Never the Same #70 Visions of Grandeur

Following his dream, Kirk wore rose-colored glasses with blinders to the reality around him that would soon influence him very personally in very conspicuous and unsettling ways.

 

Cue: “Runnin’ Down a Dream” https://youtu.be/dXYl5NrHPb4?si=jcrs9mfxeqMzV-S4

             

            Kirk grew up as a bona fide rocker living in those sixties and seventies. As a young teen, besides being a gear head, he favored psychedelic music even wearing a Nehru jacket for a period which was loosely associated with that genre of music and Hippie perspectives. Kirk never pretended to be anything close to a hippie, but a couple years after the fact he wished he had been one to have traveled to Woodstock to attend that extraordinary spectacular music festival. Being pretty much a home boy, Kirk had never been to a music concert of any type up to this point in his young adult life. As the psychedelic music period cooled it transformed into Progressive Rock which Kirk fully embraced. From his mother’s taste in music basically the orchestral and classical, he picked up on the epic, complicated progressive rock. Additionally, Kirk thought it logical to enjoy the music that carried the label of highbrow and readily accepted by the intelligent elite listening audience.

            So logically whenever he headed out to the garage, he flipped on the radio which always remained on the number one Buffalo quadraphonic rock station WPHD. This station played exclusively progressive rock never backing down from playing the latest, long extended often bizarre songs that often ran complete vinyl sides of albums which ran nonstop more or less 20 minutes! You’ll never, ever hear anything that long on broadcast radio or even satellite radio like Sirius XM anymore. The DJs were allowed, at first, to play free form underground album-oriented rock music, in other words, anything from the Progressive Rock genre they wanted. Even though Kirk would like to spend every last penny on his stock car and racing career, once in a while he’d cruise over to the music shop to buy an album that he had heard on the radio.

            Side note: Even though WPHD was known as a forward thinking, state of the art quad radio, the station didn’t prove to be commercially viable and so the owners started controlling what the DJs could play. Some of the DJs revolted and the station eventually died an early death to become yet another TOP 40 station which made Kirk very sad when he found out. Back to Kirk’s main focus.

            Kirk flew high in his life for all those things he focused on that seemed to be coming together seemingly rather spectacularly. After getting that rookie racing award, he felt good about his new project stock car, but there was a ton of work to be done and money to be spent to make that dream come true. His job paid well enough to keep his dream well-funded and progressing, though that job could go away at any moment with cutbacks and down sizings going on because of the sour economy. In the meantime, he just ignored it. Kirk still was going went with Farah a very pleasant, fine looking, stately (his own description of her to her) girlfriend who he felt proud of showing off to the world when they went out, but with his new over fixation on the car and their odd working hours, he wasn’t showing off with her all too much those days.  

            Despite the writing Kirk should have seen on the wall in so many aspects, he continued on his beloved stock car with the radio blaring away. First off, he had a lot of torch work ahead of him. Starting with the flimsy Pinto body, he torched off the remaining strengthening struts in the roof, doors, fenders and trunk. To clarify the Sportsman class rules, there was only body work behind the firewall with an ad hoc sort of hood. So the body covers the roll cage, driver and gas tank. After cutting those strengthening struts off, the body became even more flimsy, but that didn’t matter in a stock car because the sheet metal was protected by crash bar bumpers and side nerf bars.

             Anyway, with the struts removed he began spot welding the seams in the doors and trunk lid. He had to manipulate the panels carefully by propping them up, then hanging the roof from the chain hoist. When I said the panels were light and thin I wasn’t kidding with the thickness almost the same as tin cans you get veggies or fruit punch. Anyway, he used as many clamps as he had to hold the seams tight while spot welding that section before moving down along the seam. He put the spots at about a foot apart. Over half done, he ran out of welding rod, so he headed into the house and raided the closets. Yeah, he “borrowed” which would never get returned, a few metal coat hangers. The metal in the hangers isn’t as refined as real welding rod, but it worked albeit with more pops and sizzles. It took him a while, four hours or more before he got the seams welded into place. He'd have liked to have the seams perfectly symmetrical, but they’d get filled and smoothed with Bondo once mounted on the car. He then brazed the seams between the welding spots which flowed along much faster and closed in the gaps.

