1990 Mazda 323 rag top!

I really like compact hatch backs. I found a good excuse to own one back in 2008 when I was out of work for 6 months waiting for my broken back to fully  heal. I was on state disability, which barely covered the mortgage. My savings were being chiseled away from other monthly necessaries like medical bills, groceries, insurance, house utilities, and such. I was driving a Jeep Cherokee that was good for about 15 MPG. It was killing me in a time when I both had to be super frugal and also wanted to get out of the house as often as possible. I sold the Cherokee for $2200 and bought a beat little fuel sipper for $1200. I was up $1k for expenses, and had a vehicle that would go just as far as the Jeep on half the fuel. Score!

Mind you this was also during one of the times when fuel was selling for nearly $5 per gallon. So I had the 323. I also considered many other little hatch backs, but as fuel prices were rising, so were the prices of economy cars on the second hand market. This was the best I could do. It has a 1.8l ohc engine and a 5 speed manual transmission. The heater worked and it had a radio. It wasn't long before I laid into it to make it a little more personal...I found a set of Miata wheels and bolted them on (I know, there goes the savings). The car looked way better. I added some "futura" badges taken from my Falcon project. The best modification by far, though, was the sliding rag top.

I have always thought it would be really cool to own a Renault Le Car with the full sliding roof, or say, a 2CV, or an original fiat 500. Either way, I decided that there was no reason why Mazda shouldn't and couldn't have fitted a leaky, finicky sliding roof to this 323 back in 1990. Shame on them!

I wonder if I can drive like this?

1970 VW Westfalia (the travellers companion)

I love vans and always have. Growing up, my folks shuttled my brothers and I around in a 1978 Ford Econoline 150. It was an ugly root beer brown, but had a 351 V8 engine and a 4 speed manual transmission! Cool! My favorite book in second grade was one about custom van conversions of the 70's. I used to stare at those pictures and dream one day of our stripped-out Econoline looking like one of the posh Taj-Majal's on wheels that graced those pages. That never happened though, sadly. However, just after high school, a friend and I hatched a plan to go cross country for a few weeks, and we'd need cheap accommodations. I bought a smashed up and gutted blue and white 1975 VW Bus (no pictures). It had the fuel injected 2.0l engine, and man alive, that thing was fast...as long as it was hitting on all 4 cylinders....which it only did from time-to-time...

We never took our cross country trip, but we drove that van for the better part of the summer out of high school.  I was not able to figure out how to make that injected 2-liter run like it was supposed to, so I sold it down the road for about the same $400 that I had paid. The thing was, even though it ran terribly, I was entirely hooked on the experience of hanging out in the van with friends, of hunching over the steering wheel creeping up long grades, of hanging on at wide-open-throttle when the power would intermittently kick in, and generally I was hooked on van ownership.

It would be ten years or so before I had my next van, a white 1968 genuine Westfalia. I picked up the van through a coworker, somewhere near Grass Valley, Ca. It hadn't run in a few years, the registration was expired, and the interior was shabby and missing a few pieces, but we struck a deal and I got it for $300. Score!

                                       

1968 Westy- a little rough around the edges, but up for anything! Cosmetically, all I did was paint the wheels, add new hub caps, and wax the paint. I may have popped out a dent or two also.