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Title: Chevrolet Biscayne
Date Occurred: November and December 2003, plus spans many years
Date Written: December 14, 2003
Written By: Joseph Arendt
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In late November, my wife Helen and I wandered through a large toy store. We discussed whether certain toys were appropriate for a girl about to start kindergarten or a toddler boy. This was the annual ritual of Christmas shopping.
We reached a stack of toy cars, each toy about a foot long. The toys depicted American Sixties muscle cars such as Dodge Chargers, Dodge Challengers, Chevy Novas, and Ford Mustangs.
The toy Mustang reminded me of the husband of one of Helen’s friends. Mike is restoring a 1966 Ford Mustang in his garage. This major project has been going on for at least eight years already. It involved taking the car apart until the frame is off, then doing much welding. Mike explained to me in detail what he was doing. He nostalgically told me about a similar Mustang he had in high school. While he has made much progress, his dream car has more work to go before it travels anywhere under its own power. This last summer, I bought him a one-inch toy car of a 1966 Mustang. His wife joked that the toy finally showed her what the car was supposed to look like.
I looked more intently at the stack of foot-long toy cars. At twenty dollars each, I found it too expensive for re-doing a routine for Mike that I already did with a much cheaper Matchbox-sized car that summer. Then, I noticed among the large toy cars was a 1966 Chevrolet Biscayne. I pointed this out to Helen.
“It’s your car from high school,” Helen remarked.
Helen never saw this particular car in actuality as that occurred in Wisconsin many years before I met her. However, she had heard the story and, to my surprise, remembered the name of the car. The story of the Biscayne deviates significantly from Mike’s fond memories of his original Mustang. I will certainly not be buying a similar real Chevy and devote years to restoring it! Also, despite how Helen stated it, this car was never truly mine.
I did not get the toy that day, but returned a couple weeks later. The other Sixties American muscle cars were gone, replaced by a display of toy cars from the movie “The Fast and the Furious” and its sequel. However, on a low shelf in the back, I found the toy Biscayne. I thought it was such an obscure car that there would not be much demand for it. I had been right. I bought it for the memories it brought back. (See Fig. 1)
Figure 1: The 1966 Chevrolet Biscayne Toy Made by Ertl
[Photograph by Joseph Arendt, Dec. 15, 2003]
As nearly everybody who has been through high school knows, getting a car...even if an old beater car...meant status, friends, better dating prospects, increased employment opportunities, and freedom. When I was in high school, less than half the seniors had cars. Most of those with cars were boys rather than girls. That may sound sexist, but it was how it was. A young man getting his own car had completed a major rite of passage into adulthood. Sometimes I wondered if that rite was sometimes more important to the fathers than to the high school boys themselves.
I suspect that Dad set it up so I would have a possibility of a car in high school, but only if I showed initiative and worked hard. Yet, what transpired could also have happened solely from following his own interests without such motives.
Back in 1967 when I was not even in kindergarten, my parents bought a brand new automobile. It was a bright blue Chevrolet window van, the long version. It came with plywood parts and tan fabric-covered cushions that could make a bed in back, or fold into bench seats. With some rearrangement, a table could be brought up with bench seats facing it on both sides. The van reminded me of a traveling living room. It also had two metal-framed bright-blue vinyl-covered bench seats that could be bolted in.
For those who talk fondly of the Sixties, a common theme and symbol is the air-cooled Volkswagen van. In many ways, the Chevrolet van that my parents had was superior. Even with the relatively small straight-six 250 cubic inch engine, it had considerably more power than the VW van. Back when speed limits were 75 mph on the interstate system, this Chevy van could easily handle the speed and did not slow down going up hills the way the VW vans would. Also, the Chevy van was about foot wider and had a heavier water-cooled engine. That lower center of gravity and wider base made it less likely to be blown into another lane in heavy cross winds. Since every year or two, we traveled to New Mexico, where strong winds sweeping across the desert were not uncommon, this was a good thing.
By the time I was in Junior High School, the van was showing its age. The plywood and tan-fabric cushions had nearly disintegrated. They might have been thrown out already. The metal-framed, vinyl covered bench seats were more durable, so were continually in the van by then. Because of the salt used on the roads during the winter in Wisconsin, the van had significant rust damage.
