My friend Ben and I were standing next to my new Mazda Protegé on the University of Pittsburgh medical campus, where he had walked from class to meet me. He had just moved from Colorado to Pittsburgh with his long-time girlfriend, Tina, and this was the first we had seen each other in almost 2 ˝ years.
After we had driven back to their place in Shadyside and he had given me the grand tour, we settled down with his computer for some Web surfing until Tina was ready to go to dinner. Ben had found a 1950s-era spice box online that Tina liked, and he brought up its e-Bay screen. I knew that e-Bay was an online auction site, but I had never done much with it, and I certainly had never placed a bid or purchased anything. So I watched with interest as Ben logged in, bid, and explained the method whereby each bidder enters a maximum bid, and e-Bay ratchets the bids up by a pre-determined amount automatically.
"Hey, Ben? Just for fun, let's do a search for Dodge Darts." The results showed brochures, parts, and a few cars mixed in. After he reordered the list by price, the cars were much easier to spot. We started looking through them, casually discussing the pros and cons of each in turn. (Ben, like me, is a certifiable car nut, and while he does not share my particular interest in Dodge Darts, he enjoys classic cars in general.) All of this was very laid back until a certain 1968 Dodge Dart 270 4-door sedan came up.
First off, it was red. I used to think it was a waste of time to discuss a car's color – performance and reliability are the important factors to consider, right? Well, my perspective must be changing, because the car looked very, very good in that color. I had never cared much for the styling of the 1967-1969 Dodge Darts, thinking that they were rather plain in comparison to the classic lines of the 1963-66 models and the more ornate styling of the 1974-1976 models. With this color and a spear of trim running the length of the body, the simplicity of this car's profile was almost - dare I say it? - elegant.
Second, it was in very good condition. The seller had posted more than fifty photos, so I could look at the left side of the trunk interior. I could look at the middle of the trunk interior. I could look at the right side of the trunk interior. I could look at the trunk mat pulled back to expose the small rust hole in the floor. And so on, through the passenger compartment, under the hood, along the undercarriage, and outside. It had some rust in the typical places and a small dent in the right front fender, but appeared well-kept overall. Remarkably, it had only 76,000 miles.
Third, it had the 273 V8. At the end of the summer of 2002, I had done a lot of deferred maintenance on my 1974 Dodge Dart (see A Gallery of Goldilocks) so that I could drive it daily through the fall. And during more than 2500 miles in September and October, I found that while I enjoyed driving my car overall, I had one major frustration. With a well-travelled 225 slant six, a manual transmission that hated to be rushed, and a tall-geared rear axle, everyone, but EVERYONE, would beat me away from a traffic light. City buses. A 1970 Volkswagen Beetle. Old ladies on bicycles. So the prospect of driving a Dodge Dart with oomph was appealing, and a second Dart would free up Goldilocks for restoration.
Fourth, the car was well-equipped for 1968, with factory air conditioning, power steering, variable-speed wipers, AM radio, and shoulder belts. So it would be reasonably safe and comfortable to drive by today's standards. I also appreciated the fact that the seller had the original window sticker, build sheet, and owner's manual.
Finally, the car was located in Albany, New York, which, although 700 miles from my house in Michigan, would be much more accessible than the desert southwest, where many of these cars are located nowadays. The bidding had started at $750 on October 28 and was now at $1025. The seller had sold a couple hundred items on e-Bay already with uniformly positive feedback.
While Ben and I were discussing these considerations, Tina called from work to make dinner plans. We headed out in her Nissan Pathfinder to her office and then the three of us continued on to Joe Mama's. During dinner we told her about the car, and after returning to their place, I showed her a picture. Her reaction was immediate: "It's beautiful!" (If only all women were as enlightened as she!)
Ben looked at me carefully as I continued showing Tina the other pictures online. "You know, hon, I really think he's going to do this," he said to her. (Ben has been my good friend since we were both in elementary school, and while I'm not generally known for living life on the edge, he has seen me undertake some major adventures, such as driving a Mazda Miata coast to coast – but that's a story for another time.)
"I just might," I said slowly. "I just might."
I polled friends of mine with e-Bay experience for advice. Without exception, they told me that if I was serious about buying this car, I had to place my bid near the end of the auction, on November 7.
