To those of you unaware of the ongoing legacy of my Pinto not being in service for the past few weeks, allow me to give you a brief explanation: It was running a little chuggy (as any 30 year old car would) and had no heat. No heat + Minnesota weather 9 months out of the year = no good.
I drove le Pinto, or as I like to call it, "Brown Sunshine" (only those of you familiar with the White Zombie song "Black Sunshine" will get the humor in that) to my Dad's garage for him to work his magic on it - which he did. The Pinto doesn't feel like it's going to die at a stoplight anymore. Its dashboard vents provide a nice, constant warm flow of air to keep the windshield from fogging up and me crashing it into things such as signs, fire hydrants, other cars, children, slow people in crosswalks, etc.
Here's what the problem was in a highly sophisticated nutshell: It wasn't giving off any heat because this thingy that is hooked up to a few hoses was all full of all of this black sooty crap, and these other hoses that enable water to circulate into something else or something like that were old and also clogged with black sooty crap. All of this stuff was replaced and the heater works.
This one big tube looking thing that goes into the Starship Enterprise-shaped air filer thing was full of holes. Dad bandaged it with cool looking silver 3M tape.. problem solved. Jeebus - is there anything that stuff can't do??
There's also this one thing that wasn't opening and closing properly, thereby making the engine all shaky and stuff. That thing now opens and closes properly, so bye bye chugga chugga, hello smooth ass-running engine.
Father, I hope you read those last three paragraphs and are extremely proud of how much your son has learned about cars over the years. I hope one day I can be as smart and intuitive as you are with all of that stuff, but don't hold your breath.. Hey - at least I know how to put gas in 'em and drive 'em!
Thanks a million to my Dad, a.k.a. "Dr. Pinto" - and I don't mean to speak for him, but I'm sure he spent the last couple of weeks under the hood of the Pinto thanking Grandpa with 4 letter words for doing such a good job of making it so confusing to work on.
