In December of 2013, I was offered a promotion and transfer that would take me out of Chicago and to the hills of northwest Illinois. I accepted without thinking about it. The first thought of mine was, “I’m going to get to do exactly what I wanted to do when I finished grad school.” My second thought was, “I’ll be able to re-restore my convertible!” My third thought was, “How am I going to get that thing across the state in winter?”
First things first: I hadn’t started the car for a while. A long while. Long enough that the cold weather finally killed the battery. That’s no big deal. I learned how to do car batteries when I was 10. And by the time I was a teenager, my family had so many cars and so few resources to keep them in top condition that we were constantly swapping batteries from one car to another.
REPLACEMENT OF BATTERY, 1970 OLDSMOBILE CUTLASS SUPREME, with A/C:
If you can’t do a car battery, you shouldn’t be working on a car. Period. I’m not going to tell you which battery cable to disconnect first, because you had better know already. I will tell you that if you are putting a modern battery in the car, get one with a handle on it. You’ll need that handle to wiggle the battery into a very tight squeeze. Otherwise you will have to remove the windshield washer fluid tank. That is not fun when it is 10 degrees out.
With a new battery, the car now started. Man, was the carburetor in crap shape. In order to drive it across the state into the Driftless Zone*, I needed to do two things to make the car safe and road-worthy: fix the brakes and fix the carburetor. I had one month to get ready for the move. And North America received the gift of one of the coldest winters on record. I’m going to put in a plug for J.J. Auto Service in Highwood Illinois. Jeff, the owner, fixed the brakes (one bad caliper and brake line) and fixed the carb (the choke pull-off needed replacement. This made me feel good. Despite the laundry list of things my brother said the carb needed, I insisted all it needed was a tune-up and a new choke. I was right. I STILL can diagnose an old car!) Knowing that I was headed on a 200-mile trek, Jeff gave the car a once-over and found the radiator had a small leak in it.
REPLACEMENT of RADIATOR, 1970 OLDSMOBILE CUTLASS SUPREME, with A/C:
With the car now roadworthy, my brother and I drove it into the hills of the Driftless Zone. I parked it in its new garage. The original plan was to give myself a month or two to recover from the repair expense. My daily driver, a Honda Civic, needed new wheel bearings. A wheel bearing job on a front-wheel drive Civic costs a LOT more than a front wheel bearing job on an old Cutlass. I also had moving expenses blah blah blah. I got a promotion. I’m going to stop complaining. As my dad once said, “bitchin’ don’t stop the itchin'”. Anyways, the weather forecast shows that we’ll actually hit close to 20 degrees this weekend, and that’s warm enough at least to start yanking a few things out for repair. The Death Mobile will live again.
*The Driftless Zone is a geological region of North America that escaped glaciation in the most recent Ice Age. Most of it lies within Wisconsin. Small portions of it extend into northwest Illinois and northeast Iowa. It is distinguished by limestone hills and deep river valleys. The hills max out around 600 feet in elevation of the surrounding countryside. Many are in excess of 200 feet.