I was listening to Blitzen Trapper's 'No Man's Land' (below) and it brought to mind some fond memories of the Frankenbird. The Frankenbird was my best friend's 1978 Pontiac Firebird and even though it didn't have the screamin' chicken on the hood I loved that damn car. While I never could get him to sell it to me, for the better part of a year that car was effectively mine and the line in the song about taking a ride in a black Trans Am reminded me of that time. Anybody else have a vehicle that when you think back on it, "damn, that thing was fun" is the first thing that comes to mind?
Damnyankee (my best friend, we have the same first name so we use the Mason-Dixon Line to distinguish between the two of us) had bought the Frankenbird a few years after we got out of college. He was in the process of moving to the DC suburbs when he bought it so I didn't even get to see the car for the first few years he had it. It'd been sitting in a barn for years when he bought it and when he tried to drive it from Louisville to Maryland it ended up taking a few weeks and a couple visits to repair shops before he made it.
Unfortunately for him they didn't manage fix the issues with it so once he made it to Maryland he parked the 'bird and there it sat for the next year and a half. Partway through that time he moved back to Louisville and moved in with me, leaving the car in Maryland. After listening to him recite the litany of issues with the car for a few months I'd heard enough and told him that if he would fly me to the car then I would fix it (or at least rig it in proper hillbilly fashion). This we did a few weeks later, and we even got to see a bit of Atlanta (airport) along the way thanks to an overly long smoke break.
I have no photos of the Frankenbird but the photo above is what it looked like (even the color is the same). Externally the car was in great shape, probably thanks to its years of barn living but pretty much everything else was a different story. Watching Damnyankee pop the hood by pulling on a wire sticking out of the grill with a pair of pliers told me all I needed to know about what lay in store for me.
We had a few days and a few hundred bucks to get it running and a nice long list of things that needed fixing. The headlights and windshield wipers didn't work, the heater core was rusted out, some part (I still don't know its name) that engine vibrations was causing to move when it shouldn't and was choking out the engine, along with sundry smaller issues to deal with. Things got interesting as soon as we tried to fire it up, I was kneeling next to the rear wheel well smoking a cigarette and as soon as the motor caught the fuel lines started spitting out gas. Luckily that was only some hose clamps that needed tightening but it gives you some idea of all the random little things that can pop up.
We were just trying to get the thing drivable enough to make it back to Louisville so we weren't worried about permanent fixes, just rigging it good enough to get down the highway. (Although intended as temporary, all our repairs were still holding up a year and a half later when the driveshaft went kaput) Youtube proved to be an invaluable source of info for this, we figured out how to bypass the heater core by watching a video of someone doing the same thing to an old Shelby Mustang. To stop the one part from moving I improvised a mount with a U bolt and some brackets (the Lowe's employees didn't seem to think we were serious when we told them the parts list was for a Firebird).
Working on cars always takes longer than you had hoped and this time was no exception. We ran out of time before we got everything fixed so we set out for Louisville once we had gotten it mobile. We were worried that bypassing the heater core might cause it to overheat so we took the long way back to dodge the worst of the Appalachian Mountains, heading up into Pennsylvania before heading west through West Virginia and Ohio. Dusk was falling as we rolled into Columbus, Ohio and with no working headlights still we just barely made it to an AutoZone there.
'Rat's nest' doesn't do justice to the mess that was the wiring in that car, I'd given up trying to troubleshoot it in frustration. Since we still needed headlights I got an alligator clip and some wire at Autozone and improvised. I ended up cutting the hot lead going to the circuit for the headlights and splicing the alligator clips onto the end of that before clipping it directly to the hot post of the battery. Now we had headlights, you just had to pop the hood to turn them on or off...
Rigging the headlights on the fly like that proved to be the biggest excitement of the whole drive. To the surprise of our friends and family, we rolled into Louisville about 13 hours after leaving Maryland (we figured out after the fact that nobody actually expected us to make it). Having brought the car back from the dead using a random assortment of spare parts we felt we had to name the car Frankenbird (it'd had no name prior to this).
Just a few days after we got back Damnyankee had a little run in with the law and caught an assault on a police officer charge and got to spend a nice little while on home incarceration. Thanks to this the Frankenbird was mine to do as I pleased with until Damnyankee was free of confinement and fled the state with it.
The car was a mobile deathtrap, with no seat belts, holes in the floorboards, and door latches that could be a little tricky but I loved the damn thing. It had a bit of an exhaust leak and was loud as hell, (you could literally hear the car coming a mile away) so loud you had to yell to be heard over the motor. There were just wires sticking out where the radio should have been but you wouldn't have been able to hear it over the engine anyway. When you put the pedal down and heard that bored out 350 roar none of that mattered though.
Until I had to surrender the keys, I took every opportunity I got to burn dinosaur bones in the Frankenbird. I took to going to the grocery store about 1 am so that I'd have the expressway all to myself and then I'd just cruise. Those had to be the longest trips to the grocery I've ever taken but 'the long way' is a lot more fun when you're driving something like that.
Who else has a favorite car or fond memories of playing around with a hot rod? When I was driving the 'bird I couldn't hardly stop at a gas station without someone coming up to talk to me about the car, usually with a story about their brother/cousin/uncle who had one back in the day. Drop me a comment if you've got a car or a story about one that you're rather fond of! Y'all don't do anything I wouldn't do and remember, it ain't illegal if you don't get caught!
(Photos are of one of my neighbor's Caddy, I don't have any of the Frankenbird)