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Hey Man, What Else You Got? Was, ich bezahle? Wie
man billig fährt I think I got this way from my father, who got it from growing up during the Depression. When I was coming of age in Texas, which meant growing old enough to drive, which meant 13 with a learner's permit and a legal 14-year-old driver in the car, the old man's freebie-sniffing antennae were at fever twitch. Not to get me an actual car, you understand, but maybe half of one, with something on the side. As it turned out, he did even better than that, securing for the sum of $50 what amounted to perhaps one fourth of one and two things on the side, namely a wretched pink and blue '57 BMW Isetta 300 and a wooden crate that held the promised parts to two whole (?) 300cc, overhead-valve, single-cylinder motors. Junior high school was about to get a lot more interesting, all right.  Photo credit and © Ann Fletcher Isetta Owners Club of Great Britain The Isetta was pink and blue because of having once been blue and then having been pink, or mostly so: it looked like a dented bubbletoy that had marinated in a vat of Pepto-Bismol. For those of you who don't know, the Isetta* belonged to a class of post-war German mini-cars (I use the last expression loosely) designed to get the Fatherland on wheels again, only not too big or strong, you understand. It consisted of a tiny passenger compartment with a single bench seat. The entire front of the thing was a door, hinged at the left, to which the instrument pod and steering column were attached. You reached over to the right to undo the latch, then pushed against the almost horizontal steering wheel until the front of the "car" swung open and you simply stepped right out onto the ground. Somewhere behind the single seat was what amounted to one-half of a smallish BMW motorcycle engine mounted vertically and driving a very short differential-deprived rear axle through a multi-link chain. The four-speed gearshift handle protruded from the cardboard passenger compartment paneling on the driver's left. I don't remember a heater, but there was a flap of canvas for a sunroof. The way this worked was, my father put the engine together from the greasy puzzle-pieces in the wooden crate while I restored the ugly body to a semi-gleaming scarlet red. This required maybe a dozen cans of aerosol spray paint and a great deal of rubbing compound, but I was up to the job. Whether my father was, was questionable, judging from the cursing and tossed wrenches, but eventually it all came together and the damn thing worked. I doubt it ever ran for more than six days at a time, but my exploits were legend when it did.** Volvos
und chips The car I ended up with was not the squarish Swedish cars most of you are thinking of but rather an older model resembling nothing else so much as a '46 Ford. Now that I think of it, it could have been a '46 Ford, except there was no flathead in it. [Note: subsequent research shows this to have been a Volvo P544, below] The car was as solid as a block of granite and twice as heavy. It obviously hadn't been on the road for several years and lacked a battery. For that matter, it lacked a muffler too, but I cobbled up a custom exhaust with a cheapo glasspack and about six feet of flexible tubing. I did get it to run and for a while it roared along quite nicely, though driving it up to Dallas to fetch its mate would take more courage than I yet possessed. One day early in my one and only Volvo phase it stubbornly refused to turn over after I'd taken it on the longest outing yet. A short but painful examination revealed an all-but-empty crankcase -- ah, youth -- and that was that. For all I know it still sits underneath the live oak tree at 99 Red River, hulking in the weeds, and so you see the tangled trail of treads that goes with what is almost free but really not. With cars, at least, getting there is half the fun but only if you pay enough to make it out of town. 
Photo
credit, not exactly sure. Image nabbed from RAM, however, is another story. It's also only one of many, since I'm now back where I thought at first I'd started out. When the subject is computers and you're writing on the Internet, all kinds of things can come your way and some of those are best not mentioned (nowadays the walls have ears, no matter if you think you trashed a certain file or not). Someday we'll see giant camps in Kansas filled with everyone who ever swapped a disk and no one will be having fun anymore, but fortunately that's not the topic of the moment. No, I'm talking memory, me buckos, great big throbbing megabytes of RAM -- in this case another semi-gift from a distant fan. You know who you are and though we've never met, I consider you a friend. When you hear how I proceeded with the two 128s that didn't work in your machine [I'm exchanging lesser ones for these], you may decide I need a whuppin' but at least I did the best I could and somehow everything is working now, I think. (Whew) Yes, I just checked: 672MB of installed memory, something that could have only been a gleam in my happy owner's eye the day I picked up my $3,000 Power Mac 8600 from the dealer. As it was I paid $215 for an extra 32MB at the time, which brought it up to 64, hoo-hah! But here's what happened just two nights ago: Versuche
dies' nicht bei dir! The first thing I did after laying it open once again was put everything back the way it had been. This took at least two tries, because I evidently didn't have the pieces stuck in all the way and at first the bugger wouldn't boot. Very scary. ("My book! My book!") In the process I managed to knock the two 128MB pieces off the desk and onto the floor, a fine hard Saltillo tile floor, I'll have you know. One of them went skittering all the way across the room and I was sure the things were screwed. No way, thank God: these chips are tougher than I thought. When I opened up the Power Mac and put the new RAM in the proper slots, I wasn't even careful where I touched them, since I knew they wouldn't work, of course. Well yeah, but I was wrong: here we are, chugging merrily along. It ain't rocket science but it usually works, and yes, it can be sweeter when it's almost free -- at least you can take more chances. You wouldn't believe what kinds of trouble a 14-year-old boy and a funny little German car could get into in big, bad West Texas, of all places (think about it). Then again, you might! Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr can't believe the Internet is full of Isetta Web sites. Live and learn. * The model shown on these pages is a 3-wheel version. Mine, however, had two rear wheels about two feet apart. ** These and other automotive adventures soon to be either a major motion picture or an ebook. Time will tell...
(Current year's columns just below)
"GRACK!" is © copyright 2002, John H. Farr, all rights reserved
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