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"A 1936 RIDE IN THE RAIN"
BY MATT DICKENSON
I had a pretty interesting trip driving my '36 Master Sedan back from the 40th anniversary. The outing was the farthest I'd driven our Chev, 210 miles roundtrip. The trip down to Centralia was very enjoyable with all the other Chevs and ours ran fine. A few sprinkles started about the time the festivities were finishing up around 3:30 PM. I decided to "hi-tail" it home, which was about a 3-1/2 hour drive. About a mile outside of Yelm cruising about 50 mph, the metal strip on the top of the rotor under the distributor cap broke off. With some loud backfiring of unburned gas going into my exhaust, I rolled to a stop with a dead engine. I thought I'd thrown a rod. I was relieved to find the broken distributor rotor but at the same time mad because I'd left a spare back home. Within a few minutes, Ron Henry pulled over in his '39 Coupe to help. Fortunately he had a spare distributor assembly in his trunk with a rotor on it. It fit my 207! Thanks to Ron and the Chevrolet engineers that utilized common parts between engine models, I was quickly on my way.
Next I hit a torrential down pour that lasted for over 30 minutes from south of Tacoma to north of Puyallup. My vacuum wipers work intermittently at best, but again thanks to one of our Club members I made it through the storm with a few small leaks. Roger Orness loaned me his bottle of RainX while we were at Wapato Park after I told him about my erratic wipers and the threat of rain latter in the day. The stuff worked great, I was able to make out the road and on coming traffic without wipers. I rolled into the garage about 7:30 PM very happy that I decided to drive to the 40th Anniversary. I wasn't going to go because of the possibility of rain, but I discovered that old Chev's don't melt; they just keep on running with a little TLC. Matt
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