Dad took several automotive classes at the nearby Mid-State Technical School. He learned to braze sheet metal, as well as the proper use of fiberglass and body putty. He learned to acid treat metal before putting on several coats of primer followed by coats of the desired final color. He also learned to tune engines and repair a carburetor.
Using these skills, Dad seemed for a time to be turning back the clock on his beloved van. He tried to get me to participate. My driver’s license was still about three years in the future. That seemed an eternity to me. I much preferred to stay inside lost in the fantasy world of a science fiction novel then getting filthy working on a car.
Mom did not share Dad’s enthusiasm for rebuilding the old van. She regarded it as a good vehicle that had done its job well, but it had gotten so old and worn out that it would be better just to retire it.
Although young enough that I did not share Dad’s enthusiasm for automobiles, there was something I wanted badly. It was a ten-speed bicycle. This might sound like a joke today when stores like K-Mart, Walmart, and the like are filled with racks of ten-speed bicycles all priced well under a hundred dollars. Back when I was thirteen, ten-speed bicycles were relatively far more expensive than today and fairly rare. Many kids had bicycles that were single speeds or three speeds. In fact, I had gotten as a Christmas present a couple years earlier a three-speed Schwinn.
I could not afford a new ten-speed bicycle. However, an older brother of a friend of mine had a ten-speed he was selling. This bicycle was very cheap and deserved to be cheap. It had been abused. The paint was much scraped off. The wheels were greatly out of line. The front bearings were so shot that the wheel was hard to turn. The cables were all out of adjustment, as were the derailleurs. I bought the bicycle for perhaps fifteen or twenty dollars.
I striped the bicycle to the frame. Dad got interested. We applied what he had learned about treating and painting rusty cars to the bicycle frame. I spent many hours with the sanding. We then put on several coats of primer, sanding with very fine sandpaper between each coat. Unlike years earlier when Dad and I had put together a Pinewood Derby car for Cub Scouts, I was far more patient and responsible. For the bicycle, I did the work myself, with Dad giving guidance and instruction, but never taking the project over.
The bearings on the bicycle needed cleaning. Dad showed me how to remove the grease using kerosene the way he did for parts on his van. He had a five-gallon can of kerosene. It was much cheaper than commercial cleaners, yet worked well at cutting through the grease and oil. What was popular among other shade-tree mechanics was to use gasoline. It works even better at cleaning the parts, but is absurdly dangerous.
Dad is a physicist and engineer. He takes an experimental approach to many things in life. He grew curious about how dangerous using gasoline would really be. With me watching and curious, Dad took about a half-cup of gasoline. It was less than would normally be used to clean parts. He went to the base of the cement driveway, then poured it out. He then stood far back. I stood even further back. He lit a wooden match, then gave it a long toss. In an instant, flames leaped up six feet. Not just in one spot, but encompassing the entire area of the gasoline. I felt a wave of sudden heat come with the flames. If it had continued, there is little doubt the fire department would have been called. However, in much less than a minute, it was entirely over.
Dad expressed amazement that the display had been that dramatic. That ended any temptation to use gasoline for cleaning parts! The warnings about gasoline were not idle threats. I wonder if Mom ever heard of this little experiment. I suppose she will when she reads this.
After cleaning with kerosene, I could tell the races in the front hub of the bicycle were completely shot. I had to buy an entirely new front hub. Every spoke had to be removed. I had to lace all the spokes back. I was delighted when that was successfully accomplished.
When finished, the ten-speed bicycle worked wonderfully and looked beautiful. Using it, I was able to ride much further. For example, the city of Stevens Point was fifteen miles north. On the ten speed, I rode to it many times. I got so heavily into bicycling that eventually I sold that Schwinn ten-speed to my brother James. I bought a twelve-speed Trek bicycle, which back then had a hand-built frame built in a factory in Wisconsin. Most Treks are mass-produced in Japan today. I still own and use my Trek bicycle. (See Fig. 2)
Figure 2: The Blue Van, the Trek Bicycle, and Joseph
[Photograph by Frank Arendt, circa 1980]
As for the old van, by the time I was in high school, Dad had patched the holes in the body and floor. Repairing one of the rusted out doors had been a great challenge, but he had succeeded at that. The van was half-covered in gray primer, with the other half still the original bright blue. Although being worked on, Dad also daily drove the van. It would have looked decent if he just got it entirely repainted.
