So, it turns out the breaks rotted off and fell off the car on the way to work. I had had it inspected the previous day... and they didn't mention anything was wrong. I did not go back to that inspection place again.
The brakes of a car in good working order should be able to overcome the engine and stop the car even if the engine is stuck at full power. But you have to do it decisively. Push the brake pedal to the floor and keep it there until you've stopped. What often happens is people are (very naturally) confused and not sure what to do, they'll brake but not hard enough, stop braking when it doesn't seem to work, try again, etc. This can heat up the brakes to the point where they're no longer effective enough to stop the car, and then you're really in for it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DreamInterpretation/comments/nnndju...
I drove her up there in my Toyota Corolla that I later rolled over on Summit Road. I didn't realize I was upside down until I heard a scraping sound from the roof and saw the top of the windshield crinkling.
Apparently that was a thing with the 1970s era Corollas. Several years later a buddy's girlfriend who I had a secret crush on rolled her Toyota too.
With the car upside down, someone drove up, we gave it a mighty push and rolled it back on its feet! Then someone else stopped by and held a joint out his car window and said, "You look like you could use a toke."
Back to the Bug. I followed Kate down the hill into town and noticed she wasn't slowing down much around the turns. Then we got to Junipero Serra Blvd and she didn't stop at the red light. A pickup trick sideswiped the Bug and that got it to stop.
The only real damage to the Bug was a front fender, so we bought a new one at a junkyard and bolted it on.
Besides the brakes, the engine wasn't running so great either. We bought a carburetor rebuild kit and got it running much smoother.
Emboldened by those successes, I decided to rebuild the engine too. I was a member of the Briarpatch auto repair collective, where you could rent a spot in the shop and use their tools to do your own work, or pay their mechanic to do it.
I got the engine torn apart, with nuts and bolts and parts strewn across the shop floor.
Then I realized I was in way over my head and had no idea where everything was supposed to go. I asked the mechanic if he could take over. He looked at the mess, shook his head, and said "I'll do it, but this is the worst way to get a job."
We named our cars in those days. The Bug was named Gus, and later I got an MGB-GT that I named Maggie. And after that, a Fiat 124 Spyder which already had a cool name.
Spyder developed a different brake problem. I think there were air bubbles in the brake lines that expanded as they warmed up. Then the brakes would slowly and gradually clamp down. You'd be driving on level ground and find yourself having to press down more on the gas, as if you were driving uphill. And then the the car would come to a complete stop.
Instead of getting the brake lines flushed and fixed, I did the sensible thing: Each wheel had a brake bleeder valve, and I started carrying a combination wrench that fit those valves. When the car stopped, I loosened one of the bleeder valves and brake fluid spurt out onto the ground. This relieved the pressure in the brake lines and I continued on my way.
Kate and I also had a thing for the Porsche 914. We knew it was a joint venture between Volkswagen and Porsche, so we scrambled up those two names. When we saw one on the highway, we'd call out "There's a Vorp!"
I stopped having that dream nearly as often when I bought my '05 Subaru Legacy GT wagon.
What's even stranger is that my current Kia Stinger (a fun car!) becomes an exotic Maserati or Aston Martin or Jaguar in my dreams..
Growing up, a friends dad would use this as a ‘feature’ on his Datsun to move the car out of traffic when it wouldn’t restart.
Put it in first, release the clutch, crank the starter, and move the car out of the way.
I suppose that a 1980s Corolla was the last car I drift-started, though.
In a traditional automatic with a hydraulic torque converter between the engine and the gearing, you've got a problem: most transmissions use hydraulic pressure to actuate the gear selection, and hydraulic pressure is typically developed by turning of the input shaft. Some older automatics had a secondary pump to develop hydraulic pressure from turning of the output shaft. In those cars, you could select first gear, turn the ignition to run, and if you got it moving fast enough, it would develop pressure, actuate first gear, and then the transmission could turn the engine and off you were. Some references suggest pushing in neutral and selecting first when ready to start. References say you need to get up to about 15-25 mph for that; my VW Vanagon which shares the same engine type as the 914 (and is therefore a rear-engine sports car) can start the engine from a much slower roll; the speedometer rests at 10 mph, so who knows how fast I'm going, but probably walking speed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternator#By_excitation
I do wonder how much current that requires, though. In a pinch, could a duct-taped string of AAs be enough to get you going?
