Jul 2, 2008
The first car I owned was a 1931 Singer that i bought for L25 from John Fowraker the Botany professor's son. It had had some fairly advanced features in its day: - a four speed gearbox, an aluminium body and wire wheels. It also had a very tall radiator grill which gave it a rather thoughtful expression.
By the time it came to me it had a good deal to be thoughtful about. The wooden frme that supported the aluminium body had rotted as had the floor boards, so it sagged a bit on one side and the mudguard rubbed on the rear wheel whenever you turned a corner, and when the floor finally fell out you could see the road between your feet as you drove along. Furthermore the engine had evidently been deprived of oil at some time, perhaps as a wartime economy measure, so it had developed an unnatural thirst for oil which it burnt off to produce a cloud of blue smoke behind it which must have been a trial for following traffic. At the warrant of fitness station one of the staff asked if I was burning Shell X-100 or gorse.
The fancy gearbox had also been run short of oil so the cogs were so worn that my friends found that they could change gear without using the clutch; at least they could for a time until they split one of the cogs which jammed in the bottom of the gearbox and made it impossible to move the gear lever at all. There was no way of getting it repaired or replaced but after much searching of wreckers' premises I found a 1929 gearbox that could be made to fit. Unfortunately it was only a three-speed box and was somewhat shorter than the original, but by adding a sleeve to the drive shaft it could be made to reach the differential, and to work tolerably well. With that and some new woodwork and the buckled wheel for a spare we were mobile again.
Fortunately I was sharing a flat with Malcolm Douglass at the time, and he was busy restoring an absent friend's ancient 1916 Cadillac. With him on hand I felt encouraged to take the Singer's engine to pieces and to fit some "cords" piston rings which took up the slack in the cylinders and greatly improved the oil consumption and smoke nuisance. Alas! when I reassembled it I economised on the little split pins that hold the nuts on the big ends of the piston rods. You could buy new ones for about threepence each, but the old ones looked o.k. so I reused them. And of course one of them broke after a while and let the nut work loose, so as I drove cheerfully along one day there was a bang and the piston came out through the side of the engine, taking part of the engine casting with it. Naturally we came to a stop, and had to be towed home. Anyway, I screwed a patch on the side of the engine and with a few new split pins we were away again.
Later we went over a bump somewhere and broke a leaf of one of the rear springs, and when that was replaced the front wheels dropped into an excavation on Marshlands Road where someone had dug up a cable and failed to fill in the trench properly. The jolt snapped the Pitman arm which connects the steering gear to the front wheels resulting in a certain loss of control. Fortunately we were only going slowly at the time, and there was no other traffic so when I braked and the car did a sudden 180 degree turn we didn't hit anyone. In those days I always carried a length of copper wire with me, so by using a spanner for a splint and binding it onto the two ends of the broken Pitman arm we made a good enough repair to allow a slow and cautious drive home. Mercifully some kind wrecker found me another Pitman arm somewhere.
By then, it must have been 1956, Pam was lecturing at the university, and she also got the job of setting and marking the University Entrance biology paper, and I was back at Tech with an overtime job teaching UE biology on Saturday mornings so we must have had funds enough to buy a 1946 Citroen. Pam's brother Mark said he would take the Singer off our hands, (he enjoyed mucking about with cars), so we drove it gingerly over the Southern Alps to Seddonville and came back on the bus. Apparently it stayed where we had left it, on a bank above a creek outside their house until Mark's wife, Daph, got sick of the sight of it and pushed it sideways over into the creek, (she was a big girl), and I suppose it is still there.
The Citroen was what was known as a "Big Fifteen" with walnut panelled dashboard and the gear lever on the steering column, but it had been crashed at some stage and the chassis must have been still a bit bent, for it drove slightly crabwise. It must have had other problems too, for I had to replace the cylinder head gasket, and it had some problem with the petrol vaporising in the feed pipe. However it was a luxurious ride compared with the wee Singer and we drove in style down to Dunedin in May for the University tournament. Cousin Terry came with us, as did a cheerful young American student who wanted a lift, and it was a joyful trip.