However, Dad hit a snag. The engine started using a quart of oil every three hundred or so miles. That works out approximately to a quart every other fill-up of the gas tank. At Mid-State, Dad had learned that although engines could be rebuilt, it was expensive. In a place like Wisconsin where cars rust so badly, it was generally much cheaper to replace the entire engine with one taken from a rusted out car.
A friend of Mom’s had a two-door coupe. It was 1966 Chevrolet Biscayne, the same year and model as the toy car that I bought a few days ago. The toy is red, but this car was tan.
For the real car that Mom’s friend owned, the engine was nearly identical with the one in the van, except it burned almost no oil. The owner had it in for a tune-up when a mechanic discovered the frame under the driver’s side rear wheel well was rusted halfway through. The mechanic had told the owner that the car was unsafe to drive. Dad bought the car for seventy-five dollars, solely to put the engine in his van.
However, the van had the engine located inside between the two front seats. There was no hood on the van, which was blunt-nosed. A metal box between the front seats lifted up for access to the engine. Dad could not figure out a reasonable way to get the engine into the van. It certainly was not a simple matter of using a hoist jack like switching engines between two normal cars.
The Biscayne sat parked in the back yard behind a windowed shed. Mom claimed the Biscayne was an eyesore. She urged Dad to get rid of it. He did not obey. A year or two passed. Dad never did repaint the van entirely. Some of the repaired sections had visible rust again, bleeding right through the primer. Despite all the care of the acid-etching, the salt on the Wisconsin roads is brutal and unrelenting in its destruction of cars. Not only was the Biscayne an eyesore, the blue van itself was looking pretty bad. The oil consumption had gotten even worse. The van would blow out clouds of blue smoke at times, a classic sign of oil burning.
The oil use fouled the spark plugs of the van relatively quickly. Simply by frequently replacing the spark plugs and those are cheap, the van ran extremely well despite the oil use. After I got my temporary driver’s permit, I learned to drive mostly in that old van.
However, I took my driver’s test in the 1976 four-wheel-drive Chevy Suburban that my parents also had by then. I flunked my first attempt for the sole reason that the inspector said that I was struggling too much with the steering. That truck had manual steering on a massive four-wheel drive vehicle. It really was a chore to steer in tasks like Y-turns and parallel parking. I protested flunking for not really doing anything wrong other than showing visible effort in a task that really did take much physical effort.
The inspector stated, “It is your responsibility to come up with and bring a reasonable vehicle.”
I stayed flunked. That was a bitter disappointment. I probably should have brought the van instead, which I could maneuver better, but Dad had driven it to work. I was with Mom for the test, and she drove the Suburban.
Before the next test, I got under the Suburban with a grease gun. I lubed everything up, especially the steering parts. I also deliberately overinflated all the tires by 5 psi. I passed the driver’s test easily on my second attempt.
By then, I could ride a hundred miles in a day on a bicycle. I participated with three older friends in what were called Century Rides. These are one hundred mile long bicycle day trips. Rather than the Suburban, we would borrow Dad’s van. The van held four bicycles in back inside with ease, plus still had the bench seat and front seat so all four of us were comfortable. The bicycle rides were on the weekend, so Dad did not need the van to go to work. Using the van, my friends and I went to various organized bicycle rides around the state of Wisconsin.
I naturally thought of having my own car. Something that much annoyed me is that potential employers in the city of Wisconsin Rapids would only hire a high school student from the Village of Biron if that student had his own car. Biron had a population of under eight hundred people, so there were few businesses of any kind other than the paper mill that dominated the village. Wisconsin Rapids at that time had 16,000 residents with supermarkets, department stores, fast food restaurants, and the like. Even though I could ride a hundred miles without much difficulty on a bicycle, employers in Wisconsin Rapids acted like the five miles between the village and the city was much too far to travel without a car of your own. Borrowing a parent’s car did not count. It was ridiculous, but the employers would not budge.
