𝐌𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐑𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟏: 𝐏𝐢𝐭𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐬

 𝐌𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐑𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐏𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝟏𝟏: 𝐏𝐢𝐭𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐬

Brakes weren't the only mechanical things I had to worry about maintaining on the route. Running a rural paper route or mail route is rough on a car. No, it's brutal. 

I crossed 9 railroad tracks a day on my route. 11 when I had to do Yonder Hill Campsite.  I'll get back to that later. And very heavily loaded on Saturdays. Twisting the car on and off of the road at almost every box on uneven shoulders. The constant stop and go nature of a run. Gravel roads with washboard and potholes that couldn't be avoided. The teeth jarring fierceness of frozen surfaces of all kinds heaved up by the frost going down. Washouts. You name it. I became a chassis maintenance and repair master from my days as a rural paper carrier. 

Martin's Repair across the road from our Queens Line farm was a handy place for repairs, but Keith ran a very busy shop and I couldn't always get in right away, so I learned how to repair my route cars myself. It was more a convenience thing than a cost cutting measure, but I certainly saved a lot of money over the years doing my repairs myself.

As I mentioned quite a bit ago, I had my Indy 500 Brake Pit Stop set up at home, exactly halfway around the route. One of the things that had to be accounted for with each car was the absolute junk lug nuts they came with from the factory. Some bean counter got it in his never-laid-a-hand-on-a-wrench mind that it would save GM 10 cents a car to make the lug nuts smaller than finished size out of regular material, but wrap them with light shiny sheet metal to bring them to finished size. I quickly learned to absolutely, positively hate those cheap, crappy lug nuts, because the tin caps twisted on the good material and jammed solidly in my impact sockets. Then I had to drive them out with a drift punch. Oiling the socket helped marginally, but at least half of them still jammed. Running the impact back and forth helped, but they still jammed. Once the tin cap twisted, they never came out right again. They even jammed in the car's own lug wrench. When they were tightened on to the wheel, I could get the socket off by yanking and ripping up and down and sideways both ways on the impact wrench, but it would be exasperating to get that lug nut out of the socket next time I had to take the wheel off. The solution? As soon as I bought another car, besides the other regular route equipment I transferred to it, they each got a brand new full set of auto parts store solid steel lug nuts, and those factory junk pieces of crap lug nuts went in the scrap pile where they belonged from the beginning. Replacing those facsimiles with the Real McCoy made all brake and suspension and chassis maintenance and repair ever so much easier and less frustrating from then on. It was money well spent. 

If one of those bean counter geeks ever had to change a tire once in their lives on one of those cars those lug nuts would have disappeared the next model year, never to return, guaranteed. 

Besides brakes, the next chassis and suspension things to be repaired most where sway bar links, front wheel bearing and hub assemblies, McPherson struts, CV drive axle assemblies, rear shocks, front ball joints, and rear wheel bearings, in pretty much that order. And exhaust system components, fitting about in between wheel bearings and struts in frequency. 

A sway bar link failure might show itself up as a 'pop' or a 'ping' as the top nut part of the long bolt that held the assembly let go and shot off against something above, but it was more apt to be that I just noticed the car was suddenly rocking more side to side as I went on and off the pavement at boxes. That could get a little irritating and it was harder on all other suspension pieces as the car rolled and pitched more. The sway bar links were just long bolts with rubber bushings and washers and spacers. The below picture isn't a J Car setup, but a similar 'stacking' of the components. The J Body setup had the sway bar much closer to the swing arm than this, as shown in how much shorter the spacer sleeve appears in the above pic. From this, another one of the symptoms that showed in a sway bar link failure was a rapid hammering sound that appeared on rough roads as the sway bar end contacted the swing arm. Because the sway bar link bolts appeared to not have any rust preventative coating from the factory, they rusted out inside the bushings where salt water sat, and then the top or bottom nut portion got so thin that it blew off on a bump or a curve. It was almost a bigger job to take the wheel and tire off than to replace the sway bar link itself. As the kits came with parts to do both sides, and the other was apt to fail soon anyway, I usually replaced both sides while I was at it. If I thought of it, I coated the new bolt with grease so it wouldn't rust again. The car was good for as long as I was going to own it then. 

The next most often component to replace was a front wheel hub and bearing assembly. The need for replacement would slowly announce itself in a faint droning sound that would gradually increase over time until it was a loud moaning noise that increased in frequency and volume with speed. Once it was loud it was definitely time to change it if I hadn't already because it could then cause uneven wear on brake pads on that side and cause darting of the front end of the car with uneven road surfaces. 

