Terry Tales

Error in Transmission

I wasn’t a car guy back in my college days, but even I knew that a used Chevy Vega didn’t amount to much. My fiancée bought a green Vega hatchback in 1977, a year before we got married. It cost her the princely sum of $600 and the guy guaranteed that the engine was okay now. Ominous words, but the price was really low!

That Vega engine was an early example of an aluminum block mated to a cast iron head. There’s a huge difference in the thermal expansion of those two metals and it creates a lot of stress when they’re bolted together and heated up. Like in an engine. The president of GM believed that an aluminum engine shouldn’t need a radiator, but the design engineers insisted. Even so, the Vega radiator was too small, the engine was prone to overheating, and the aluminum block would warp if it got hot enough. And a warped block soon led to a blown head gasket. The fix required pulling the engine out and milling the block flat again. I was skeptical of this whole story, but it was Deb’s money and her decision. And the work must have been done right because that aluminum engine never gave us any trouble.

Debbie was perfectly okay with the Vega’s 3-speed manual gearbox. She’d been raised on a farm and had learned to drive in a 1949 International pickup. The Vega was a veritable luxury car compared to her dad’s old truck. I wasn’t impressed with the Vega’s performance, but it worked for us as a couple. My vehicle at the time was a Yamaha 250cc motorcycle. It wasn’t all that great for two-up riding and it certainly wasn’t good for Montana winters. But I could hop on the bike when I felt the ‘need for speed’ and Deb could run leisurely errands in the car. The Vega was a real workhorse, we even folded the rear seats and loaded my bike into the back one time.

I was a senior at Montana State University in 1978, with two weeks of winter break in my schedule. We decided to spend Christmas at my parent’s house near Ronan, about a five-hour trip, via I-90, from our apartment in Bozeman. I had morning classes, so we left on Friday afternoon with Deb driving through snow flurries under darkening skies.

The Vega began making a rumbling, rasping noise as we drove past Deer Lodge. It didn’t sound like the engine, so I told Deb to shift down into second gear. The noise stopped, so I told her to keep going.

“We’ll just get there a little later,” I assured her.

We were already halfway to my parent’s place and I hoped the car could last a couple more hours. It’s tough to know what to do when you’re away from home and short on money. It wasn’t one of my better decisions, but I wanted to get my dad’s advice. He was a pretty good mechanic in his day.

It was fully dark and snowing hard by the time we approached Drummond. The transmission noise was back and the freeway was icy. Deb and I were both feeling tense. We hit a rough spot and the jolt caused Debbie to fishtail and slide off the road. She’d been going fairly slow due to being in second gear and there wasn’t any damage to the car, but we were stuck. I could still spin the wheels in first and reverse, so I figured we could at least drive off the freeway into Drummond – if we got back on the road.

We were within sight of main street, but half a mile from the freeway exit, so I climbed over the chain-link fence and slogged through the fresh snow into downtown Drummond. There weren’t any service stations open, of course. In 1978 everything was shut up tight after six pm. There was a nice guy at the bar though, who was happy to help. He drove me back to the Vega in his 4-wheel drive pickup and quickly pulled us up on the road again.

I didn’t want to repeat my trek through snow and dark in a more remote spot, so we limped off the freeway in first gear and parked the car at a weigh station. I figured it would be safe there for a day or two while I planned our next step. I’d called my parents from the bar in Drummond, and dad was already on the way to pick us up. We only had to wait for an hour in the cold and then our bad day would be over, or so we thought.

Dad arrived in his Plymouth Scamp as promised and we transferred boxes and bags into his trunk. Dad asked me to drive because he’d rushed off without his wallet and license. I noticed the needle on the gas gauge was near E as we approached our exit to highway 93. Locals used to call that spot the Y, and it had a truck stop where a traveler could buy gas or diesel late at night. Dad didn’t have any money on him and he didn’t want me buying him gas.

“We can make it,” dad insisted.

So, I made another poor decision and pressed on. We made it another twenty miles, running out of gas on the steep hill just outside Ravalli. I made an uncomfortable, engine-off U-turn in the middle of highway 93 and coasted back to the lone service station in Ravalli. It was closed, of course.

There weren’t any helpful drinkers at the Ravalli bar, so dad called my mom. She had a spare key for the pickup and finding a gas can was no problem, but where would she buy gas at eleven-thirty pm? Luckily for us, dad had an account with a bulk fuel supplier in Ronan. He was a mail carrier at the time and used a lot of gas on his rural route. The bulk price was lower than a full-service place and, best of all, customers pumped their own gas. Each pump had several key slots for different accounts and each customer had their own key to operate the pump.

So, mom found the necessary keys, hopped in the pickup, stopped in Ronan to pump a couple of gallons of gas, and arrived in Ravalli a little after midnight to save the day. The only thing she forgot to bring was a funnel. There we all stood, looking at the can of rescue gas with no way to bridge the 6-inch gap to the tank. Discussion ensued.

The drunks in the bar, again, were no help. They’d never even seen a funnel. Okay, roll a rubber floor mat into a cone? Awkwardly thick and kind of dirty. A piece of cardboard? Maybe a magazine? We tried several methods and finally managed to get most of the gas into the Scamp. Then the whole family made a little parade to my parent’s house, only eight hours after the car started to make noise and I told Deb we’d be a little late. But getting there was only half the fun.

