Malfunction Junktion !

Ray McCune's Website

A few more things I remember being valuable learning experiences.

Beware of your environment, when playing with fire.

Well this one goes back to when I lived in Kenmore, yep, I lived in Kenmore for a couple years. On 15th Street in an apartment building, with 5 apartments and nobody crazy enough to park in the garages in the rear. So being a complete madman at the time I would buy and sell junk cars and work on them in the garages in the back. I had a set of oxy acetylene torches, and I liked to modify cars, a lot. In fact, I liked to shorten them. I shortened a Plymouth Station Wagon by removing the entire back seat area, this put the rear wheels nearly under the front seat,. It most resembled a "Big Assed Gremlin". If it had ever driven again, I'm sure it would have been dangerous because of the lack of weight on the front wheels. I had plans to replace the engine, but because of the design of the engine area it became a real project. And as I was working in an open faced building and had zero security. Things started coming up missing, at a greater rate than I could replace them, and I sold it to a scrap dealer, who was delighted to have it and used it in his lot for a couple years to draw in the suckers. It was a sever modification, I think he told people it was a prototype for a new NOMAD. After this I decided to get something with more room for engine swaps and internal expansion, so I shortened a Chevy Van, well actually a Chevy Corvair Corvan. I figured with the engine in the rear, and the steering gear in the front, the center was pretty much useless, so I removed it. It ended up with the front and rear wheels so close together, it would only roll 3 inches, if I put a cement block between the wheels. It would have really been cool to drive, except for the little issue I had with the cutting it in half. You see the garage had an asphalt floor, which over the years had cracked and caved and generally turned to goo. Add to that years of leaking cars, and of course some of my activities, and well it was actually a highly flammable surface. In addition, the Corvair Corvan had two large plastic tubes, that ran from the rear engine to the front for heater and defroster operations. They were tucked up in the frame, to protect them from any type of assault, except maybe that of an acetylene torch cutting the entire vehicle in half. Now, if you have ever cut plastic with a torch, you may have experienced something like what I'm about to describe. Remember, this is an unlit, 4 stall, flue block structure, with an inflammable floor, built to house buggies, I think, because a car was really hard to shoehorn in. I'm wearing coveralls, and dark goggles, crouched on the floor of a stripped out van, that I had to enter by shimmying through a door that wouldn't open all the way because the stall is too small.

Maybe I shouldn't tell this, it really seems not too bright at this point. I didn't own an extinguisher, in fact never used one before. This was when I was a Machinist Apprentice at Goodyear, a new father, and doing anything to stay out of the apartment, and get a garage fix... Well I started it, I guess I'll finish.

As I cut across the roof I had a little trouble with the glue they used to hold the headliner in place, catching fire. But I just beat it out with my gloves and kept cutting. I'm pretty sure I took out the entire roof section and one side, the side with the double open doors as a unit, they were hanging against the garage wall as I started across the floor, with the torch. I had removed the carpeting, no really, I peeled it out before any of this, or just after it first started smoldering from the dripping headliner glue. But anyway I was cutting pretty good and it was getting real hard to see. No Fuel lines, no brake lines, well they only had a little juice in them anyway. OH CRAP the power steering lines, well they needed shortened anyway, but there was some thing else. As I unknowingly continued into the next large plastic tube, the first one was making that "zip----zip---zip" sound made famous by burning the insulation off 300 Ohm TV Lead in Cables. Something nobody will ever hear again thanks to 75 ohm coaxial cable, but I digress. I really couldn't see anymore, and it was getting harder than usual to breath. As I pulled the goggles up I still couldn't see, not much, just the flames under the floor of the van. It looked like the whole van was smoking, that was nothing new at this point. But the flames were new, and getting bigger and it was getting hot, and it wasn't just the van. The floor under the van was burning, and burning quite well! I had been having trouble keeping the torch hoses out of the way, they tended to melt when in contact with hot steel or the flame from the torch, so I had recently moved them to the roof opening, which had cooled of course, and I had pushed the door section to the rear, sort of under the vans rear wheels. So, there was no pulling the van out of the garage, and no way would beating it out with my gloves work. Then I remembered, in the back stairwell of the apartment building, on the landings, were these pitiful little red fire extinguishers, maybe a pound, no more than two, and there were two of them.

Now I remembered this, as I was trying to get out of the burning van/garage deathtrap I had created, while trying to save my torches, hoses, and tools, and my butt! I ran up the stairs and grabbed the first extinguisher, I had no idea what it would do. I had never used one, and I was reading the directions as I ran out the back door and saw the smoke rolling out of the garage's van filled opening. I shot that sucker all over the van, the garage, and everything in sight. It helped, but it wasn't enough. I raced to the second landing, grabbed that extinguisher, and remembered there was also one in the front stairwell, I blasted through our apartment and grabbed that one on my way out the front door of the building. I ran up the insane mountain drop off driveway, which was why I was the only one using the garages, and hit the garage at a full run with both pins pulled, extinguishers blasting. After about a minute I ran back in the apartment, filled a large pan with water, and went out to finish the job. I managed not to burn down the garage, and the powder which was everywhere for years there after, kept it from catching fire again. So I did get it welded together afterwards, but I never got all the powder out of it, or the garage, or my taste buds. That stuff is nasty! I tasted it for years. In fact I recognized it when I made the move to the Fire Service. I did get that van welded together, gas welded of course. I never had an electric welder until into the 80's and then it was a Lincoln buzz box. Which worked fine, but not nearly like the welders I have today. Today I could do the whole job in a weekend, and feel safe driving the contraption afterward. Well, as safe as you can be with a 40 inch wheelbase.

Man, are we happy out here!