A semi-convenience of changing them was built in to their design. They were just held in place with three capscrews and the main CV (Constant Velocity) nut. Replacement was in order of: Jack up that side. Remove the wheel and tire. Stick a large screwdriver in the fins of the caliper, then break the axle nut free with a 30MM socket and a 2 foot Johnson bar, possibly with a pipe on it for extra leverage. Then, run the nut the rest of the way out to the end with the impact wrench. Now, pry back the brake caliper to open it, and undo the two capscrews to remove the caliper, and hang it on the spring of the MacPherson strut. Pull off the brake rotor, and the wheel bearing and hub assembly is now exposed for removal. Leaving the axle nut on until it was flush with the end or just slightly protruding, drift the nut with a big club hammer to free the splines of the axle from inside the hub. Remove the axle nut the rest of the way. There was one big hole in the hub. That was for accessing the capscrews that held it in place. With the transmission in Neutral, rotate the hub until the head of a capscrew was visible through the hole. Remove that one, and repeat for the other two. Then, crawl in the wheel well and beat and pound on the bearing assembly for all I was worth until I was blue in the face, sweat dripping in my eyes, muttering things I shouldn't under my breath, wishing I could get my hands on the fiend that conceived this setup in the first place, ruing the day I was born, and thinking there had to be at least 7 better ways of doing this. Finally, just as I was about to give up and die of a heart attack, I would detect a little movement; a crack of separation between the hub and bearing assembly and the steering knuckle it was bolted to. Another five or ten minutes of driving on it from opposing angles and it finally would unceremoniously just fall out like it was the first exploratory tap of the hammer. The culprit, as always, was rust. Rust that snapped the sway bar links off, and rust that seized the wheel bearing and hub assemblies in place in the steering knuckle. To make darn sure that didn't happen again, I cleaned out the remaining rust in the steering knuckle as best as I could, and liberally coated it and the new bearing and hub assembly - and myself - with anti-seize compound. 

If I had to ever change that wheel bearing and hub assembly again, it wouldn't be a quarter as much beating to get it back out. Other than the first one, I never actually had to beat another bearing and hub assembly out again to replace it that I can remember, but if I did the anti-seize compound would work for me and save me a lot of effort. I didn't even have to remove them to replace a MacPherson strut assembly with an 'Easy Strut', which consisted of pretty much everything but the steering knuckle the bearing and hub assembly was bolted to. That was because I just transferred the steering knuckle and the bearing and hub assembly to the new strut as a unit.

The first front wheel hub and bearing assembly I replaced myself failed again within one completely disheartening week. Only 7 days from a new one to needing a new one again. They weren't cheap in those days. There was no eBay or Amazon much less overnight delivery with Amazon Prime. No, they were 200 bucks plus tax, and a trip to Canadian Tire in Renfrew or Pembroke; whoever had one in stock. I asked Keith Martin what the heck I did wrong. I was sure it had to be something I did. Or didn't do. He asked me if I torqued the axle nut properly. The axle nut? I didn't know I had to. He told me that was what put the 'pre-load' on the bearing. The bearing assembly had to be torqued up tight to not wear. He instructed me to put a two foot Johnson bar on it and jump with all my weight on the end of it. I didn't know the fine threads of the axle shaft or nut could take that much! Then drive a hundred miles and do it again. I tried that and I never had a new front wheel bearing and hub assembly fail prematurely again. I still do it that way today, thirty years later. 

Replacing a strut wasn't difficult. It was really just 6 nuts nuts beyond a brake pad change. There were two 17 or 18 MM nuts to sandwich the bottom of the strut onto the steering knuckle. The bolts were a little tough to get out manually but I found if I spun them with the impact wrench they'd come out easily with just a few very light taps of a hammer while I was turning them. Take off the tie rod end nut and pop the tie rod out with a 'pickle fork', and then the easiest part: three 13 MM nuts under the hood at the top of the strut tower and the strut would pretty well fall right out.. Reverse the process to reinstall and all was good. That part was really well designed and made returning to a 'like new' ride quality surprisingly easy. 

The earlier CV axle assemblies weren't very good. I had several failures of them. They would announce their limited remaining time by starting to make a clicking sound while turning. They didn't allow nearly as much grace time from beginning to make a sound to an all out failure. If something flew up off of the road and tore the rubber boot and gravel got in, they were history in 2 or 3 days. They would lock up during a turn and bust apart, and that was it; Stranded. I kept a close eye on CV boots. There were wonderful CV boot kits available that came split so you just cleaned the joint and packed it with the grease that came with the kit, wrapped the split boot around the joint and cinched it with an industrial strength zip tie. Done in minutes. No need to pull the entire shaft and take it apart to replace the boot. A huge time and effort saver. 

