instead of the whole bed hardtop.
The downside of Scouts? Accessories like the water pump, distributor, alternator, etc. were sourced from whoever sold them cheapest. This makes these bits prone to breaking, and figuring out whether it's a Ford or GM or Chrysler or AMC part is frustrating. Local parts stores hate these things. Did I mention rust? For some reason, IH sheetmetal is about as resistant to water as, oh, plaster. Most Scouts still on the road are little more than rolling frames covered with swiss cheese bodywork.
Interesting bit of trivia...These vehicles are uncommon, especially in nice shape. One of the best collection of IH vehicles I've seen is at the National Auto and Truck Musuem of the United States, located in Auburn, Indiana. They've got ten or more IHs covering the early 'teens era solid-tire trucks up through the '70s Scouts.
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Don't panic! It's not an alien invasion... It's just old-fashioned ugly.
I refer to this as "the last of the big Darts." In 1963 the Dart became a rebadged version of the compact Plymouth Valiant. Actually, the 1962 Dart was already downsized compared to the '61 models. Because it was 400 pounds lighter than the previous year's model but still packed engines as big as 413 cubic inches, this car was a drag racer's dream! Try 5.8 seconds 0-60mph for a 413, four-speed coupe.
Unfortunately, it was Chrysler's nightmare. Virgil Exner headed Chrysler's styling at that time. He'd done some good stuff in the '50s, but from 1960 on the cars just got weirder. For '62, he pushed for downsized "big" Plymouths and Dodges on the assumption that if the public liked compact cars (which became very popular after 1960), they'd love a smaller big car.
BUZZ! Wrong answer, "Ex"... The buying public assumed they were getting less car for their money. And of course the cars were generally considered ugly. Really ugly. Sales went into the toilet, and Dodge had to bring out a bastard at midyear which consisted of the full-size '62 Chrysler with a '61 Dodge grille grafted on. Exner lost his job after this debacle.
Actually, though, the basic product was quite good. The smaller dimensions came from trimming bloated sheetmetal, not interior space. My car was a four-door sedan, and it was larger inside than a new Crown Victoria. They just don't make cars with this kind of rear seat knee room anymore.
The base engine available was the famous 225 cu. in. Slant Six, well known for durability. My car had the next engine up the prestige ladder: the 318 cu. in. V-8 with a two-barrel carburetor. On this car it teamed with a pushbutton-controlled TorqueFlite automatic transmission. While not the rocket the 413-equipped cars were, it was still fast. Particularly when I needed to pass someone, those cubes came in handy.
Ride and handling weren't up to modern standards, of course, but were surprising for a car this large. Chrysler adopted a torsion bar front suspension in 1957 and stuck with it into the '70s. The torsion bars (which absorb road motion by twisting rather than deflecting) do a good job placing the wheels and don't transmit as much noise into the body as coil springs would. The biggest deficit in the handling is that live rear axle -- it's a jackhammer on washboard roads and could get hairy in bumpy turns.
I put about 15,000 miles on this car from fall of '95 through January '97. It ran with the big dogs on the highway, tooling right along at speeds up to 90mph on the interstate. On long cruises, mileage approached 20mpg, but locally I got a more typical 16mpg. Oil consumption was about a quart per 1000 miles, par for the age and mileage on the car.
The Dart holds (and will probably continue to hold) the record for car sold furthest from home. When I first started advertising it, I received calls from as far away as Amsterdam (the one in Europe). The final purchaser took a Greyhound bus down from Winnipeg, Canada, and drove the car home. I guess Dart fans are where you find them!
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This was a most excellent car. I bought it for $800 (on my credit card!) when my '87 Thunderbird broke down far from home. I soon sold the T-bird and drove this car exclusively for the next year. It carried me to California for an internship, to Wisconsin on my honeymoon, and to New Jersey with my blushing bride by my side.
Or maybe she was simply asphyxiating. Station wagons have a tendency to leak exhaust back into the cabin, and this one was no exception. But heck, the fumes weren't that strong. I breathed them for over a year, and I are am normal as yew Wold thiNK tu Xpectorate. :)
The Rambler got its start at Nash in 1950. It was the only really successful compact of the '50s (discounting the '59 Studebaker Lark as a late-comer). Originally, just a convertible, sedan, and two-door wagon were available. After the '54 Nash-Hudson merger that produced American Motors (AMC), Rambler was treated as a separate brand name.
