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I remember working on those Fords at the gas station/garage. Kind of a pain, got in the way of working on the engine a bit.
Might have been a bit of pain but not near as much pain as most of the cars nowadays.
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Problem was, you had to do tune ups once/twice a year, unlike now.
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I might be a little bit of an odd ball but I never minded doing tune ups once or twice a year.
Notice where the distributor is, they’d come in the shop, have to do the point and condenser and avoid the hot stuff.
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I don’t know if there was a reason for it or not but all cars of that era had the distributer either on the front or back of the engine the engines no matter what make were pretty much the same I often wondered why all the distributers couldn’t be put on the front to make it easy to work on.
The slant 6 Mopars had the distributor in the middle of the engine under the slant. I used to take the kids to the park on a nice sunny Sat in September or October with my dwell meter, timing light and tools and pull the dist. out and put it on a picnic table to change the points, and condense while the kids played and my wife fixed. lunch.
I have always found car maintenance and repairs relaxing. hat is probably why I never took it up for a living. There would be too much pressure to hurry to make money. I enjoy doing a thorough job, not a fast one. When I had a steady city tractor, I always had the fastest one in the fleet. Sometimes you would drive 1/2 hour to a customer and wait all day while they loaded and unloaded the trailer so there was plenty of time to work on them.
When I went on the road, we usually had a different tractor every day and every time the company bought new ones, the challenge was to find a quick way to get either more power or speed or both.
The oldest trip was on the old non turbocharged Cummins was to use a vice grip to clamp the return line shut from the fuel pump. That did not make the truck faster , but the increased pressure gave you more power on the hills.
{ was driving for one company and the shuttle van in Indianapolis took me and an Oklahoma City driver to the motel. When we got there, the clerk gave me a room but handed him the phone to call dispatch. They told him they had found a vise grip on the tractor he brought in. He claimed it was not his, The dispatcher told him that if that was his defense, he should not have welded his inital on the vise grip.The shuttle took him to the Greyhound station to get home. At least the company has to pay for your way home if you are fired out of town.
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As a kid, just remember that just because there was a lot of room under the hood, didn’t necessarily make everything accessible. Making mistakes is how we learned. I remember putting new plug in the 61 Merc. Got 7 done but broke the last one in two. Bad tools I suppose, but hard to get at. Had to make a trip down to the Shell station for a new one. Then on the 59 Pontiac, the last one under the generator came out but impossible to get it back in again. Had to devise the hose with a wire inside it to guide it in. Even then my joints didn’t swivel enough. Yeah I enjoyed doing the work but mistakes and learning from it were part of it. Now I’ve advanced to lawn mowers.
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My 2012 Camry is boring, in 9 1/2 years I have done oil changes, brakes and a windshield washer pump. Judging by my sons experience after he moved to Florida 10 years ago, if I lived there, I would not have had to do brake.I would have had to replace the battery 2 or 3 times.
I have had mostly Ford’s and Mopar’s and as oldtimer_11 said on the slant 6 it was easer to take the distributer out to change the points I also had a few Chevy’s I don’t recall witch one it was but one I had you had to take the front wheels off and go under the fender to get to the plugs when it came time for the second tune up I got rid of it.
I had a heck of a time trying to get the points adjusted right on my 68 Dodge. Then it would cut out at the wrong time if they weren’t right. Finally had a mechanic do it. So I was happy when I got GM and you could adjust them with a dwell meter and allen wrench.
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That was about the only thing I really liked about working on GM’s. plus that type of distributer was easy to get to.
I suspect that was Elizabeth Montgomery’s Corvette, she played the witch on the television show Bewitched.
Years ago I replaced the spark plugs on a V-8 Chevrolet Monza in a parking lot in about two hours, it isn’t easy, you need to raise the engine to replace the left rear spark plug. Today it takes me 4 hours to replace the spark plugs on a V-6, we have come so far.
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Interesting. I thought the new powertrain didn’t come out until the 2021 model year. I should have waited a couple of months to buy my Frontier.
No, it is the only power option for 2020 and 2021.
So I see. I think it was Car & Driver that erroneously stated that there was no change to the Frontier from the 2019 to 2020 model years.
Well the new engine and transmission along with an $8k jump in the base price, but part of the reason for the big jump in the base price is that the new engine/transmission is the only engine/transmission available. Gone (for now) is the 4 cylinder/5 speed. Rumors for new 4 cylinder and even a diesel later in 2022/2023 or 2024 abound.
Now if they would only update the body, which debuted for the 2005 model year.
Honestly, I don’t see anything wrong with the body. How long did VW stick with the original Bug body. From the pictures I’ve seen of the 2022, it looks just like a Toyota Tacoma. But a truck is a truck.
The current body does poorly in the offset frontal crash test.