COUNTING DOWN
If the track had been ready on Monday, I don't think I
could've convinced Beck to let the maiden voyage of the rocket
car wait until Jimmy came in on the weekend. He was far too
anxious to get moving on the whole thing. As a matter of fact,
the only way I was able to get him to wait as long as I did was
by agreeing to start getting things ready on Friday. After my
Dad and I went home from the yard on Friday, I returned to the
yard and found Sal and Beck waiting for me. We backed the flatbed
into the weedy field where the Rocket Car was docked, set up the
ramps, and hoisted the car onto the flatbed with the winch. I
drove the flatbed out to the abandoned mine and down the slope to
tracks, scared shitless that I'd get the truck stuck in the soft
sand. But I made it down the slope okay, and we lowered
the Rocket Car onto the tracks.
It looked perfectly at home sitting on the rails. Like
that's were it was meant to be all the time.
But we didn't have time to stand around admiring the way
the Rocket Car looked on the tracks. Even though we were a
hundred yards from a fairly secluded stretch of highway, the
sight of a five-ton flatbed, a four-wheel-drive pickup, and a
rocket powered `59 Chevy on railroad wheels would've
looked pretty peculiar to anyone coming down the road. So as soon
as the car was on the rails, I climbed into the Chevy's drivers'
seat and Beck pushed me down the tracks with the pickup's bumper
until the car was close to the mine entrance. Actually, it almost
went THROUGH the boarded- up hole in the mountain. I was sitting
sitting there enjoying the ride, halfway to the mine entrance,
when I suddenly realized that hitting the dump valve would stop
the car PERMANENTLY. Or at least until we went back to the
scrapyard and snagged the portable compressor to re-inflate the
shocks. About a quarter mile from the mine entrance I started
waving out the window and screaming for Beck to stop, and when he
finally hit the brakes, I must've been doing about forty or so.
By the time the car coasted to a stop, I was no more than fifty
feet from the entrance.
Close call.
We pulled the boards from the mine entrance again, and
Beck used the pickup to ease the Chevy into the mine. Very
slowly. Once it was all the way inside, he took me back to the
flatbed, and followed me back to the yard. I parked the flatbed
where it usually spent the night, we loaded the portable
compressor into the pickup, and returned to the mine.
Since we didn't have a tow chain, we had to muscle the car
far enough out of the mine for Beck to get the truck in front of
the Chevy and push it back down the tracks. When we got the car
about a mile from the entrance, we let the car coast to a stop,
Beck got out of the pickup, and Sal slipped into the driver's
seat. Beck jumped into the Rocket Car with a maniac grin on his
face, and Sal maneuvered the pickup behind the Chevy.
Beck gave us a jaunty thumbs-up, and Sal hit the gas. We picked
up speed until we were doing about fifty, and just before I was
about to scream at Sal to stop, he hit the brakes. We watched the
rocket car pull away at goodly clip.
And keep going.
And keep going.
And just as I was wondering if the brake system might have
malfunctioned, I saw the ass end of the Chevy pitch up slightly
as Beck hit the dump lever. Sal and I both let out the breath
we'd been holding, and drove down to where the car was stopped.
When we got there, the car was resting on the runners and Beck
was sitting on the hood. Less than twenty feet from the mine
entrance.
I'll say it again: Beck was a fucking maniac.
I thought he might make up an excuse for waiting so long
to stop, that the brakes didn't work or whatever, but he didn't
even bother. The runners had scraped the rust off ten feet of the
rails, and when I looked under the Rocket Car, water was still
squirting out of the hoses. When I asked what the fuck was wrong
with him, Beck said "Hey, I didn't feel like pushing this fucker
all the way to the garage, so I let it coast most of the way. You
have a problem with that?"
Actually, I didn't. The "garage" he was referring to was
actually the mine shaft, where we planned to stash the car until
the firing test the next day. Nobody wanted to go through the
bullshit of hauling the car back to the yard, so we decided to
simply push it into the mine, replace the boards, and leave it
there overnight. And after re-inflating the shocks from
the compressor in the pickup, that's exactly what we did. But
every time I looked at those two bright spots on the rails, less
than twenty feet from the boards covering that mine shaft, I
wondered if it would EVER be a good idea to let Beck drive the
thing while a rocket was pushing it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
LEFTOFF!
The first (and last) test run of the Rocket Car happened
on Holy Saturday, 1978. For the non-Christians in the house, Holy
Saturday is the day before Easter, a day the faithful are
supposed to spend preparing for the Easter feast and quietly
contemplating the Miracle of the Resurrection. My family has been
Catholic for about a thousand generations, so I suppose this put
me firmly among the ranks of "The Faithful". Which means the
Pope probably would've frowned on my spending the day before
Easter experimenting with illegal military ordnance and
trespassing on private property, but I'm also confident that
nothing in the Bible covers what we were doing that Saturday
morning, so I probably had some wiggle-room.
We assembled at the abandoned mine early in the morning,
just before dawn. The prefabricated story to my parents was that
Jimmy and I were driving up to.... a big city in the area (you'll
excuse me if I don't specify which one), and wanted to get an
early start. Jimmy was using the same excuse for anyone at
his house who was curious. Dad wasn't even going into the yard
on Holy Saturday, so I had the day to myself. I went to Jimmy's
house and found him waiting for me on the front porch, and we
left for the mine.
When we arrived, I was tremendously relieved to find that
Sal and Beck were already there, sitting on the hood of the
pickup, which was parked near the mine entrance. They even had
the boards pulled from the mine entrance and the car pushed out
into the open. My relief wasn't due to the fact that
they'd showed up (you couldn't have kept Beck away with a court
order) but because they were just sitting on the hood of the
pickup, patiently waiting for Jimmy and I to arrive. See, the
night before, we'd loaded two of the JATO's, the portable
compressor, and three five-gallon jerry cans of water into the
back of Beck's pickup, for convenience's sake. It was way
too much stuff to haul in my car, and we figured the gear would
be safe spending the night in Beck's truck, covered with a tarp.
What hadn't occurred to me until I got home was that Beck was in
possession of everything he needed to test the car HIMSELF, on
the sly. I even considered taking a ride past his house around
midnight to see if the truck was still there, when it occurred to
me that even though he DID have the ignition button on the
dashboard, he had no way to light the rocket. And I didn't think
he was stupid enough to set the car up and strap himself
in while Sal stuffed lit matches into the JATO, trying to get it
started.
Sal would've done it without hesitation. But not Beck.
I'd like to say that depriving Beck of the igniters was a
piece of intelligent foresight on my part, but it was really
exactly the opposite. I'd just forgotten them. We had to stop at
the scrapyard to get the igniters and a hundred-foot roll of
field-phone wire before we went to the mine.
Anyway, I left my car parked on the shoulder of the road,
and we walked down the slope to find that Beck and Sal were
aching to get the test under way. Beck shot a look at the
igniters in my hand as he was getting into the truck, but it was
still too dark out to read his expression. If I had to guess, I'd
say it was an irritated one. Beck started the truck and
drove around to the front of the Rocket Car, then left it in low
gear as he pushed it to the opposite end of the track, with the
rest of us riding on the tailgate. It wasn't until the car was
stopped at the end of the track that Jimmy looked the car over
and asked what turned out to be a VERY important question.
He said "So why is the car pointing THIS way?"
Sal and Beck and I stared at the car for a minute, and
although I can't speak for the other two, I was trying to come up
with something to say. To be honest, I'd never given it much
thought. I suppose that when the car was brought to my Dad's
scrapyard, it was hauled onto the flatbed rear-first, because the
front end was further from the path winding through the
yard. When we loaded the car to bring it to the mine, winching it
onto the flatbed rear-first was simply the easiest thing to do,
so that's what we did. And when we got to the tracks, I'd simply
driven the flatbed to the end opposite the mine shaft and parked
facing away from the entrance. It seemed like a good way to avoid
driving the flatbed over the tracks themselves, which might have
damaged them. So when we rolled the car down the planks and onto
the tracks, it ended up facing the mine entrance. Sure,
we could've set it on the tracks facing the opposite way, but...
nobody thought of it. Actually, nobody even thought to THINK
about it. The whole process seemed simple and straightforward,
even the part where we pushed the Chevy into the mine entrance
and boarded it up. I mean, you DRIVE a car into a garage, you
don't BACK it in, right?
So the three of us gave Jimmy a shrug, and I asked him
what difference it made. He walked around the car looking
thoughtful, and after awhile said "None. This is good" But later
on I figured out what he'd been thinking about. If something went
wrong with car (specifically the brakes), which way would we want
it to be pointing? If the brakes failed while it was heading
AWAY from the mine, the car would eventually run onto the
wide-gauge rails at the end of OUR track. And with the flatbed
back in the yard, it wasn't likely we'd be able to get the car
off the tracks if it got stuck there. But with the car pointed
TOWARD the mine, a brake failure would mean the car simply flew
into an abandoned silver mine. We could declare the experiment a
failure, nail the boards back up, and call it a day. Of course
the equation looked a lot different with a passenger on board,
but that's why we were doing a test run first.
Ah yes, the test run.
Once Jimmy was through looking the car over, I broke the
news to Beck that the first run would be unmanned. He didn't like
the sound of that a BIT, even after I explained to him that it
was in his best interest. Personally, I wouldn't have gone near
the thing unless we'd had at LEAST one trial, but Beck's mind
didn't work that way. He wanted to ride in the car on the first
run, and it took awhile to convince him that it simply
wasn't going to happen. But after a little arguing he
grudgingly accepted our logic. We took one of the JATOS out of
it's crate and loaded into the pipe at the rear of the car, then
I had Sal drive me down the tracks toward the mine. When the
odometer had ticked off exactly a mile, I made him stop while I
got out and pounded an eight-inch spike into one of
the wooden ties. The lumber was still solid enough to hold the
spike well, which was nice to see, since I had no alternative
plan to activate the brakes. We drove back to the Rocket Car and
found that Jimmy and Beck had already shoved one of my igniters
into the JATO nozzle, attached the leads to the roll of
field-phone cable with wirenuts, and were unrolling the cable
away from the tracks. I told Sal to park about fifty feet away
from the Chevy, with the broad side of the truck facing the
tracks. Jimmy had mentioned the chance of the JATO exploding like
a bomb when it was ignited, and I wanted to have the pickup truck
between me and the JATO when it was lit.
I filled the can under the Chevy's hood with water from
one of the jerry cans, closed the hood and rigged the automatic
brake. The wire stretched between the runners was only five or
six inches above the railroad ties, and it looked low enough to
catch on the spike with no problem. Beck came over to watch the
whole procedure, a little miffed that the unmanned test
had obviously been planned out well in advance. But by then it
was too late for him to raise any serious objections. If the car
ran okay, he'd get his ride. If not, he'd be grateful we made the
test.
Once the brakes were rigged and the water can filled,
there was only one thing left to do: Light the mother and see
what happened.
We all gathered around the truck, Beck popped the hood,
and I cut the field phone wire from the roll and stripped the
ends. By then the sun had climbed over the top of the mountains,
and we had a clear view of the entire track. I wrapped one of the
field phone wires around the corroded negative post of the
truck's battery, and just as I was about to touch the other
wire to the positive, Sal yelled "Wait!"
He scared the shit out of me.
I said "What? What? What's the problem?"
Sal looked slightly embarrassed, and said "Shouldn't we
have a countdown?"
Jesus Christ.
Beck gave him a smack in the back of the head, but I told
him sure, if he wanted a countdown, we'd have a countdown. So Sal
counted down from ten, and when he reached zero, I touched the
wire to the lead of the battery.
Liftoff.
The sequence of events that followed happened so damned
fast that I'm surprised my mind was able to record everything
that occurred. But even though parts of this story have grown
foggy over the years, the memory of the actual Flight of the
Rocket Car remains crystal-clear.
When I touched the wire to battery post, we heard a little
fizz from the JATO. I knew what it was, since I'd heard it
before. The igniter going off. I didn't expect to hear it, since
I figured the rocket would light instantly. Instead, it hissed
for a second, then stopped. But before I could start to worry if
the rocket was a dud, there was a massive eruption
of orange flame from the ass of the Chevy, as if it had just laid
the worst fart in history. Along with the flame was a huge,
howling roar, something nobody had counted on. We'd all seen the
Apollo launches on TV, and we KNEW that rockets were noisy, but
nothing had prepared us for this. It sounded like.... I don't
know what. Like a solid-fuel rocket igniting, I suppose. And the
noise and smoke continued for what seemed like a long time
before the Rocket Car took off.
No, scratch that. It didn't take off, it JUMPED.
I've been trying to figure out a way to put it into words,
but the sight is almost impossible to describe. Think of this:
You know what it looks like when you shoot a paper clip with a
rubber band? One second the clip is between your fingers, and the
next it's just... gone. You can't track it with your eyes,
because it moves too fast. All you can do is hope to shift your
eyes to where it was going, so you can see where it hits.
Think of the same thing happening with a 1500-pound car.
And I remember thinking later that there was no way in
HELL I was EVER going to ride in the thing. I could only imagine
what would've happened to Beck if we'd let him ride in it. I'm
sure the seat would've been torn from it's mounts, and Beck
probably would've made a hasty exit through the back
windshield. I don't know much about G-forces or rocket
construction, but I can't think of any way a regular car seat
could've stood up to that kind of acceleration.