For '56 there was an new, bigger Rambler. Wagons were by now available in four-door models. AMC designer Bill Reddig came up with the trademark dipped roofline and standard roof rack as a way to save tooling costs: many parts were shared with the sedan. As a consequence, Rambler wagons were relatively inexpensive and sold like hotcakes. Usually, they comprised 30-40% of Rambler's sales! AMC president George Romney decided to dump the slow-selling Nash and Hudson brands after '57, and for several years AMC was Rambler alone.
The '59 body was updated with fairly graceful fins in '58. The fins were redesigned in '60, becoming smaller but still complementing the car's overall styling. In '62 the fins were gone, but the mid-size Ramblers (Classics, officially) weren't totally restyled until 1963, when they won Motor Trend's Car of the Year award. Sales were good in this era, with Rambler challenging Plymouth for third in the industry in '60 and '61.
Drivetrains were pedestrian. The base engine was a 195.6 cu. in. straight six originally designed as an L-head unit for the 1941 Nash 600. A later overhead-valve conversion on the old block raised horsepower to 127, or 135 with the optional Super-Pak two-barrel carb. Although a Borg-Warner automatic was available, the three-speed and overdrive transmissions still sold well. Rambler buyers tended to value thrift. A Rebel version of the Classic with a 250 cu. in. V-8 never sold nearly as well as the sixes.
As you would expect, even the Super-Pak version of the six is far from a rocket. My wagon had the standard transmission without overdrive. Cruising at 60mph was comfortable, but any faster and the engine was wound pretty tight. I saw 90mph once. Once.
Economy was fair, especially for the size of the car (about equivalent to a modern Taurus wagon). Careful highway driving was good for 22mpg or more, and regular around-towning pulled in about 18mpg. The overdrive cars are vastly preferable, both for cruising speed and fuel economy.
Ramblers are excellent long-distance cars. Coil springs at all four corners contribute to a cushy ride, and the seats are quite comfortable. Reclining seat backs were inherited from Nash and were unusual for the era. These would even fold down to form beds, to the delight of travelling salesmen and hormonal teenagers.
My Rambler tracked very well down the road, through strong crosswinds could cause some entertaining twitches. Handling was okay, though hardly up to sports car standards. The basic tendency was understeer. While the weak-sister engine could never induce oversteer, getting on the gas in a tight corner would tighten up the line somewhat. Body roll, of course, was Queen Mary quality.
Another feature of the Rambler that I appreciated was the Weather-Eye heating system. Originally introduced on Nashes, this was one of the best heaters put out by Detroit for years. The air intake in the bulge at the back of the hood rammed fresh air through the system, providing tremendous air flow summer and winter. Maximum heat would melt my galoshes, except that some thoughtful rust in the floorboards provided ventilation.
This Rambler was better than many on the rust front. AMC actually dipped the entire car in rust proofing. Nonetheless, it is a rare Rambler that totally escapes the tinworm. And because the body and frame are integral (early unit body construction was another AMC feature), rust can be very bad for these cars.
When looking at Ramblers, especially watch for rust in the structurally critical rocker/frame areas under the doors and the front suspension A-arm and coil spring attachment points. Also watch for loose front ends -- this was a weak point and parts can be a bugger to find.
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This was probably the most unreliable car I ever loved. About every two weeks when I got it running right, I could drive it to within two and a half miles of heaven. Then the Lucas demons would bring me sputtering and popping back to the purgatory of my garage.
Unlike many British car owners, I usually DID make it back to the garage under my own power. Once I had to walk three miles in the dark, but I'd had a great evening up to that point. And once I had to have it towed 70 miles, but we'll get to that story.
I bought this car when I sold my nice '49 Plymouth, for three reasons: I'd always wanted a British roadster, I vastly preferred the shape of the MGA to the MGB, and the price matched what I'd gotten out of the Plymouth. Actually, it was great, body-wise, with some rust in the rockers and the snout which had been decently repaired. That luscious red paint (a Corvette color, in reality) topped it all off.
Under the skin, it was hardly a purist's car. The previous owner had replaced the original A driveline with a rebuilt engine, all-synchro four-speed, and rear axle from a '78 B. Everything fit, and the motor was mechanically good, but the guy was hardly a perfectionist when it came to wiring and hoses. Stir in the usual Lucas electrical maladies, and it was a recipe for trouble.
