Toymods Car Club Inc: General Car Talk => Hurry up CLG (do not open if Crown pictures offend)

Toymods Car Club
www.toymods.org.au

F.A.Q.

Home

Members

Toymods » General Car Talk » Hurry up CLG (do not open if Crown pictures offend) Show: Today's Posts :: Show Polls Email to friend

Author

Topic

CLG
Forums Junkie

I supported Toymods

Location:
Perth, Western Australia
Registered:
December 2002

Re: Hurry up CLG (do not open if Crown pictures offend)	Tue, 02 August 2005 16:44

I was flicking through the net and found the link to some photos I had a mte host, so thought I'd tell the stroy of the flower power ute, and the reason it was pulled to pieces as seen in the photo above. Picture it, a pleasant day during Summer just past. I had the undertaking to drive down to Albany (400Kms south of Perth), to pick up the flower power ute for a friend who had purchased it sight unseen, bar a few photos. I muttered the immortal words, "Wanna come down to Albany, pick up a car and drive back, we'll be back before the Sun goes down?" to my mate Seth, so the road trip was on. I packed the car with spare wheels, heavy rope, and a few tools, collected the car trailer, checked the tyre pressures on both trailer and tyre, put ONE speaker in the passenger's footwell for tunes, and we set off, around 9:30ish. The trip down there was quite uneventful, we even passed people doing less than the speed limit (100Km/h with the trailer on). We finally got to the farm, to find the old girl sitting in the paddock - it had been there for quite a while. We towed the ute around the paddock three times with a tractor to free up the drum brakes that had seized, from lack of use then loaded it onto the trailer. I looked at the balance and thought it was about as good as it would get, so we tied it down. Out onto the gravel road we came in on, keeping the speed to about 40Km/h to get a feel for the tow, and also keep the dust down, and also snap a few travel shots: Finally made it onto the bitumen, and slowly increased the speed. We got to about 75Km/h and felt a trailer whip starting, so we stopped and untied the straps and ropes, repositioned the ute, and then retied it all back down. We also looked for other cause of the whip other than incorrect weighting and saw that the Left Front tyre on the trailer was low on air - something to rectify when we got to the first air compressor. We Set off again, and got to about 70Km/h and it all happened again - this time more agressively, and unfortunately uncontrollable. The results: I'm still shitty at damaging my Falcon - parts for these old cars are hard to find at the best of times, and this one had very good sheet metal and trims. There was only minor damage to the ute, though I thought it strange where it did show signs of damage, but more on this later. the ute broke four tie downs and launched itself forward over the trailer denting the boot of the Falcon with it's front bumper. We walked out of the crash without injury, but realised we were stuffed - 400Kms from home. Not long after plowing through the bush, the local ranger came along with his diesel 4WD Hilux. He took out his snatch strap, and hooked onto the end of the trailer. I looked at the weight of his car and the weight of my setup, and thought, no way in hell would his ute pull us out - I was wrong!!! It was amazing to watch. I was in the falcon, engine running (didn't even loose a drop of water in the crash!), and in reverse, waiting for the momentum of the snatch to start before I applied power also. The Hilux gripping with all four wheels, took up the slack and then the whole car skipped into the angle it could pull at - the back end moved over about a foot, and then dragged us out! Next some clever jakcing and proping to get the ute back onto the trailer while being snatched again, saw the flower power ute returned to the trailer proper. The Ranger left with our thanks, and we proceeded to take stocjk of the damage and see if we had enough straps and rope to tie down with?! We managed to cobble together another four tie downs, and assessing the load again, took off once again. The bloody trailer whip was still there so we drove to a maximum of 60Km/h. We finally found a road house and filled the suspect tyre, di a few electrical repairs, refuled the car and ourselves, and set off again, it was now late afternoon. I had also organised to pick up some parts owed to me from friends in Cranbrook (100Kms north of Albany), and we got in at 8:30 that evening. Spent an hour at the pub, had a Bundy and Coke to celebrate our escape, then thought about our plan of attack to get home. Now, we were limited to 60Km/h as the extra air in the tyre hadn't helped the trailer whip, and nothing we did, improved it either. I suspect a combination of factors led to it occuring, the foremost being suspect tyre, a possible "crab" in the trailer (never saw it towed from behind so can only assume), and tow car weight. Basically being stuffed from the antics of the day, we thought about grabbing a room at the pub, and driving home the following day, however 60Km/h on the Albany Highway would create far less hassles in the middle of the night than the middle of the day, so we set off at 9:30 to make the journey home - we were still 300Kms away! I cleaned a possum up around 11:40 (sorry mate, but I wasn't swerving for a kamikaze possum given our previous experience) and about 11:45 the trailer started whipping again, followed by a complete tyre failure, yep you guessed it - the suspect tyre! Went to change the wheel only to discover the trailer mags had the wrong wheel nuts for the spare steel wheel! We stole one wheel nut from each of the rear wheels of the Falcon (replaced it with one mag nut each) and didn't even think about taking any from the front wheels, and drove the mag wheel nuts onto the steel rim - we were still hours from home and it was the best it was going to get! More fuel, more food - thankfully I brought a jerry can for the trip - in the middle of the night, there was only one roadhouse between albany and Perth that was open for fuel - we would have run out if not for the jerry can! Finally made it to the outskirts of the metro area, and the Alternator light came on strong - complete alternator failure! Seth was driving at this time while I dozed, i was awoken by "uh dude, the alt light has just come on?" my reply - "just keep driving"!!! We got home about 3:30am, I grabed a quick shower and went to bed. got up at 9:30ish to survey the damage: As you can see above, Mechanic Puppy was not impressed we had destroyed his chariot! The crash was a blessing in disguise for the new ute owner - it showed the ute was absolutley full of fibreglass, and extensively rusted - every panel had a skim of fibreglass over it, the sills were completely rusted out and replaced with a fibregalss shell, and the structural parts of the body were also held together with fibreglass. It became uneconomical to freight to Sydney as was the original plan, so the owner graciously gave the car to me for parts. Any one want to buy a red interior? [Report message to a moderator]

[Message index]

-=] Back to Top [=-

Current Time: Wed Jan 8 08:36:02 UTC 2025

Total time taken to generate the page: 0.0070459842681885 seconds

.:: Contact :: Home ::.