In the space of a second, the car jumped down the track,
heading away from us, and we were enveloped in thick,
chemical-smelling smoke. Another bit of poor planning. We all ran
up the slope to get out of the artificial fogbank, but the
roar from the rocket stopped as quickly as it started. Jimmy says
the burn time on our JATO was 2.2 seconds, but at the time it
seemed a LOT longer than that. I staggered up the slope and
looked down the tracks, to see that the Rocket Car was moving
along at a rapid pace, toward the spike I'd driven in the
railroad tie. And although it was moving damned fast, it was far
enough away so that I can't even take a guess as to how fast it
was going. My eyes were still burning from the rocket smoke, but
I did see it pass the point where I'd planted the spike, and
then...
Something happened.
Intellectually, I know exactly what happened. The spike
caught the piano wire, pulled the stick out from under the
dump-valve lever, and the air shocks lowered the car to the
rails. I didn't actually see the car drop, but it
must have happened. Because a second later, more smoke started
pouring out of the car. Only this time it was coming from UNDER
the car, and it was steam, not smoke. The runners had heated up,
and the water shooting onto the hot brakes was turning into
steam.
But it kept going.
And going.
It didn't seem to be slowing down very much, either. It
MUST have been, since the runners were obviously pushing against
the rails hard enough to create a lot of heat. But I guess it
wasn't enough. The car kept moving, closer and closer to the
mine. The last coherent thought I had was that it had been a VERY
good move to point the car toward the mine. It was still moving
at a good clip, highway-speed at least, when it was fifty yards
from the entrance. It obviously wasn't going to stop in time,
and I remember wondering just how far into the mine it would
go before stopping.
But it never made to the entrance.
Later on, Jimmy and I had a long discussion about what
happened next, but we were too far away for anyone to have a
clear view. Maybe one of the runners burned away and got caught
in the ground. Or on the tracks. Maybe one of the old axles
finally reached it's breaking point. Or one of my welds
couldn't take the strain. Whatever it was, the Rocket Car
derailed about twenty yards from the mine entrance. It still had
plenty of inertia, and continued moving toward the mine, but the
wheels were no longer on the tracks. Actually it was straddling
one of the rails, screeching and screaming and kicking up a cloud
of sparks from the point where the frame slid along the rail.
And it was no longer aligned with the mine entrance,
either.
Things were still moving too fast for my brain to process
the information, but when I saw the car skidding toward the mine
entrance at sixty or seventy miles an hour, and NOT firmly on the
rails, I knew that Something Bad Was About To Happen. Exactly
WHAT was still a mystery at that point, but a second later I
found out. The Chevy slid down the tracks, but instead of driving
through the mine entrance, it went in at an angle with the ass
end canted toward the road. The front end smashed into one of the
huge timbers that outlined the mine entrance, cracking it in
half. After a very short pause, the timber collapsed,
immediately followed by the overhead timber it supported. Those
timbers must have been under considerable stress, because a
second later the entire entrance to the mine collapsed on top of
the Rocket Car with a huge grinding rumble and a cloud of dust.
I just gawked.
I remember that part clearly, standing there looking at
the car in the distance, just before dust obscured the picture.
My Rocket Car was sitting there like a busted Tonka truck while a
mountain fell on it.
I almost cried.
A second later I became aware of voices shouting behind
me. I turned around and saw Jimmy and Sal in the bed of the
pickup, and Beck behind the wheel. They'd obviously had the sense
to get into the truck and chase down the rocket car, while I
stood there with my mouth hanging open. I jumped into the bed,
and Beck floored it toward the mine entrance. Toward
the FORMER mine entrance. During the short ride I was wondering
how we were going to haul the car out of the pile of rubble and
get it out of there, but when we got closer I saw that it was a
foolish idea. The front half of the car was crushed like a beer
can, under boulders ranging from the size of a watermelon to the
size of the car itself. Smaller pieces were still coming down
when we got there. The only way that car was ever coming out was
if someone torched off the back end and hauled it out with
a winch.
The front end was never going to see the light of day
again.
Beck stopped the truck a safe distance from the wreckage,
and we all got out to look. But there wasn't much to look at. The
only thing NOT buried by the cave-in was the last four feet of
the car, and that was about it. The trunk lid and rear bumper
were visible, but the rest of the car was buried under boulders
and rubble. It was obvious that the car would have to stay were
it was, but after we gaped at it awhile, I decided that there WAS
one part of the Rocket Car that absolutely couldn't stay where it
was.
The rocket itself.
Up to that point we were guilty of little more than
trespassing. Sure we'd caused a mine to cave in, but the mine had
been closed for decades, and it wasn't likely anyone would be too
upset about it. But that fucking JATO bottle was sticking out of
the wreckage in a VERY obvious way, and had to go. So I
cautiously made my way over to the remains of the Chevy,
hoping an expended JATO would be a lot lighter than the full one.
I gave it a tug, but it wouldn't budge.
Beck came over and gave me a hand, but we still couldn't
make it move. It wouldn't even wiggle. All we could figure was
that the pipe must have been twisted or squashed further in,
where we couldn't see it. After a little more grunting and
pushing, Beck went back to the pickup for his jack. We figured
that if we took some of the weight off the pipe, we might be able
to budge the rocket. But before he could get back, the pile of
rubble shifted, sending a good-sized boulder careening past me.
Suddenly jacking the car up seemed like a very poor idea.
And shortly after that, even staying in the area didn't
seem very smart. Jimmy quickly summed the situation up for us. At
that particular moment, there wasn't much we could do in the way
of damage control. The car was stuck, and there was nothing we
could do about it. The JATO was wedged in too tightly to remove
too. And if WE couldn't move it, then it was unlikely anyone else
could. Not without a major effort. Fortunately, the only thing to
show that we'd even BEEN there was the piece of field-phone
wire at the other end of the tracks, and the remains of the
Rocket Car itself. Which meant that it was an excellent time to
get the hell out of there, before someone came down the road and
wondered what was going on.
We needed no more encouragement. Beck and Sal ran for the
cab of the pickup, Jimmy and I piled into the bed, Beck pointed
the truck toward the road, and stomped the gas. I guess he didn't
have the four-wheel drive engaged, because the back wheels of the
truck threw up rooster-tails of sand as we took off up the slope,
but not the front wheels. But we didn't get stuck, which was the
one thing I was afraid of. We shot up the slope, bounced onto the
asphalt, and as soon as the rear wheels hit the asphalt they
started burning rubber. Beck steered back toward town, only
stopping long enough for Jimmy and I to bail out and run to my
car. I jumped in and started, it, but Jimmy ran back down the
slope, toward the end of the railroad track. I yelled after him,
but instead of yelling back, he stooped and grabbed something
from the ground.
The field-phone wire.
He was reeling it up in his hands as he ran back up the
slope, and when he reached the car he tossed the wad of wire in
the back seat and jumped in.
I punched the gas, spun the car around, and headed back
toward town. And that was the last I ever saw of the Rocket Car.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Monday, April 16, 2007
The Rocket Car Chapter 7
SAFETY FIRST (OR SECOND)
Why none of us thought to take a look at the tracks coming
out of that abandoned silver mine before this is anyone's guess.
Beck and Sal and I had stood right on top of them when we got the
bucket cars, but none of us considered the possibility that a
long section of the track might still be there, only underground.
As a matter of fact "underground" is a pretty drastic term for
what we found. The tracks were actually covered by a fairly thin
layer of drifted sand and dust. The outcrop around the
mine shaft broke the wind enough to keep the tracks clear near
the entrance, but beyond that, the rails must have been a good
place for drifting sand to pile up, and eventually cover the
rails. But Jimmy's tire iron sank no more than an inch or two
before striking metal, and we didn't so much have to DIG for the
rails as brush the sand off them. We ended up walking more than a
half mile from the mine entrance, Jimmy stopping occasionally to
stick the tire iron into the sand, and striking metal every
time. Eventually it started getting too dark to see where we were
going, so we made our way back up the slope to where the cars
were parked. I told Jimmy I'd be back bright and early the next
day to find out exactly how far the tracks ran, but Jimmy seemed
confident we'd have more than enough.
He didn't seem too confident of the Rocket Car, though.
When we got back to the cars, I found that Jimmy had me
follow him in my own car because he was going back to school
directly from the mine entrance. But there was still a matter he
wanted to discuss, that matter being the first run of the Rocket
Car. Without a good launch site the matter could wait, but since
it seemed as if we'd found one, Jimmy figured we'd better discuss
the whole thing immediately. It turned out that he was VERY
worried about the first run of the car, particularly the idea of
having a person inside when we fired it. Of course I already knew
there were plenty of things that could go wrong, since I'd built
the thing in a junkyard. But when Jimmy started to lay out the
possible ways a person inside the car could get hurt or killed,
he made it sound a little less safe than going over Niagara Falls
in a barrel. First, we were dealing with a highly volatile
chemical propellant we knew nothing about. We didn't know how old
it was, where it came from, or how it was supposed to
behave. There was actually a very real possibility that the JATO
could explode like a bomb, reducing the car to flame and shrapnel
in a split-second. But even if it DID work as expected, the
rocket was held in place by a length of water pipe welded to the
bottom half of a train car that was God only knew how old. If any
of the welds didn't hold, there was no telling what the outcome
would be. Then there was the matter of the brakes. All we had was
a setup that looked good and sounded like it might work. But if
someone inside the car found themselves going 100+ miles per and
the brakes DIDN'T work...
The way he described the whole thing made it sound like
suicidal insanity, and I started to get a little pissed off at
him. If he'd been thinking about all this shit the whole time,
why hadn't he SAID anything?
As it turned out, he wasn't suggesting that we scrap the
project outright, just that we perform a "test run" before trying
it for real. An UNMANNED test run. Rig a system to activate the
brakes at some point after the JATO had burned out, point the
Rocket Car down the tracks, and let it run pilotless the first
time. After all, it wasn't as if we needed a man at
the tiller while the car was moving. The person we'd been
referring to as the "pilot" would actually be the "passenger",
his sole duty being to hit the dump valve before the car ran out
of track. And since we had four JATOS, wasting one for the sake
of safety seemed like a prudent move.
I had to admit, he made a LOT of sense.
I pointed out that Beck would probably have a bird when he
found out we weren't going to let him drive the car on it's
maiden voyage, but we both agreed that it wouldn't be a major
problem as long as Beck got to drive it on the first MANNED run.
We'd just take a second JATO along, and if the car ran
successfully the first time, Beck could take it out the
second time. If the car ended up a twisted lump of smoking metal,
Beck would be happy we decided to take the precaution.
With these details settled, I said goodbye to Jimmy and
headed home. On the way I was thinking about how to kick in the
braking system with nobody inside the car, but since we'd only
need it for the trial run, it didn't have to be anything fancy.
The next day I was busy at the yard sorting through the latest
load of junk my Dad had bought at an auction over the weekend,
but I DID find time to rig the brakes for our test run. All I did
was twist a screw-eye into each brake runner, then run a length
of piano wire through the openings in each eye and up through a
hole in the Chevy's floor. I tied the ends of the wire to a short
stick, and used it to prop the brake's dump valve in the "up"
position. Then I looped a piece of rubber from a bicycle inner
tube over the lever, and tied it under the valve box. The bike
tube pulled the lever toward the "dump" position, but the lever
couldn't move due to the stick propping it up. I figured that
once we found a good section of track, all we'd have to do was
drive a spike into one of the rail-ties at the point where we
wanted the brakes to kick in. When the car passed over the spike,
the spike would snag the wire, pull out the stick, and the dump
valve would snap down, activating the brakes.
Now, if you're getting tired of hearing about all the Rube
Goldberg bullshit I was adding to this machine, take a minute to
think about how I felt while I was doing the work. By the time
Jimmy suggested that "we" rig "some sort of automatic brake
system", I was getting mighty sick of rigging and drilling and
bolting and cutting. Let's face it, despite the fact that we came
up with a few clever ways to solve pretty tough problems, the
Rocket Car was STILL just a pile of shit that I knocked
together in a junkyard. And I was tired of trying to figure out
ways to make important things happen by using other people's
garbage. I made up my mind that the auto-brake was the last piece
of work I was going to do on the car. If what I'd built at that
point wasn't good enough, I'd simply turn the whole mess over to
Beck and let him drive the fucking thing into the Mystery Mine,
or past the police station, or whatever he wanted to do.
However, there was still the matter of the launch site
preparation to take car of, so on Tuesday I called Beck and told
him to swing by the yard in his Dad's pickup and get me after
work. He and Sal both showed up, and when I took them to the
abandon mine and showed them how far from the entrance the tracks
extended, they were ecstatic. I didn't bother to explain that
Jimmy had come up with the idea two days earlier, since they'd
probably spent Monday and Tuesday driving around in the desert
looking for a decent set of tracks themselves. I brought a tire
iron along, and sat on the tailgate of the pickup while Beck
drove away from the mine entrance. Every now and then he stopped
the truck, and I plunged the tire iron into the sand where the
tracks should be. And I kept striking metal over and
over. Finally the truck stopped and stayed stopped, and when I
looked over my shoulder, I saw that we'd come to the end of the
line. Or at least the end of the usable line. Exactly 1.9 miles
from the mine entrance, the narrow-gauge tracks intersected a set
of modern, standard-gauge tracks leading into town. Which made
sense, after I'd thought about it awhile. The newer tracks were
probably laid on the bed of some old narrow-gauge tracks, and
the rails leading toward the abandoned mine were probably a
spur coming off the main tracks.
But who cared? We had two miles of narrow gauge track,
more than enough to run the Rocket Car on.
I hoped.