So that begged the question – how high to bid? After years of managing the Dodge Dart Page, I had an idea of the value of these cars. After deciding this, I happened to be browsing in the automotive section of Borders Books on November 5. The one classic car price guide in stock had an entry for a 1968 Dodge Dart 270 V8 4-door sedan in #4 condition (which seemed like a fair estimate for this car) was $2150. This supported my instinct .
At the end of the day on November 6, the bidding stood at $1075.
Even though I had plenty to keep me busy at the office, the hours seemed to drag. After work, I hurriedly logged onto e-Bay and checked the listing with fifteen minutes to go until the auction closed.
At ten minutes until auction closing, I synchronized a timer to the e-Bay clock and watched it count down. Eight minutes. Six minutes. Four minutes. Three minutes. Two minutes. With sweating palms and trembling fingers, I entered my maximum bid and submitted it with precisely one minute and thirty seconds to go. "Congratulations! You have the high bid!" e-Bay informed me.
I went back to the description screen and kept hitting the "reload" button on my browser to see how high the price would go after my bid. One minute, twelve seconds. Reload. Fifty-eight seconds. Reload. Forty-five seconds. Reload. Twenty-seven seconds. Reload. Fourteen seconds. Reload. "Auction has ended."
And there I sat, trying to catch my breath as the information on my computer screen slowly sank in -- I had just agreed to purchase a red 1968 Dodge Dart 270 .
So I dropped by my local insurance agent, who was very helpful once she had recovered from the news that one Dodge Dart was just not enough for me anymore. She prepared a packet of documents for me that same day, containing everything on the checklist Doug had sent me from the NY DMV.
I then decided that driving a rental car out to Albany made more sense than flying, since carry-on baggage restrictions would limit the tools I could bring. Instead, I would just transfer everything from the trunk of the rental to the Dart at the time of purchase. Budget offered the least outrageous one-way rental rates (even a bit cheaper than flying), so I reserved a car online with them. The repair bag I packed contained wrenches, sockets, pliers, penetrating oil, jumper cables, a spare set of points and condenser, a tach/dwell meter, roadside reflectors, a flashlight, duct tape, and a Chilton's Dodge Dart repair manual, among other things. My friend Mat had agreed to lend me his cell phone for the weekend and take me to the rental car agency at the airport.
So I was all set ... I hoped.
The Windsor meeting ended in the mid-afternoon, and I headed through the rain onto the 401 expressway, whose signs sternly warned me in English and French that speeding 120, 130, or 140 km/h would lead to fines of $100, $143, or $295, respectively. Traffic was moving at 120-130 km/h, however, so I crossed over the Niagara River into Buffalo before 7 PM.
The AAA Tourbook had recommended a certain restaurant in Buffalo that interested me, but the neighborhood looked iffy to be parking a car with a trunkful of luggage and tools. So I continued east onto I-90, the New York Thruway. The Popeye's dinner at the Thruway rest stop brought back memories of college, when Popeye's chicken had been a cornerstone of my diet. It also reminded me why I hadn't eaten Popeye's since graduation.
At the rest stop, I used a public phone to reserve a room at a Rochester-area motel. Just after I had hung up, a man with a scraggly beard and unkempt clothing approached me and said, "I overheard that you were staying on Lehigh Station Road. Do you know how to get there?" I assured him that the reservations agent had given me detailed directions. He meditated on this for a moment, scratching his chin slowly. "There are a lot of motels on Lehigh Station Road," he commented. I nodded non-committally. He then looked me straight in the eye and asked, "Which motel are you staying at?" I answered vaguely that I wasn't quite sure of the name, thanked him for his concern, and got out of there. Fast. (Memo to self: Don't make future hotel reservations at turnpike rest areas.)
Doug met me at a Citgo station on Broadway, and I followed him into downtown Schenectady, where we parked and walked into the municipal building. The first hitch was a sign saying that the DMV had moved to a new location on State Street.
The second hitch arose after we had arrived at the correct DMV location and waited for 45 minutes in line to obtain an in-transit license plate (a temporary plate that permits a car sold in New York State to be driven to a different state to be registered there). The NYS DMV is particular not only about the insurance information it requires to issue the tag, but also the format of this information. Here, although the four-page packet from my insurance company contained all the needed information, the DMV would not accept it because they wanted it all on a single page. Phone calls to my insurance company ensued, followed by handwritten emendations by my agent to the most complete of the four pages and a hurried fax to the Schenectady DMV. Having finally satisfied the demons of bureaucracy, I gratefully handed over $10 and received my NY in-transit plate.