            In his usual method of working, Kirk seemed to forget the safety advice he got in high school from the “Primitive Pete” films who did all the wrong things with tools while ignoring important safety equipment. Remember young teen aged Kirk brazing in brother in law’s garage with his green open top rubber boots? Not a good idea with molten hot braze dripping down with some of those drops finding their way into the open boots and directly onto his feet. Kirk wears the scars on both insteps and ankles where the braze burned holes in his flesh that he wears to this day. Ouch!

            Shortly after that, he found that his bell-bottom jeans worked great to cover the tops of his boots to keep the hot metal from falling in and staying off his tender feet, but his jeans had fringy GROOVY! HIP! MOD! hems so once in a while they’d start on fire. Not on fire per se just a little smudgy smoldering. Well… Learning a little bit along the way, Kirk currently working on his new car wore his steel-toes boots that were required at work with straight-legged jeans. So learning a little along with work-related fashions changes for Kirk over a couple years especially on welding jobs.

            Eventually, the Pinto body became one solid assembly. Kirk couldn’t say he was 100 percent pleased with the look of the body hanging from the ceiling, but there it was, more or less, take it or leave it, what he wanted in a more modern body style than the coupe.  While he was doing the brazing, he cut small pieces of flat sheet metal to cover the holes for the taillights, door handles, and rear view mirror.

            Yeah, his coupe looked pretty cool on the track and was photogenic in green and yellow, but he thought coupes had become passe from a long ago gone era of open wheel racing. The “big boys” in Sportsman classes around the country were going for a lower, streamlined profile and in many cases not even using production cars, now fabricating non-de script, generic bodies from thin sheet metal. Kirk thought that practice was unprofessional so favored the use of real car bodies from U.S. automakers.

            Anyway, Kirk felt anxious to get this preliminary cutting and welding steps out of the way so he could get down to the technical building of the car. And do you know what? Just when he was on a roll, he ran out of acetylene and oxygen for the torch with a whole lot more work to do before he got to that exciting technical stock car fabrication.

            With a day break to replenish his gas bottles, Kirk went to work on the car again this time with the torch cutting tip. Looking over his newly purchased frame, he realized he had a lot of dismantling to do before he could do any building and assembling. On the four corners, he put the frame on jack stands. Starting with those huge heavy-duty truck cross members, he began burning the rivets and welds off, careful not to cut into the frame rails. He used the flame and blowtorch function to “scab” off the unwanted pieces without hurting the metal frame underneath.

            The sparks flew like fountains of meteors and globs of molten steel plopped on the floor like magma to splash like little fireworks. Once in a while, an especially large hot piece of metal would cause the concrete surface to pop with a mini explosion. Sparks found their way down Kirk’s shirt collar, in his hair with a sizzle and burn his wrists where his leather gloves and shirt didn’t cover. Remember his garage was in the old stable area of the barn where one extra hot piece of metal in an unexpected, undesired hidden place would cause an instant and catastrophic fire. 

            Kirk knew as he worked that this frame would be too long to leave whole and he’d have to shorten it, but not until he did a whole lot of measuring and figuring where roll cage, body, and engine/transmission combo would fit within the frame.  He pressed on until the cross members fell to the floor with massive clunks. Pulling off his goggles, he surveyed the frame rails that didn’t look quite so heavy and thick sitting there without the cross members. He carried the still-hot metal out the door and threw it in his ever-growing scrap pile. Getting back to work, he started at the front and burned off the unnecessary mounts for the steering box and other components. He removed the shock absorber mounts along with the transmission and rear axle mounts. By the time he finished, a day later mind you, he had two bare frame rails. Kirk again looked them up and down pleased with his destructive handy work.

            I guess what they say is true: You have to have demolition before construction can begin.

