Sixty-one years of owning a series of old, weird, sometimes high-mileage cars—attributes sometimes concentrated in the same vehicle—I’ve accumulated more than a few tales of roadside woe. Fortunately, years of hard-learned fixit lessons meant that I was usually able to effect at least jury-rigged repairs, and thus I was rarely stranded. When I look back on some of my earlier adventures, I question my sanity in attempting the task—but success at the time tended to cloud what was in retrospect bad judgment.
The first one involved a Fiat Topolino. This was the original Fiat 500, a tiny two-seat coupe, very advanced when introduced in 1936. It quickly became the Model T of Italy: that country’s first truly affordable car. Few were ever imported to the U.S.; most were brought back by returning servicemen after WW II. Ever since reading Warren Weith’s story in a 1964 Car and Driver, I wanted one. It took five years before finding a Topo lurking behind a garage not far from Griffiss AFB near Rome, New York.
The good news: It was a desirable B model, combining the graceful Thirties styling with 16½ horsepower, versus the earlier A model’s thirteen from its 569-cc four-cylinder engine.
The bad news: It had been sitting in the owner’s back yard for 10-plus years. The engine was in boxes in the garage, with only an owner’s manual and a parts book. I bought it anyway, and dragged it home on a rope behind my 2002, its driveshaft thrashing around underneath. Miraculously, the brakes worked, and the tires held air.
At that time, Topolinos were so popular for A-Gasser drag-racer bodies that I chained my prize to a tree to ensure that it wouldn’t disappear one dark night.
Then the Air Force saw fit to transfer me to southwest Ohio, 500 miles away. I had slightly over a month to get my prize running—and drivable—because our 2002 wasn’t powerful enough to tow the Fiat that far. I reassembled the engine, primarily by guesswork and an exploded diagram in the parts book. I had to reuse the old head and manifold gaskets, make new cork pan and timing-cover gaskets, and guess at torque figures.
Reinstalled, the engine started right up, and held coolant. The tranny shifted and it actually drove… and stopped. Nothing short of a miracle.
We moved to Ohio sans Fiat. A month later I flew back to retrieve the Fiat, with a rudimentary set of tools. The first day I made nearly six miles. The fuel pump quit, not surprisingly; the diaphragm was 20-some years old and hadn’t been used for 15. I caught a ride back into town and bought an electric pump—a huge affair nearly as big as the cylinder head. Wiring it into the ignition, I was on my way again—for another 50 miles. Somewhere west of Syracuse, tooling along at its 50-mph cruising speed on the New York Thruway, the Fiat produced an ominous knock; even I, a neophyte mechanic, knew the sound of a rod bearing.
I took the next exit, consulted my map, and found parallel back roads. I also bought several cans of STP to mix with the car’s normal diet of straight 50-weight oil. My cruising speed was now 35 mph. The knock didn’t disappear, but it didn’t get worse, either—and I was still under way.
But Luigi—yes, I name my cars—wasn’t through with me yet. Finally back in Ohio, cruising along out in the country, the car started to slow, and despite more accelerator and downshifting, finally came to a near halt. That’s when I noticed the steam.
A Topolino’s radiator is mounted higher than the engine, so water circulates via thermosyphon physics (cold water sinks, hot water rises), thus no need for a water pump—until the siphon is broken. A leaking freeze plug accomplished that. With no temperature gauge to warn me, I had seized the engine.
A nearby farm provided me with two gallon jugs of water. I slowly and carefully decanted their contents into the radiator; it took both gallons to both cool and fill the one-gallon cooling system. Amazingly, the engine, once it cooled down, started again, seemingly none the worse for wear. I attribute that to both block and head being cast iron, so they expanded and contracted evenly, without blowing that used head gasket. Fortunately, the leak was tiny, so I topped up the radiator every time I stopped, which was frequent.
The final 150 miles were uneventful. I made it home, rebuilt the engine properly—with a replacement crankshaft—and eventually restored the car.
Our 2002s aren’t immune from roadside repairs, either. A long-ago trip from Dayton to St. Louis for a Gateway Tech weekend (remember those?) in a friend’s 2002ti provided a challenge to us. Stuart had removed the mechanical fuel pump, installing an electric pump to better supply those two thirsty Weber sidedrafts.
Unfortunately, about halfway there, the electric pump started acting up. We managed to limp into a McDonalds parking lot, where the pump gave up the ghost altogether. Fortunately, before we left Dayton, I had grabbed my Trip Reserve Spares Kit and threw it in the trunk along with my duffle bag.
“Okay, now what?” asked Stuart.
“No problem,” I answered. “I have a spare fuel pump, pushrod, and phenolic spacer in my spares kit.” Ten minutes later, with a little creative fuel-line splicing, we were on our way, having entertained the onlookers watching from the restaurant.