Beck was thrilled over the discovery, until I explained
that the buried rails would have to be cleared before we could
take the car out for a test run. He enthusiastically assured me
that he and Sal would have the tracks cleared the next day, but I
had my doubts. And my doubts turned out to be well-grounded. I
didn't hear anything from Beck and Sal the next day, or the
day after that. I assumed they were in the process of clearing
the tracks, and it turned out they were. And the process turned
out to be a lot harder than either of them imagined. They started
out with Beck driving the truck while Sal sat on the tailgate,
dragging a street-sweepers broom along the rails. It worked, but
not as well as they expected. After driving that two-mile stretch
of track twice, Beck came up with a much better idea. They
simply broke back into the abandoned mine, grabbed the last
bucket-car we'd found near the entrance, and pushed it down the
length of the tracks with the bumper of the pickup. Once the
wheels loosened up, the bucket car worked like a snowplow and
cleared the tracks with a single pass. I had my doubts that this
method worked as well as they claimed, but when I drove out
to the abandoned mine after work on Thursday, I saw that it had.
Two rusty metal rails poked out of the hardpan, starting at the
mine entrance and extending out into the distance. When I took a
closer look at the rails, I saw that they were indeed rusty as
hell, but still solid. When I banged one with a rock, I saw
plenty of good steel under the rust.
Best of all, they were straight as an arrow.
For me, this was the point where the whole project made
the transition from theory to reality. I squatted next to those
tracks and realized that the last obstacle had suddenly been
removed, that we really were going to run the car. And to my
surprise, it didn't feel good at all. Suddenly the whole thing
seemed stupid and insane and dangerous and illegal as hell. But
by then it was way too late to stop.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Why none of us thought to take a look at the tracks coming
out of that abandoned silver mine before this is anyone's guess.
Beck and Sal and I had stood right on top of them when we got the
bucket cars, but none of us considered the possibility that a
long section of the track might still be there, only underground.
As a matter of fact "underground" is a pretty drastic term for
what we found. The tracks were actually covered by a fairly thin
layer of drifted sand and dust. The outcrop around the
mine shaft broke the wind enough to keep the tracks clear near
the entrance, but beyond that, the rails must have been a good
place for drifting sand to pile up, and eventually cover the
rails. But Jimmy's tire iron sank no more than an inch or two
before striking metal, and we didn't so much have to DIG for the
rails as brush the sand off them. We ended up walking more than a
half mile from the mine entrance, Jimmy stopping occasionally to
stick the tire iron into the sand, and striking metal every
time. Eventually it started getting too dark to see where we were
going, so we made our way back up the slope to where the cars
were parked. I told Jimmy I'd be back bright and early the next
day to find out exactly how far the tracks ran, but Jimmy seemed
confident we'd have more than enough.
He didn't seem too confident of the Rocket Car, though.
When we got back to the cars, I found that Jimmy had me
follow him in my own car because he was going back to school
directly from the mine entrance. But there was still a matter he
wanted to discuss, that matter being the first run of the Rocket
Car. Without a good launch site the matter could wait, but since
it seemed as if we'd found one, Jimmy figured we'd better discuss
the whole thing immediately. It turned out that he was VERY
worried about the first run of the car, particularly the idea of
having a person inside when we fired it. Of course I already knew
there were plenty of things that could go wrong, since I'd built
the thing in a junkyard. But when Jimmy started to lay out the
possible ways a person inside the car could get hurt or killed,
he made it sound a little less safe than going over Niagara Falls
in a barrel. First, we were dealing with a highly volatile
chemical propellant we knew nothing about. We didn't know how old
it was, where it came from, or how it was supposed to
behave. There was actually a very real possibility that the JATO
could explode like a bomb, reducing the car to flame and shrapnel
in a split-second. But even if it DID work as expected, the
rocket was held in place by a length of water pipe welded to the
bottom half of a train car that was God only knew how old. If any
of the welds didn't hold, there was no telling what the outcome
would be. Then there was the matter of the brakes. All we had was
a setup that looked good and sounded like it might work. But if
someone inside the car found themselves going 100+ miles per and
the brakes DIDN'T work...
The way he described the whole thing made it sound like
suicidal insanity, and I started to get a little pissed off at
him. If he'd been thinking about all this shit the whole time,
why hadn't he SAID anything?
As it turned out, he wasn't suggesting that we scrap the
project outright, just that we perform a "test run" before trying
it for real. An UNMANNED test run. Rig a system to activate the
brakes at some point after the JATO had burned out, point the
Rocket Car down the tracks, and let it run pilotless the first
time. After all, it wasn't as if we needed a man at
the tiller while the car was moving. The person we'd been
referring to as the "pilot" would actually be the "passenger",
his sole duty being to hit the dump valve before the car ran out
of track. And since we had four JATOS, wasting one for the sake
of safety seemed like a prudent move.
I had to admit, he made a LOT of sense.
I pointed out that Beck would probably have a bird when he
found out we weren't going to let him drive the car on it's
maiden voyage, but we both agreed that it wouldn't be a major
problem as long as Beck got to drive it on the first MANNED run.
We'd just take a second JATO along, and if the car ran
successfully the first time, Beck could take it out the
second time. If the car ended up a twisted lump of smoking metal,
Beck would be happy we decided to take the precaution.
With these details settled, I said goodbye to Jimmy and
headed home. On the way I was thinking about how to kick in the
braking system with nobody inside the car, but since we'd only
need it for the trial run, it didn't have to be anything fancy.
The next day I was busy at the yard sorting through the latest
load of junk my Dad had bought at an auction over the weekend,
but I DID find time to rig the brakes for our test run. All I did
was twist a screw-eye into each brake runner, then run a length
of piano wire through the openings in each eye and up through a
hole in the Chevy's floor. I tied the ends of the wire to a short
stick, and used it to prop the brake's dump valve in the "up"
position. Then I looped a piece of rubber from a bicycle inner
tube over the lever, and tied it under the valve box. The bike
tube pulled the lever toward the "dump" position, but the lever
couldn't move due to the stick propping it up. I figured that
once we found a good section of track, all we'd have to do was
drive a spike into one of the rail-ties at the point where we
wanted the brakes to kick in. When the car passed over the spike,
the spike would snag the wire, pull out the stick, and the dump
valve would snap down, activating the brakes.
Now, if you're getting tired of hearing about all the Rube
Goldberg bullshit I was adding to this machine, take a minute to
think about how I felt while I was doing the work. By the time
Jimmy suggested that "we" rig "some sort of automatic brake
system", I was getting mighty sick of rigging and drilling and
bolting and cutting. Let's face it, despite the fact that we came
up with a few clever ways to solve pretty tough problems, the
Rocket Car was STILL just a pile of shit that I knocked
together in a junkyard. And I was tired of trying to figure out
ways to make important things happen by using other people's
garbage. I made up my mind that the auto-brake was the last piece
of work I was going to do on the car. If what I'd built at that
point wasn't good enough, I'd simply turn the whole mess over to
Beck and let him drive the fucking thing into the Mystery Mine,
or past the police station, or whatever he wanted to do.
However, there was still the matter of the launch site
preparation to take car of, so on Tuesday I called Beck and told
him to swing by the yard in his Dad's pickup and get me after
work. He and Sal both showed up, and when I took them to the
abandon mine and showed them how far from the entrance the tracks
extended, they were ecstatic. I didn't bother to explain that
Jimmy had come up with the idea two days earlier, since they'd
probably spent Monday and Tuesday driving around in the desert
looking for a decent set of tracks themselves. I brought a tire
iron along, and sat on the tailgate of the pickup while Beck
drove away from the mine entrance. Every now and then he stopped
the truck, and I plunged the tire iron into the sand where the
tracks should be. And I kept striking metal over and
over. Finally the truck stopped and stayed stopped, and when I
looked over my shoulder, I saw that we'd come to the end of the
line. Or at least the end of the usable line. Exactly 1.9 miles
from the mine entrance, the narrow-gauge tracks intersected a set
of modern, standard-gauge tracks leading into town. Which made
sense, after I'd thought about it awhile. The newer tracks were
probably laid on the bed of some old narrow-gauge tracks, and
the rails leading toward the abandoned mine were probably a
spur coming off the main tracks.
But who cared? We had two miles of narrow gauge track,
more than enough to run the Rocket Car on.
I hoped.
Beck was thrilled over the discovery, until I explained
that the buried rails would have to be cleared before we could
take the car out for a test run. He enthusiastically assured me
that he and Sal would have the tracks cleared the next day, but I
had my doubts. And my doubts turned out to be well-grounded. I
didn't hear anything from Beck and Sal the next day, or the
day after that. I assumed they were in the process of clearing
the tracks, and it turned out they were. And the process turned
out to be a lot harder than either of them imagined. They started
out with Beck driving the truck while Sal sat on the tailgate,
dragging a street-sweepers broom along the rails. It worked, but
not as well as they expected. After driving that two-mile stretch
of track twice, Beck came up with a much better idea. They
simply broke back into the abandoned mine, grabbed the last
bucket-car we'd found near the entrance, and pushed it down the
length of the tracks with the bumper of the pickup. Once the
wheels loosened up, the bucket car worked like a snowplow and
cleared the tracks with a single pass. I had my doubts that this
method worked as well as they claimed, but when I drove out
to the abandoned mine after work on Thursday, I saw that it had.
Two rusty metal rails poked out of the hardpan, starting at the
mine entrance and extending out into the distance. When I took a
closer look at the rails, I saw that they were indeed rusty as
hell, but still solid. When I banged one with a rock, I saw
plenty of good steel under the rust.
Best of all, they were straight as an arrow.
For me, this was the point where the whole project made
the transition from theory to reality. I squatted next to those
tracks and realized that the last obstacle had suddenly been
removed, that we really were going to run the car. And to my
surprise, it didn't feel good at all. Suddenly the whole thing
seemed stupid and insane and dangerous and illegal as hell. But
by then it was way too late to stop.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, April 14, 2007
The Rocket Car Chapter 6
AFFATUS INTERRRUPTUS
Before I go on, I think I should take a minute to explain
why this whole story is getting so lengthy. Actually, my wife
says I should issue a formal apology for inflicting such a
long-winded pile of shit on anyone who reads this. And I halfway
agree with her. But I want to make you aware of one thing: I did
NOT plan it this way. When I decided to write down the story of
the Rocket Car, I figured it would take all of two pages, maybe
three. Four at the outside. That's because I was working from a
set of 20-year-old recollections, and a lot of the details were
missing. I didn't realize that once I started dredging up these
old memories, all SORTS of bits and pieces would start to fill
themselves in, whether I wanted them to or not. Four pages became
five, then six, etc. etc. I originally planned to have the whole
thing done by the beginning of April, so that it would be ready
to go on the 20th anniversary of the first (and last) run of
our Rocket Car, but April came and went, and I was still hunting
and pecking. So did May, then June.
Nothing I can do about it now.
Besides the miscellaneous details that came flooding back
when I started to write this story down, the technical details of
the whole project turned out to be more involved than I
remembered when I started writing. When I began, I remembered a
simple 1-2-3 process that took place over the course of a few
weeks, and seemed fairly simple. But as the story progressed, I
realized I had to supply a LOT more detail than I
originally intended, just to keep it from sounding completely
stupid. And I'm still not sure I've accomplished the
not-sounding-stupid part. Even though the project was executed
one step at a time, it had a goofy, ill-planned,
Li'l Rascals feel to it, and no amount of explaining is going to
change that. Because basically it WAS a Li'l Rascals undertaking.
The only thing missing was a sign saying "He-Man Rocket Kar Klub"
over a treehouse door. But I'm not going to lie about the facts
or try to make the whole thing sound less silly than it actually
was. If someone had been hurt or killed, or even we'd been caught
trying to run a homemade rocket car through the desert, I'm sure
we'd all have ended up in the pokey. Even if a judge were willing
to overlook the instances of theft and trespassing
and illegal possession of military fireworks, we'd have probably
been charged with SOMETHING, just on general principal.
Conspiracy To Commit Flagrant Stupidity, maybe. If Beck had
gotten his way, a charge of attempted suicide would've been a
sure thing.
But nothing like this ever happened.
Having said that, I'd now like to issue a formal apology
for inflicting such a long-winded pile of shit on you.
Sorry about that. It won't happen again.
There you go, Lily. I did it. Happy?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
The idea of the Rocket Car sitting on cinderblocks in the
scrapyard, just waiting for a place to run it, was driving Beck
crazy. I have to admit, I was getting anxious to take it for a
test run myself, but Beck was really going nuts. I didn't hear
anything from him for the rest of the week, and I assumed it was
because he hadn't found a suitable launch site. It
was actually because his Dad had taken the four-wheel drive out
for one of his mysterious desert jaunts, and was gone for the
rest of the week. That left Beck and Sal with only one option,
driving Sal's beat-to-shit Ford Falcon, a car that barely held
it's own on pavement, never mind in the desert.
Meanwhile, the Rocket Car waited in the field.
I tried to think about it as little as possible, since I
didn't want to end up afflicted with the mania had gotten hold of
Beck. I worked at the scrapyard, just as I always had, trying to
avoid the far corner of the lot where the Rocket Car was. More
than once I thought about what I'd do if my Dad suddenly got a
buyer for that 1959 Chevy Impala, but there was really no point
worrying about such things. If it happened, I was simply screwed.
No way to explain my way out of a situation like THAT.
So I simply waited.