My CX-5 even has a wireless-pushbutton start, not a physical-key-in-the-ignition start, but I've still been able to roll-start it when the battery is too dead to crank the starter motor but still has enough juice for the electronics (lowest I've seen is ~8v if I recall correctly, but don't quote me on that).
The process is pretty much the same: put the car's ignition into the "ON" position (in my case, press the pushbutton twice without touching the pedals -- once to ACC mode, then once to move from ACC to ON), then it's the same as normal: clutch-in, shift to your preferred gear, get rolling, and pop the clutch. Engine computer sees "oh, looks like the engine's spinning, let's add gas and spark" and you're good to go.
Anecdotally, I've seen the described behavior of the engine computer ("detects spinning and adds gas/spark, even if the initial motion wasn't from the starter motor") on automatic transmission vehicles, too. On a 2008 Chevrolet, I found that if you revved the engine up a bit (for inertia), turned the key to OFF, then quickly turned the key back to ON (without turning all the way to START), the engine computer will catch it and keep it running.
But I came really close to getting in trouble with a 1948 Chevy pickup. I backed it into my grandfather's garage, and then found out that it was a bit too far forward to be able to close the door. So I turned the ignition on, put it in reverse, and touched the starter.
Unfortunately, the engine caught with that brief touch of the starter, leaving me frantically stabbing for the clutch before I pushed through the back of the garage...
Fortunately, it idled very slowly, and I had (of course) given it no gas.
In hindsight, stalling while crossing railroad tracks, like quicksand, is a much less common danger in adulthood than I was lead to believe as a younger person.
I was born in 1980 and it seemed people would get stuck in quicksand on tv regularly when I was a kid, but it seems a kind of danger that has almost disappeared from the collective narrative.
Why was it popular before? Why isn't it anymore? This baffles me.
Most quicksand I'm aware of is in tidal flats [0] [1] and it really is dangerous to take a short cut over them. Come to think of it, most normal sand I encounter is in tidal flats, too.
[0] https://www.98fm.com/news/north-dublin-beaches-quicksand-war...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/southend-on-sea-deadly-...
He was equally entertaining and knowledgeable in class.
DYK Miata is a recursive acronym? It stands for: Miata Is Always The Answer.
I have a friend that had a 914, and sent it to him. Made his day.
When I came back out, the attendant that had parked it was nowhere to be seen. I handed him the tag, he retrieved the key and a few minutes later off in the distance I heard him trying to start it. He managed to get it out of the parking spot before he gave up and motioned for me to walk down to him. After some discussion, he gave up and let me drive it out of the lot.
Congratulations on getting hired to this team! You probably count yourself lucky, but don't. We had been trying to fill this role for the past 5 months and every candidate would run away as soon as we showed them our homegrown auth framework. But don't run yet please, do give it a try.
So, you are still here? It must be a bad job market out there. Looks like you found the documentation for the project. Let me save you the trouble, it has not be updated since 3 years ago (about the time John quit). No worries, there are lots of usage examples in the Perforce repo. Perforce is like Git but that's for another day.
So you managed to checkout the code. Before you type "make", let me remind you to install this particular version of Python and set up your LD paths. Make sure you don't have anything else relying on Python because they will probably never work again.
If you hit the dreaded "std::vector<std::__cxx11::basic_string<char> > >'} is not derived from 'const char*'" error, ask Joe (if he is still around) to show you which header file you need to tweak. That's not checked in because it breaks the build on a legacy server we still have running for one of the customers.
… someone else please take over… :-)
That sounds so familiar!
My first car was a barn-find 22 year old (at the time) 1964 Triumph TR4. It had a moderately bad oil leak, and the oil would land on the exhaust manifold and be blown along the transmission tunnel. Smoke would fill the interior around the shift lever. It would smoke more heavily the harder you pushed it.
Great read. Several years ago I owned and drove a '67 Olds Cutlass for sixteen years. (Two door, auto-trans, AC, standard brakes.) I purchased the car in 1990 and everything was in working order. When the carburetor finally warped beyond repair, I cobbled together some other Olds carb body parts and, since the automatic choke parts were bad, I rigged up a manual choke line through the firewall. This made the car undriveable for the other drivers in my family! The sequence of gas pedal pumps and knowing when to disengage the choke was too much to surpass. :)
ChrisArchitect•2h ago
2023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092
2022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489
dang•2h ago
A few things to know before stealing my 914 (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767092 - July 2023 (303 comments)
A few things to know before stealing my 914 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878489 - April 2022 (417 comments)