Rear shocks were super simple to change, so hardly worth mentioning except for the fact I already mentioned I used air shocks to increase my level load carrying capacity.

Front ball joints. For how much I really actually enjoyed doing my own brake and suspension work, I did not care much for changing ball joints. The reason was they were riveted in place with three big, thick, large headed rivets, not bolts. They had to be ground out with a grinder. That wasn't so bad in itself. What was bad was the swing arms that the ball joints were riveted to were only made of light stamped steel rolled over onto itself. If I ground too deeply, I wrecked the entire swing arm, so it was grind a little, then check, grind a little, then check, grind a little, then check... until the entire head was ground off flush, but no harm to the swing arm. Then the rivet still needed to be drilled through in bigger and bigger drill bits until I could punch out the remainder of the rivet with an air hammer and punch bit. Then it was repeat the whole process for the two other remaining rivets. It was a slow and tedious process. I could buy an entire new swing arm with the ball joint already installed, but they cost a lot more and I hated taking out the two bolts hidden up in the subframe of the car that the swing arm... well... swung from. So it was grind a little, then check, grind a little, then check, grind a little, then check... Once I finally got the last rivet out, a couple of raps with a hammer and the ball joint fell out. After all of that tedious work, installing the new one was a breeze: Just stick it in and attach it with the three new included bolts and nuts: The way the original should have been in the first place! I didn't care for that job at all, and even less after the first one, knowing what a pain in the neck it was going to be. But the show must go on! Or the mail must go through. Or the newspaper. Whatever. It just had to be done, and I saved a lot of hard-earned middle of the night money doing that instead of paying a professional mechanic shop rates I really couldn't afford.

I rarely had to replace rear wheel bearing and hub assemblies. They weren't easier than front ones, and they weren't harder. They were just different. I wasn't nuts about working on rear drum brakes, and replacing a rear wheel bearing and hub assembly necessitated that. 

Exhaust system work was a different sort. Usually when I needed to do exhaust system work it was due to rust, and it meant rust in my eyes. No matter how rusty an exhaust system, I always found it fought me tooth and nail to remove the bad sections. Hammers and chisels, grinders with cutting wheels, hacksaws, reciprocating saws, and air chisels. And what did all of those have in common? They made the rust fly. Grinders and cutting wheels made the rust fly and a portion of it in red hot particles that did an amazing job of getting through my then-thick hair and burning my scalp. I can't remember ever just unbolting a bad section and removing it. No, it was get the car up on ramps, get me down on my rump, and eat rust. Lots of it. And no matter what safety glasses or googles I wore, I still got rust in my eyes. But, there sure was satisfaction in turning the key for the first time after an exhaust repair and hearing a soft, sedated purring from a former uncivilized beast of a vehicle. 

During the time of the Frenzy, in a snowstorm on the route one night, we came off of the Zion Line on a 'big first half' and turned back towards Cobden on County Road 21, or the Foresters Falls Road as it is now known. It was snowing pretty heavy, and that area of the Zion Line/Foresters Falls Road was very open and susceptible to drifting from a West wind, which was exactly what was blowing hard that night. With everything white and blowing white and the ditches filled in and the edges of the driveways hidden by the uniform snow, I misjudged Curry Campbells' Repairs yard and hit the ditch driving in to his shop to drop off his papers for the day. The Frenzy dove into the ditch and back up onto his yard with a small explosion of snow all around us. We got a good jostling around in the interior, and a new, very loud exhaust note instantly presented itself as that fresh, soft snow didn't carry the car at all and the culvert ripped the exhaust right off from and including the catalytic converter on back and wrapped it around the rear axle. I was mad at myself for missing the yard, but Denise said, "I thought we were in the right place too." It was so hard to tell. I was just judging distance from the Zion Line corner. All topography was disguised; camouflaged in that uniform atmosphere of white. Much worse and we would have needed aircraft instrumentation to judge where we were. Not much we could do but keep going, and allow the wind swept bare parts of the pavement where they showed up to do their duty and wear the hanging parts of the wrecked exhaust system off in a long spray of sparks. Fortunately there was no other real damage other than my pride. Well, I didn't really have much pride so there just wasn't any other damage to speak of. 

For a week or so because it was the dead of winter and so cold and snowy, I drove with virtually no exhaust system. I didn't like it, but I had no place to work inside. It was pretty loud, so I tried to keep my RPM's down as much as I could in the wee hours of the morning. One morning after I dropped JR's Country Store's papers in their rack and walked up to the counter with my daily chocolate milk and a Big Daddy chocolate chunk cookie, Ray said to me, "Danny, people are starting to complain..." And they had every right to. 