The next day, we considered options. I didn’t want to risk driving the Vega any further, but an 80-mile tow was far too expensive. And dragging it behind dad’s pickup over icy roads didn’t seem like a good idea either. My uncle Roy was sure that our little Vega would fit in the back of his big cattle truck. So, we threw some two by six planks in the back, grabbed the come-along winch and set off for Drummond again. The big question was where to find some kind of loading dock.

We found a driveway near the weigh station that went uphill and almost parallel to the main road. Roy backed his truck up to the side of the driveway so that the bed was at driveway level and we used the planks to bridge the gap. I drove the Vega up the driveway and turned it sideways so it faced the back of the truck. Then we carefully pulled the car across the makeshift loading ramp with the come-along. Roy’s truck was plenty long and there was almost a foot to spare on each side of the Vega. Unlike the previous day, our retrieval trip went well and we unloaded the car at dad’s shop building without any difficulty.

We took a couple of days off to enjoy Christmas and then dad and I started the process of fixing the car. The first step was to jack up both ends and put the car on blocks to give us room to work. Dad worried about how to handle the heavy gearbox without a purpose-built transmission lift. But it was surprisingly light and we managed to get it out of the car using muscle and a small floor jack. Dad scoffed at the quality of these flimsy new car designs.

We weren’t surprised to find that the transmission was toast. We didn’t see an obvious leak, but there was no oil inside and who knows how long it had been running dry. To check the transmission oil, you had to crawl underneath, remove a small plug, and feel for it with a finger. Oddly, I hadn’t ever done that.

Dad was confident that we could replace it ourselves, but a new transmission would cost hundreds of dollars. So, we went to our local junkyard instead. The Vega model line had sold fairly well, but wasn’t very reliable, so junkyards of the time had both a steady supply and a high demand for Vega parts. Not only did they have a transmission, it was already removed and ready to go, for only $30. It was a four-speed instead of a three-speed, but hey, that would be an upgrade!

The ‘new’ transmission mated up with the engine and the speedometer drive cable just fine, but it turned out to be about two inches longer than the three-speed version. That meant the driveshaft needed to be two inches shorter. Back to the junkyard!

“Sorry, we don’t have that driveshaft. Or any driveshaft the right length to fit your Vega.”

What to do? A new driveshaft would take a month to deliver and I needed to be back at school the next week. With little choice, and without the experience to know if it was really a good idea, I decided to modify the one I had. There was a universal joint at each end of the driveshaft, so I could simply cut off the rear u-joint, shorten the driveshaft, and weld the u-joint to the shaft again. A machine shop would have been nice, but dad had an arc welder and an assortment of hand tools, so that’s what I used.

A sheet of paper wrapped around the driveshaft provided the guide to mark a perpendicular cut line. Fifteen careful minutes with a hacksaw and I had two pieces of driveshaft. Another thirty minutes with a metal file and a try square and the cut end of the hollow shaft was squared up and ready to weld.

Back to the hacksaw. It seemed to take forever to cut through the existing weld and free the u-joint. I didn’t want to cut too deep into the u-joint stub and the weld was actually harder than the steel of the driveshaft. Eventually, though, I was able to separate the two inches of unwanted shaft from the u-joint. A few more minutes with the metal file smoothed the cut and I was ready to slip the u-joint stub into the end of the newly shortened driveshaft.

Dad was skeptical that I could get it straight enough to run at highway speeds without vibration. But he helped align the pieces as best we could and then I fired up the arc welder. I’d taken a welding class in high school, so I was actually better at this part than my self-taught dad. I knew how to strike an arc and how to advance the molten puddle at a steady pace to penetrate without burning through. I also knew enough to tack the pieces together with a couple of spot welds and recheck the alignment before proceeding. Everything looked okay, so I began a painstakingly slow series of welds. I ran a bead about an inch at a time, rotating the shaft in between so I could maintain the proper angle with the welding rod.

It took all afternoon, but the modified driveshaft fit exactly as I’d hoped. We got the Vega down off the blocks and our car was functional again. A short drive up the gravel road to the highway didn’t reveal any problems. Once on the pavement, we gave it a real test, going through the gears and slowly accelerating to fifty mph. Fifty? We were obviously going a lot faster than that! It turns out that the speedometer drive on a four-speed Vega transmission is different from the one on the three-speed. About a third slower. Our indicated fifty was really seventy-five.

Deb and I drove the Vega around Ronan a few times over the next week and we felt mostly confident driving it back to Bozeman. It took a couple of months, though, before I stopped feeling a sense of panic at every random noise from under the car. The speedometer took some getting used to, but we learned to make a mental adjustment for the indication. Twenty was actually thirty, thirty was forty-five, forty was sixty, and so on.

The four-speed gearbox upgrade worked just fine for the next couple of years and the head gasket remained intact, but I never did learn to like that car. After I graduated and got a ‘real’ job, we decided to get rid of the Vega and buy a Subaru station wagon. The Subaru was far more reliable and it also had four-wheel drive to handle the Montana winters. Deb advertised the Vega for $400 and had no trouble selling it. The buyer found my transmission story hilarious and decided that the speedometer was a feature rather than a problem. I do have to admit that Deb’s Vega was a good investment. We drove it for three years, had a fine adventure, and in the end, it cost us only $200.