I learned some interesting things over the last week that could potentially help some 1960's big car owners. If we had just pumped up the tires, I may have never learned this valuable lesson....
A few years ago, my friend bought a 1964 Thunderbird that he had driven on a pretty regular basis. It was an ok looking / running car, that usually made it home without the help of a tow truck. I personally liked the car a lot. My only pet peeve about it was the horn button. (It sounds stupid, but keep reading.) The factory horn button on the steering wheel didn't work, therfore the horn was rewired to a big stupid out of place button that was drilled into the dashboard. It clearly did not belong there, and was a real eye sore for me everytime I sat in the car. My friend never really cared to fix it, because normal people wouldn't even think about it (including him), and the big stupid button usually worked. After a year or so, he ended up selling that car, and a few other cars came and went.
Last week he came across a really nice 1963 tbird for an even nicer price. This one was 10x the car that his previous 64' was, and it didn't even have a big stupid horn button drilled into that dashboard! Like most of the "mint" vehicles that we both buy, the car had been sitting for a year or two and had flat front tires and a dead battery. We underestimated how difficult it is to move a car this way. We figured we would arrive early at the guys house, throw the thunderbird onto trailor, sign some papers, and be on our way, all in about 15 minutes. Unfortunately that was not the case. We started our morning with a flat tire on the car trailor, on a major highway, about half way to the guys house. MAJOR SETBACK. After a few hours, we did make it there, and found that we had forgotten the cigarette lighter driven air compressor. The car's owner didn't have any way of pumping up the front tires, and we didn't want to take them off and bring them somewhere. It seemed that our only option was to drag the car onto the trailor with the winch. This sounds easy, and it is, until you rip the rag joint at the bottom end of the steering column. Suddenly the job is a lot more challenging. After about an hour of pushing, pulling and dragging, the car was on the trailor without any usable steering.
We got the car back to my house by mid afternoon and had it running great in no time at all. However, the front wheels were still not connected to the steering column, and we didn't quite have any Thunderbird parts in stock. We decided to pull out the destroyed rag joint and see what we could do with it, because we were both determined to drive the car that day. With a little elbow grease, a few small injuries, some imagination, a bit of grinding, and spare 60 Pontiac parts, we had successfully replaced the rag joint. In the process, we found a unimportant looking ground wire attached to the rag joint, that spins with the column and makes the horn work. As some of you may know, the early 1960's Thunderbirds have a steering column that slides to the right. This makes it easier to step in and out of the vehicle. (If you have never seen this before, you have to, it is really very neat.) The pivot point for the sliding column is at the rag joint, which means it gets abused more than usual, along with the little ground wire. This got me thinking. I bet that there are a lot of Thunderbird owners out there with non functioning horns, all because of this simple, easy to replace, unsuspecting ground wire. I would bet that it was that wire that prevented the horn on my friend's 64' from working, in turn causing the previous owner to add the big stupid button to make it work. Thus causing me to write this article, in hope that other Thunderbird owners do not to add a big stupid button to their cars. Just think, all of this could have been prevented if we just pumped up the damn tires. Lesson Learned!
-HRCS
Oh, and if you are wondering, we did drive the 1963 t-bird that day around my yard, and it is now a daily driver.