            The frame rails now devoid of any superfluous attachments were basically two independent squared boxed rails tapering thicker and flatter towards the middle then thinner again over the hump for the rear axle to the very rear where the bumper would mount.  Kirk wrestled the rails one at a time to balance on jack stands and then propping them into approximate place beneath the suspended Pinto body. He aligned the body over the frame rails so the wheel wells lined up with the humps in the frame for the rear axle.  Lowering the body down, he eyed up how wide the frame needed to be in reference with the body, that is, the frame needed to be just wide enough for the body to attach along the bottom without  distorting the body, at least, not too much. He tried to think and reason out the variables like how tall the body needed to sit with Kirk sitting in the seat and where the engine and transmission would reside. Not making any final decisions, Kirk took chalk and marked out preliminary positions of things.

            Being silly in appearance but with no one looking and a real purpose in mind, he dumped out a five-gallon bucket that had trash in it, and set it inside the body. Crouching and crawling in under the back of the body, he turned the bucket upside down and sat down. Judging his headroom with his hand he found his head had only an inch clearance from the sheet metal roof. This wouldn’t do. He judged where the surface of the bucket and his butt sat relative to the frame. He figured that he had room to shift the frame and body apart because he needed at the very least two and a half inches of headroom for the roll cage above his head including the clearance between it and the body depending how close he built the cage to the roof, plus he had to consider over an inch thick helmet on his head. He had some in-depth figuring to do before getting to work, and then sitting on those calculations a while before making and permanent construction.

            Work on the car meant a whole lot of welding especially on the roll cage. Kirk supposed he could measure, or at least estimate the total length of pipe to build the roll cage plus cross members and other uses he recalled from his old car despite using the different body. He decided to just measure what he envisioned for the new car. Starting in, just the braces front and back that run from the frame to the cage amounts to twenty-five feet of pipe. He then measured the arches that hug the inside of the body, the strengthening “X”s in the roof and behind the cockpit. Then there were four rows of pipe on each door that protects the driver from direct side collisions, not to mention the short pieces between those rows. Kirk added all these lengths together to get a grand total of 90-some feet. To be safe, he rounded up to an even one hundred.

            What bothered him most remained the fact hovering in his mind for some time that much of the pipe needed to be bent, and bent precisely, to tightly fit the inside profile of the body. Precisely bent to fit gave Kirk reason to be concerned. He needed a pipe bender which is a heavy-duty leveraging tool either powered by hydraulic motor or hand pump. It wrenched Kirk’s brain to wonder about that very important part of the job because he sure couldn’t afford one. He also had to fabricate a whole bunch of gussets as well which are triangular pieces of metal that must be welded into each corner of the cage construction. He decided on a two foot by two-foot quarter-inch flat piece of metal for this purpose. Kirk’s head spun with the many, many implications especially worrisome for Kirk were the steps and pieces that he might overlook. The work and expense of just this part of the build meant many hours of labor for him. Was he that motivated? Did he have enough passion stored up?  With minor relief he thought Jon would most likely help along the way in the fact that Jon was an expert welder.

            After thinking on it for one day at work he decided to order the metal so he could get to work. He called Buffalo Metal Corporation with his order, who told him that delivery was free and that they would bring all that metal COD, that is, Cash On Delivery. They appreciated the order. Kirk didn’t think that this service was anything unusual, but it surely stemmed from the poor economy at the time which didn’t affect Kirk, not yet, but many businesses just hung on.

            Kirk was not one who could’ve been described as a social guy, in fact, he could’ve been labeled as anti-social. This probably stemmed from his isolation in school while growing up and that he didn’t get much attention while being overlooked as an individual from his parents and siblings. Nevertheless, he found in his racing circle that you could get a lot of information through the racing grapevine or basically word of mouth. Basically for him meant the only driver Kirk knew or had spoken more than two words to was Chuck, and besides, Chuck had helped Kirk immensely on his second season endeavor, so Kirk called Chuck to activate the racing grapevine.

            As always, Chuck seemed glad to hear from Kirk and always ready to help in whatever means he could. After the regular intro chit chat, Chuck asked what he could do for Kirk. Kirk kind of felt self-conscious that Chuck would think that Kirk would only call if he needed something, but as we know, that’s the only reason Kirk called. Chuck seemed only mildly surprised that Kirk was in the process of building a new car, again stating that he thought Kirk showed real talent and was on his way up in the racing circles. (No pun intended.)

