Driving to Orlando

(Previous: Going to Florida)

The intermittent rain was still there (intermittently). I turned on the windshield wipers and was pleased to discover that they worked. After a while, the rain stopped, and I attempted to turn off the wipers. I was then presented with a philosophical question.

The wipers undeniably worked: they were wiping. However, if the wipers fail to stop working when the switch is moved to 'off', can the fact that they continue to 'work' mean that they in fact do not work? Probably easier to say that the switch doesn't work properly.

The switch continued to not work properly for some fifteen miles, until I made a left turn. When I turned on the indicator, the windshield wipers returned to their park position and stopped.

After I had made the turn and turned off the indicator (it doesn't self-cancel when you turn left), the windshield wiper switch started not working again. This wasn't so bad, because by this time it had started raining again.

(Nicole, I should point out, was at this point close to bursting a seam with laughter. All her life, she'd heard stories of English car electrics (Why do the British drink their beer at room temperature? Because Lucas also makes refrigerators). She knew, on some intellectual level, that there appeared to be strange interconnections between seemingly-unrelated electrical systems in English cars. It is one thing to hear of a car that had headlights that would not work concurrently with the radio (an MG Midget I used to have); it is another to see these strange interactions with one's own eyes. I believe that she thought that people with British cars had been exaggerating the hardships for entertainment value and sympathy. Now she knew that they were in fact probably toning down the stories out of embarrassment.)

The rain was by now not intermittent: it was really coming down. I was driving on an expressway at this point, and trying as much as possible to keep out of other vehicles' spray.

The problem is, when you're driving on an expressway in a car with 60 horsepower and an automatic transmission, you're not really in control of who or what is in front of you (eventually, everyone is in front of you). People keep passing you and cutting back into your lane as soon as possible. You get hit with a lot of spray from their tires.

And this is a major problem in the Austin America. You see, the ADO16, like the Mini before it, had a then-revolutionary transverse-mounted engine. The odd thing about the Mini and ADO16, though, is that they turned the engine and its cooling system sideways. If you look under the hood of, say, a current Cadillac, you find a sideways engine sitting behind a radiator that fills the space behind the grille. Presumably, this was done to shorten the car overall, and to simplify the radiator hoses. (If you've ever seen one of these British radiator hoses, you're laughing right now. They're not just hoses, but plumbing systems in their own right, with branch lines grafted into the hoses themselves. They are totally unobtainable on the normal car parts market, probably have to be hand-made, and are prone to failure because of their complexity.)

In the Mini and ADO16, the radiator is in 'front' of the engine. But because the engine is turned sideways, the radiator vents into the left front wheel well. The grille is right where you'd expect it to be, in the front of the car. But it's just there for a bit of air flow and for appearance.

Now. The A-series engine -- a masterpiece of engineering -- has its intake and exhaust system on the 'left' side of the engine (looking from the 'front'), and everything electrical on the 'right' side. When installed sideways, this means that the distributor, spark plugs, coil, generator, and starter are all right behind the mostly-decorative grille on the front of the car. Right where they can get sprayed with water whenever it's wet out.

This design is understandable. After all, these cars come from England, which is known around the world for its semi-arid, 'temperate' climate. (The incredibly clement weather also explains why English firms have built so many convertibles over the years.) Having been designed for such a dry place as England, it's understandable that you might encounter some problems in the Sunshine State.

(There is allegedly available a plastic shield that fits over the ignition system and that eliminates or lessens this problem. I have never even seen a photograph of one of these installed, though, so I still doubt its existence.)

The end result of all this is that the ignition gets wet, and the engine starts to miss. This happened a few times, but it never got really bad, thanks to evasive driving. I was a little worried, but we were making good time, and were about 15 miles from our hotel for the night when we stopped at a tollbooth. I paid the toll and started up again, only to discover the car had a distinct lack of power

When it's running properly, this car has 60 horsepower (or so). When it has a "distinct lack of power", it's barely moving.

I sputtered the car over to the side of the road, where it died completely. They say that God looks out for fools, a category that must certainly include people who drive just-purchased 33-year-old Austins upwards of 100 miles, because at that moment it stopped raining.

I got out, grabbed the toolkit, and started poking and prodding. The ignition was damp, but working. The air filter was extremely dirty, but functional. There was fuel in the see-through fuel filter. I banged on things and scratched my head for a little while, every so often having Nicole attempt to start the car from inside.

Eventually, I noticed an eerie silence while the ignition was turned on. The ticking noise of the fuel pump wasn't there. My heart sank: I had no way to improvise a fuel pump on the side of the road.

Under the theory that whatever was wrong with the fuel pump was just barely wrong enough to keep it from working -- after all, it had been working a few minutes before -- I attempted impromptu repairs. I banged on the pump with a Crescent wrench, hoping to dislodge sediment that might be clogging it up. I wiggled all the wires, judging from their appearance that they were likely shot. I removed the pump entirely and blew out as much fuel as I could, in an attempt to dislodge even more sediment. I moved the fuel filter from between the pump and the carb to between the pump and the tank, where it might do some good. (Though I am concerned that the filter might have been deliberately placed after the pump in order to keep bits of the pump out of the carburetor. Hmm.)

I did all of this, you see, because I didn't have any electrical test equipment with me -- not even a light bulb on a wire. In the end, I found that one of the car's two fuses was blown. I replaced it, and the fuel pump started happily sputtering away. I should have checked the fuses before I did anything else.

Next: Driving Around Orlando