Actually, I did get ONE minor detail taken care of during
the delay, building igniters for the JATOs. I removed all the
taillights and turn-signal lights from the Impala (no matter what
became of the Rocket Car, signaling for a turn wouldn't be an
issue) and soldered two wires to each bulb. Next I carefully
cracked the glass on each bulb, leaving the filaments intact. The
bare filaments would heat to white-hot when connected to
car battery, but simply laying a hot filament inside the JATO
nozzle didn't seem like it would do the trick. Maybe it would
have, but since Beck and Sal still hadn't found a place to use
for a launch site, I had time to come up with something better.
So I pulled a dozen of the blank M-60 rounds from the ammo belt
my father kept in his office as a decoration, tore off the
skinny end of each shell, and dumped out the powder inside. I
poured a little of the powder into each of seven squares of
newspaper, folded the newspaper squares into packets around the
filaments of the light bulbs, and trussed each one up with
masking tape. When I connected one of them to a battery to test
the idea, it made an impressive little flare.
Surely enough to light the JATO. I hoped.
When Sal and Beck STILL hadn't reported finding a launch
site by Friday morning, I even went through the trouble of
putting an old car battery on the charger at the shop, installing
it in the Rocket Car, and wiring it to a switch on the dashboard.
I considered painting the switch bright red, with the word
IGNITION! underneath, just because I had the time. In retrospect
I'm glad I didn't go through the trouble, since we never used the
switch anyway. But at that point I realized that if Beck and Sal
didn't find a good spot soon, I might end up hauling the car out
to the nearest set of tracks and trying it out myself.
Jimmy came back from college again that weekend, just
about the same time Beck's father came back from who-knows-where
with the four-wheel-drive. During the week I had high hopes that
we'd be able to launch over the weekend, but when everyone
gathered at the scrapyard on Saturday afternoon, I knew it wasn't
going to happen. Jimmy took a look at the sprinkler system
and pronounced it workable, although I could tell he still had
some grave misgivings about how well a couple of pissing garden
hoses would cool down the brake runners. I had the same
misgivings myself, but the amount of heat generated would depend
on so many unknown factors that is wasn't something we
could really plan for. We didn't have any idea how fast the car
would actually go, what shape the tracks would be in, or even how
much the car weighed. From my point of view, the sprinklers were
there for only one reason: To keep the runners from burning up
like matchsticks when they hit the rails. After all, they WERE
made from wood. If the sprinklers could keep the runners from
turning into torches, they'd fulfill my expectations.
While Jimmy was inspecting the rocket car and telling us
what he'd found out about my JATO bottles (which turned out to be
very little), Sal and Beck told us about the launch locations
they'd scouted out over the week. And the news they had was grim
indeed. Within ten miles of town there were a total of three
sections of track long enough to run the rocket car on, and in my
opinion they were all dead losers. Beck and Sal knew the
area well enough to realize that most of the modern wide-gauge
tracks had been laid either directly on top of, or very close to,
the places where narrow-gauge tracks had once existed. So
naturally they started their search at the switching yard near
the city limits. There they found an excellent set of
narrow-gauge tracks roughly paralleling a shiny set of wide-gauge
rails that were probably used every day. But despite the fact
that the old-style tracks stretched for miles, they ran right
through a busy switching yard. Not a good place to test a
jet-propelled boxcar.
Another possibility was a set of rails that started in the
desert, continued for five miles or more, and ended in a soft
dirt field that would have been ideal for cushioning any crash
that might happen. Unfortunately, this set ran directly through
the middle of town, and the field at the end was the Jaycees
Softball Field, right across the street from the
police station. Even though Beck must've realized we'd never go
for THAT idea, it was obvious that he liked it. I imagine he
wanted to set the Rocket Car on the tracks across from the police
station in the dead of night, then blow the horn and scream until
a dozen cops came running out of the station to see what the
ruckus was. At that point he'd hang a moon out the window, then
light off the JATO and blaze out of town.
Or maybe this wasn't what he had in mind. But if you knew
Beck, you'd probably agree with me.
The last location Sal and Beck found was even worse than
the tracks that ran past the police station. The Mystery Mine was
a bargain-basement tourist attraction a few miles from town that
promised to show visitors the INNER WORKINGS OF AN AUTHENTIC
SILVER MINE. People who paid the $2.50 admission were loaded
aboard an ancient, rattling, mine-car and hauled through a few
hundred feet of cavern, while a tour guide in a hardhat
and goggles pointed at rusted pieces of machinery and chunks of
rock, explaining what they were. We'd all been on the Mystery
Mine tour at one time or another, and everyone agreed that the
only thing even VAGUELY interesting about it was wondering if a
cave-in would trap you in the bowels of the mine. Possibly
forcing you to eat the other tourists to survive. There was an
old song that used to play on the radio that described this
scenario, and there was a popular joke around town about being
trapped in the Mystery Mine and having to eat your way out. A
discreet sign near the mine's entrance proclaimed that it was
inspected for safety by the U.S. Bureau of Mines on a yearly
basis, but everyone knew that ancient mines tended to cave in
weather the U.S. Bureau of Mines said it was okay to or
not. Therefore, new folks in town were always advised not to take
the Mystery Mine tour without packing a sharp knife and a salt
shaker.
Cannibalism and the U.S. Bureau of Mines really weren't
our problem. But the fact that the Mystery Mine was a tourist
attraction presented all SORTS of difficulties. The land around
the Mystery Mine DID have plenty of narrow-gauge track, that much
was true. More than enough to suit our needs. But it also had
lots of fences, lots of lights, a couple of security guards, and
a handful of vicious Dobermans that patrolled the grounds at
night. We all knew it, too. I think Beck and Sal really just went
out to the Mystery Mine to take the tour and kill an afternoon.
Jimmy and I wouldn't have even wasted time with the trip.
The end result was that the Rocket Car was ready to roll,
but we had no place to roll it. Beck and Sal were confident that
they'd be able to find a good spot the following week (since they
were once again desert-capable) but Jimmy and I had serious
doubts. We knew the area around town as well as anyone, and the
chances of finding a good place to run the car were starting
to look grim.
When Jimmy spent the weekend in town, he usually headed
back to the college on Sunday evening, right after dinner. So it
surprised me when I got a call from him at 6:00 Sunday evening,
asking me if I wanted to take a ride with him to "discuss a few
things". I said sure, no trouble. He told me to drive over to his
house, and when I got there, he was already in his car. He
signaled for me to follow him, and I did. I had no idea where
we were going, but I followed anyway. After a few minutes I saw
that we were heading out of town, and I wondered what he was up
to. But I stopped wondering a little while later, when he pulled
to the side of the road near the abandoned mine shaft where we'd
liberated the two ancient bucket cars. He got out of his car,
opened the trunk and took out a tire iron, then headed toward the
mine entrance without a word. When I asked what we were doing, he
held up one finger in a wait-a-minute gesture.
I shut up.
Jimmy walked down the slope and stopped in front of the
boards we'd re-nailed over the entrance. Even though the sun was
almost down, there was still plenty of light to see by. I thought
he'd brought the tire iron to pry off the boards near the
entrance, but when I reached the place he was standing, he
started walking down the tracks, away from the entrance.
Ten paces later he'd reached the point where the tracks ended,
buried in sand. He took a few more paces, then bent over and
jabbed the pointy end of the tire iron into the sand.
To my surprise, it clanked.
Jimmy looked at me with a goofy little smile on his face,
and when I realized what he was doing, I smiled myself. Probably
just as goofily. He pulled the tire iron out of the sand, walked
a few more paces, then stuck it into the ground again. No clank
this time. But when he stuck it in again, a few inches to the
left, he got the same metallic clank. He was now standing a good
fifty feet from the mine entrance, and at least twenty feet
from the spot where we all assumed the tracks terminated. He
looked up at me, with that dumb smirk still plastered across his
face, and said "So, how far out do you think these tracks
actually go?"
----------------------------------------------------------------
Before I go on, I think I should take a minute to explain
why this whole story is getting so lengthy. Actually, my wife
says I should issue a formal apology for inflicting such a
long-winded pile of shit on anyone who reads this. And I halfway
agree with her. But I want to make you aware of one thing: I did
NOT plan it this way. When I decided to write down the story of
the Rocket Car, I figured it would take all of two pages, maybe
three. Four at the outside. That's because I was working from a
set of 20-year-old recollections, and a lot of the details were
missing. I didn't realize that once I started dredging up these
old memories, all SORTS of bits and pieces would start to fill
themselves in, whether I wanted them to or not. Four pages became
five, then six, etc. etc. I originally planned to have the whole
thing done by the beginning of April, so that it would be ready
to go on the 20th anniversary of the first (and last) run of
our Rocket Car, but April came and went, and I was still hunting
and pecking. So did May, then June.
Nothing I can do about it now.
Besides the miscellaneous details that came flooding back
when I started to write this story down, the technical details of
the whole project turned out to be more involved than I
remembered when I started writing. When I began, I remembered a
simple 1-2-3 process that took place over the course of a few
weeks, and seemed fairly simple. But as the story progressed, I
realized I had to supply a LOT more detail than I
originally intended, just to keep it from sounding completely
stupid. And I'm still not sure I've accomplished the
not-sounding-stupid part. Even though the project was executed
one step at a time, it had a goofy, ill-planned,
Li'l Rascals feel to it, and no amount of explaining is going to
change that. Because basically it WAS a Li'l Rascals undertaking.
The only thing missing was a sign saying "He-Man Rocket Kar Klub"
over a treehouse door. But I'm not going to lie about the facts
or try to make the whole thing sound less silly than it actually
was. If someone had been hurt or killed, or even we'd been caught
trying to run a homemade rocket car through the desert, I'm sure
we'd all have ended up in the pokey. Even if a judge were willing
to overlook the instances of theft and trespassing
and illegal possession of military fireworks, we'd have probably
been charged with SOMETHING, just on general principal.
Conspiracy To Commit Flagrant Stupidity, maybe. If Beck had
gotten his way, a charge of attempted suicide would've been a
sure thing.
But nothing like this ever happened.
Having said that, I'd now like to issue a formal apology
for inflicting such a long-winded pile of shit on you.
Sorry about that. It won't happen again.
There you go, Lily. I did it. Happy?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
The idea of the Rocket Car sitting on cinderblocks in the
scrapyard, just waiting for a place to run it, was driving Beck
crazy. I have to admit, I was getting anxious to take it for a
test run myself, but Beck was really going nuts. I didn't hear
anything from him for the rest of the week, and I assumed it was
because he hadn't found a suitable launch site. It
was actually because his Dad had taken the four-wheel drive out
for one of his mysterious desert jaunts, and was gone for the
rest of the week. That left Beck and Sal with only one option,
driving Sal's beat-to-shit Ford Falcon, a car that barely held
it's own on pavement, never mind in the desert.
Meanwhile, the Rocket Car waited in the field.
I tried to think about it as little as possible, since I
didn't want to end up afflicted with the mania had gotten hold of
Beck. I worked at the scrapyard, just as I always had, trying to
avoid the far corner of the lot where the Rocket Car was. More
than once I thought about what I'd do if my Dad suddenly got a
buyer for that 1959 Chevy Impala, but there was really no point
worrying about such things. If it happened, I was simply screwed.
No way to explain my way out of a situation like THAT.
So I simply waited.
Actually, I did get ONE minor detail taken care of during
the delay, building igniters for the JATOs. I removed all the
taillights and turn-signal lights from the Impala (no matter what
became of the Rocket Car, signaling for a turn wouldn't be an
issue) and soldered two wires to each bulb. Next I carefully
cracked the glass on each bulb, leaving the filaments intact. The
bare filaments would heat to white-hot when connected to
car battery, but simply laying a hot filament inside the JATO
nozzle didn't seem like it would do the trick. Maybe it would
have, but since Beck and Sal still hadn't found a place to use
for a launch site, I had time to come up with something better.
So I pulled a dozen of the blank M-60 rounds from the ammo belt
my father kept in his office as a decoration, tore off the
skinny end of each shell, and dumped out the powder inside. I
poured a little of the powder into each of seven squares of
newspaper, folded the newspaper squares into packets around the
filaments of the light bulbs, and trussed each one up with
masking tape. When I connected one of them to a battery to test
the idea, it made an impressive little flare.
Surely enough to light the JATO. I hoped.
When Sal and Beck STILL hadn't reported finding a launch
site by Friday morning, I even went through the trouble of
putting an old car battery on the charger at the shop, installing
it in the Rocket Car, and wiring it to a switch on the dashboard.
I considered painting the switch bright red, with the word
IGNITION! underneath, just because I had the time. In retrospect
I'm glad I didn't go through the trouble, since we never used the
switch anyway. But at that point I realized that if Beck and Sal
didn't find a good spot soon, I might end up hauling the car out
to the nearest set of tracks and trying it out myself.
Jimmy came back from college again that weekend, just
about the same time Beck's father came back from who-knows-where
with the four-wheel-drive. During the week I had high hopes that
we'd be able to launch over the weekend, but when everyone
gathered at the scrapyard on Saturday afternoon, I knew it wasn't
going to happen. Jimmy took a look at the sprinkler system
and pronounced it workable, although I could tell he still had
some grave misgivings about how well a couple of pissing garden
hoses would cool down the brake runners. I had the same
misgivings myself, but the amount of heat generated would depend
on so many unknown factors that is wasn't something we
could really plan for. We didn't have any idea how fast the car
would actually go, what shape the tracks would be in, or even how
much the car weighed. From my point of view, the sprinklers were
there for only one reason: To keep the runners from burning up
like matchsticks when they hit the rails. After all, they WERE
made from wood. If the sprinklers could keep the runners from
turning into torches, they'd fulfill my expectations.