That afternoon I dragged a parts car with a good exhaust in from the field with a tractor, flipped it on its side with the loader, took out the driver's side shock and coil spring, and basically cut the entire exhaust system out of it. I lifted the back of the Frenzy high in the air with the loader, and undid the rear shocks so the rear axle would hang down as low as possible. With it like that I wiggled and pried and twisted and jammed and crammed that one piece exhaust system in over the rear axle and attached it at the bolt on section ahead of the catalytic converter, attached the rear hangers and that was it. I lowered the car again and reattached the rear shocks, and she was back to her sweet, quiet, meek little self again. Until she took her next frenzy. 

While we're talking about exhaust systems, one thing that a lot of the J Cars I bought had in common was, because of their age and mileage by the time they got to me, they would be getting due for a new muffler. A new one in those days was over 80 dollars plus tax. Becoming a tractor parts reseller towards the end of me being a carrier, I had access to new farm tractor mufflers. One of my suppliers had an excellent CD with all their hundreds of tractor mufflers searchable not only by make and model application, but also by dimensions. Very convenient. I can't remember the tractor make and model number that corresponded to a J Car, but I do remember my wholesale price at the time: $23.00. Almost a quarter of the price of one at Canadian Tire. But the bonus didn't stop there; the tractor muffler was of a lot heavier construction than the car muffler, so it would last longer to boot. Guaranteed it would outlast the car for me. So, if a retired route car was out in the field with one of those mufflers on it, and the one I was driving needed one, I could just snatch one from a parts car and I got extra life out of that one and had one for the 'new' car for free. In the winter time I would just buy a new muffler from my tractor parts suppliers to save messing around in the snow, but in the summer I'd yank one out of a parts car if it needed one. I never burned out a tractor muffler. 

When Brenda and I met after I had quit the route and sold off all of my parts cars for wrecking, she had a sweet little 1999 Pontiac Sunfire 2 door coupe. A different body outside and inside, but my same familiar J Body chassis underneath. I could change front brakes in it faster than she could get dressed and do her hair. After a couple of years together, her car was developing two things: a bad passenger front wheel hub and bearing assembly, and a burned out muffler. Right down my alley. Now fully tractor parts guy and no longer a carrier, but very, very familiar with the underpinnings of her make and model of a car, I bought the same tractor muffler and installed it for her. No cost to her, of course, to install it, and I paid for the muffler myself. I still needed to change the front hub and bearing assembly as it was making that steady, low droning noise that resonated throughout the car. 

We picked up her Mom and Dad one Sunday afternoon to go to the Shanloon Chinese restaurant in Renfrew for their Sunday buffet. Brenda told her Dad about the new tractor muffler and how much cheaper it was. He always looked for anything he could think of to put me down, so he started razzing about how stupid it was to put a tractor muffler in a car, and how loud it was. There was no use of me saying anything. But Brenda did. "Dad, that's not the muffler, that's the front wheel bearing." He scoffed at that and said she was just covering for me. I knew better than to waste my breath so I just said nothing. 

The following week a really nice warm, bright Spring morning presented itself, and I got up and replaced the front wheel hub and bearing assembly on the passenger side and, second nature to me, had it done before Brenda got up. When she came out to the shop for the day, I had her test drive the car. She was very pleased to have her car back to its sweet, quiet little self. 

The following Sunday, as was our weekly tradition, we went to her parent's place and picked them up to go to Renfrew for the Chinese buffet. I didn't say anything. I just let the situation set itself up. As we were driving there, Brenda said to her Dad in the back seat, "See how nice and quiet the car is now, Dad?" 

He responded, "Yeah, it's about time you came to your senses and took that stupid tractor muffler out and put a proper car muffler back in! What a boneheaded ****in' thing to do that was!" 

Brenda looked at him in the mirror, levelly meeting his eyes; "No, Dad: He changed the front wheel bearing. The tractor muffler is still there." There was a deep offended 'harrumph' out of the back seat and that was the last either of us ever heard of that. 