By then, the Biscayne did not run. It had tall grass growing all around it where the lawn mower did not reach. I put some effort into getting the car going. Dad enthusiastically helped me. A 1966 Chevy engine is so simple that the task was not difficult. This was the smallest size engine available in that model. It looked like three of the same engines would fit in the space under the hood if put side-by-side. This meant there was plenty of space for tools and hands. That engine was the easiest that I have ever worked on by far.
Dad and I replaced the points because those were corroded. Today’s cars do not even have these. It was a combination electrical-mechanical device that sat under the distributor cap. It was part of delivering current to the spark plugs. It was a cheap part. It only took a little patience and adjustment with a feeler gauge. Another task was gapping and putting in new spark plugs. I threw in a new air cleaner for good measure.
This sort of tuning up Dad could do in his sleep from working on the same type of engine in his van for so many years. He seemed delighted that I was finally taking an interest in cars rather than just bicycles. Even if the car was truly not repairable, Dad treated this as an excellent learning experience for me.
Despite a year or two without use, the Biscayne’s engine ran great after Dad and I tuned it up.
I then wanted to get the car up on ramps to get a better look at the rusted frame. I did not trust a jack for that. However, we did not own ramps. Dad did have a stack of sturdy wood that he got for free. He let me have it. I made ramps. These were far more sturdy than it might sound, as the wood was heavy and strong. Dad and I used those ramps for years with a number of vehicles. They are long gone by this time, though.
With the Biscayne running well and ramps built, I finally got a long, hard, close look at the rusted frame. The mechanic had not lied about it being rusted halfway through. What was strange though was only one small portion of the frame was rusted. The rest of the frame and the body of the car were sound. (See Fig. 3)
Figure 3: The Location of the Rusted Frame
[Photograph of Ertl Model by Joseph Arendt, Dec. 15, 2003]
The correct way for doing the repair would be replacement of the entire frame. Considering I made wood car ramps because I felt I could not afford to buy new metal ones, this was far out of my price range. This particular car would not be worth that expense anyway, as there was a modest amount of body rust.
Dad had a friend who was excellent at welding. Dad was skilled at brazing, which uses brass sticks and flux to repair steel. It makes long-lasting repairs to sheet steel, being far stronger and more durable than using exclusively fiberglass and body putty. Dad had taught me so I was fairly competent at brazing. While Dad owned a brazing outfit, he did not have a welder. For the frame, it seemed welding was needed as it is stronger than brazing. Dad sent me off to his friend.
I consulted with Dad’s friend. It looked like the repair I wanted would be difficult, but was possible. The type of steel of the frame would make welding difficult, though.
Dad’s friend had me try some arc welding on some scrap metal. It was nothing like brazing. I was terrible at it! The welding rod kept sticking. I was unable to lay a good bead. I was rapidly convinced that I needed to get somebody who knew how to weld well do the repair for the car.
I also needed some strong, thick steel for the repair. Dad found some quarter-inch thick plate steel that was being scraped. He brought that home with his van.
Steel that thick is not something to cut with a hack saw by hand. I tried it. Fifteen minutes of hard work had a cut perhaps a quarter inch long. Dad came up with a better approach. His brazing outfit had a metal cutting tip. We used that. It cut the steel easily. However, it quickly depleted the oxygen tank. Dad rented a large oxygen tank, bringing it home strapped down in his van. It was about five feet tall. This was much larger than the tank that had come with the brazing outfit. As I recall, it was not expensive renting the large oxygen tank.
Using that set up, I got the thick, heavy steel cut into the pieces I wanted. It looked like I really would get the Biscayne back on the road.
The battery in the car would no longer hold a charge. I had to put the battery charger on for hours just to be able to start it. Yet, a test with a voltmeter showed the alternator was good. I bought a brand new Sears Diehard battery, which solved that problem.
Another problem was after sitting in the back yard for a couple years, the tires were rotted. It turned out the State of Wisconsin had passed a law making steel-studded snow tires illegal. Dad had four such tires for his van that he used to install every winter. Those tires had plenty of tread and the rubber was in decent shape. With permission from Dad and a few hours work with a needle nose pliers, those tires no longer had steel studs. The Biscayne had usable tires.