While Jimmy was inspecting the rocket car and telling us
what he'd found out about my JATO bottles (which turned out to be
very little), Sal and Beck told us about the launch locations
they'd scouted out over the week. And the news they had was grim
indeed. Within ten miles of town there were a total of three
sections of track long enough to run the rocket car on, and in my
opinion they were all dead losers. Beck and Sal knew the
area well enough to realize that most of the modern wide-gauge
tracks had been laid either directly on top of, or very close to,
the places where narrow-gauge tracks had once existed. So
naturally they started their search at the switching yard near
the city limits. There they found an excellent set of
narrow-gauge tracks roughly paralleling a shiny set of wide-gauge
rails that were probably used every day. But despite the fact
that the old-style tracks stretched for miles, they ran right
through a busy switching yard. Not a good place to test a
jet-propelled boxcar.
Another possibility was a set of rails that started in the
desert, continued for five miles or more, and ended in a soft
dirt field that would have been ideal for cushioning any crash
that might happen. Unfortunately, this set ran directly through
the middle of town, and the field at the end was the Jaycees
Softball Field, right across the street from the
police station. Even though Beck must've realized we'd never go
for THAT idea, it was obvious that he liked it. I imagine he
wanted to set the Rocket Car on the tracks across from the police
station in the dead of night, then blow the horn and scream until
a dozen cops came running out of the station to see what the
ruckus was. At that point he'd hang a moon out the window, then
light off the JATO and blaze out of town.
Or maybe this wasn't what he had in mind. But if you knew
Beck, you'd probably agree with me.
The last location Sal and Beck found was even worse than
the tracks that ran past the police station. The Mystery Mine was
a bargain-basement tourist attraction a few miles from town that
promised to show visitors the INNER WORKINGS OF AN AUTHENTIC
SILVER MINE. People who paid the $2.50 admission were loaded
aboard an ancient, rattling, mine-car and hauled through a few
hundred feet of cavern, while a tour guide in a hardhat
and goggles pointed at rusted pieces of machinery and chunks of
rock, explaining what they were. We'd all been on the Mystery
Mine tour at one time or another, and everyone agreed that the
only thing even VAGUELY interesting about it was wondering if a
cave-in would trap you in the bowels of the mine. Possibly
forcing you to eat the other tourists to survive. There was an
old song that used to play on the radio that described this
scenario, and there was a popular joke around town about being
trapped in the Mystery Mine and having to eat your way out. A
discreet sign near the mine's entrance proclaimed that it was
inspected for safety by the U.S. Bureau of Mines on a yearly
basis, but everyone knew that ancient mines tended to cave in
weather the U.S. Bureau of Mines said it was okay to or
not. Therefore, new folks in town were always advised not to take
the Mystery Mine tour without packing a sharp knife and a salt
shaker.
Cannibalism and the U.S. Bureau of Mines really weren't
our problem. But the fact that the Mystery Mine was a tourist
attraction presented all SORTS of difficulties. The land around
the Mystery Mine DID have plenty of narrow-gauge track, that much
was true. More than enough to suit our needs. But it also had
lots of fences, lots of lights, a couple of security guards, and
a handful of vicious Dobermans that patrolled the grounds at
night. We all knew it, too. I think Beck and Sal really just went
out to the Mystery Mine to take the tour and kill an afternoon.
Jimmy and I wouldn't have even wasted time with the trip.
The end result was that the Rocket Car was ready to roll,
but we had no place to roll it. Beck and Sal were confident that
they'd be able to find a good spot the following week (since they
were once again desert-capable) but Jimmy and I had serious
doubts. We knew the area around town as well as anyone, and the
chances of finding a good place to run the car were starting
to look grim.
When Jimmy spent the weekend in town, he usually headed
back to the college on Sunday evening, right after dinner. So it
surprised me when I got a call from him at 6:00 Sunday evening,
asking me if I wanted to take a ride with him to "discuss a few
things". I said sure, no trouble. He told me to drive over to his
house, and when I got there, he was already in his car. He
signaled for me to follow him, and I did. I had no idea where
we were going, but I followed anyway. After a few minutes I saw
that we were heading out of town, and I wondered what he was up
to. But I stopped wondering a little while later, when he pulled
to the side of the road near the abandoned mine shaft where we'd
liberated the two ancient bucket cars. He got out of his car,
opened the trunk and took out a tire iron, then headed toward the
mine entrance without a word. When I asked what we were doing, he
held up one finger in a wait-a-minute gesture.
I shut up.
Jimmy walked down the slope and stopped in front of the
boards we'd re-nailed over the entrance. Even though the sun was
almost down, there was still plenty of light to see by. I thought
he'd brought the tire iron to pry off the boards near the
entrance, but when I reached the place he was standing, he
started walking down the tracks, away from the entrance.
Ten paces later he'd reached the point where the tracks ended,
buried in sand. He took a few more paces, then bent over and
jabbed the pointy end of the tire iron into the sand.
To my surprise, it clanked.
Jimmy looked at me with a goofy little smile on his face,
and when I realized what he was doing, I smiled myself. Probably
just as goofily. He pulled the tire iron out of the sand, walked
a few more paces, then stuck it into the ground again. No clank
this time. But when he stuck it in again, a few inches to the
left, he got the same metallic clank. He was now standing a good
fifty feet from the mine entrance, and at least twenty feet
from the spot where we all assumed the tracks terminated. He
looked up at me, with that dumb smirk still plastered across his
face, and said "So, how far out do you think these tracks
actually go?"
----------------------------------------------------------------
The Rocket Car Chapter 5
HEAT OF THE MOMENTUM
I stared at the note for quite awhile, trying to figure
out what it meant. At first I figured Jimmy must have left the
bundle of shocks, since his father stocked such things at his
body shop. But there was no way a college student like Jimmy
would misspell a common word like "problem", drunk or sober. And
the fact that most of the words were spelled CORRECTLY pretty
much eliminated Sal. Which meant that the shock-absorber care
package must have been Beck's doing, and as soon as I realized
this, I hustled the bundle into the house and stashed it in my
room. Obviously Beck's creative juices hadn't REALLY started
flowing until Jimmy and I left the previous night, and he'd
eventually come up with some sort of solution to the braking
problem. It also seemed that he had enough confidence in his idea
to act on it. At the time I had no idea what sort
of solution Beck could've come up with for our "problum", I just
hoped it turned out to be as sensible in the light of day as it
seemed when Beck came up with it the night before. The bundle of
shocks I stuck under my bed were relatively new, but covered with
dust and road-grime. They obviously hadn't come from an all-night
auto parts store. I guessed that Beck had been struck with a
burst of twisted inspiration after Jimmy and I left, then spent
the rest of the night staggering around town with his brother, a
bumper jack, and a crescent wrench. Looking for donor
to contribute some hardware to our cause. It seemed as if they'd
found one, too. And if someone was going to wake up that morning
to a car that was mysteriously missing all four shock absorbers,
I hoped like hell Beck's plan was worth it.
But I never actually ASKED Beck where the shocks came
from, and he never volunteered the information. I didn't consider
it critical to the mission.
I did, however, call him later in the day to ask what I
was supposed to DO with the shocks. His first suggestion was that
I stick them up my ass. I assumed that he was just in a bad mood
from a hangover, since there was no way an assfull of shock
absorbers would help to slow a fast-moving Rocket Car. So I kept
interrogating him until he finally remembered the details of his
Grand Plan, and agreed to meet me at the scrapyard later on. When
he finally showed up at the gates to the yard he looked
like hammered shit, but I expected as much. Go spend a night
getting drunk and stealing auto parts and see how YOU feel the
next day. But he was also reasonably coherent, and described his
idea while we walked out to the weedy corner of the field where
the Rocket Car was still perched on cinderblocks.
And I have to admit, it was good. Real good. Better than
anything we'd figured out up to that point, anyway. But the best
part (to me, anyway) was that it didn't involve me stealing
anything else that my father might notice.
Beck's idea was simple, elegant, and easy to put into
practice. I'd install the air shocks on the Rocket Car normally,
just as if the car would be riding on pavement instead of rails.
But I'd also bolt a pair of wooden beams onto the belly of the
car, runners that were placed exactly between the front
and rear train wheels. Each runner would be thick enough to reach
almost all the way down to the tracks, and the bottom would be
covered with rubber cut from old tires. The effect would be that
the car would roll freely while the air shocks were inflated,
with the twin runners suspended inches above the steel tracks.
When it was time to stop the car, the pilot would activate a
release valve which would dump the air from all four
shock absorbers simultaneously. The car would drop until it's
entire weight was resting on the runners, which would be pressing
into the railroad tracks. This would provide two brake shoes
three feet long, pushed against the track under the weight of the
car's body, providing a HUGE amount of stopping-power. And since
the wheel flanges would also still be firmly on the tracks,
the car would remain traveling in a straight line.
When Beck finished explaining his idea, I stood there with
my mouth hanging open. Actually we BOTH stood there with our
mouths open, but while my jaw was flopping due to surprise,
Beck's was caused by a powerful hangover that was still affecting
his motor control. I must admit, though, I was pretty impressed
with his thinking. We'd talked about dozens of ways to stop the
rocket car the previous evening, but nothing that even came
CLOSE to Beck's plan. It was simple to build, easy to install,
and stood a fair chance of working. I knew that sooner or later
I'd have to talk to Jimmy about the whole thing, but that didn't
stop me from getting to work installing the air shocks on the
Chevy as soon as Beck slouched out of the scrapyard and went
home.
I worked on the car for the rest of the afternoon, wanting
to get as much done as I could on a Sunday, while the yard was
closed. By the end of the day, I had the shocks installed on the
car and a pair of three-foot-long runners made from sections of 2
x 4 bolted together to make them thick enough to reach the rails.
All that was left to do was bolt the runners to the car frame and
arrange the air hoses for the shock absorbers, and the car would
be ready to test. It was THEN that I finally called Jimmy and
asked him to come down to the yard. Talking to him
sooner would've been the sensible thing to do, but I didn't want
to take a chance that he'd come up with some laughably obvious
reason the brake-runner system wouldn't work. At the time, my
thinking on the subject was pretty clear: There were only two
ways were going to be able to stop the Rocket Car, either by
using a drogue chute or by Beck's braking system. And although I
wasn't too keen on the idea of taking one of my Dad's parachutes,
I'd do it if it was the only way to get the Rocket Car to work.
But even if we DID use a drogue chute, the car would need
an additional braking system anyway. A parachute will SLOW a car,
but it won't STOP it. You still need regular brakes for that.
The way I figured it, we'd need Beck's idea no matter what
happened. So I decided to show Jimmy the braking system I was
building and see what he thought. If he pointed out some reason
why it was completely foolish, I'd show him Dad's parachute
collection, then tell him that the brake runners were the STANDBY
system, and we were actually going to use a parachute to slow the
car to reasonable speed.
It not only sounded reasonable, but it kept me from
looking like a total asshole.
All my planning was unnecessary, though. When Jimmy heard
me describe the rail-braking system and saw what I'd done to the
car so far, he was VERY impressed. I think he was also a little
pissed off that Beck had come up with the idea, and not him. But
here's a thought that never occurred to me back in 1978, and to
be honest, I'm glad it didn't: We never really had any proof that
it was BECK who came up with the idea. For all we know, it was
SAL who dreamed up the notion of using runners to stop the car.
Yes, yes, I know, it's a ridiculous thought. Like having your
pet hamster wake up one morning with a revolutionary process
for splitting atoms. After all, we're talking about the guy who
wanted the pilot of the Rocket Car to hoist a goddamned ANCHOR
out the window to slow down.
Still, you never know. And Jimmy, if you're reading this,
I'm sorry I even brought it up now. I know you'll lose some sleep
over it. But I couldn't resist.
Anyway, Jimmy DID give the braking system his stamp of
approval, and I never had to admit that Dad had a bunch of
parachutes stashed in the shed. The only reservation Jimmy had
about the system was one that should've been obvious to me from
the start: heat. If the car were traveling as fast as we expected
it to, rubber-coated planks pressing against metal rails
would probably get hotter than hell. On the other hand, this
WAS basically the same system used by every car on the road, as
well as racing cars. Drum and disc brakes are essentially nothing
more than pads or shoes pressing against moving pieces of steel
to stop the car. The only difference between their system and
ours was that standard brakes pressed brake pads against steel
that was spinning, while ours used steel moving in a straight
line. And even though our car would be traveling a lot faster
than most, we had much more overall braking surface. So Jimmy and
I talked about ways to cool the runners for awhile, just in case
heat buildup turned out to be a real problem. Actually, I think
Jimmy might have made the heat problem sound worse than it really
was, just so Beck wouldn't get ALL the credit for solving the
brake problem. But to give credit where it's due, we DID wind up
with a heat problem, so whatever Jimmy's motivations might
have been, it's a good thing I listened to him.
Then again, if I'd ignored him, I doubt it would've
changed the final outcome too much.
With the conceptual details taken care of, all that was
left was construction. Even though the braking and brake-cooling
systems were the hardest part of the car to fabricate, it didn't
take long to get them built and installed. Bolting the runners to
the car frame was quick work, and even though it took a little
doing to get the air-dump valve connected to all four
shock absorbers, I had plenty of materials to work with laying
around the scrap yard. After removing the valve stems from the
air inlets to the shocks, I attached sections of air-compressor
hose to the valves themselves. The other ends of the hoses ran to
an air valve that started life as the door-opening lever on a
city bus. With the lever in the "open" position, all four shocks
could be inflated from a single air inlet near the dump
lever. Once the shocks were pressurized, releasing the lever kept
them inflated until the lever was pushed again.