Speaking of tractor parts, another place where my tractor parts business met rural paper delivery was headlights. The later J Cars had plastic headlight units with replaceable bulbs. They weren't nearly as good as sealed beams. They fogged over in a dull haze, seriously reducing their effectiveness. I found they didn't have much side dispersion of light to begin with so I couldn't see the ditches well. Ditch visibility is critical for a nighttime paper carrier. Seeing what was in the ditch helped you prepare for what might come out of it. My solution to that was to add a pair of simple, cheap, Massey Ferguson 35 headlights close together to the front bumper of the car. They certainly gave the car a goofy, googly-eyed appearance, but I wasn't out there in the middle of the night barely making minimum wage - if that - in someone's old trade in to impress anyone. Those big frog-eyed headlights really helped out on the sideways dispersion of light, and up close on the road as well. With those lights on, besides the ditches, I could see the paper boxes really well as I pulled up to them on a foggy or rainy night. If a monkey was going to drop out of a tree on me I would see that coming too. I could see the squirrels running on the lines above me. I remember the morning crew at the Four Corners being fascinated with them and asking me to turn them on, thinking they'd be super bright and powerful. They weren't. That wasn't what I had them for or I would have used more modern focused driving lights. I wanted a broad dispersion of light and they gave me that to a tee. With them on, I drove in a big round hole they punched through the nighttime darkness. They looked funny, but they really worked well for what I intended them for.

One place I absolutely hated going in was a certain campsite. Their very long, twisty gravel driveway was just terrible. By far the worst section of the route, bar none. Nothing else was even close to it. No matter how slow I drove, which slowed me down a lot and put me behind, that road was just absolute torture on the car. That was in the days of the J2000. I would drive in the field where I could to not be on that road. Three times the vibration of that awful road snapped the starter mounting bolts off and I had to have them drilled out and replaced. 

The first time it happened really caught me by surprise. Mostly learning my lesson about falling asleep behind the wheel, I had pulled over for a power nap. When I went to start the car again the starter just spun free with a thunking noise. I opened the hood and was very surprised to see the starter just hanging there by its battery cable. It was grounding enough to engage, then it lost ground as it swung around on the cable causing the thunking sound. That was a pickle. "C'mon MacGyver..." I didn't have much on me, but I did have a car jack, a lug wrench, and a large screwdriver. I used the jack to hold the starter up in place. The starter twisted out of place by its torque when I turned the ignition key. I used the lug wrench to hold it jammed it in place, and I shorted the solenoid with the screwdriver, and she fired up! "ATTABOY!" I tied it in place with some paper bundle straps so it wouldn't snap the battery cable off during the rest of the route, and got done.

Keith Martin told me he was amazed at my ingenuity getting it going again with snapped off starter bolts, and that he wouldn't have thought of that. From a mechanic like him I took that as a high compliment. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Or necessity is the mother of invention.

I no longer shut off the car for a power nap until I checked to make sure the starter bolts hadn't snapped off from the wicked vibration of that awful roadway.

We found that later J Cars had a small stamped steel bracket added to the outboard end of the starter that helped support it. We added that and the bolts lasted longer, but still snapped off again. I had had it and told my supervisor Garry either I don't go in there any more or I quit. No negotiation. "They go or I go, Period." I won, and I never broke another starter bolt in close to a million more kilometers in car after car. No more checking for broken starter bolts before I shut off the engine on the route. 

As much as I tried to be prepared for all mechanical eventualities, due to the ongoing variability of running a nighttime paper route and the unpredictability of a spontaneous mechanical failure, occasionally something would arise that was just plain unexpected. 

We had a complete brake failure one morning. One paper box they were fine, the next one my foot sunk to the floor on the brake pedal. Rats. A blown brake line. We were in the Cavalier. A blown brake line was a pain in the neck, but somewhat manageable. Just slow down by gearing down, don't go too fast, and use the parking brake for extra braking when I needed it. But... this was different. There was a squealing in the driver's side rear brake. Not just when I used the parking brake; all the time. I wasn't sure what that was all about, but any time there was a problem but you could keep going, you kept going. Newspapers were only good for one day. They had no shelf life. So we kept going. 

There is a certain heightening of senses for a nighttime driver; you know you're on your own so you develop a constant low grade paranoia of environmental and mechanical outbreaks of a completely unexpected, unpredictable, capricious, and totally helter skelter nature. This was one of them. You never really completely relaxed on the route, no matter how good you felt, how good the weather and visibility was, and how good a condition your car was in. Your Spidey senses were always scanning, ready to tune in sharp on a problematic frequency. My sense of smell caught it: hot steel. Hot steel was bad. Very, very bad. Like the run is about to come to a literal grinding halt bad. Hot steel normally only comes from a bearing about to completely fail. That didn't compute with a brake failure. Something very out of the ordinary was going on. I stopped and got out and looked. The rear wheel on the driver's side was smoking hot. The paint was actually smoking! What in the world... I couldn't even begin to touch the wheel. Denise got out and came around to have a look.