We sold the Citroen when we went to Samoa at the beginning of 1957, and for a time there we were carless, until the local traffic officer, Jack Lankow, who had finished his contract and was due to go home, sold us his Vanguard van. It drove a bit like a ute. The springs were hard and as the back of it was usually empty the ride was pretty bouncy. At some stage it was carrying some drinking coconuts in the back, and a couple of them must have rolled under the front bench seat where they remained, so I always associate it with the smell of rancid coconut juice. However it served us well enough until towards the end of 1958 when we imported a brand new Volkswagen from Australia.
Even it had its problems. It didn't idle very smoothly, and the paint was inclined to suffer under the tropic sun, at least until we got a good coat of wax built up on it. But it was a dream to drive, and although it was only 1200 cc it would pull a full trailer or my little yacht, and not complain. We brought it home with us at the beginning of 1960 and drove it all over New Zealand towing a trailer I made that unfolded into a little caravan. There was room for a bassinet in the space behind the back seat, where a baby could be soothed to sleep above the engine. We kept that car for thirteen years, so all three of our kids experienced its soporific qualities in their infancy. Perhaps that's why they all grew up so relaxed and placid. Those were happy days. We finally sold it in 1971; I'm not sure why. Of course it had the typical Volkswagen peculiarities, the absence of a fuel gage for example. Apparently Dr Porsche who designed it, didn't believe in electric petrol gages, considering them to be a fire hazard, so instead he fitted a little tap in the petrol line, down near the clutch pedal, so that when you ran out of petrol you could reach under and turn the tap over to a reserve supply, and after a wait of half a minute or so, you could start the engine again and drive away. Then you had to remember to turn the tap back when you filled up again, or next time you ran out you would really be stuck. And of course it was not uncommon for the car to choose to run out when you were in the middle of a busy intersection, where even a half minute wait could be embarrassing. But there was nothing else wrong with it, The fellow that bought it from us was a VW mechanic, and he test drove it and said he couldn't fault it. Perhaps the luggage space was getting too small for us and our three kids.
It also had a cute jack that came with it, - a little bit of steel pipe with an ingenious fitting on it that plugged into a socket under the side of the car, and which could be worked up the pipe with the help of a lever, lifting the car and depending only on friction. When you had changed the wheel you used the same lever to release the thing and it just slid down the pipe. Well in 1967 I got sabbatical leave from Massey and we went on a great OE with our two kids to Europe. I bought a second hand Vauxhall Viva in England and we drove it to Russia. Going through Germany we pulled into a layby, for a tea break and there was a big Mercedes parked there with a flat tyre. The old fellow that was driving it was escorting two well dressed old ladies, - perhaps they were all on their way to a wedding. Anyway he had got the jack out of the boot but he didn't have a clue how to work it. As soon as I looked at it I recognised it as the same as the Volkswagen one. So I jacked up the car and changed the wheel and he was full of gratitude. Looking back I suppose it must have seemed like magic for him, stuck in the middle of nowhere with two grumpy old ladies, and along comes a bloke in a little foreign car, who explains in fractured German that he comes from the other side of the world, but who knows immediately what to do, and does it. The Lord moves in mysterious ways.
In 1971, we bought a Renault 12 TL, mainly on the recommendation of "Which" magazine which did reviews of cars and gave it a very good write up. It was so quiet after the VW you could forget that you had left the engine running. We did a circuit of the South Island in it, and it towed our trailer/caravan over to Coromandel and up to Barry's farm near Dargaville whenever we needed to. Mostly it took us for weekends out to Huia where we had bought a bach in 1971. It was a good car, but built out of rather feeble steel which began to rust after a few years. In 1981 we sold it and bought a Subaru Ace.