Three Cylinders Are Better Than Two

I talked to Marc this morning. The death ray lives! He will not be able make lunch tomorrow unless he buys another car. He has a scheduling conflict with the Trooper. He's looking to buy an old Geo Metro. Figures he can pick one up for about $1500. They get something like 35 or 40 miles per gallon. You can't get transportation much cheaper than that. AND they have a three cylinder engine, which you can actually see! It would be worth buying just because it is such an oddball. Whoever heard of a three cylinder engine in a car? (Well, I have, but we'll get to that.)

More importantly, the engine is so small that in spite of all the plastic stuff that is crammed into the engine bay of modern cars, you can still find it. Most cars the engine bays are packed so full you cannot find the engine because of all the plastic do-dads stuffed in on top of it. This is an important feature on a $1500 car because you can bet that sooner or later it is going to need some repairs and if you don't want all your savings to go to the repair shop, you are going to have to fix it yourself. If you are going to work on it yourself, it is better to have a car that has room to work on the engine.

For (an upside down) example, he wanted to replace the oil sender on the Trooper but (in addition to the $250 price tag) he could not find it. Of course the Trooper is four wheel drive, so you have the front drive axle and all it's supporting structure underneath the engine. There is so much stuff down there you cannot even SEE the oil pan, much less locate the oil sender. That's what you get for buying these new fangled foreign jobs. I have an American made four wheel drive pickup truck and I do not have this problem. I can see MY oil pan, or I could if I ever crawled underneath.

Since there does not seem to be a problem with the oil pressure, only with the gauge, I suggested he paste a picture of his kids over the oil gauge. A true Click & Clack (the Tappet Brothers) kind of solution.

But back to three cylinder engines. This reminds me of something that happened a long time ago. Saab used to make very small, very funny looking little car with a three cylinder, two stroke engine. A friend of mine in high school got hold of one and we drove it from Utica, Ohio, to Los Angeles so he could interview at some art or design school. It did fine on the flats but when we pulled out of Denver early one morning heading up into the Rockies we could not get it go much faster than a crawl. We had a disagreement about whether we were going uphill or not, and I have to admit that there were very few visual cues to indicate such, it was still dark.

Still, Matt insisted that there must be something wrong with the engine, so we stopped at a filling station to have a look. Nothing obviously wrong, but look, the sparkplugs are right on top of the engine, easy to reach. We could easily take them out and have a look. Bad move. The head was aluminum. The first two plugs came out easily enough, but the third brought the aluminum threads with it. Nothing wrong with plugs, put them back in. Start the motor and BANG! What was that? Oh look, there is a new dent in the hood! The engine ejected plug number three, the one with the stripped threads!

Now what? Well, it is six o'clock on Sunday morning, no shops are open, guess we'll just press on. And so we do, all the way up the Rocky Mountains on two cylinders, engine making awful noises, blowing gasoline fumes, crawling along, searching the map for the lowest passes that will get us through these mountains. Finally we reach Grand Junction, a town that looks like it might be big enough to have an automotive machine shop that could fix our problem. Well, yes, they could, if they were open, but it's Sunday, and they aren't.

We're getting desperate. It's time to apply some Afro-American Engineering (nigger-rigging in pre-Politically Correct lingo). We dig up some bailing wire, jam number three spark plug in as tight as we can make it. Loosen the head bolts all around number three plug. Wrap the bailing wire around the insulator of the plug and around the head bolts, tight as we can make it. Tighten up the head bolts. Don't put the spark plug lead on. Fire up the engine and see if it holds. It does! Wonderbar! Well, in for penny, in for a pound. Will it work with the spark plug lead attached? Hook it up and try it again. It's still holding. My gawd, are we geniuses or what? Don't wait, lets get going before it decides to give out. It held all the way to Los Angeles where we were able to effect a proper repair.

Sometime later I was talking to my cousin-in-law about this car and the terrible mileage we were getting. He had one of these old two stroke Saab's and he told me the exhaust pipe gets clogged. He had taken his off, heated it with a torch and beat it with a hammer to dislodge all the accumulated crud. After this operation, the mileage was restored to it's previous glory. The alternative was to buy a whole new exhaust system for hundreds of dollars. I think my friend sold his before resolving the mileage issue.

Update June 2016 replaced missing pictures.