Zero shelf life of a newspaper be darned, this was definitely a Stop situation. No question about it. It had to cool down enough for us to be able to then continue on to help. As we stood looking, suddenly there was a 'WHOOOF!', and fire erupted out of the wheel well! Orange flames surrounded the tire and came out of the slots in the wheel! Denise had her 710 ML bottle of Pepsi in her hand from our gas stop at JR's Country Store. Thinking fast, she doused the flames with a hard squeeze of her hand on the plastic bottle. I thought they would just erupt again, but they didn't. I guess her cold drink from the cooler at the store lowered the temperature of the wheel just enough to prevent it. There had been another odour that I just couldn't put my finger on but now the dots connected: hot brake fluid. I had never smelled hot brake fluid before, but now I knew what the fuel for the flames was. 

We likely would have lost the car if Denise hadn't shot her Pepsi out on it. I don't think there was any water source close enough to have backed the car in to to have saved it otherwise. She saved the day. Well, the car. It appeared that the day itself was pretty well wrecked.

At least it was daylight. We refilled Denise's bottle out of the first ditch water we came to and very cautiously drove to Keith Martin's place and pulled in. Driving in to the shop, I told Keith what was going on. He couldn't believe brakes could get hot enough as to set fire to their own brake fluid, so I told him to get a good source of water ready. He grabbed his garden hose he used for his tractor dynamometer and aimed it at the wheel. I sat back in the drivers seat, and, with the door still open and looking back at the rear quarter, asked, "Ready?" 

"Ready." 

I pressed the brake pedal, and, as a fresh shot of brake fluid hit the red hot steel inside the brake drum, it instantly erupted in another, identical 'WHOOOF!' The flames shot out of the wheel well again. Keith doused them with his garden hose and shook his head in disbelief. "I've never seen brake fluid get hot enough to catch fire before!" Spraying lots of water onto the wheel to cool it down, we jacked it up and removed it. Then we sprayed the brake drum down to cool it and remove it. It came off surprisingly easily, the heat buildup having separated it from the hub it would have normally been rusted to. The cause of the problem immediately presented itself when all of the inner brake pieces, oily and blackened from burning, tumbled out on the ground, bent and ground up. Something had failed in the brake shoe setup and they fell out of place and jammed inside the drum, pressing on it. Without them in their proper place holding the wheel cylinder pistons in, the pistons blew out, allowing brake fluid into the drum and explaining the sinking brake pedal making me think we had blown a brake line. Regardless of the presence of brake fluid, the resulting friction of the brake shoes and levers and pistons and springs all piled up in a heap under the wheel hub in the drum caused the heat buildup. The grating steel was already practically at ignition temperature. Without air flow from moving, it quickly hit ignition temperature. It just needed fuel. That came when fresh brake fluid was dumped in from above from me pressing the brake pedal. Or it just dripping down when we had stopped before. 

We pinched the flex line for that brake shut with a pair of Vise Grips, refilled the brake fluid reservoir, and pretty well had most of three brakes for the rest of the route. There was air in them by that time, but they were still there. A totally manageable situation. Back on the road only losing maybe three quarters of an hour to an hour! Then it was a just simple matter that afternoon of getting the parts we needed and rebuilding both sides of the rear brakes for even braking, and bleeding the entire system. Once that job was done it was totally back to normal. However 'normal' the completely unpredictable nature of a rural nighttime paper route can ever be. That was the only time a set of rear brakes ever fell apart like that on me, and the only time either Keith Martin or I ever saw brake fluid get hot enough to spontaneously combust. 

On the subject of brakes, as they were my highest wear and expense item, I did whatever I could to extend their life. That entailed doing what I could to keep them cool. Heat buildup is their biggest enemy, and that's exactly what they get on a rural paper route. Just like Eddie Rabbit, 'I Love a Rainy Night'. The constant tire spray from rainy roads kept the brakes cool. When it wasn't raining I drove through every puddle I could find. Fresh snow was excellent for extending brake life as well. There was a very long puddle along the Haley Road that stayed full for days after a good rain. That was my Haley Station Brake Bath. I drove through there at just the right speed to really splash the brakes well, but not to be through it too fast and limit their immersion. The brake steam rose in a huge cloud around the car. There were a couple of places where there was a puddle on the passenger side where I was making a right turn. If I hit them just right, when I turned to the right, if Denise hadn't gotten her window up, the cloud of acrid steam came in all over her; "BRAKE STEEAM!" It was a bit of a mean trick, but pretty harmless. Except for all that asbestos in vapour form. 

Ohhh, truth be told, I always bought premium metallic brake pads for their added ability to withstand heat and resist brake fade, so there wasn't any asbestos in them. None. Zip. There. Happy now? I'm not such a heartless sort after all. 

