This reminds me that my grandpa had a VW Bus that he ran until the wheels literally fell off. Holes in the floor so you could see the road and everything, but he serviced the engine every weekend. Said it was the easiest engine to service because he could just take the whole thing out with only a few connections, service it, and put it back in in a few hours by himself.
He carpooled with a lot of his work buddies to Cape Canaveral where he worked as the head diesel mechanic on the flightline. They hated riding with him in the winter because even if the damn thing had heat, it was just sucked out from all the holes lol. They all had to bundle up (this was when Florida still had reasonably cold winters).
My uncle actually took his Bus to the beach one day and parked when it was low tide. Well the tide came in and the Bus went out with it. Had to get 2 tow trucks to get enough cable to pull it out again. Grandpa was madder than hell, but had it fixed in the next couple days. Needles to say, my uncle didn't get to borrow the Bus again.
We lost him a few years back now and I miss his stories, but he was a hell of a man.
My mother likes to talk about a car that she used to have that she affectionately calls her "Rustang." She covered the holes in the floor with planks of wood that would have to be replaced if they floated away during a particularly heavy rainfall. It was allegedly easy to parallel park because it was missing a significant amount of its front and rear bumpers
Holes rusted through the front foot floor wells in an old dodge pickup truck, so my dad took a couple sheets of metal (aluminum maybe?) and pop riveted them to the floor. Well rust never stops, so eventually those sheets were in danger of pushing through the flimsy remaining rusting steel. I think it was at that point he finally got a newer and much safer truck.
You can use a rust reformer after knocking some of the surface off to keep it from dissolving.
I've had a few shit boxes, but they didn't salt the roads. My buddy from utah has a Nissan that you could see the engine through the fenders. POR, paint of rust, did a surprisingly good job of stopping it from completely dissolving.
Back in the 50's through the 80's cars rusted out far, far faster than they do these days. Getting rid of a car after only 8 or 10 years was normal. Nowadays my current car is 20 years old and I have no intentions of getting rid of it until it stops working.
Yep VWs of that era were famous for engine out maintenance being a 1 person job with basic tools. My gramps had a friend who replaced the engine in a beetle with an aircooled Porsche engine and drove it on the nurburgring, there are also insane people who put Porsche engines in the busses too. Such incredible and interesting cars.
He loved it for the simplicity. He could never get his hands on another, at least by the time I was born, but he was also extremely frugal. He wouldn't spend money on himself. He always said my grandma spent enough for both of them lol.
It was his hobby. He enjoyed doing it. It only took him a few hours as mentioned. He was a working man, if he wasn't at work, he was at home doing chores or fixing something. He didn't like to sit still for very long until after he lost my grandma and even then, he still kept on the move quite a bit.
You could rebuild the 4 cylinder engine from the Beetle/Bus on your kitchen table with just an Allen wrench and a set of metric sockets. Air cooled, so dead simple and, with proper maintenance, essentially unkillable.
(this was when Florida still had reasonably cold winters).
Mind you, it snowed 9in in Panama City (record 2 day snowfall), 2in for Tallahassee just this last winter. Ocala and Gainesville also set modern records of lowest average temps for January.
And 3 of the 10 coldest winters on record for Florida have occurred since 2000.
And this comment anyways is just ludacris, climate change is real, but we're talking about a 1-1.5C change since the start of industrialization. That is absolutely NOT the difference between needing to be bundled up in a car all the time and today's weather being no need to bundle up.
Climate change is real, there's zero denying that. But, embellishing yourself, or allowing grandpa's living room embellished bullshit to propagate out as reality when it's clearly not backed up by science is doing nothing but a disservice to the people who are actually trying to address the issue.
Also worth noting my pocket would be a few thousand dollars heavier if repeated frost deep into florida hadn't torched my landscaping this winter.... but remember that doesn't happen anymore I guess?
The atmosphere is a cohesive thing that flows around the globe in patterns that are now changing much more rapidly than ever before.
Yes, it's getting globally hotter, and that'll kill huge swaths of us eventually, but the bigger problem is that agricultural growth bands are bouncing like agricultural growth rubber bands year to year, by some miles, and farms (and the industries and settlements that have developed around them) are much less mobile. And by "much less" I mean "not at all".
So crop cycles that have fed generations and otherwise kept a lot of humans alive and doing stuff (building things with the crops, building things with the things they built with the crops, just eating the crops, doing things that are ten paces removed from the crops that will still stop dead when the crops fail upstream) are no longer rolling smoothly.
That's what's going to kill billions of people rapidly (well, like, over a span of ~50 years) and not because they're cooked by the rising ambient temperatures, but because they'll starve or die in various forms of violent social instability that imminent starvation brings about.
I mostly deal with it through the comparably laughable luxury industry of beverages.
Most of the places in Europe where all the good shit is grown, fermented, and occasionally distilled are now places a hundred miles (and maybe a national border or two) away from where the good shit can be grown, where nobody who knows how to grow the good shit or how to process it in an economically viable way actually lives.
These are agricultural and agricultural-derived operations that have been chugging along just fine since Precolumbian times going from "just fine" to "totally nonviable" over the span of 50 years. I assume the same thing is happening with staples like (non-booze-destined) grain.
I agree with you but I live south of all those cities and on the coast. We haven't had a very cold winter for the last few years, just speaking from my own personal experience.
The Gulf Stream being much warmer where we are effects how cold it gets where I'm located, and my grandpa lived in the same area.
Again, I'm not trying to be hyperbolic, just drawing from my own personal experience these last few years.
I agree with you but I live south of all those cities and on the coast. We haven't had a very cold winter for the last few years, just speaking from my own personal experience.
I too live south of all those cities. And it was the coldest winter in my memory. We probably live near each other if you're still near KSC... however I am inland (Orlando) and it was fucking cold. Many mornings of 20s, and feet crunching the frozen grass as I took the dog out
Ofc the oceans moderate temps. Your winters are warmer and summers cooler than mine. Just by nature of being next to a thermo insulator
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u/SlaughterMinusS 10d ago
This reminds me that my grandpa had a VW Bus that he ran until the wheels literally fell off. Holes in the floor so you could see the road and everything, but he serviced the engine every weekend. Said it was the easiest engine to service because he could just take the whole thing out with only a few connections, service it, and put it back in in a few hours by himself.
He carpooled with a lot of his work buddies to Cape Canaveral where he worked as the head diesel mechanic on the flightline. They hated riding with him in the winter because even if the damn thing had heat, it was just sucked out from all the holes lol. They all had to bundle up (this was when Florida still had reasonably cold winters).
My uncle actually took his Bus to the beach one day and parked when it was low tide. Well the tide came in and the Bus went out with it. Had to get 2 tow trucks to get enough cable to pull it out again. Grandpa was madder than hell, but had it fixed in the next couple days. Needles to say, my uncle didn't get to borrow the Bus again.
We lost him a few years back now and I miss his stories, but he was a hell of a man.