I suggested to Doug that we take a break to grab a quick lunch since it was now almost 2 PM. During lunch, Doug told me of a widely varied career in banking, the auto industry, and software development. It was remarkable to me that this unassuming fellow had been a banking executive. (Note to anyone near downtown Schenectady: Maurice's on State Street serves top-notch delicatessen.)
We then went to drop off the rental Taurus at the Albany airport. Hitch #3 came up when the Budget agent asked me the odometer mileage. "24,933," I answered confidently, since I had just looked at the odometer while parking the car. The agent replied that the rental form showed the starting mileage as 14,335 -- how had I managed to drive more than ten thousand miles in less than 36 hours? "It all has to do with making efficient use of time," I responded cheerfully. The agent was less than fully convinced.
Finally, Doug and I were in his Chevy Astro van, heading toward his friend Ron's auto repair shop in Altamont, where the car was parked. As we drove, Doug filled me in on some of the car's history.
Several weeks earlier, he and Ron had driven Ron's Rambler station wagon to a Mopar show in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. As they entered the show grounds, the Rambler's engine died. Apparently, long-accumulated gunk in the fuel tank had dislodged itself and clogged the fuel system. After repeated unsuccessful attempts to de-gunkify the fuel lines, Doug and Ron decided to retrieve the car another day with Doug's flatbed truck. But how were they to get back to Altamont now?
"So we started looking for a car to buy just to get us home," Doug continued as we rolled along US 20. "This one vendor had two 1968 Dodge Darts for sale. The white one was a slant six and pretty ratty, and the red one was a V8 and in much nicer shape. After Ron and I worked on him for a while, he dropped his price a couple hundred dollars, and the deal was done."
On their way home from the show, Doug and Ron investigated their purchase a little more closely. Except for a ripped driver's seat, the interior was in very good shape. The engine ran smoothly and strongly, and the steering was tight. Doug was thinking that he and Ron had done very well on this deal. Then he opened the glove compartment.
"I couldn't believe it!" Doug told me. "There in the glove compartment, neatly folded, was the original owner's manual, warranty packet, window sticker, and build sheet! At that point, there was no doubt in my mind that this was something special.
"Now, I'm not much into Dodge Darts," Doug said. "Don't get me wrong – they're nice little cars – but I really prefer classics from the Brass Era. So I decided to auction it off on e-Bay in hopes that the car would go to someone who'd appreciate it."
And here we were, pulling into the lot of Ron's repair shop. A truck was blocking the Dart in, so while Doug went to find keys for the truck, I inspected my new purchase. Although it was already dusk, the car looked very good from what I could see, inside and out. The oil and transmission fluid both were at the correct levels, and the tire pressures were fine all around. The odometer read 75,812 miles. While Doug moved the truck, I transferred all of my luggage into the commodious Dart trunk, and the moment of truth had come. I settled myself into the driver's seat, pumped the gas once, and turned the key. The engine fired up immediately, sputtered, and died. But with another twist of the key, the 273 restarted and settled into a lumpy idle.
While the engine was warming up, Doug showed me how to attach the shoulder belts to the lap belts and then went to find an Allen wrench to tighten the inside rear view mirror, which was loose on its mount. It only took a minute before the heater was putting out warm air, so with Doug in the passenger seat, we set forth on a test drive.
After maneuvering the car around a side street to get the feel of the steering and brakes, I pulled onto NY Route 146 and pressed the accelerator to the floor. The car gained speed quickly as the Torqueflite shifted crisply and quietly, and in no time at all, we were doing 50 MPH. I then pressed hard on the wide brake pedal, and the car immediately slowed straight to a crawl. The power steering was boosted more than I preferred, but everything else felt just fine. All of the accessories worked except for the rusted emergency brake, the air conditioning, and the fender-mounted and dashboard turn signal indicators. When the headlights were turned on, the amber parking lights in the grille went out, which makes sense if parking lights are for parking and headlights are for driving, I suppose. I had never seen that before, though.
"Seems like things are in good shape," I commented to Doug as I drove him back to Ron's garage.
"Oh yes," Doug said. "As I told you, I asked Ron to go over the car a second time to make sure that you wouldn't have any unexpected failures on your way home – I know you have quite a distance to go."
