Ah, the boombox in the back seat. I am certainly familiar with this technique. My friends and I used to "cruise" around town with a boombox in the back in high school. Of course, we were always short of cash, so the gas tank going dry or the batteries going dead often quickly ended our rides. Actually, I could put a new head unit in my car if I wanted since I've installed plenty in past cars, but I'm just too cheap and lazy to do so. Plus, I hardly listen to music anymore (inside or outside of cars). If I listen to the radio at all I'm probably tuned into talk radio, for which an AM/FM unit is fine. The only times I really wish for a CD player is on long drives through the back country when the only stations on the dial are hard-core Bible-thumpin' preaching. Although "REPENT! FOUL SINNERS!" blaring from the speakers does tend to keep me awake on late-night drives.
I also used to have a love of small cars. The very first car that I bought with my own money was a 1980 Honda Civic. That's back when they were still really small. I could reach out the front window and open the gas tank in that car, so I used to joke about having a remote gas lid release. In those days, Honda used a really strange engine head/carburetor setup (CVCC) to control emissions and increase fuel economy. By 1980 I think pretty much everyone else had gone to catalytic converters, but Honda was still using that CVCC system along with a whole raft of emissions plumbing. I had all kinds of problems with that car especially vapor lock since CVCC caused the engine to run pretty hot. I think vehicles during that time (pre-electronic engine controls but still having to handle emissions) had really reached the nadir for driveability/reliability. Great time to learn how to work on cars then! Well not really as more often than not I was stuck on the side of the road trying to figure out how to get home.
One of my neighbors used to have a really cool/interesting small car...a Honda Z600! Check this out:
I tried to buy it off him since it was just sitting under a cover in his yard, but he would never sell it. The car was ridiculously small, by far the smallest car I've ever seen in the US. It had something like a 600CC two-cylinder
air-cooled engine. Yes, I'm pretty sure that was really one of Honda's motorcyle engines.
The tires looked like they belonged on a riding mower (about 9 or 10 inches). Crash safety was probably nil, but I wanted it badly. It was even bright yellow like the one in the photo above. Maybe that's the only color they came in, I'm not sure. Anyway, that was right around the time the Wayne's World movie came out, and of course being stupid and easily impressionable in high school, I wanted a "cool" offbeat little car to tool around in like the Pacer in that movie. Never mind that the Pacer was actually probably twice as large as the Honda Z.
Topic: Car thread (Read 866 times)