I first tested the air-valve system on Tuesday afternoon,
and when I saw that it worked the way it was supposed to, I
immediately called Beck. He came to the yard with Sal, and the
three of us took turns raising and lowering the car for almost an
hour before the novelty wore off. Despite the fact that it wasn't
very exciting to watch, there was something distinctly
satisfying about seeing the system work the way it was supposed
to. Of course Beck was more anxious to "take the car for a spin"
than ever, and he actually got a little pissed off when I pointed
out that we weren't out of the woods yet. There was still a heat
problem to deal with, but this detail didn't cut much ice with
Beck. He was positive that it wouldn't be a problem, which meant
that our next step was to take the Chevy out and light the
rocket. So rather than dwell on the heat problem, I said "Haul it
out WHERE, and light the rocket with WHAT?"
That took the wind out of his sails in a hurry.
See, we still hadn't considered how we were going to
ignite the JATO, but to be honest, this wasn't a major sticking
point. There was a rubber plug in the end of the exhaust nozzle
of the rocket I'd inspected, and it seemed logical to assume that
some sort of igniter plugged into the hole. Probably an
electrical fuse, something along the lines of the igniters used
for model rockets. Whatever fueled the rocket (ammonium
perchlorate, I later found out) was no doubt highly flammable,
and shouldn't be too tough to ignite.
But I knew I could come up with something better than a
fuse.
A much bigger problem was the launch site. Beck got sulky
and petulant when I pointed out that we had no idea where we'd
actually run the car, but he didn't argue too much. Even if I
agreed to hoist the car onto Dad's flatbed right then and there
and drive around searching for a spot to use, I'm sure Beck
would've realized how dumb the idea was before we even got out of
the yard. So I put Beck in charge of finding a suitable launch
site, which I'd have done even if he wasn't being a royal pain in
the ass and keeping me from my work. His Dad's four-wheel drive
was the perfect vehicle for location-scouting, and he and Sal
were more familiar with the surrounding desert than anyone I
knew. Beck and Sal headed for the gates deep in conversation, and
I got back to work.
The brake-cooling system I ended up building was pretty
cheesy, I'll be the first to admit that. But since we weren't
even sure it was necessary, I didn't want to spend a lot of time
messing with it. I ran a length of garden hose along each wooden
runner, near the point where the runner was attached to the car.
Took the ends near the front of each runner, and led them
into the empty engine compartment. I tied off the ends under the
car, then punched holes along the sections near the runners with
an awl. Water entering the ends in the engine compartment would
leak out through the perforations, soaking the runners and pads.
I told you it was pretty cheesy.
The only part of the cooling arrangement that even came
CLOSE to sophistication was the result of a brainstorm that came
to me while I was strapping a five-gallon jerry can under the
hood of the Rocket Car. I started putting the sprinkler system
together with the idea that we'd simply open a valve before
launch, letting water leak out of the hoses and onto
the runners for the duration of the run. But while I was
attaching the jerry can, a better method occurred to me. Instead
of attaching the garden hoses to a valve, I drilled a pair of
holes directly into the top of the jerry can, and fed the hoses
through the holes. Then I drilled a third, smaller hole, and
connected another hose from the jerry can to the air-dump handle
for the shock absorbers. I sealed all the hose connections
with massive amounts of rubber cement, then called it quits for
the day.
No word from Beck or Sal that night, so I assumed finding
a launch site wasn't as easy as they'd thought it would be.
When I checked the Rocket Car the next day, the rubber
cement sealant had dried to the consistency of a hockey puck, so
I tested the entire system. I filled the air shocks from Dad's
portable compressor, then closed the dump valve. Filled the jerry
can with water, and screwed the top down tight. Said a quick
prayer, and hit the dump-valve lever. There was a slight hiss
as the air rushed out of the shocks, through the dump valve.
But instead of being vented into the open, the last air-hose I'd
installed directed the escaping air INTO the jerry can full of
water under the hood, forcing water OUT through the sprinkler
hoses. When I checked under the car there was an impressive
puddle, and water was still jetting out of the holes in the
garden hoses.
I was thrilled beyond words.
And when Jimmy saw the whole system in action a few days
later, he said he was "..really impressed with my application of
Bernoulli's Principle." Hell, I didn't even know the Italians
BUILT rocket cars.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
I stared at the note for quite awhile, trying to figure
out what it meant. At first I figured Jimmy must have left the
bundle of shocks, since his father stocked such things at his
body shop. But there was no way a college student like Jimmy
would misspell a common word like "problem", drunk or sober. And
the fact that most of the words were spelled CORRECTLY pretty
much eliminated Sal. Which meant that the shock-absorber care
package must have been Beck's doing, and as soon as I realized
this, I hustled the bundle into the house and stashed it in my
room. Obviously Beck's creative juices hadn't REALLY started
flowing until Jimmy and I left the previous night, and he'd
eventually come up with some sort of solution to the braking
problem. It also seemed that he had enough confidence in his idea
to act on it. At the time I had no idea what sort
of solution Beck could've come up with for our "problum", I just
hoped it turned out to be as sensible in the light of day as it
seemed when Beck came up with it the night before. The bundle of
shocks I stuck under my bed were relatively new, but covered with
dust and road-grime. They obviously hadn't come from an all-night
auto parts store. I guessed that Beck had been struck with a
burst of twisted inspiration after Jimmy and I left, then spent
the rest of the night staggering around town with his brother, a
bumper jack, and a crescent wrench. Looking for donor
to contribute some hardware to our cause. It seemed as if they'd
found one, too. And if someone was going to wake up that morning
to a car that was mysteriously missing all four shock absorbers,
I hoped like hell Beck's plan was worth it.
But I never actually ASKED Beck where the shocks came
from, and he never volunteered the information. I didn't consider
it critical to the mission.
I did, however, call him later in the day to ask what I
was supposed to DO with the shocks. His first suggestion was that
I stick them up my ass. I assumed that he was just in a bad mood
from a hangover, since there was no way an assfull of shock
absorbers would help to slow a fast-moving Rocket Car. So I kept
interrogating him until he finally remembered the details of his
Grand Plan, and agreed to meet me at the scrapyard later on. When
he finally showed up at the gates to the yard he looked
like hammered shit, but I expected as much. Go spend a night
getting drunk and stealing auto parts and see how YOU feel the
next day. But he was also reasonably coherent, and described his
idea while we walked out to the weedy corner of the field where
the Rocket Car was still perched on cinderblocks.
And I have to admit, it was good. Real good. Better than
anything we'd figured out up to that point, anyway. But the best
part (to me, anyway) was that it didn't involve me stealing
anything else that my father might notice.
Beck's idea was simple, elegant, and easy to put into
practice. I'd install the air shocks on the Rocket Car normally,
just as if the car would be riding on pavement instead of rails.
But I'd also bolt a pair of wooden beams onto the belly of the
car, runners that were placed exactly between the front
and rear train wheels. Each runner would be thick enough to reach
almost all the way down to the tracks, and the bottom would be
covered with rubber cut from old tires. The effect would be that
the car would roll freely while the air shocks were inflated,
with the twin runners suspended inches above the steel tracks.
When it was time to stop the car, the pilot would activate a
release valve which would dump the air from all four
shock absorbers simultaneously. The car would drop until it's
entire weight was resting on the runners, which would be pressing
into the railroad tracks. This would provide two brake shoes
three feet long, pushed against the track under the weight of the
car's body, providing a HUGE amount of stopping-power. And since
the wheel flanges would also still be firmly on the tracks,
the car would remain traveling in a straight line.
When Beck finished explaining his idea, I stood there with
my mouth hanging open. Actually we BOTH stood there with our
mouths open, but while my jaw was flopping due to surprise,
Beck's was caused by a powerful hangover that was still affecting
his motor control. I must admit, though, I was pretty impressed
with his thinking. We'd talked about dozens of ways to stop the
rocket car the previous evening, but nothing that even came
CLOSE to Beck's plan. It was simple to build, easy to install,
and stood a fair chance of working. I knew that sooner or later
I'd have to talk to Jimmy about the whole thing, but that didn't
stop me from getting to work installing the air shocks on the
Chevy as soon as Beck slouched out of the scrapyard and went
home.
I worked on the car for the rest of the afternoon, wanting
to get as much done as I could on a Sunday, while the yard was
closed. By the end of the day, I had the shocks installed on the
car and a pair of three-foot-long runners made from sections of 2
x 4 bolted together to make them thick enough to reach the rails.
All that was left to do was bolt the runners to the car frame and
arrange the air hoses for the shock absorbers, and the car would
be ready to test. It was THEN that I finally called Jimmy and
asked him to come down to the yard. Talking to him
sooner would've been the sensible thing to do, but I didn't want
to take a chance that he'd come up with some laughably obvious
reason the brake-runner system wouldn't work. At the time, my
thinking on the subject was pretty clear: There were only two
ways were going to be able to stop the Rocket Car, either by
using a drogue chute or by Beck's braking system. And although I
wasn't too keen on the idea of taking one of my Dad's parachutes,
I'd do it if it was the only way to get the Rocket Car to work.
But even if we DID use a drogue chute, the car would need
an additional braking system anyway. A parachute will SLOW a car,
but it won't STOP it. You still need regular brakes for that.
The way I figured it, we'd need Beck's idea no matter what
happened. So I decided to show Jimmy the braking system I was
building and see what he thought. If he pointed out some reason
why it was completely foolish, I'd show him Dad's parachute
collection, then tell him that the brake runners were the STANDBY
system, and we were actually going to use a parachute to slow the
car to reasonable speed.
It not only sounded reasonable, but it kept me from
looking like a total asshole.
All my planning was unnecessary, though. When Jimmy heard
me describe the rail-braking system and saw what I'd done to the
car so far, he was VERY impressed. I think he was also a little
pissed off that Beck had come up with the idea, and not him. But
here's a thought that never occurred to me back in 1978, and to
be honest, I'm glad it didn't: We never really had any proof that
it was BECK who came up with the idea. For all we know, it was
SAL who dreamed up the notion of using runners to stop the car.
Yes, yes, I know, it's a ridiculous thought. Like having your
pet hamster wake up one morning with a revolutionary process
for splitting atoms. After all, we're talking about the guy who
wanted the pilot of the Rocket Car to hoist a goddamned ANCHOR
out the window to slow down.
Still, you never know. And Jimmy, if you're reading this,
I'm sorry I even brought it up now. I know you'll lose some sleep
over it. But I couldn't resist.
Anyway, Jimmy DID give the braking system his stamp of
approval, and I never had to admit that Dad had a bunch of
parachutes stashed in the shed. The only reservation Jimmy had
about the system was one that should've been obvious to me from
the start: heat. If the car were traveling as fast as we expected
it to, rubber-coated planks pressing against metal rails
would probably get hotter than hell. On the other hand, this
WAS basically the same system used by every car on the road, as
well as racing cars. Drum and disc brakes are essentially nothing
more than pads or shoes pressing against moving pieces of steel
to stop the car. The only difference between their system and
ours was that standard brakes pressed brake pads against steel
that was spinning, while ours used steel moving in a straight
line. And even though our car would be traveling a lot faster
than most, we had much more overall braking surface. So Jimmy and
I talked about ways to cool the runners for awhile, just in case
heat buildup turned out to be a real problem. Actually, I think
Jimmy might have made the heat problem sound worse than it really
was, just so Beck wouldn't get ALL the credit for solving the
brake problem. But to give credit where it's due, we DID wind up
with a heat problem, so whatever Jimmy's motivations might
have been, it's a good thing I listened to him.
Then again, if I'd ignored him, I doubt it would've
changed the final outcome too much.
With the conceptual details taken care of, all that was
left was construction. Even though the braking and brake-cooling
systems were the hardest part of the car to fabricate, it didn't
take long to get them built and installed. Bolting the runners to
the car frame was quick work, and even though it took a little
doing to get the air-dump valve connected to all four
shock absorbers, I had plenty of materials to work with laying
around the scrap yard. After removing the valve stems from the
air inlets to the shocks, I attached sections of air-compressor
hose to the valves themselves. The other ends of the hoses ran to
an air valve that started life as the door-opening lever on a
city bus. With the lever in the "open" position, all four shocks
could be inflated from a single air inlet near the dump
lever. Once the shocks were pressurized, releasing the lever kept
them inflated until the lever was pushed again.
I first tested the air-valve system on Tuesday afternoon,
and when I saw that it worked the way it was supposed to, I
immediately called Beck. He came to the yard with Sal, and the
three of us took turns raising and lowering the car for almost an
hour before the novelty wore off. Despite the fact that it wasn't
very exciting to watch, there was something distinctly
satisfying about seeing the system work the way it was supposed
to. Of course Beck was more anxious to "take the car for a spin"
than ever, and he actually got a little pissed off when I pointed
out that we weren't out of the woods yet. There was still a heat
problem to deal with, but this detail didn't cut much ice with
Beck. He was positive that it wouldn't be a problem, which meant
that our next step was to take the Chevy out and light the
rocket. So rather than dwell on the heat problem, I said "Haul it
out WHERE, and light the rocket with WHAT?"
That took the wind out of his sails in a hurry.
See, we still hadn't considered how we were going to
ignite the JATO, but to be honest, this wasn't a major sticking
point. There was a rubber plug in the end of the exhaust nozzle
of the rocket I'd inspected, and it seemed logical to assume that
some sort of igniter plugged into the hole. Probably an
electrical fuse, something along the lines of the igniters used
for model rockets. Whatever fueled the rocket (ammonium
perchlorate, I later found out) was no doubt highly flammable,
and shouldn't be too tough to ignite.