The only major step that remained was getting the steel plates welded in. It looked like I was going to be in the lucky minority of high school seniors who had a car!
A car might be useful in another way. What was popular for high school graduates in Wisconsin Rapids and Biron was to go to college at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. It was a fifteen to twenty mile trip, so an easy commute in a car. The in-state tuition for the University of Wisconsin system was low. By living at home and commuting, a good college education at Stevens Point was achievable for a very modest sum of money. From some comments Dad had made, this seemed a direction in which he was encouraging me.
I had already decided I wanted to study electrical engineering. Stevens Point did not have this program. University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Wisconsin-Platteville did. All the other universities in the system were out of the running. This meant moving away and living in the dorms.
One possibility was to go to UW-Stevens Point for a couple years, then transfer. However, when I asked my guidance counselor at high school and some others, it seemed courses like Calculus and Physics at Point were not quite up to those at a university with an actual engineering school. Those who had tried transferring had not generally been successful. My guidance counselor recommended that if I wanted to become an electrical engineer, I should start out immediately at a school like UW-Madison or UW-Platteville.
During my last two years in high school, my grades skyrocketed. I had given up study halls to cram in more courses that I thought would help prepare me for studying engineering in college.
As for the Biscayne, just as I was on the verge of success, Dad suddenly lost enthusiasm for helping me. One reason he had was something that I had not considered. I had no good counter-argument.
The brakes in his old van had gotten bad. Dad had pulled the wheels and checked the brake shoes and drums. Those were fine. Dad then tracked the problem down to the master cylinder. It was leaking brake fluid, so had to be replaced.
When one pushed the brake pedal, a lever shoved a hydraulic cylinder called the master cylinder. Hollow metal tubes called brake lines transmitted the pressurized fluid to the wheels. Other hydraulic cylinders at the wheels then converted the pressurized fluid back into mechanical force. It caused the brake shoes to push against the drums to stop the car. At least, old Chevys had drum brakes on all four wheels. Most modern cars have disk brakes, so the terms change slightly to brake disk rather than brake drum, the names accurately describing the shapes.
The 1967 van had the right front wheel and left rear wheel on one hydraulic system, while the left front wheel and right rear wheel were on the other. Thus, if pressure was lost in one system, the brakes still stopped the car with one front and one rear wheel, although less efficiently. This had happened with the van. Dad noticed the lessened braking and had investigated.
That was the way Chevrolet did their braking systems in 1967. It was not the system used in the 1966 Biscayne, even though a single year earlier. It had all four wheels tied to the same hydraulics. If there were a leak, brakes were lost on all four wheels! Thus, Dad had a serious safety concern that was part of the very design of the car, even if I got it back to working like it had when new.
Dad and I had a serious talk about this. Was a retrofit to a 1967 system possible and affordable? Neither of us knew.
Dad then brought up something else. I can say without exaggeration that this conversation changed the direction of my life.
He knew quite well that for those in Biron, having a car made it far easier to get a minimum wage job in Wisconsin Rapids. I am referring to the type of job of stuffing groceries, using a cash register, or flipping burgers. Although the brake issue was unresolved and the parts for the frame not yet welded in, I was close to getting the car going. If I did, Dad would let me have the car for the $75 he originally paid for it. Even back in 1980, that was not much money. I had paid nearly that much for the Sears Diehard battery in the car already.
Dad then said that unlike the parents of some other high school kids I knew, he and Mom would not contribute a dime to car insurance for my own car. For a high school kid, it costs a lot of money for even minimum coverage. High school drivers are considered high risk.
Dad explained that if I had the car street legal, I probably could get a minimum wage job in Rapids. With such a job, he felt I could work enough hours to pay for car insurance on my own.
However, he had heard me talking about studying electrical engineering. He knew I had within a fairly short period of time gone from a mediocre student to getting nearly straight A’s. He suggested that to pay for car insurance myself would require working so many hours that my academic performance would almost certainly go down. For the long-term goal of becoming an electrical engineer, he recommended that I drop all plans for the Biscayne and concentrate on my education.
