OUT AND ABOUT
Jeez, it was good to catch up with so many of you lot at last months’ Rolling 30 gig at Eastern Creek. Between GT and myself, I reckon we yakked with at least half the people there. Some of you wanted to tell me your own views on the long-running red-motored EJ Holden debate, others just wanted to say hi and ask us about our projects. And if you saw the VW Beetle that Torrens had dragged down to the event, ‘project’ is letting it off lightly. As in, the towing fee to get it there was in considerable excess of the value of the car itself.
Some of the cars that interested me most were the unusual ones you don’t see every day. I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw a genuine, unmolested Mazda RX-5, and the Sigma Turbo was a highlight, too. I also got talking to a couple of brothers, one with a Saab 900 Turbo and the other with a 99 Turbo. The blokes were great guys and their cars were amazing; the 99 Turbo was even running the original Inca (some folks know them as ‘Aztecs’) alloy wheels that always remind me of the energy domes the blokes in Devo wore in their film clips.
And it always seems to be that when you get a pair of family members into the same kind of car, there’ll be a good story behind it. And this was no exception: Seems their dad had gone into a (I think) Jaguar showroom and then a Volvo dealership back in the day and, in both cases, had been ignored by the sales staff. So, he walked out and took himself around to a Saab showroom where he was greeted like a long-lost son. One of the brothers told me: “He didn’t even know what a Saab was, but he wanted a European car, so he pointed and said ‘I’ll have that one’”. The rest is history. Makes you think though; if the sales staff at the other shops hadn’t been such dicks, maybe these two lads would have turned up at Rolling Thunder in an E-Type and an XJS.
So it was a beaut day and since I left Melbourne that morning with the rain coming in sideways, the
Sydney sunshine was most welcome. So thanks again to those who bothered to say g’day…you made my day. It’s just a shame I couldn’t drag the RA40 Celica or Project Duckshit along for the day. It’ll be different if we hold a similar event in Melbourne… What do you Mexicans reckon? Would it be a goer?
Meantime, anybody out there got a HappyDays car with an aftermarket alarm? Does yours drain the battery, leaving you spending Sunday mornings trekking up to the battery shop and breaking out the spanners, instead of driving the car up the mountain to your favourite pie shop for a coffee and vanilla-slice? I’ve had a couple of older cars over the years where a previous owner has fitted an aftermarket alarm, thinking they were doing the right thing, and both of them have destroyed batteries at a fearful rate.
At first I thought I’d just leave them on a tricklecharger, but even that doesn’t seem to completely solve the problem as they both seem to massacre batteries faster than they should (and no, I don’t buy El Cheapo batteries). My latest solution has been to fit one of those little battery isolators to the negative terminal and effectively disconnect the battery between drives. You can still hook the trickle-charger to the battery, but you won’t have the damn alarm constantly trying to flatten the battery. Will it make any difference? I’ll let you know in a couple of years.
I could get rid of the alarm, but that’s going to cost money and I’d lose the central locking function in the process. Okay, I could live without central locking, but it’s also kind of nice to know that there’s an alarm on my side whenever either car is parked somewhere other than my shed. The only thing I have to remember to do now is lock the cars before I disconnect the battery. Get that wrong and the clunk function won’t lock the car afterwards, right? Yep, saw that coming. Oh, and make sure the bonnet’s open so you can get in to reconnect the battery.