Gl Registration From Speed Mining: Fill & Download for Free

ZOMG. I’ve owned such a batch of these.There was the ’79 CVCC Civic Wagon, but Franklin Veaux has done that one already.Then there was the 200SX. Looked pretty much like thisI’d been laid off and our old Golf gave up the ghost shortly afterward so I needed a car that I could pay not a lot of cash for to get me through until I found a new job. This fit the bill. The paint on mine was in slightly better shape and it looked kind of sporty, but was utterly gutless. I drove it for a year with no need for major repairs but there was a check engine light for something in the emissions system that I simply couldn’t find, so I couldn’t sell it to someone for anything other than parts. So….we went racing: Homepage - 24 Hours of LEMONS. I found four similarly loony friends, bolted in a roll cage, stripped out everything we could for weight savings, and went off to Stafford Springs CT where the beast managed to survive the race and actually finished mid-pack. We took it back the next year but it didn’t survive me not noticing quickly enough when the temp gauge shot up after a radiator hose broke and that was the end of that.Our team name was nominally “The Knights Who Say NI-ssan”, but once people saw the car with a painting on the driver’s door of a naked guy in driving position but sitting on a toilet we we dubbed “Naked Guy Racing” and just went with it. Unfortunately, I can’t find any of my photos of the car in racing trim at the moment…..But that car was the lap of luxury compared to the Subaru. Actually, two of them.Not long after we were married, (about 1990) we needed to find a cheap car for my wife to drive around town. It was another “what can we get with the money in our pocket” situation, and it turned out that a friend from college had a parent who’d recently had to stop driving due to age and failing eyesight, and happened to have a well-cared-for 1978 Subaru GL that he’d let go for a pittance. This was before the days when Subarus were all AWD, so it was a very basic — Honda Civic level — economy car. It had a tiny trunk and stored the spare tire in the engine compartmentbut it was a perfectly cromulent around-town car until some high schooler in a Toyota pickup decided he could make the yellow light my wife was stopping for and rear-ended her, totalling the car. But our Subaru karma didn’t end there; it turned out that another college friend had just bought a new car and had another 1978 GL that he’d sell us for $100. It was…substantially less well cared for, but mechanically sound. It was…rusty. The left front quarter panel had rusted at the bottom, then been bolted back to the frame, then had rusted out around the bolt so it would “flap” slightly at highway speed. I drove it on a ~50-mile each way commute for over a year. When we gave up on it, I drove it to the junkyard; it was leaking all its essential fluids, and I got $25 for it. Best deal I ever made. Godawful car, though.It did give me my best police encounter story, though. The Subie came with a bunch of spare parts including a spare dash (just in case) that were jammed into the trunk when we got it. Never needed many of them and I just left them there. And as it was my commutermobile and pretty much a piece of crap to start with, I was, shall we say, less than diligent about keeping the interior clean. Get a snack on the way home? Toss the wrapper over my shoulder into the tiny back seat. I should also say that at the time I was a 35mm photography buff, so there was a collection of empty film canisters back there two. Oh, and I had shoulder-length hair.So I’m on my way home from my job at IBM in Kingston, NY, back up to the Albany area where we were living. That included about a 40-mile stretch on the NY Thruway (I-87), and one evening I was cruising along in a pack of cars at about 72 (in a 65 zone) when we passed a NY state trooper in the median. Usually this isn’t a big deal, but that night the trooper decided to pull me over. Maybe it was the flapping fender. Either way, there I am in the breakdown lane, and the large trooper is asking for my license and registration. It’s dusk and he’s looking inside the car with his flashlight as he’s talking to me and suddenly I see him go on full alert and ask “What’s that?” as he’s looking at several empty 35mm film canisters in the back seat. I immediately realize that he thinks he’s got a drug bust, and explain that I’m a photographer and those are just empty film canisters. He asks to see one, and I slowly reach back and grab a couple off the back seat and hand it to him. I watch bemusedly as he opens them, sniffs, sticks a finger in and tastes it and looks extremely disappointed. (Side note; I’ve never been one to indulge in illegal drugs personally, but I knew enough people who did that I knew exactly what he was thinking.) So he asks, “Can I take a look in the trunk.” Now, don’t do this but I made an exception because I knew what the trunk looked like and, with images of Repo Man dancing in my head, got out of the car and unlocked the trunk. The trooper opened the trunk, looked at the batch of stuff crammed inside, shook his head slightly, then said, “get out of here” and walked back to his car.On the other hand, the car that everyone thought was a piece of junk but was actually a bit of a Q-ship was this guy…It was 1978. I’d left the small town in NC where I’d grown up to go to college in upstate NY. My family made a trip in the station wagon to haul my stuff up in September, and I flew home at Thanksgiving. We couldn’t afford to fly me back and forth all the time, though, so my parents managed to buy me a car. One of these in black was sitting in front of the house when we arrived. 18-year-old me was…underwhelmed. It was an automatic 1974 Fiat 124 sedan. What I didn’t realize was that the “Special” badge on the back meant that it had the Lampredi twin-cam engine from the Spider and significantly more “voom” than the exterior would lead you to expect.I drove it back and forth from approximately Asheville NC to Albany NY from 1978 until I graduated in 1983 plus twice to Boca Raton, FL when I went on co-op there for six months. Drove it to Boston for baseball games and science fiction conventions. Took it on time/speed/distance rallies through the boonies in NY and VT.Despite the Fiat reputation for reliability (and rust!) it never stranded me. Among its…interesting…features were a “twin spark” distributor. It had two sets of points in the distributor, one with 10 degrees more dwell than the other and it would switch between them based on engine temperature for better driveability on cold starts. At some point (no pun intended) the cam in the distributor got nicked somehow and would wear down the points. I got adept at adjusting them by eye and setting the timing by ear. It was remarkably advanced in many ways; it had independent suspension and four-wheel disc brakes; I remember surprising more than a couple of BMWs with it. The wildest feature though, was the “cruise control”. Like some of the other cars described here, it had a manual choke with the typical little knob on one side of the steering wheel that you would pull out to set the choke. But on the other side of the wheel was another knob mysteriously marked “THROTTLE”. When you pulled out this knob and twisted it, it would clamp down on the throttle cable to hold it in place. That was…not insanely unsafe on the interstate in light traffic, but…what in the name of all the gods were they thinking?It lasted longer than I had any right to expect and could hold an amazing amount of stuff. I moved home from college in it including the entire frame of a queen sized waterbed. After I graduated in 1983 and took a real job in Florida I replaced it with a TR7 convertible which was…not a good idea.That was the car that started my love for European cars, though. I grew up in a NASCAR Ford/Chevy/Dodge world and this was my first experience with a “foreign car”. Since then I’ve owned another Fiat (124 Spider), a couple of Saabs, a Porsche, a Triumph, a couple of Audis, a couple of VWs and a BMW and assorted Japanese cars (including an RX-7 and a Miata).