Dad stressed that it was entirely my choice. If I wanted instead, I could pay him seventy-five dollars, then the car would be mine. Since it had no plates, we could use a tow cable and the powerful Suburban to bring it to his friend, the welder.
What Dad said made good sense to me. Also, unlike many of my teachers, Dad had not treated my academic turnaround as a temporary fluke, but a serious and perhaps permanent change in attitude.
I dropped working on the Biscayne like it was a hot potato! I think even Dad was surprised how completely I stopped working on it. It was as though a switch had been turned from on to off. I did not do a single thing to the car after this conversation.
To those in my class at high school who knew how close I was to having my own car, one of the highest dreams of most high school students, I had gone insane! In hindsight, I wish I had never told any other high school student a thing about the car.
My grades stayed high. I was accepted at both UW-Platteville and UW-Madison. For a variety of reasons, I started at UW-Platteville. I felt my high school education had prepared me well. All the effort I had put into studying paid off handsomely. My first semester, I was on the Dean’s List and admitted into the Freshman Honor Society.
While living on campus in the dormitory, I found little need for having a car. Some of the students had cars while others did not. For succeeding academically, having a car did not seem to help.
It looked like I would not be dropping out of the engineering program at Platteville, and I did not have a real need for an automobile on campus. During my second semester in college, Dad sold the Biscayne to a neighbor for two hundred dollars. Mom was delighted that after all those years, the eyesore was finally gone.
The neighbor ignored the rusted frame. He never put in the thick steel brace parts that I made, even though Dad offered them with the car for no extra charge.
Dad told me the neighbor drove it for about a year before junking it. The car...very old by then...developed various mechanical problems. Talking to the neighbor, Dad said that he found out the car was having trouble with the brakes, where they would go out unless the brake pedal was vigorously pumped. This was just the concern Dad had had because of it not having a split hydraulic system.
Dad’s blue van lasted many years longer. The high oil consumption continued, but popping in new spark plugs kept working. I had graduated with a bachelor degree in electrical engineering a year before Dad finally junked the twenty-year old van.
Therefore, unlike Mike, I never owned a car in high school. The 1966 Chevy Biscayne was instead the car I could have had if I had chosen a different path. Despite what having a car would have done for my social status when in high school, I think Dad’s advice was superb.
When I worked as an electrical engineer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, I met a physicist who told me about the car he had when he in college. He had a 1966 Chevy Impala. This car was nearly identical to the Biscayne. While the Biscayne was the economy version for the full-sized line, the Impala was the fancier version.
The physicist told me that he had the same problem with the frame rusting underneath the driver's side rear wheel well. The rust was not on the passenger side, just on the driver’s side. He said that one day, the car made a scrapping noise after he drove down a steep driveway. He continued a short distance, and the scrapping continued. He thought the tailpipe or muffler had come loose, so was dragging. He pulled over to check. The rusted frame had given. It was the car itself that dragged on the road!
I suspect such a thing would have happened to the Biscayne if the neighbor had continued to use it.
As for why such an obscure economy-line car would rate having a toy in the year 2003, it is because of the optional engine. Unlike the small 250 cubic inch in-line six-cylinder engine, the model has under the openable hood a depiction of a massive 427 cubic inch V-8 engine. This makes it qualify for being under the brand name “American Muscle” by Ertl. For the real car, that engine would make it much, much faster. However, back when I almost got the car going, I was glad of the smaller engine. The so-called Energy Crisis had not yet ended. The smaller straight-six engine let the car go significantly farther on the same amount of gasoline than the large V-8.
In the autumn of 1984, I borrowed for one semester a 1976 Volkswagen Dasher that my parents had purchased. This enabled me to do a co-op term at Kohler Company, which was a valuable, educational, and profitable experience. I returned the car after the co-op, but I bought the same car for a modest sum when I graduated in 1986. So, that VW was my first car and I did not actually own it until after graduating from college. The Saturn sedan I drive today, which I bought used from Dad, is the fourth car that I have owned. It would been the fifth if I had really owned the Biscayne, but I never did. For all four of my cars, what I learned working on the Biscayne has been useful many times.
THE END
If you want to talk to me, I can be reached at arendtj@att.net