A tune-up never lasted more than 1000 miles, and these are very unpleasant cars to drive when they are out of tune, but we'll get to that story. My tune-ups were strictly electrical. In fact, this is the only car I've ever really had to tune up. But regular checks of the points, coil, condenser, and plugs were worth it.
I never attempted to adjust the dual vacuum-pot Solex carburetors. I'd heard too many horror stories about attempting this. Apparently the operating principal is something the Abingdon engineers borrowed from Welsh druids. The car always ran, so I never worried about them.
And when everything was tuned up, boy did the car run. The '78 engine had been rebuilt for higher compression and pulled as well as could be expected from any little four-banger. Okay, a well-flogged Taurus could pace me off the line, but the driver wasn't having as much fun shifting or making such nice noises. The four-speed sychro gear box had short, sweet throws. Snick! Snick! A cherry bomb muffler provided a beautiful, raspy exhaust note which thrilled my spinal cord running up through the gears. And the snap and snarl when idling down... Ah! Rapture...
All those things you've heard about MG handling are true. Your butt is mere inches from the ground, and the small dimensions of the car lend themselves well to kart-like tossability. The ride is pretty supple for a stiffly suspended light roadster. The rack-and-pinion steering is delightful, firm and quick. By modern standards, the tires are pretty skinny -- this lends itself nicely to neutral four-wheel drifts.
The story: through a complicated set of circumstances, my fiancee was in New Jersey, the wedding was in Texas, the MGA was in Indiana, and I was in California with the Rambler. In two days, I drove the Rambler from California to Indiana (which is probably some kind of Rambler record). Then I had to pack the MGA with as many of my belongings as it could carry and hightail it for New Jersey to meet my soon-to-be bride and fly down to Texas.
I hadn't had time to tinker with the MGA all summer and knew it was in a mildly poor state of tune before I left. Points, and all that. It had a slight miss at idle. Plus, the charging system was doing a piss-poor job of keeping the battery up. But, hey, I gotta go.
By the time I drove west-to-east across Indiana, the tune had deteriorated to where the engine was missing a lot at idle, making stop-and-go a matter of dancing between the brake (SLOW DOWN!) and the gas peddle (KEEP RUNNING!). Not wanting to drive much at night because the lights would really kill the electrical system, I stopped at a truck stop. All motel rooms in the area were full so I slept next to my car, under the stars, between the trucks, on the gravel.
I planned to get a tune-up the next day, but once I was on I-70 the MGA was running great again. I decided simply to go as far as I could, stopping as little as I could, and hope the Druidic gods would smile upon me. When I did stop for gas, the engine was missing at progressively higher RPMs. Amazingly, it did mostly keep running on one or two cylinders with an occasional stomp of the gas pedal to build revs.
By mid-Pennsylvania, the miss was starting to affect me at highway speeds. Fortunately, speeds out there start to pick up as you get closer and closer to New York City. By the time I crossed the Pennsylvania/New York border I was running in the fast lane with traffic at 90mph!
By this point, I was within sight of my goal: getting within a hundred miles of my fiancee's apartment. It was starting to get dark, which meant turning on the lights, which meant killing the battery and eventually the engine. The state of tune was so bad I'd never survive the stop-and-go off the interstate. But I had an ace up my sleeve: AAA Plus membership!
This is an essential if you like to drive beaters. It costs around $45 annually, but gives you several free tows up to 100 miles (the "Plus" part). Especially when I drove the MGA, this paid for itself. I found a small town off the highway about 70 miles from my destination, parked at a gas station, and called the friendly AAA people.
They came and loaded the MGA on a massive International flat bed transport, where it looked even tinier than usual. I rode in the cab and talked to the driver, a very nice guy. About 11pm, we pulled into the quiet neighborhood where my fiancee lived. Backing in to unload the car, diesel growling, backup warning beeping, and lights flashing, we probably looked like a spaceship had landed. A few days later, my wife married me anyway.
But, I couldn't afford storage in New Jersey and didn't want the unprotected roadster to sit out all winter. After a tune-up (Oh, did it run nicely!), I enjoyed several bittersweet autumn cruises along the New Jersey coast. Then I sold the car. And four months later we moved back to Indiana, land of cheap indoor storage. I could kick myself. I'll probably never find one half as nice at twice the price.