            So, Kirk immediately asked Chuck if he knew where he could borrow a pipe bender. Seeing it had been a long time since Chuck built his car, he had no need for a pipe bender and hadn’t heard of anyone having one, but he told Kirk that he’d get back to him after checking around. Kirk thanked him and that was that. Next day after work, Chuck called Kirk. Seemed he had checked around and found out that a friend of a friend of a friend KNEW a guy who had a bender lying around. Kirk thought this sounded hopeful. Anyway, Chuck followed through to find out the guy with the bender was rather well off, meaning wealthy.  Seems several years ago, this guy, Bill, thought it would be fun to race a stock car. He bought a nice, clean good-looking car. Well, at the same time Bill stocked up on all kinds of stock car related tools and gadgets including a bender for some reason.

             Come to find out the car Bill bought was beautiful, but a real stinker. Not much power and handled like a boiled potato on a china plate meaning not too good. Apparently, Bill had no passion for the sport, he just wanted to have fun and soon went elsewhere to find some kicks. Long story shortened he still had all those tools according to Chuck’s friend because he had personally borrowed them. There was the caveat in Bill’s loan policy: You hurt or wreck his tools, you bought them, which is only fair, Kirk thought. Chuck gave Kirk the info which sent Kirk immediately to Bill’s immaculate and huge garage which was located in the well-to-do ‘burbs. Wow! Kirk thought, that’s a big garage and a huge, beautiful house

             Bill seemed like an all right older guy despite being rich. Indeed, his garage was very neat, clean and well stocked with tools, but the bender was in a back room. A bit dusty and rather old so indeed it turned out to be a hand pump type. Bill told Kirk he never personally used the bender, but several other racers had, so he thought it worked just fine. Kirk offered a rental payment or such, but Bill refused it.

            “Glad to help out you hard core racer guys. I respect your tenacity and mettle out there. Have fun with it.” 

            The bender itself turned out to be rather heavy and unwieldy with its attached six-foot hydraulic hose and stout hand pump. After loading it up, Bill asked Kirk if he knew how or had operated a bender before. Kirk lied and said he had. Kirk truthfully told Bill that he didn’t know how long it would take him to build the roll cage. Bill said that that would be okay unless some other racer came around and really needed the bender before Kirk was done. Kirk told him that he would do his best to just get on with the job and return the bender as soon as he could. Kirk went on his merry way waiting with bated breath for the necessary ingredient for progression that being his pipe delivery.

            In the meantime, Kirk always perused the auto and auto parts classifieds whether he needed something or not. After all, he was by nature a wheeled vehicle connoisseur with his Firebird, van, motorcycle and stock car if that really was a cross-section of highly desirable vehicles, but then again, a guy could always want and use more. Taking his usual weekend coffee break in the old kitchen with his mother, Kirk spotted something in the listings that sparked his fancy: “Must sell, International ton and a half truck. Runs good, little rust, decent tires, no bed. All ready for your hauling needs. Will consider offers. call…”  Kirk instantly envisioned his new stock car hauler, so he called the guy and made arrangements to see it.

            Arriving on the scene, he immediately saw his vision in the old red truck with a standard cab and a bare frame in back. Kirk had already known that with the current poor economy everything for sale was likely to be available at a bargain, hence, the buyers’ market was in effect. The middle-aged guy looked for some reason desperate to sell, Kirk perceived.  He said he had bought the truck to put a stake bed on it, but pointed out that with the bare frame a guy could put whatever bed he wanted for any kind of hauling.

            Kirk didn’t give anything away. He started the engine which sounded good and tried out the clutch and each gear forward and reverse. Yeah, it’ll work. Taking advantage of the situation, he offered the guy a hundred dollars under his asking price. The guy didn’t flinch, pause or act like he wanted to counter offer. He’ took Kirk’s offer. So now Kirk had a truck too. Things were coming together for Kirk to become the hot s**t stock car driver he always dreamed of becoming.          He could just FEEL it all over from his fingers to his toes so this path had to be his true destiny!

            Kirk would definitely be Never the Same if all his visions came together, right?  Or if they didn’t as well, right?