When Barney Overholtz drove his 1952
station wagon into Gus Wilson's Model Garage, he was about as
downcast-looking as anybody Gus had seen in a good while.
"How are you, Barney?"
Gus greeted him. "I haven't seen much of you lately. Where have
you been keeping yourself?"
"I've been pretty busy,"
Barney told him, "since I promoted myself from the paper route to delivering
groceries after school and Saturdays for Eric Watt's market."
"That's how you tell it," Gus went on, poking the youngster
playfully in the ribs. "The way I hear it is that you are spending
considerable time chauffeuring Sadie Plevens around."
"Well, maybe I am,"
Barney admitted flushing to the roots of his brown hair.
"But I won't be able to
mush more. The way this car eats gas, I'll go broke and have to give
up truckin'. Sometimes I wish I had my old 1941 Ford back again."
"That's peculiar," Gus
said. "This six-cylinder job should give good mileage. Should
get around 20."
"It should," Barney
complained. "but it doesn't. I'm lucky to get 12. And sometimes
she almost won't run."
Barney Does His Own Fixing
Gus didn't ask the young
fellow why he hadn't brought the car in sooner. He knew. Barney
had started his newspaper route with a third-hand 1941 Ford, with a
crankcase full of water. Gus had managed to stop the water leak into
the crankcase, but the old car had finally become worn out, and Barney had
been forced to buy a newer vehicle for his new job. You couldn't, Gus
thought now, help support the old folks, buy a good car, take out a girl,
and at the same time pay garage bills. Barney was inclined to do his own
fixing. Gus sensed that he must have been pretty desperate to bring
the car in now.
"We'll take a look at
it," Gus told him, lifting the hood.
"I worked on it some
myself," Barney said, "but it didn't seem to do much good. The only
thing I found wrong was that the felt in the air cleaner was sort of charred
and burnt. I put in a new felt—maybe some of the old one got stuck in
the carburetor."
"Maybe it did," Gus said,
perking up his ears. "I wonder how that felt got charred—must have
ignited some time from a backfire, before you got the car."
Gus started the motor,
idled it, gunned it, shut it off.
"Sounds all right to me,"
he commented, wheeling over his tool kit.
Gus Makes an All-Around Check
He removed the air
cleaner, washed out the felt in solvent, cleaned the bowl and added fresh
oil. He pulled the carburetor and cleaned it, carefully checking
passages and screens, float setting. Replacing the carburetor, he
snapped off the distributor cap, closed the points by rocking the car in
gear, turned on the ignition switch, held the high-tension wire from the
coil near the block, snapped the points with his thumb.
Noting the strong spark,
Gus replaced rotor, cap and wire. He removed cleaned, tested and set
the plugs, made a compression test on all cylinders. Again he started
the motor, listened to it with cocked ear.
"Sounds pretty sweet to
me, Barney," Gus told the youngster. "Full compression on all
cylinders—good shape all around. Sounds like she's timed right, but
we'd better check. Slow spark could cost you gas."
Gus cleaned the timing
mark on the vibration damper, hooked up his strobe light, finding the timing
only a hair off. He set the spark on the mark, made a routine check
for loose wires, worn spots, battery terminals and ground.
"Let's drive her around
the block, Barney," he said.
The car performed
perfectly, and Gus turned it over to the youngster at the garage, charging
him the smallest amount he dared without making him feel that he was getting
special favors.
Stan Hicks, Gus's young helper,
knowing his boss's weakness for helping out youngsters just starting out in
life, smiled to himself.
"If all our customers
were kids, Gus," Stan said, "we'd be broke in a month. What was wrong
with the car, anyway?"
"Hanged if I know," Gus
said. "I never did find anything really wrong. Maybe he had some
charred felt in the carburetor passages. I might have failed to see it
when I blew it out."
Barney Calls for Help
Gus felt satisfied that
he had given the car a thorough check, and was considerably surprised when
Barney drove in the next day.
"She wouldn't take it
this morning, Gus," he said. "Pa had to break out his car and deliver
my groceries. And was he mad!"
"How'd the car act?" Gus
asked.
"It ran fine at first,"
Barney said, "and then when it got hot—it was a warm day yesterday, you
know—it began to miss. The farther I went the worse it got.
Wouldn't pull the hat off your head. I phoned Pa from the Nolan farm
and he came and picked me up. After we got the orders delivered we
came back for my car. It ran all right then, but I brought it right in
to you."
