CATAGORIES: 126 CARTRIDGE FILM,History,PHOTOGRAPHY,SCANNED FILM,YARBZ LIFE PICTURE DIARY,YARBZ NEGATIVE/POSITIVE ARCHIVE — Yarbz @ 10:35 am

BIGGER SIZE IMAGE IN THE ‘MORE’ SECTION

THE STORY:
This is Yarbz and his 1972 Chevelle taken by my mom in 1978. This is the driveway of the house where we lived in Simsbury, Connecticut. I think this is April but I’m not sure. The car was purchased from some guy out in Unionville Connecticut where I saw it sitting on his front lawn with a For Sale sign. I believe this is the initial cleaning and polishing. My parent’s classic rugged and hard sucking Electrolux vacuum was assisting in making this car mine along with a bottle of Armorall sitting on the roof.

The Chevelle was basically stock with a 350 cubic-inch V-8 and a Muncie four-speed manual transmission. It has a 10-bold rear-end which was eventually replaced with a 12-bolt Positraction rear-end later in the year after the original differential began to leak gear oil. I found the 12-bolt Positraction at a local junk yard. My buddy Mike, who worked with me at the ARCO gas station, and I put it in one weekend. The car was very fun and looked great during my senior year at Simsbury High School. While I had the car, I repaired, upgraded and did lots of modifications some of which were ill-advised like the 12-bolt differential. The gear ratio on the new rear-end was different so the speedometer was off. Worse than that was that at highway cruising speeds the engine ran about 500 rpm’s higher than before.

The extra wear and tear from the higher revolutions eventually caused my engine to become unhappy. The unhappiness came to a head one night and caused my motor to explode with anger on the highway while driving up to Springfield Massachusetts where I lived at the time. It was about 1:30 AM and I was racing some guy in a Chevy Nova north on I-91. All the sudden the car made a split-second stutter and then a huge bang! Lots of crunching was heard and felt under the car. I pressed in the clutch and allowed the car to gradually slow. When I looked in the rearview mirror there was an incredibly thick trail of smoke erupting at 80 miles per hour from the back of my Chevelle. I immediately felt as if I was shot down in a WWII fighter and was spiraling to Earth, leaving the tell-tale oily smoke trail behind as I slowly arched toward an inevitable impact in the English countryside.

After gliding to a stop on the side of the dark highway I found that the push rods had blown through the oil pan. This is usually an indication that your motor needs some maintenance. Luckily, the guy I was racing and his buddies pulled over and gave me a ride the rest of the way to my apartment in Springfield. The Chevelle would eventually be towed to my parents’ house and there it would sit until it was sold for $500. I will never know if the person who bought it actually put in a new engine and got it going or not. I wonder to this day if the car is still on the road somewhere.

It was shortly after the destruction of the Chevelle’s engine that I decided my life was going nowhere and that I didn’t want to grind out a living as an auto-mechanic as originally planned. I enlisted in the Marine Corps in the fall of 1978 and was to report to MCRD (Marine Corps Recruit Depot) San Diego in January 1979. This seemed like the best way to achieve an immediate change to the direction of my life. As it turned out, it was.