But I knew I could come up with something better than a
fuse.
A much bigger problem was the launch site. Beck got sulky
and petulant when I pointed out that we had no idea where we'd
actually run the car, but he didn't argue too much. Even if I
agreed to hoist the car onto Dad's flatbed right then and there
and drive around searching for a spot to use, I'm sure Beck
would've realized how dumb the idea was before we even got out of
the yard. So I put Beck in charge of finding a suitable launch
site, which I'd have done even if he wasn't being a royal pain in
the ass and keeping me from my work. His Dad's four-wheel drive
was the perfect vehicle for location-scouting, and he and Sal
were more familiar with the surrounding desert than anyone I
knew. Beck and Sal headed for the gates deep in conversation, and
I got back to work.
The brake-cooling system I ended up building was pretty
cheesy, I'll be the first to admit that. But since we weren't
even sure it was necessary, I didn't want to spend a lot of time
messing with it. I ran a length of garden hose along each wooden
runner, near the point where the runner was attached to the car.
Took the ends near the front of each runner, and led them
into the empty engine compartment. I tied off the ends under the
car, then punched holes along the sections near the runners with
an awl. Water entering the ends in the engine compartment would
leak out through the perforations, soaking the runners and pads.
I told you it was pretty cheesy.
The only part of the cooling arrangement that even came
CLOSE to sophistication was the result of a brainstorm that came
to me while I was strapping a five-gallon jerry can under the
hood of the Rocket Car. I started putting the sprinkler system
together with the idea that we'd simply open a valve before
launch, letting water leak out of the hoses and onto
the runners for the duration of the run. But while I was
attaching the jerry can, a better method occurred to me. Instead
of attaching the garden hoses to a valve, I drilled a pair of
holes directly into the top of the jerry can, and fed the hoses
through the holes. Then I drilled a third, smaller hole, and
connected another hose from the jerry can to the air-dump handle
for the shock absorbers. I sealed all the hose connections
with massive amounts of rubber cement, then called it quits for
the day.
No word from Beck or Sal that night, so I assumed finding
a launch site wasn't as easy as they'd thought it would be.
When I checked the Rocket Car the next day, the rubber
cement sealant had dried to the consistency of a hockey puck, so
I tested the entire system. I filled the air shocks from Dad's
portable compressor, then closed the dump valve. Filled the jerry
can with water, and screwed the top down tight. Said a quick
prayer, and hit the dump-valve lever. There was a slight hiss
as the air rushed out of the shocks, through the dump valve.
But instead of being vented into the open, the last air-hose I'd
installed directed the escaping air INTO the jerry can full of
water under the hood, forcing water OUT through the sprinkler
hoses. When I checked under the car there was an impressive
puddle, and water was still jetting out of the holes in the
garden hoses.
I was thrilled beyond words.
And when Jimmy saw the whole system in action a few days
later, he said he was "..really impressed with my application of
Bernoulli's Principle." Hell, I didn't even know the Italians
BUILT rocket cars.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The Rocket Car Chapter 4
LUXURY AT THE SPEED OF SOUND
One aspect of the Rocket Car legend that always tickles me
is that no matter how much the story varies, the make, model and
year of the car is ALWAYS specified. Sure this is a nice detail
to have on hand, but considering the details left OUT of the
description, it looks... sorta silly. In the Darwin Award
version, there's no mention of which highway the car was on, or
even whereabouts in Arizona the story took place. And Arizona is
a pretty big place. There's also no mention of any investigation
that took place afterwards. But despite all these oversights,
the story DID specify that the car was a 1967 Chevy Impala. I
think the reason this detail is always supplied is because it's
critical to make the listener think the test pilot at least
LOOKED cool when he flew into the cliff. You'll never hear
someone tell a story about a guy in a rocket-powered K-car or a
Volkswagen Beetle. It has to be a car that DESERVES to have a
rocket attached to it.
In the case of our Rocket Car, we gave some serious
thought to not even using a car body. As soon as we got back to
the scrapyard, Beck wanted to weld one of the JATO's to a bucket
car, stick the car on a track, and light the rocket. He was
doubtless the craziest member of Team Rocket Car, and if I'd been
willing to go along with his idea, I have no doubt he'd have
climbed in and lit the fuse himself. Fortunately, they were
MY JATOs, so I had veto power over all the dumb ideas. Or at
least the REAL dumb ones. Of course sticking a JATO on a bucket
car was out of the question, but building a simple platform on a
bucket-car base with a car seat bolted onto it sounded like the
easiest way to build a rocket sled. Actually, this is pretty much
what the NASA rocket sleds looked like. But this
arrangement would mean that each run would be limited to a single
passenger, and I only had four JATO's. When Jimmy and I discussed
the details of the project, he seemed pretty confident that the
thrust from the rocket would be enough to push a four-passenger
car at a reasonable speed. And if we used a car body, we'd have a
windshield, doors, and some degree of protection if anything went
wrong. Granted, a car body wouldn't do us much good if we hit
something (like a canyon wall) at jet-fighter speed, but it was
better than wiping out in a director's chair at 300 miles per
hour.
Despite Beck's impatience, I got started building the
Rocket Car the next day.
Our car wasn't a 1967 Chevy Impala, but a 1959 Chevy
Impala. A bone-white Impala, with a red interior. I know how
bizarre that sounds, but once a story starts to mutate into a
legend, there's no telling which parts of the truth will stick.
Obviously the Chevy Impala part made the cut.
We didn't choose the `59 Impala for it's aerodynamics or
structural qualities, but because one was available. My father
happened to have one, resting on cinderblocks, in a forgotten
corner of his lot. Engine, transmission and wheels were all
missing, sold to Jimmy's father at some point. The only reason
this car was otherwise intact was that Chevrolet only used the
1959 style for a single year, which meant the body parts would
only be usable on another 1959 Impala. This particular car was
obscure enough so that once the mechanical parts were stripped,
it was pretty much useless. And this is why what was left of my
Dad's `59 Impala was left to decay in a field.
Fortunately, the leftovers were all that we needed.
Cutting the bodies from the bucket cars was a chore, but
not as bad as I expected. The thin metal of the buckets was
rusted to tatters in spots, so burning through it was fairly
easy. But despite this, I still used almost an entire tank of oxy
getting the bodies cut away from the bases, and I knew my
Dad would be suspicious when he found I'd used all the oxygen in
an almost- full tank. Luckily, Jimmy was able to help out in
that department. When I told him about my predicament the
following weekend, he simply took my empty oxygen cylinder and
swapped it with one of the dozen or so his Dad kept on hand at
his body shop. My father might notice if a brand new tank of
oxygen were suddenly empty, but Jimmy's Dad's shop used so much
gas he'd never know the difference.
Attaching the cut-away rail car bases to the Chevy frame
was pretty easy too. Jimmy stressed the importance of getting the
two sets of wheels precisely aligned, but it wasn't that hard.
The old Chevy frame had plenty of places for bolts and welds, so
picking spots where the wheels would line up was a snap. And
since the Impala was already up on blocks, it was no problem to
slide the wheel frames underneath and lift them into place with a
floor jack, then weld away. I'm sure that these days my students
would laugh like hell at the thought of me laying underneath a
car with an oxyacetylene torch in my hand, but the fact is, I
learned how to draw a bead and cut metal when I was 14 or 15
years old. Growing up around a scrapyard DID have certain
advantages, and learning how to work with a torch was one of
them. So aligning the wheel frames and welding them to the
car was a fairly straightforward process.
The propulsion unit (hah!) consisted of a five-foot length
of steel water pipe, welded to both the rear bucket car AND the
Chevy's frame. This might sound like overkill, but at the time I
had no idea how much thrust to expect from the JATO bottle, so it
seemed best to err on the side of caution. I plugged the end of
the pipe facing the front of the car with a slug of scrap steel
and welded it into place, and even cut the center out of
a threaded cap to screw onto the exhaust end to hold the
JATO bottle securely once it was installed. The end-cap seemed
like a good idea while I was doing it, but Jimmy laughed like
hell when he came in the following weekend and saw my handiwork.
He pointed at the steel cap, and said "That rocket is gonna be
pushing against the car hard enough to make it fly like a bullet,
and you're afraid it'll fall out the BACK end?"
What can I say? This is one of the reasons Jimmy was doing
all the brainwork.
Unfortunately, his critique wasn't only limited to the job
I did on the "propulsion unit". He also asked how I planned to
stop the thing once the ride was over, and I had to admit that I
didn't have the slightest idea.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
TOUGH BRAKES
In the Darwin version of the Rocket Car tale, the car
burned out it's brakes instantly, and was eventually stopped by a
cliff face. We hoped to come up with a somewhat more elegant
braking system, and we did. But not
without considerable brainwork.
The night Jimmy inspected my work on the Chevy, all four
members of Team Rocket Car gathered at a neighborhood bar to
discuss the considerable problem of stopping the car once it was
moving. When I started putting the car together, I assumed Jimmy
would have some idea what we'd do. But as it turned out, he was
just as clueless as the rest of us. So we gathered at the bar
in the hope that ONE of us could come up with a workable idea.
Of course the lack of any way to stop the Rocket Car was
considered a very minor point with Beck. He was perfectly willing
to haul the car out to a long stretch of empty track, get in,
fire it up, and hope he slowed down before he ran out of track.
In his eyes, worrying about something as trivial as brakes was a
sign of cowardice.
Like I said, he was out of his fucking mind.
Fortunately, Beck didn't have much say about the
situation, so we decided that we wouldn't launch the car until we
had SOME sort of braking mechanism to slow it down.
The most popular idea was, naturally, a drogue chute. The
Spirit of America used one, as did a few types of fighter planes,
top fuel dragsters, etc. But like the optimal solutions to most
of our problems, the question was where to FIND one. Nobody had
any idea how to go about getting a parachute. Nobody except for
me, that is. My father actually had six Army surplus parachutes
sitting in a storage shed near the office at the scrapyard, the
spoils of particularly good auction years before. Five of them
were standard personnel chutes, and one was a massive
cargo-drop canopy. But Dad also KNEW he had six of them. He'd
started out with a dozen, and occasionally sold one to a skydiver
or army/navy store. A good surplus parachute was worth upwards of
$200. There was no telling what the cargo chute would be worth to
the right buyer. But if one were to turn up missing, Dad would
certainly notice. Of course we might have gotten away with
using a parachute, then returning it once we were finished with
it, but even this presented problems. It might work okay for the
FIRST ride, but how about the second? I certainly knew nothing
about parachute rigging. All I was sure of was that there was a
LOT of cloth that had to be stuffed into a very small pack.
Besides, I'd already stuck my neck out pretty far for the
sake of the Rocket Car, and I didn't want to stick it out any
further. So I kept the existence of Dad's parachutes to myself,
and hoped someone else would come up with an alternate plan.
Using a retro-rocket was discussed briefly, but it only
took Jimmy a minute to punch THAT idea full of holes. Even though
rigging a retro would mean nothing more than sticking a second
JATO on the front of the car to oppose the one in the rear, it
would mean a maximum of two rides before we ran out of JATO's.
This much was obvious. What wasn't obvious was the physics of the
whole thing, which Jimmy was happy to explain. Firing the first
rocket would provide a huge forward thrust for a very
short time, but a retro rocket would produce an IDENTICAL thrust
(if we were lucky) in the opposite direction, for the same
duration. Which would mean the only way to bring the car to a
dead stop would be to fire the retro as soon as the thrust rocket
burned out. That would result in a 0-to-300 acceleration in
seconds, followed by a 300-to-0 DEceleration in the same amount
of time.
Doesn't sound like much fun, does it?
And if the retro was fired a little too late, it could
easily result in the whole rig traveling BACKWARDS. Possibly at a
high rate of speed. Or even worse, the retro might be a dud. Or
the ignition system might not work.
Needless to say, we shitcanned the retro-rocket idea in a
hurry.
Sal suggested outfitting the car with a huge anchor, one
that could be heaved out the window at the critical moment. The
rest of us suggested that Sal shut the fuck up and get us another
round of beers.
I brought up one idea I'd been toying with, stretching a
cable across the track and fitting the Rocket Car with a tailhook
to slow it down. Why not? After all, aircraft carriers had been
using this system to stop incoming planes for years, and it
seemed to work just fine. But before I could explain the idea,
Beck started laughing his ass off, then asked if I wanted to use
a rubber inner-tube to catch the car, or just tie a rope between
two fence-posts. And I clearly remember how much this pissed me
off. Here was a guy willing to strap a military rocket onto his
back and sit in a rusty rail-car while someone lit the fuse, but
he was laughing at MY ideas. Unfortunately, he DID have a point.
It wasn't until years later that I found out how aircraft
carriers absorbed the shock of a plane catching an arresting wire
(it involves huge pistons moving through cylinders of hydraulic
fluid), but I knew that rigging a similar system would be next to
impossible. Putting a tailhook on the car and catching
an arresting wire was simple. But it sure as hell couldn't be
stationary wire. There would have to be some system to absorb the
impact of a car moving at high speeds, and we couldn't come up
with anything. We went through a slew of ideas for mechanical
systems, but I rejected them all because they were either too
complicated, too expensive, or too impractical.
Jimmy pointed out that rocket sleds usually ended up in a
pool of water, which both acted as a brake and cooled the whole
contraption down. Beck pointed out that all the narrow-gauge
railroad tracks HE'D ever seen were in the middle of the desert,
where pools of water were pretty tough to come by.
Overall, we ended up batting exactly zero for the evening.
