The Ford Fiesta
The Fiesta was a peculiar little German-made Ford. They used an incomprable 1.6 liter engine that was practically air-cooled. The radiator seemed, especially in the dead of winter, tacked on as ornamentation. These were great little cars. Tough and speedy they would sometimes get 30MPG. An extra-special fringe benefit of owning one of these cars is that you could take the German car snobs down a notch. I would bet that a Fiesta was a close race with a Rabbit in a drag race and they probably handled better, too. Another cool thing about these cars is that all the cars came prepped for all the options. When I went to junkyards, I just unscrewed panic handles, toggle switches, fog lights and other stuff from junkers and added them to my cars. Voila! Instant option packages!
1980 Ford Fiesta Sport
This was my first one and the first
car I ever purposely shopped for and then purchased for a price over $100.00. I
had a big tax return that year and some extra money saved up. I was sick of
paying through the teeth to operate gargantuan gas suckers. I wanted an econobox.
The Fiesta is a good looker, and I found a dandy. The blue was a respray, the
sun roof was not a stock one (one of the few that didn’t have a stock sunroof)
and it had the sport option package. That meant another first for me: A
TACHOMETER! I loved this car. It was my longest lived, longest run car to that
date. The thing that killed it was its CV joints going out. A new axle shaft
was $150.00. I paid $850.00 for it when it had 95,000 miles on it and it was just starting to show its wear.
With cars like this what happens when your car starts eating parts? You buy a parts car!!!
1978 Ford Fiesta Ghia
Enter the parts car. This one was a
beautiful, fully loaded GHIA model. The only thing wrong with it, aside from 4
bald tires (the ones it came with went on to my ’80), was that the bolt that
you filled the transaxle oil from had broken. These cars were rather cheaply made. The bolt must
have had a nut welded to the transaxle case to act as its threads. Those welds broke and so the
threads were spinning with the bolt. This meant that the bolt couldn't be removed. Even if a guy could
have spun the bolt inside the nut, once the bolt was free, the nut would have dropped INTO the transaxle.
Either way, the tranny was toast and I wasn't going to mess with it. Because of all this, no
oil could be added and that had shredded the gearbox.
I was just starting to dig into the project when I dumped both of the cars off
on some guy who thought they were even neater than I did. That dude got a good
deal, too.
1979 Fiesta Sport
Yet the Fiesta story was not over. A
couple of years after divesting myself of Ford’s little German go-cart, I was hanging out
with pals at the student union. Cars came up as a subject as they do and
I mentioned that I liked these things. One of the guys in the group said his
wife had hit a deer with one and it was laid up at his father in-law’s farm. I
asked him if he wanted to get rid of it and he said yes. The price was $75.00.
He didn’t think it ran, so he had it towed to my apartment.
When I saw it, I thought the damage wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t. The radiator was sound, the hood opened (these things had "suicide" hoods that were hinged at the front), the license plate on the front was still there. It was a go. I got it running and washed the chicken feathers out of it and off I went.
Unfortunately, being the dead of winter, I took it to an oil change place to get its oil changed. Unfortunately, because the slack-jawed shitheel who was running the place thought a bottle of his “fuel line cleaner” was just the thing for my car. He stuck it in the tank without asking me first and then stuck it on the bill. He told me it was “Standard Procedure.” I told him in the midst of absolutely blowing my stack that fuel line cleaner was the last thing this car needed. I told him that as we spoke, that stuff was loosening all the crud in the tank and fixing to send it downstream to the fuel filter that would soon clog and leave me on the side of the road. I told him that I would be lucky to even get home (15 miles). I also informed him that I not only would not be paying him for his bottle of goo, but I would be sending him the bill for the tow I would most certainly need once the filter clogged. He didn’t argue much as if he did he would certainly have been killed.
I did not make it home, only about ¾ of the way there when the car sputtered and died. I hiked to a phone, called the idiot at the shop and told him where I was and to send a tow truck to me and take care of the bill. To his credit, he did. I was happy to see that oil change place went out of business about 3 months later and was somewhat proud that my bill hastened its departure. The little car got several fuel filters and finally stopped going through them at such a clip.
It eventually passed emissions with most of it’s air pump tubing needing to be replaced with carefully removed junkyard items. I kept it for about a year.
I learned a valuable and somewhat startling lesson on how other people perceived me when a female friend offered to buy it from me for 2 cases of beer and a $20.00 coupon book for breakfasts at my favorite hash house. I learned an even bigger lesson about myself when I accepted the deal. She got the good end of the bargain: It ran for at least 2 years beyond the sale date before I lost touch with it.
