How Could I Be So Stupid/Careless?

I’ve always been a Mopar guy and in 1977 bought a ’65 Imperial 2 door hardtop. Land yachting at its best! In 1972 I discovered Mercedes Pontons. My brother brought home a ’61 190Db. A ’49 Plymouth with German flavor, anyway I was selling Ponton parts in Hemmings and got a call from a guy in the Carolinas that needed a trans. It was 1978 or ’79. What I should’ve done was shipped it by bus but no let's drive it down from right above Philly at 10 MPG! I just had the right rear axle seal replaced so my friend and I were good to go. Running down I-95 the car would kind of move funny like getting hit with a gust of wind. We got to the customer’s house, got paid and were back on the road by early afternoon. Twenty miles or so up Route 301 there was the tell tale noise of a bad right rear axle bearing. I pulled over and my friend who is a mechanic and I pulled the right rear apart. In the meantime an African American Sharecropper type stops in his obligatory old Chevy pick-up and offers help. He takes us with the axle to a parts store and Marv there presses the old bearing off and puts the new one on. We get back to the car and find out that the race won’t fit right but we decide to put it back together. We put everything together and we are up the road except we have this noise still. A little further on we stopped for food. After that we are driving up the road and it’s getting dusk. Suddenly there’s a flash, then another and I timed it just right to see this three foot flame out the side of the axle! Holy S**T! We pulled over on the only stretch of highway with no dirt on the shoulder. Pulled an old jacket out and beat out the fire. We were right below Rocky Mount and there was a gas station across the road so we wandered over. We parked and attracted a crowd. The axel was on fire again! This Good Ol’ Boy comes over and says “Ya’ll know yer car’s on fire”. I said “yeah, I know”. “Ya’ll need a extinguisher?” “Yeah, is it yours or the company’s”. “It’s the company’s”. “OK then” ‘cause my truck driving friend said that it was always a ***** when you used your own extinguisher when your helping somebody on the road! So with the fire out we decided to go across the street to the K-Mart to get a couple of extinguishers to put the fires out as we went up the road! So we went into the K-Mart and bought two. When we got into the car there weren’t any brakes. Yeah, the rubbers in the wheel cylinder were burnt! So we made the decision to park the car and figure this out later. We went to the bus station to go to the Raleigh-Durham Airport. While we were waiting they called the bus for Philly and we looked at each other and went to Philly on the bus. We barely got to Philly. The bus trans was dying as we drove into the terminal! We took the train home and figured the train was going to die but we got there.

That day when I got home I bought a ’62 Imperial from a friend and pulled the axle out and my dad and I went back to Rocky Mount the next day. Dad had a ’71 Ranchero and we loaded everything we thought we were going to need. We got there about 1 o’clock and were done about 7:30 that evening and after staying the night we got home without a problem.

So the guy with the fire extinguisher at the gas station, he was a truck driver. His truck was parked at the gas station, FILLING THE TANKS WITH GASOLINE WHEN A CAR ON FIRE DRIVES IN!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can only imagine the headlines about the gas station conflagration in Rocky Mount that killed 20 people and nobody knows what happened!

Not long after this episode I find out that when you’re dealing with a Mopar 8 ¾ axle you need to grease the bearing before you put it together. There is an inner and outer seal so no oil gets to the bearing. So John, when he did the axle seal, didn’t grease the bearing which is why it went bad in the first place and then when Marv put the bearing on he did it like a Chevy when the Mopar is backwards. The race is installed first then the bearing.