One morning, I was driving into Haleys in a car I had just bought the evening before. A Pontiac Grand Am, I think. Bright blue, and in excellent condition. Beautiful. No J Car was available, so I 'settled' for that. It was automatic and power windows and everything else and a little bigger than a Sunbird or Cavalier. And very cushy. As usual, when I got there, I headed for my Haley Station Brake Bath. As in hundreds of times before, I rolled into it and out of it in a cloud of steam... to a dead stop. The engine was dead. Lots of battery so I kept trying to start it. Nothing. Nada. It turned out that V6 with its individual ignition coil packs did not appreciate being wet. Dead. All six of them shorted out. Their replacement cost was more than I paid for the entire car and I was not willing to do that. Eight hundred bucks and not thirty miles 'til it was DOA from just driving through some water! One particular naval nomenclature suited it to a Tee: Dead in the Water. I sold that heap off for parts or scrap and never looked at another. A car that can't drive through a puddle to cool the brakes is not a paper route car. I rehashed an old Sunbird that had been through the wringer two or three times but still ran and drove just fine. Well, passably. It was beat and ugg-ley, but it just wouldn't die. And it wasn't one bit adverse to all the water I could throw at it, so it dove back into my Haley Station Brake Bath again, day after reliable day. You couldn't beat a J Car for blood'n'guts reliability. 

It might not be the right place for it, but that backup buggy deserves recognition. It was a 1989 Pontiac Sunbird 4 door. Yes, a 4 door. The small window bane of my existence. Except... it wouldn't die. After the J2000 and the Cavalier RS, I basically figured 6 months lifetime left for a route wreck when I bought them. Something would go that wasn't worth fixing in an average of 6 months. Some cars (not J Cars) didn't make it all the way around the route even once. Some went for a year or more. But the typical was 6 months. One winter I blew through a car and needed one. Nothing was available. In the Auto Trader I found that Sunbird at a dealer in Kemptville or Smiths Falls. 200 bucks. I was really in a vehicle jam somehow, and asked them if they would deliver it. They did - for no charge! They towed that car all the way up here for that price! Him and his buddy just seemed to want to go for a drive so they threw a tow bar on it and hauled it all the way up here. He warned me on the phone, "It isn't pretty but it runs good. The front passenger wheel bearing is noisy. The front passenger door doesn't open. And it's dirty." 

You had me at "it runs good." Sure enough, it did. Darn good, as a matter of fact. It was kind of burgundy in colour, and just generally rough. A good vacuuming out did wonders for the livability of the interior. I couldn't get the door panel off from the inside to free up the door, so I thought to myself, "It's only a 200 dollar 4 door; who cares?" After saying that I took a grinder with a cutoff wheel and cut three sides of a square in the door and peeled the metal back. I found the linkage that came apart and reattached it and the door opened and latched once more. It never came loose again. I rolled the sheet metal back and screwed a piece of galvanized steel over it and that was it. Ready for the route. I had no expectations of that car. None at all. I only bought it to drive until I could find a better one. It sure showed me though. It was my backup for years. It absolutely refused to die. To be nice it was kind of like an undead swine flu victim. After the door handle hack repair, I never fixed another thing on it except for the prerequisite brake pads from time to time and an oil change whenever it actually came to me to do so. Which was seldom. Not with anything else. Just that one. I just drove it. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of kilometers. I retired it at least 3 times from full service for something else only to rehash it again by just getting in and turning the key. Best car deal I ever made. Well, other than getting 4200 dollars and tax taken off the Frenzy when I bought it. It was so clockwork reliable it never went out to the field with the parts cars. It stepped into the place of cars a lot better looking than it had been in years. No matter what I was driving at the time, it was sitting in the back yard, ready to out-live yet another one and step up in its place when that one went toes up in the clover. That car belonged in a Mad Max movie as the last thing still running in an apocalyptic landscape of nothing but sand, psychos, and heat waves.

That was off on a little bit of a tangent there. Maybe that car should have had its own chapter. I couldn't let it go without a mention of it somewhere. It was just unbelievable. Kind of the Energizer Bunny of route buggies. It definitely wasn't built on a Monday or a Friday. That car could still be running somewhere for all I know. If it ended up in a demolition derby, with any kind of half decent driver it would have been the last car running. No doubt in my mind. 

Landscape-wise, washouts were dice rolls when it came to driving through them. As I said in the Frenzy chapter, the Cavalier met its end from driving through one. I learned my lesson from that and was much more careful from then on. I had a white 2 door Sunbird coupe and was coming out Acres Sideroad to the Fourth Line when I came over a hill in the dark and there was a washout. Well, the road was low there and the water from the West side often overran it in the Spring of other years then dried back up again. I thought nothing of it and just slowed down and drove through it for a brake bath as I often had in the past. This time it was different. It had cut a deep, narrow channel through the road, invisible under the calm surface of the water. I hit it with the front tires and stopped very short with the back wheels off of the ground by probably two or three feet. Not wearing a seatbelt for mobility, my forehead hit the windshield and I got a big goose egg, and I wrenched my right wrist. 

