Back when I got my license in the early '70's we all had carburetors on our vehicles.

All had some kind of choke on them. Some of the automatic chokes were difficult to get set right others were just great. On the ones that were real problematic for me I would put a manual choke cable on them.

When I had my first VW bug it was so rusty that you could pretty well toss a cat through the floor with out hurting it.

I fixed the floor and put a 'heater' kit on the engine. It was a bunch of tin that wrapped around the fins on the jugs of the air cooled engine. It was pitiful for heating the inside of the car. I took the interior out the next summer and stuffed in fiberglass insulation. That helped some but also that next winter I got a Coleman catalytic heater for my ice fishing shack.

On those cold winter mornings in northwest Wisconsin I would put the catalytic heater inside the car on the passengers side floor and in just minutes the car was totally thawed out and ready to go. I also had a magnetic heater that I would stick on the bottom of the oil pan to keep the engine warm through the night.

It always started right up if I remembered to plug it in.

Almost all the cars up in that area had some kind of engine heater in them. There were some that replaced a head bolt others that went inside the oil pan. My favorite was called a tank heater. You would cut into the heater hose and install it. That way when you started your car the antifreeze {and the rest of the engine} was nice and warm didn't take long for the interior to get toasty.

The cabin heater in most older cars work just fine if they are not clogged up. Of course the rest of the engines cooling system has to be working right too.

Even these new cars can be helped out with a engine heater in the really cold weather. And any car needs to have its cooling system working correctly or you will have problems.

I have a '74 MGB. It came with a pair of SU carburetors on it. Those carbs are a PITA to keep set right. You really need a manifold gauge called a manometer to get them set correctly. I made a pair out of clear plastic tubing and a board but still had problems with them, so I bought a Weber down draft carb and intake manifold.

The Weber came with a complicated automatic choke on it and when it finally failed I hooked up the manual choke wire that used to be hooked up to the SU carburetor to the Weber. That worked out great.

 

Why anyone would get offended from a post on the internet is beyond me......

 

I had a gas heater in my old vw. I loved it. Didn't matter how cold it was outside, get in the car, start the engine, fire off the heater, and it was WARM.

 

Having a little less altitude above ground level might have seen it stay on its feet when traversing the ditch... but who knows.

 

Bummer.

Damage the truck any?

 

 

By react I meant everything through completion of the evasive maneuver.

If I'm reading you and others correctly, you're saying that it's up to the driver of the vehicle in front to maintain safe separation distance. If that's true, then when you get rear-ended you're at fault for not driving the other guy's vehicle safely.

 

if you had read my first post about this correctly, you would have read that there were 2 cars in front of my buddy. the very front car brake checked the middle car, which would have cause less of a space for my buddy to react, especially with snow covered icy roads...

since hes got his truck back, i have learned that it was his rear brakes that locked up, and not his front, causing him to fishtail, and instead of hitting the car in front of him he opted for the ditch.

the loss of control could have been corrected, but he didnt want to hit the guy in front of him.

 

I read it correctly.

My father was always just about the stupidest and most aggressive driver on any highway he traveled -- stupid because he was literally stupid, with an IQ of about 85, and aggressive because he was pathologically narcissistic and believed that as the driver of the big rig he had the right to bully other drivers. For all of that, he never hit anything with the front of a truck in the more than 40 years that he was a trucker.

I'm not bragging on my old man. I lost respect for him when I was a child, and cut him out of my life long before he finally graced the Earth with his departure from it. The point here is that there's just about no excuse for not being smarter than him about driving well.

 

That era truck has rear wheel anti-lock brakes. Either way, he did the right thing by hitting the ditch as I was trained to do that when I learned to drive. The other difference I can think if is to this day I still pump my brakes even in vehicles that have anti-lock breaks.