Tree-fitty. And a rockcrusher. and a cut-down corporate posi.
That fixes it.
I drove that puppy like a rented mule. (It was my brother's and he'd have killed me If he knew some of the shenanigans I did with that car, including racing a guy in a Mach 1 set up for drag racing down the windy steel plant road (gravel) and beating him! The Vega cornered pretty well, especially on gravel (oversteer, baby!) if you anticipated when you would need power and hit the gas that couple of seconds early. That guy had ladder bars under the Mach 1, way too stiff for curves on gravel, and I got up on his butt and beeped the horn in short beeps until he got rattled and went wide on a turn--and I slipped under him and passed him and beat him to the end of the road. (Boy, was he pissed off, and I made fifty bucks on the bet --and the side action on that little run was huge).
Next iteration, I was selected to teach a college friend to drive like a bootlegger (Group Project), and got a little too much air with his Vega and bottomed it hard on the landing. That's the time I cracked the oil pan. I ended up shelling out a bunch of precious beer money to get that welded.
The third one was a mercy purchase from a friend moving to Louisiana, who had parked his '73 on a rather large rock and didn't want to tow it south. The oil pan had a big dent from the rock, the front was mashed back enough the radiator and fan had been taken out, and it was a bondo buggy anyhow, rusted out so badly in the front wheel wells that you could pick up the hood and check the tires. When I bought it, he threw in a new set of tires, and I figured worse come to worse, I could get something for those (I ended up using them).
Desperate times make for desperate acts, and when my Landcruiser threw the timing chain, money was tight, and I could fix the Vega well enough to get around town for about thirty bucks. The patch was slow, and getting around town was all I really needed. So I jacked the front out into place (more or less) off the harmonic balancer, got a junkyard radiator, and put it back together, after cutting the shredded plastic off the fan. I licensed it, purchase price twenty bucks with new tires thrown in. The DMV lady insisted I couldn't purchase a running vehicle for $20 and I told her it wasn't running when I bought it. But she taxed me on a $200 vehicle anyway, sight unseen (or maybe she would have believed me). I drove that for a couple of years around town with the crank journals rapping off the inside of the oil pan. It kept going and going and going, even though it would have been banned in Bowman (ND), for being an "ugly" vehicle. I finally sold it a couple of years later after I'd had a couple and was driving home (wintertime, naturally) and had a policeman following me when the driver's door popped open. I wound the window down, and held that dang door in place until the cop turned off, and drove it home and parked it. I sold it to a guy who wanted the steering gear for a hot rod he was building, and came out even on the deal. It only held 3 quarts of oil (because of the dent in the pan) but it still fired up when I sold it.
If I'd had the time (I think I got the only Vega engine built on a Wednesday afternoon from the way folks talk about them), I'd probably have grabbed the engine and tranny for some future project, but that car never owed me a dime. I didn't take it on the highway, though, because it shook like Glamorous Glennis going through the sound barrier at 55 MPH. Mebbe my friend messed up the tie rods a little when he parked it on the rock...
