Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

I believe I’m well on the way to proving the existence of a genetic pre-disposition toward the ravaging of garage doors. I have two subjects to use for case studies: Myself and my father.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that it had been my experience that garage doors yield readily to vehicles that attempt to pass through them. When my first encounter down that line failed to convince me of this, a few subsequent incidents brought me solidly into the fold.

…

If memory serves me, in the 70’s, Ford had a few “design issues” with the transmissions of some of its vehicles where on occasion they could slip from “park” into “reverse”. This was seemingly a bad thing if the car was running. Go figure. I also seem to recall seeing stickers on the sun visors of said vehicles indicating that they really felt you needed to have the parking brake on in just such circumstances. Got all that? You’ll want to keep it all in mind as I continue…

My uncle, my father, and I were working inside the detached garage behind our house. It was cold out and my dad needed to run the engine of the Ford while he worked. So, we did what you do in such cases: We put a piece of flexible tubing onto the tail pipe of the car and ran it under the garage door so that we could keep it mostly closed. While my dad tinkered under the hood, my uncle and I were working on the inside of the vehicle, cleaning it out and doing some other mostly cosmetic stuff.

Whatever the work was that my dad was doing at the time seemed to require that he rev the engine a bit here and again. He was able to do this from under the hood by means of tugging the accelerator cable by the carberator, and he had done this a few times already. However, one of the times that he did this, the aforementioned “design issue” manifested itself with the result that the car started moving backward toward the closed garage door. My uncle and I were leaning into the vehicle from both the driver and passenger side when it started its attempted escape. You’d think that we would have hopped out of the way, wouldn’t you? Not a chance. Instead, for some strange reason we both grabbed the car and dug our feet in as though we could stop it. It wasn’t moving fast but I can tell you that our combined strength wasn’t near enough to halt its progress. So, the car quietly dragged us both along as it backed into and through the garage door. The only one who had any sense was my dad. As we were being drug along, he walked to the driver’s side and threw it back into park (or turned off the ignition, I can’t remember which), halting the vehicle. Sadly, by that time most of the rear of the car was outside the garage. Anyhow, you can imagine what followed: yet another repair of a garage door and its associated hardware for my poor dad. The upside in this case (sorta) was that this time the door being crunched was on my dad’s side of the garage instead of being on my mother’s, as it had been when I had my “Mustang-through-door” incident. I guess the optimist would say that everything was in balance as a result…

But was that all? Noooooooo….

1. 
   All Car Garage said...
   1:56 pm - April 11th, 2006

   2007 Ford Mustang California Special Edition

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