It was a pain to tune and needed lots of work. But when that MGA ran...
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The very first Beater Du Jour! A little personal background is in order... Back in high school, I already wanted something older to drive. My parents are good souls and humored me. After several months proving myself in the family beater, a '77 LTD with a 400 cu. in. V-8 known as "Edna the Sky-Blue Tank," they agreed to buy me my first car.
My father and I looked at a variety of vintage clunkers in varying states of decay. Typical was the day we spent two hours in a cold mist helping a guy fire up a '47 Dodge that had been sitting for years. When it finally started, I climbed in for a test drive. This car had the old Fluid Drive semi-automatic and was s-l-o-w. I spent two miles nursing it up to 50 mph, then crested a long hill, looked at the right angle corner at the bottom, and tried the brakes for the first time.
Nothing, of course. The pedal went to the floor and stayed there. I had my foot off the gas and we benefitted from some engine braking, but other than that I was frozen with panic. At the last minute, the owner leaned across the seat and yanked the wheel, dropping the tires into the ditch on the inside corner and jerking us around the turn safely at 30 mph. My family, following in Edna, saw only a 20-foot wall of water thrown up from the ditch.
We kept looking and eventually found this '48 Plymouth, passing over a decent V-8 Ford 60 in the process. We never regretted the decision. The Hoover (we named it for the hollow sound the driveline made in 3rd gear) had a fairly solid body, a rebuilt '54 flathead six, and a new interior.
The P-15 series Plymouths were post war models and ran for three years and a bit, 1946 to early 1949. The basic car was little changed from before World War II, using an ancient but strong flathead straight six engine, three-speed manual tranny, independent front suspension and hydraulic brakes. While basically unexciting, these cars were tough, reliable hombres and earned a good reputation in their era.
The Hoover saw me through my senior year of high school, then took me to college for the first three years at Valparaiso University in northern Indiana. It never failed me in all that time, starting even in the coldest weather on the old six-volt system. We did take the precaution of installing a heavy-duty 6-volt tractor battery for extra cranking power.
Though the car always started, winter driving was not its strongest feature. Heating and defrosting were provided by a little breadbox unit on the firewall, barely sufficient to keep the passenger's toes warm. Given time, the defroster would melt ice off the bottom two inches of windshield. I usually drove blind during cold weather, peering out the mail slot hole in the ice. When the thermometer really dropped, I usually drove fully clothed in winter gear, boots and mittens, with a blanket wrapped around my legs for good measure.
The six was an excellent engine. I used straight unleaded (all Chrysler engines have had hardened valve seats for decades) and ran with interstate traffic at 65 mph, no problem. The Hoover averaged 18 mpg in regular driving. While it was not a fast car, I used to get my speed kicks by blowing off Ford Escorts at stoplights. If they didn't know I was racing them, I usually won. What a life...
The Plymouth's ride took some getting used to. The suspension was softly sprung and not very well damped, and the seats were also quite bouncy. Once I got used to the odd sensation of moving up and down inside the car, independent of the vertical motion of the car, which was independent of the road, things were fine. Body roll was scary, but the car handled okay for all that. Brakes were excellent.
I appreciated the many special features of the car: the "safety-signal" speedometer, which at night was illuminated in green, yellow and red at progressively higher speeds; the trunk-mounted third taillight (remember what a big deal this "new" safety feature was in the '80s?); the clear plastic Mayflower hood ornament that I never got around to mounting a light in; and the warm tone and amazing reach of the AM tube radio. Many memories were generated in this car, and high school and college buddies still remember me as much by the car as anything else.
I was a restless youth, however. My junior year of college, I decided I was interested in a car with a real heater and maybe a luxurious FM radio. Eventually, I bought an '87 Thunderbird and my parents retired the Hoover to a barn, where it sits to this day. We get it out about twice a year for short drives. The engine reliably fires on the third revolution, though the brakes are usually flat. Mostly the car just collects dust and bird droppings -- a sad fate for a fine car.
The Hoover is currently for sale. My family is tired of moving it around the barn, and it needs to find a new home and someone to care for it. Contact me for information if you are interested.
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Copyright 1997 M. Park Hunter. This page and its contents written, photographed, designed, slaved over, etc. by the author. Please do not copy anything without my permission.
Reset May 20, 1997.