I was 3/4 mile away from home one afternoon in Marietta Georgia in 1978, when I heard the "Snap', and the clutch pedal from my chevy Monza went to the floor. A frayed clutch line had had enough. The great part of this story is that the road was a very slight downhill grade and I coasted 3/4 of a mile to my apartment, into the parking lot and right into the parking spot in front of my front door. An even greater part of the story is after repairing the cable , I sold the Monza and bought a 1972 Volkswagen minivan. What a fun vehicle.
In 1973, in the middle of January, in Michigan, during a freezing cold snap (that was the 'snap' part of this story), I was driving home at 11:30pm from an art class, when the accelerator pedal linkage froze in the 'go-fast' position. When I realized what was happening I tried various things like down shifting and trying for a micromoment going into neutral, but got chased back into 4th gear by the very high revs of the engine. If I recall I was going 40-45 mph. I even tried riding the brakes for a short while but got discouraged with that result. Interestingly I dont think it occured to me at the time to turn off the ignition key (?). The one thing about VW Beetles in those days (other than being a total blast to drive), was that the cabin windshield defrost mechanism was more of a concept than an actual functioning system. So, I always carried an ice scraper for INSIDE windscreen scraping while driving. Seeing it on the passengers seat, I grabbed the handle and used the scraper end like a hook to get under the accelerator pedal and pull it back to slow the fuel flow to the carburator (kind of like pulling the reins back on a horse). This worked real well. I was able to control the acceleration and get myself home.
On yet another occaision around 1970, a friend called me to come over an see his new car his brother gave him. It was a MGA. I had never seen one before. It looked kind of neat, so I got in to go for a ride. We were going down the road at 60 mph and I thought it was going to rattle my teeth out it vibrated so badly. At around 35 mph we were driving down a 4 lane highway when there was that 'SNAP', and the drivers side front wheel went rolling off and ahead of us for a moment before veering off to the side of the road. We scraped across the oncoming opposite two lanes, which fortunately had no oncoming traffic, over to the side of the road as if we had purposely parked facing the direction of oncoming traffic, and came to a stop. As we were getting out of the car to walk home my friend very nonchalantly stated, "I'm giving this POS back to my brother".
Hi Guest!
Hey - did you know if you click on the title of a thread it will take you to the first unread post since you last visited that thread?
but were afraid to ask: 
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smilie in place of the real @
Pretty Please - add it to our Events forum(s) and add to the calendar! >> 