I remember that I was pretty damned depressed when Jimmy
and I left the bar that night, despite the fact that I was pretty
drunk. Considering the progress I'd made on the rocket car up to
that point, I figured that a braking system would be a minor
point. Surely if we put all three of our heads together (well,
3-1/2, counting Sal) we could come up with SOMETHING.
But it hadn't happened.
Or at least it hadn't happened while we were all sitting
at the bar. Jimmy tried to blow some optimistic sunshine up my
ass while we walked up the street toward our houses, saying that
one of us might be able to come up with something later, once we
were all sober. I didn't consider it likely. Beck and Sal seemed
to think better when they were drunk, and they were both pretty
shitfaced when we left them. If they hadn't come up with
anything at the bar, chances are they never would. And Jimmy and
I weren't having any brainstorms drunk OR sober.
Anyway, there's no telling how Sal and Beck spent the rest
of their evening, but the next morning my Dad woke me up by
pounding on my bedroom door. When I finally peeled my eyes open,
he asked me who was delivering my car parts in the middle of the
night.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
Part of my incomprehension was from a hangover, but even
if I'd spent the previous night drinking Kool Aid, I would've
been pretty confused. So he led me out to the front porch and
pointed to a bundle of four thick metal rods, tied together with
twine, laying on the porch swing. When I looked closer, I saw
that they were actually a set of heavy-duty air-adjustable car
shock absorbers. Jammed under the twine was a note written in
what looked like crayon on a crumpled paper bag.
It said this:
Problum solved.
Call me later
Major Tom
----------------------------------------------------------------
One aspect of the Rocket Car legend that always tickles me
is that no matter how much the story varies, the make, model and
year of the car is ALWAYS specified. Sure this is a nice detail
to have on hand, but considering the details left OUT of the
description, it looks... sorta silly. In the Darwin Award
version, there's no mention of which highway the car was on, or
even whereabouts in Arizona the story took place. And Arizona is
a pretty big place. There's also no mention of any investigation
that took place afterwards. But despite all these oversights,
the story DID specify that the car was a 1967 Chevy Impala. I
think the reason this detail is always supplied is because it's
critical to make the listener think the test pilot at least
LOOKED cool when he flew into the cliff. You'll never hear
someone tell a story about a guy in a rocket-powered K-car or a
Volkswagen Beetle. It has to be a car that DESERVES to have a
rocket attached to it.
In the case of our Rocket Car, we gave some serious
thought to not even using a car body. As soon as we got back to
the scrapyard, Beck wanted to weld one of the JATO's to a bucket
car, stick the car on a track, and light the rocket. He was
doubtless the craziest member of Team Rocket Car, and if I'd been
willing to go along with his idea, I have no doubt he'd have
climbed in and lit the fuse himself. Fortunately, they were
MY JATOs, so I had veto power over all the dumb ideas. Or at
least the REAL dumb ones. Of course sticking a JATO on a bucket
car was out of the question, but building a simple platform on a
bucket-car base with a car seat bolted onto it sounded like the
easiest way to build a rocket sled. Actually, this is pretty much
what the NASA rocket sleds looked like. But this
arrangement would mean that each run would be limited to a single
passenger, and I only had four JATO's. When Jimmy and I discussed
the details of the project, he seemed pretty confident that the
thrust from the rocket would be enough to push a four-passenger
car at a reasonable speed. And if we used a car body, we'd have a
windshield, doors, and some degree of protection if anything went
wrong. Granted, a car body wouldn't do us much good if we hit
something (like a canyon wall) at jet-fighter speed, but it was
better than wiping out in a director's chair at 300 miles per
hour.
Despite Beck's impatience, I got started building the
Rocket Car the next day.
Our car wasn't a 1967 Chevy Impala, but a 1959 Chevy
Impala. A bone-white Impala, with a red interior. I know how
bizarre that sounds, but once a story starts to mutate into a
legend, there's no telling which parts of the truth will stick.
Obviously the Chevy Impala part made the cut.
We didn't choose the `59 Impala for it's aerodynamics or
structural qualities, but because one was available. My father
happened to have one, resting on cinderblocks, in a forgotten
corner of his lot. Engine, transmission and wheels were all
missing, sold to Jimmy's father at some point. The only reason
this car was otherwise intact was that Chevrolet only used the
1959 style for a single year, which meant the body parts would
only be usable on another 1959 Impala. This particular car was
obscure enough so that once the mechanical parts were stripped,
it was pretty much useless. And this is why what was left of my
Dad's `59 Impala was left to decay in a field.
Fortunately, the leftovers were all that we needed.
Cutting the bodies from the bucket cars was a chore, but
not as bad as I expected. The thin metal of the buckets was
rusted to tatters in spots, so burning through it was fairly
easy. But despite this, I still used almost an entire tank of oxy
getting the bodies cut away from the bases, and I knew my
Dad would be suspicious when he found I'd used all the oxygen in
an almost- full tank. Luckily, Jimmy was able to help out in
that department. When I told him about my predicament the
following weekend, he simply took my empty oxygen cylinder and
swapped it with one of the dozen or so his Dad kept on hand at
his body shop. My father might notice if a brand new tank of
oxygen were suddenly empty, but Jimmy's Dad's shop used so much
gas he'd never know the difference.
Attaching the cut-away rail car bases to the Chevy frame
was pretty easy too. Jimmy stressed the importance of getting the
two sets of wheels precisely aligned, but it wasn't that hard.
The old Chevy frame had plenty of places for bolts and welds, so
picking spots where the wheels would line up was a snap. And
since the Impala was already up on blocks, it was no problem to
slide the wheel frames underneath and lift them into place with a
floor jack, then weld away. I'm sure that these days my students
would laugh like hell at the thought of me laying underneath a
car with an oxyacetylene torch in my hand, but the fact is, I
learned how to draw a bead and cut metal when I was 14 or 15
years old. Growing up around a scrapyard DID have certain
advantages, and learning how to work with a torch was one of
them. So aligning the wheel frames and welding them to the
car was a fairly straightforward process.
The propulsion unit (hah!) consisted of a five-foot length
of steel water pipe, welded to both the rear bucket car AND the
Chevy's frame. This might sound like overkill, but at the time I
had no idea how much thrust to expect from the JATO bottle, so it
seemed best to err on the side of caution. I plugged the end of
the pipe facing the front of the car with a slug of scrap steel
and welded it into place, and even cut the center out of
a threaded cap to screw onto the exhaust end to hold the
JATO bottle securely once it was installed. The end-cap seemed
like a good idea while I was doing it, but Jimmy laughed like
hell when he came in the following weekend and saw my handiwork.
He pointed at the steel cap, and said "That rocket is gonna be
pushing against the car hard enough to make it fly like a bullet,
and you're afraid it'll fall out the BACK end?"
What can I say? This is one of the reasons Jimmy was doing
all the brainwork.
Unfortunately, his critique wasn't only limited to the job
I did on the "propulsion unit". He also asked how I planned to
stop the thing once the ride was over, and I had to admit that I
didn't have the slightest idea.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
TOUGH BRAKES
In the Darwin version of the Rocket Car tale, the car
burned out it's brakes instantly, and was eventually stopped by a
cliff face. We hoped to come up with a somewhat more elegant
braking system, and we did. But not
without considerable brainwork.
The night Jimmy inspected my work on the Chevy, all four
members of Team Rocket Car gathered at a neighborhood bar to
discuss the considerable problem of stopping the car once it was
moving. When I started putting the car together, I assumed Jimmy
would have some idea what we'd do. But as it turned out, he was
just as clueless as the rest of us. So we gathered at the bar
in the hope that ONE of us could come up with a workable idea.
Of course the lack of any way to stop the Rocket Car was
considered a very minor point with Beck. He was perfectly willing
to haul the car out to a long stretch of empty track, get in,
fire it up, and hope he slowed down before he ran out of track.
In his eyes, worrying about something as trivial as brakes was a
sign of cowardice.
Like I said, he was out of his fucking mind.
Fortunately, Beck didn't have much say about the
situation, so we decided that we wouldn't launch the car until we
had SOME sort of braking mechanism to slow it down.
The most popular idea was, naturally, a drogue chute. The
Spirit of America used one, as did a few types of fighter planes,
top fuel dragsters, etc. But like the optimal solutions to most
of our problems, the question was where to FIND one. Nobody had
any idea how to go about getting a parachute. Nobody except for
me, that is. My father actually had six Army surplus parachutes
sitting in a storage shed near the office at the scrapyard, the
spoils of particularly good auction years before. Five of them
were standard personnel chutes, and one was a massive
cargo-drop canopy. But Dad also KNEW he had six of them. He'd
started out with a dozen, and occasionally sold one to a skydiver
or army/navy store. A good surplus parachute was worth upwards of
$200. There was no telling what the cargo chute would be worth to
the right buyer. But if one were to turn up missing, Dad would
certainly notice. Of course we might have gotten away with
using a parachute, then returning it once we were finished with
it, but even this presented problems. It might work okay for the
FIRST ride, but how about the second? I certainly knew nothing
about parachute rigging. All I was sure of was that there was a
LOT of cloth that had to be stuffed into a very small pack.
Besides, I'd already stuck my neck out pretty far for the
sake of the Rocket Car, and I didn't want to stick it out any
further. So I kept the existence of Dad's parachutes to myself,
and hoped someone else would come up with an alternate plan.
Using a retro-rocket was discussed briefly, but it only
took Jimmy a minute to punch THAT idea full of holes. Even though
rigging a retro would mean nothing more than sticking a second
JATO on the front of the car to oppose the one in the rear, it
would mean a maximum of two rides before we ran out of JATO's.
This much was obvious. What wasn't obvious was the physics of the
whole thing, which Jimmy was happy to explain. Firing the first
rocket would provide a huge forward thrust for a very
short time, but a retro rocket would produce an IDENTICAL thrust
(if we were lucky) in the opposite direction, for the same
duration. Which would mean the only way to bring the car to a
dead stop would be to fire the retro as soon as the thrust rocket
burned out. That would result in a 0-to-300 acceleration in
seconds, followed by a 300-to-0 DEceleration in the same amount
of time.
Doesn't sound like much fun, does it?
And if the retro was fired a little too late, it could
easily result in the whole rig traveling BACKWARDS. Possibly at a
high rate of speed. Or even worse, the retro might be a dud. Or
the ignition system might not work.
Needless to say, we shitcanned the retro-rocket idea in a
hurry.
Sal suggested outfitting the car with a huge anchor, one
that could be heaved out the window at the critical moment. The
rest of us suggested that Sal shut the fuck up and get us another
round of beers.
I brought up one idea I'd been toying with, stretching a
cable across the track and fitting the Rocket Car with a tailhook
to slow it down. Why not? After all, aircraft carriers had been
using this system to stop incoming planes for years, and it
seemed to work just fine. But before I could explain the idea,
Beck started laughing his ass off, then asked if I wanted to use
a rubber inner-tube to catch the car, or just tie a rope between
two fence-posts. And I clearly remember how much this pissed me
off. Here was a guy willing to strap a military rocket onto his
back and sit in a rusty rail-car while someone lit the fuse, but
he was laughing at MY ideas. Unfortunately, he DID have a point.
It wasn't until years later that I found out how aircraft
carriers absorbed the shock of a plane catching an arresting wire
(it involves huge pistons moving through cylinders of hydraulic
fluid), but I knew that rigging a similar system would be next to
impossible. Putting a tailhook on the car and catching
an arresting wire was simple. But it sure as hell couldn't be
stationary wire. There would have to be some system to absorb the
impact of a car moving at high speeds, and we couldn't come up
with anything. We went through a slew of ideas for mechanical
systems, but I rejected them all because they were either too
complicated, too expensive, or too impractical.
Jimmy pointed out that rocket sleds usually ended up in a
pool of water, which both acted as a brake and cooled the whole
contraption down. Beck pointed out that all the narrow-gauge
railroad tracks HE'D ever seen were in the middle of the desert,
where pools of water were pretty tough to come by.
Overall, we ended up batting exactly zero for the evening.
I remember that I was pretty damned depressed when Jimmy
and I left the bar that night, despite the fact that I was pretty
drunk. Considering the progress I'd made on the rocket car up to
that point, I figured that a braking system would be a minor
point. Surely if we put all three of our heads together (well,
3-1/2, counting Sal) we could come up with SOMETHING.
But it hadn't happened.
Or at least it hadn't happened while we were all sitting
at the bar. Jimmy tried to blow some optimistic sunshine up my
ass while we walked up the street toward our houses, saying that
one of us might be able to come up with something later, once we
were all sober. I didn't consider it likely. Beck and Sal seemed
to think better when they were drunk, and they were both pretty
shitfaced when we left them. If they hadn't come up with
anything at the bar, chances are they never would. And Jimmy and
I weren't having any brainstorms drunk OR sober.
Anyway, there's no telling how Sal and Beck spent the rest
of their evening, but the next morning my Dad woke me up by
pounding on my bedroom door. When I finally peeled my eyes open,
he asked me who was delivering my car parts in the middle of the
night.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
Part of my incomprehension was from a hangover, but even
if I'd spent the previous night drinking Kool Aid, I would've
been pretty confused. So he led me out to the front porch and
pointed to a bundle of four thick metal rods, tied together with
twine, laying on the porch swing. When I looked closer, I saw
that they were actually a set of heavy-duty air-adjustable car
shock absorbers. Jammed under the twine was a note written in
what looked like crayon on a crumpled paper bag.
It said this:
Problum solved.
Call me later
Major Tom
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