"Yeah, I wouldn't want to lose my brakes or anything!" I joked. We both laughed. With that, I shook Doug's hand and was on my way.
I took local roads to US 20 and topped off the tank at a Mobil station before entering Interstate 88 towards Binghamton. The first cassette in my portable tape player honored Ben's role in helping me find this car: Huey Lewis and the News "Fore," a long-time favorite for both of us. At first, I drove very conservatively – after all, here I was in the dark on a strange road in an unfamiliar, 34-year-old car. After about ten uneventful miles at 60 MPH, I began to relax and push a little harder. 65, 70, 75 ... the car promptly and smoothly accelerated to whatever speed I liked. No vibration, no wandering, and except for wind whistle, virtually no noise. I smiled and drove on into the night.
As I travelled through towns like Elmira, Corning, and Bath, I began to appreciate some of the idiosyncrasies of my new car. For instance, the knee safety pad installed under the dashboard (on 1968 Darts only) was a convenient location to store cassette tapes and sunglasses. The turn signals were self-canceling if I went through a turn, but they had no lane-change feature, so I had to remember to turn them off manually after changing lanes. The front bench seat had no headrests, so it seemed the most natural thing in the world to drape my right arm along the top of the seat as I drove along -- very comfortable. The variable-speed wipers were helpful in changing weather conditions, and when I shut them off, the wipers would halt mid-swipe, reverse themselves through a partial swipe, and then park. I had never seen that before and was highly amused by it. The wipers got a lot of use as I drove through snow, sleet, and freezing rain. Despite the weather, the scenery in southern New York was just beautiful, and frequently, I was the only car on the road.
A Mobil stop in Arkport required 15.3 gallons to fill the 18-gallon tank. Since the car had travelled 252 miles after I had topped it off near Altamont, this translated to about 16 ˝ mpg. That seemed pretty good to me considering the power of the engine and the size of the car. I continued west on NY 17 / I-86 to Erie, PA, and rejoined I-90. Compared to NY 17, I-90 had much heavier traffic all the way to Cleveland, where I stopped for gas again. This time, it took 14.2 gallons to fill the tank after 252 miles, or nearly 18 mpg. As the Ohio sun was setting near Lorain, I decided to make a Taco Bell stop. Applying the brakes on the I-90 off-ramp, my eyebrows shot up as the brake pedal slowly sank to the floor.
Uh oh.
I coasted to a stop in the Taco Bell parking lot and experimented with the brake pedal, discovering that while there was some squishy resistance the first few times I pumped the pedal, after that, the pedal went straight to the floor with the slightest touch.
Raising the hood and opening the master cylinder revealed that the one of the two chambers was dry – the dual reservoir design had sealed off the half of the system that was still intact, providing some hydraulic braking power even after the pedal went soft. I walked to a neighboring Marathon station, bought a can of brake fluid, and returned to the car to fill the empty chamber and replace the cover. Now it only took two pumps of the brake before the pedal was back on the floor. I sat behind the wheel and ruefully considered my options. It was now 5:30 PM on Saturday night. No mechanics would be available until Monday. Few auto parts stores would be still open at this hour, and trying to fix an unfamiliar car myself in the dark would probably be a futile exercise. With the temperature in the twenties and snow on the ground, it would be a cold and wet one, too.
On the other hand, half of the hydraulic system was still functioning, and the roads from Cleveland on home were very familiar to me. The car had also slowed quite readily from highway speeds just from my taking my foot off the gas. So I refilled the again-empty chamber in the master cylinder and decided to drive onward. Carefully.
Very carefully.
Now travelling in darkness, I continued on I-90 to Ohio Route 2 and took that through Sandusky to Toledo, constantly straining my eyes to see as far down the road as possible in case I should have to slow down. I tried to use the brakes minimally, since if the remaining half of the hydraulic system failed, I would not be able to drive any further. In this way, I applied the brakes only twice between Lorain and Toledo – a distance of more than eighty miles. Toledo presented a nasty surprise with the closure of I-280, and the detour, with a 55 MPH speed limit and about a dozen traffic lights, was a bad place to lack full braking power. Luckily, I completed the detour and got back on the freeway without incident.
