Thursday September 2, 2021

 

 Baja Car Potential

 
    After talking to a woman who had ardently participated in Baja racing, she told me there are a bunch of Roseau County enthusiasts who race Baja (bah-hah) cars on dirt tracks, like the one that the late Billy Austin made years ago outside of Roseau. It was all news to me, but sounded like it was a great deal of fun. I never got there.

    A month ago, one of the wife’s Facebook friends featured a poster about a Baja Race event in nearby Middle River, Minnesota; https://youtu.be/Js9jeoYHEKc so Baja racing was on my mind after the engine of our 1989 Honda Accord started, after not running for five years. The little four-cylinder engine idled down to a purr so smooth I could’ve set an open can of beer on the valve cover and not spilled out a drop, (saying as much about my late-in-life eye-hand coordination as its engine timing).

    It was last licensed in 2014. Its three flat tires and mounted spare had sunk into the ground a few inches where they weren’t buoyed up by snowmobile track or two-by-six planks. When I put a battery in it, I had the idea it might start, which it did with just a little prompting. It was then, that the wheels began to turn in my head, if not so on the car.

    Originally, I had gotten the idea to scrap the Accord because the scrap iron prices had risen appreciably. Chairman Joe had taken advantage of the salvage scheme and contributed a 1960-something VW, loaded with a bunch of steel odds and ends to Jon’s Salvage in Greenbush, who even came and got it.
 
    The Honda had long since become an eye-sore. Vehicles like this tend to become storage facilities if parked too long on the fringes of our yard, just as Chairman Joe correctly predicted my red Ford Escort wagon would become, after he and I pulled it off a trailer upon its demise and parked it there in 2017, two weeks after I retired. That engine is never going to re-start; it’s no Honda.

    We had purchased the Accord from Chairman Joe’s sister-in-law who had purchased it new and had put several thousand miles on the 299,333-mile engine. It was practically the spitting image of an alike 1989 Honda Accord, same model, color and appointment (almost) that I had bought from Chairman Joe that his father had owned; I had helped him drive it back to Minnesota from Boston in 2000. I had taught some of our grandchildren to drive in it; my wife’s oldest son had driven it to work at the toy factory for two years when he lived here, as had I before I got the Escort.

    It was classic four-door model with retractable, flip-up headlights, sun roof, tinted windows, cloth seats, and custom trim package -- that had all seen better days. Taken out of regular use, it sat forlornly beside the 1995 GMC van, (which we still use during the summers primarily) and had become home to mice and garter snakes, whose tell-tale droppings and shedded skins on the floorboards, under the seats, and under the hood, shared its interior with several Tupperware storage boxes of old camping gear and car parts accumulated over the decades I discovered, once I started cleaning out its booty. The wife had tried to limit the intrusion of mice over the years to no avail.

    We put the car in Roseau Sell or Swap and titled the sale ad: Baja Car Potential $500. I would’ve asked far less, but the wife has an attribute for horse-trading that I do not. The first interested party was from the Warren/Alvarado area and negotiated with her over the price, not me. I tried to interject its sell-ponts, of course; the fact the engine runs so smoothly, that all the lights -- and sun roof work like the day it rolled off the show room floor; which lead to an existing problem, I knew about -- the back brake drums were seized-up so the back wheels wouldn’t turn without some serious physical effort.

    I learned about that issue in 2016, when we had gotten it started during a lull in our deer hunting effort. The son who had driven it more than the others wanted to see if it would start, and of course it did; but the drums were stuck. We worked on the drivers side wheel and got it loosened up -- but then remembered we were supposed to be deer hunting and shucked the whole idea-- til now.

    Loosing the drums may not be too big a problem, I had hoped, but watched a couple Youtube videos on the subject, just to reacquaint myself. With a potential customer on the horizon, I decided to give it a good try myself and worked a good portion of an afternoon to free the wheels up to no avail; I managed to wiggle the drivers side drum from the brake lining enough to say I had some success, but not enough to get it to turn at all. It was too hot of a day my body told me, so I quit.

    The Alvarado guy agreed on the discounted price, the wife had wrangled from him, but the day he was to come and get the car, he called saying he had found a car closer to him and wouldn’t be coming.

    But almost in the instant we had hung up from him, someone else called who was not to be deterred by a couple frozen brake drums. The voice on the other end sounded familiar to me and the more we talked, the harder my old brain worked to identify it was a co-worker of mine from the toy factory all those years ago. 

“Gary?”

Hoo-yah!

    Gary’s teenage sons were getting into Baja racing, and had built a previous car. So when he learned it was me, it was a fun afternoon for all of us, including the wife, who admitted getting rid of the old Honda was almost an emotional experience when she thought of all the fun the grandkids had in it those years ago. (Chairman Joe might have felt the same way.) Maintaining safe Covid distances, she took several pictures of the loading of the car, on their trailer, accomplished with the use of my tractor and forty-feet of chain.

    She wasn’t there when the boys hungrily looked at the car’s Baja potential or hear Gary say, “Oh yeah, this’ll be great! It’s a four-door -- that’ll give us some extra length ... We’ll bust out all the glass, remove all the seats except for the drivers seat. Put a roll bar in it. Weld the doors shut ...”

    “Call us when you race it, Gary!”