My nearest paper customer pulled me out with his 4x4 pickup. The car was alright except the driver's side front wheel was noticeably closer to the back of the wheel well than normal. A bent swing arm. Well, the tire didn't rub, so it was keep going. The alignment was out, of course, but it still drove alright otherwise. 

I had quite a headache and my wrist was pretty sore and my hand was almost useless. Ray and Jeanette were pretty concerned about the bluish-red goose egg on my forehead when I walked into their store and wanted me to go to the hospital. Ray even offered to take me, but I still had the second half of the route to do, and, if I wasn't carrying my head in a bucket I wasn't going to any hospital. I did the Queens Line papers up to the farm, and stopped in and took some pain killers and had a power nap. When I woke back up, feeling a little better, I turned around and went to head back out the driveway to continue when the car stopped and laboured when I put my foot on the gas pedal. I got out and checked and that front tire was now jammed against the back of the fender well. I looked underneath in front of the large space between the tire and the front of the fender well and the swing arm had snapped off between its two bolts that held it to the subframe. If that had happened on the road at speed it could have been very, very bad with a nearly complete loss of control situation. The Good Lord held that swingarm together for me to get home and only let it fall apart where it was safe.

Shifting the remaining papers to the old stalwart backup route buggy, I finished the route and then came home to change that swingarm with one out of a parts car. After a good long nap, that was. My head felt a little better but it wasn't much fun doing suspension work with a nearly useless right hand. I chose a car that I had changed the ball joint on the driver's side so I at least wouldn't have to do that again.

I never drove through water across the road again until I was absolutely certain the roadway was still there underneath. I would take a stick and prod the ground ahead of me under the water. Cold, wet shoes and socks beat the heck out of a goose egg on the forehead and a nearly broken wrist. And a wrecked or nearly wrecked car. 

Being that the farm was exactly halfway around the route and pretty well smack dab in the middle of it territory-wise as well, even though the route was 100 miles or 160 km long, I was never more than 13 or 14 kilometers from home. Basically the farm was the center of a compass comprising of the route. If a looming breakdown situation presented itself, I only had that far to drive home. Or, in the event of a sudden complete breakdown like a fuel pump or fuel line failure, I only had that far to walk home. 

One morning something failed almost right at the corner where Dick's head banged into the roof of our truck. I can't remember what it was. It was just too long ago and my memory isn't what it used to be. Anyway, it was winter, and we'd had one of those really wet periods and then a sudden deep drop in temperature, resulting in a flash freeze, so there was ice everywhere. Worse, after it froze, we got a light, dry snow. Just enough to make footing super-treacherous. The dry snow on the dry ice was the perfect lubricant. Like graphite. Denise was with me and we had hardly started hoofing it for home when I really slipped on the ice over an uneven section and did the splits and tore stuff in my groin and down my one thigh. I was strong and fit and athletic, but that slip got me good nevertheless. Or bad, really. The rest of that walk home sucked. I mean bigg tyme. 

Another episode took place where I thought I could make it home. Not by much, but make it home. The car developed some kind of passenger side front suspension trouble on the Fourth Line. It was pretty bad, so I thought I'd try getting home by Acres Sideroad and the Blind Line in to the back of our farm to stay off main roads as much as possible. Grab the backup and head back out. I didn't make it. The front end fell completely apart on the Blind Line halfway to the farm. Nothing for it at that point but hoof it home for the backup buggy. Hafta fix the car later. That blew about 45 minutes, but at least I was back mobile again. I rehashed that backup buggy so many times I lost count. It saved my bacon again and again. 

After the run I grabbed the tools and equipment and parts I needed and went up there with the truck and got it pieced together right there on the soft shoulder of the road. I don't remember the exact breakdown, but I do remember it being a pain in the neck to repair on the side of the road because the gravel shoulder was so soft and rounded it made it hard to jack the car up to work on it. It wouldn't move, period, so I'm thinking it was a CV joint failure. If I hadn't done so much work on them I wouldn't have tackled it there and instead winched it onto my trailer and hauled it home. But, I got it done, and it was ready for the route again the next morning. In those days I probably could have done brake or front end work on those cars in the dark. I should have opened a GM brake and front end repair shop. I can hardly imagine a front suspension repair on the side of the road at my age now. I'd herniate a disc or dislocate my prostate or something.