Driving north into Michigan, I began to relax a little. It was much easier to anticipate changes in traffic patterns on a limited-access highway than on a surface street like the Toledo detour. I flipped on the AM radio and started setting the selector buttons to the stations I like in southeastern Michigan and southwestern Ontario. While searching for my stations, I stopped to listen to one of the other stations I had tuned in ... and heard the Chicago traffic report! The next station I stopped at had the local news out of Cincinnati! (Both cities were about 250 miles away.) The reception was amazing, and the thumbwheel controls that put the volume and tuning adjustments right next to each other made it easy to set the stations.
As I approached my exit, another problem occurred to me. How would I stop from highway speed on the freeway offramp - a short downhill ramp ending at a traffic light? One mile before the exit, I slowed from the 70 MPH speed limit to 60. A half a mile before the exit, I slowed to 50. When the ramp came into sight, I turned on my emergency flashers, downshifted into second gear, and slowed to 40, taking my foot off the gas as I entered the ramp. Halfway down the ramp, I downshifted into first gear, and when the car got down to 10 MPH, I shifted into neutral so that the idle "creep" wouldn't fight me as I stopped the car. In this way, I managed to come to a complete stop at the red light, and I had to apply the brakes only at the very end.
I live just a short distance from the freeway, and while mine is a hilly neighborhood, most of the roads to my house are uphill, so I had no difficulty controlling the car's speed. Finally, at 8:30 PM, I backed my new 1968 Dodge Dart into the driveway. The odometer read 76,518 – I had driven 706 miles since picking up the car - 571 that day, and the final 140 with partially non-functional brakes. Whew!
Later that day, I called AAA to transport the 1968 Dart over to my favorite brake repair shop. The brake shop was only about half a mile from my house, but I figured that I had done enough to tempt fate the previous day and shouldn't attempt to drive it. The tow truck and I must have been quite a sight as we went to the repair shop – a 1974 Dodge Dart leading a flatbed truck transporting a 1968 Dodge Dart!
Scott, the assistant manager at the brake shop, called me early Tuesday morning to say that one of the rigid rear brake lines had rusted through, causing the loss of hydraulic pressure. Furthermore, all four of the wheel cylinders were leaking, and one of the brake shoes had broken into two pieces inside its drum. All of the rigid brake lines appeared to be original except for the one to the left front wheel. Scott suspected that the new left front line had replaced an original line that had also rusted through and that the remaining lines were not to be trusted.
I decided that although the expense of reconstructing the brake system would be high, I could afford to spend some money on the car since the purchase price had been perhaps 2/3 of its value. So I told Scott to go ahead. The shop ended up replacing the wheel cylinders, the brake shoes, and all the brake lines except for the ones to the master cylinder. The line on the left front had to be replaced as well because it had been cross-threaded into the junction block. Upon investigating a slight looseness in the steering while road testing the brakes afterwards, the mechanic found that the idler arm was loose on the bolt where it attaches to the frame; the part was new but apparently defective.
I knew that Doug's mechanic friend Ron had replaced the idler arm, and I suspected that he had also replaced that left-front brake line, thinking back to Doug's offhand comment that the brake pedal was "a little soft" when they had first picked up the car. But if Ron had been under the car to replace that line or do other brake work, he must have seen that the other rigid lines were in poor condition. Had Doug sent me on my way knowing that the car was not fully roadworthy?
It was hard to believe that he had. Doug had impressed me as a master businessman, and in business, one's reputation is crucial. For him to endanger a flawless reputation on e-Bay just to try to save several hundred dollars seemed implausible to me. Had Doug been that concerned about conserving money, he would not have had Ron replace the idler arm. Assuming that Doug was unaware of the car's problems, the next question was whether Ron knew about them and had deliberately kept Doug in the dark. Had Ron intentionally applied band-aid repairs instead of fixing the car right?
Here again, I was inclined to think that Ron's actions were unintentional. The cross-threaded brake line fitting (if he did replace that line) and faulty idler arm both suggest negligence or incompetence to me more than malice. If Ron was in too much of a rush to notice that the new idler arm was loose, it makes sense that he would not have noticed that the brake lines were in marginal condition. Certainly this would not absolve him (or ultimately, Doug) of responsibility for saying that everything was shipshape, but it made me less inclined to shoot down Doug's e-Bay record. I decided instead to chalk it all up to experience – in the future, any car I buy sight unseen will be checked out thoroughly by an objective, competent third-party before the deal is final.
And needless to say, if I ever break down in Altamont, NY, Ron's Service Center will not be the one to fix my car!