"Great!" Gus said, but he
didn't feel that way. A stubborn look came into his eyes as he rolled
up his tool kit and started the motor.
It seemed to Gus that he
had never heard a motor that ticked them off better. But for the
moment he was disinclined to trust his highly trained car. He
abandoned his usual method of working, and began using his motor analyzer
and test panel.
What, he asked himself,
would cause a motor to miss when real warm, and yet work perfectly when cold
or ordinarily warm? Vapor lock? Too hot a type of plug?
Faulty coil or condenser? Some sort of resistance building up in the
ignition system? Loose connection or poor ground?
Gus went to work
systematically. He tested the coil and condenser, installed new
points, making certain that there were no hidden jokers in the distributor,
such as a movable breaker point striking a screw head, or faulty insulation
or ground. He checked valve setting, cam angle, wiring, connections.
The further he went the more he became convinced that there was nothing
whatever wrong with Barney Overholtz' car. Finally he buckled up
everything and lowered the hood.
"Now," he said grimly to
Barney, "Let's really road-test her."
Twenty Miles and All's Well
It was a beautiful, mild
spring day as they drove out of town. The morning sun was fast warming
the air. Gus nursed the car along, varying speeds, hitting this hill
fast, that one at slow pull, alert to the hum of the motor, the throaty song
of the exhaust. They drove 10 miles, 20.
"I guess you fixed it all
right," Barney commented. "I knew you would."
"I hope so," Gus said,
trying to sound confident.
Engine Sings a New Song
They came to the long,
climbing slope of the Big Hill road, and they were nearly to the top when
Gus sensed a new sound developing in the motor. It wasn't something
that he could instantly put his finger on, yet it seemed to him that he
should be able to. It was a familiar yet momentarily elusive change in
motor tone.
"Something wrong, Gus?"
Barney asked quickly.
The words had hardly left
his mouth when the car slowed seemed to lose its power. Gus jiggled
the throttle, watching developments warily. The motor
began to miss and stagger, and the wagon barely made the summit of the rise.
Gus pulled to the side of the road and leaped out, just as the engine gave
one last gasp and died.
The burly mechanic looked
ruefully at Barney, because very preoccupied with fumbling his pipe from his
pocket tamping it with tobacco with a horny thumb.
He lit a match on the seat of his
over-alls puffed reflectively.
"Nice view of the valley
from here, isn't it?" he remarked.
Gus Takes Time Out
He seemed to be
completely absorbed with the view, yet his mind was racing. He'd be
hornswoggled, he told himself, if he'd lift that hood and make any more of a
fool of himself before this kid, until he had some idea of what he was
looking for. He'd checked and rechecked everything that could possibly
cause trouble. There was nothing he could do but putter around like a
jay bird, until he got a new slant on this deal.
Gus chewed thoughtfully
on his pipe. That change in motor tone before the engine started
missing had been as familiar to him as the sound of running water.... What
was it, anyway? By golly it had sounded as though the motor was
choked.
Quickly Gus removed the
air cleaner and peered into the carburetor's throat. The choke was
wide open. Gus checked it with his fingers-here was no doubt about it.
What now? Air cleaner? But he had cleaned and checked that
thoroughly. Still the suspicion of a choked motor, once firmly
established, persisted in Gus's mind. He removed the top of the air
cleaner, lifted out the felt. The piece of felt seemed somehow off
base, too limp and floppy.
"Where did you get this
felt, Barney?" Gus asked.
"I cut it out myself,"
Barney said, "from a piece we had around."
Air Cleaner Gets a Strangle Hold
"Ah!" Gus's exclamation
held a note of disgust. "I should have noticed this when I cleaned the
air cleaner," he declared.
"Guess I'm getting addled
in my old age.
But both times you drove into my shop,
you'd driven only a few blocks. The motor was still fairly cool, the
felt fairly stiff. When this felt gets really warm it gets limp.
It sags down and shuts off the air from your motor. No wonder the
motor sounded choked to me and you got such poor gas mileage. We'll
put in a factory-spec felt, and your troubles are over, Barney."
They were over. A
week later Barney drove into the garage and announced no trouble.
Moreover, he said with a happy grin, the station wagon was doing about 21
miles to the gallon.
"Goes to show," Gus told
Stan Hicks, "that a man can't pinch pennies in the wrong places. It
doesn't pay. It didn't pay for Barney Overholtz, and that's for sure."
"Yeah," Stan Hicks said
disgustedly.
"You really made him pay, didn't you.
Two dollars, wasn't it?"
END
