My Father's love for cars

My father loved cars and loved meddling with them every week. I remember the cars he had – 1947  Renault, 1947  Studebaker Champion and later to a 1956 Studebaker Champion. Although he was a civil Engineer he had an exceptional talent for automobile engineering. He had great skill in tuning engines and loved spending hours in tuning engines.

As a teenagers he would call me and my brother to help him when he starts working on the car. He taught us so many things about cars and I am glad I was fortunate to have had such a wonderful father.

I remember the day he decided to overhaul the engine of the 1947  Renault in our house garage at Neyveli. He took the help of a local mechanic to help him pull out the engine and then it was completely ripped open. As a teenager I learnt how a car engine worked.  We had practical training on almost all parts of the car engine- engine block, piston, piston rings,   engine valves, how the cooling system works and so on. The car was consuming lot of oil and he explained in detail why he had to change the piston and the piston rings. He made couple of trips to Chennai (then Madras) to get the parts. I remember helping him clean the engine block and also in grinding the engine valves. After a month of working he completed the job facing many challenges on the way. For example getting the engine gasket was a great challenge.  The engine had a light metal head which posed great challenge during the final assembly. Finally one expert advised him on how it had to be tightened uniformly to solve the problem. It worked.

All our visits to home town Thanjavur or Chennai (my mother’s hometown) was by car and many of such trips would turn out to be adventurous.  I remember on one trip to Thanjavur from Neyveli (a distance of about 130 kms) we had to break the journey at a friend’s house at Kumbakonam as the car’s brakes failed. In certain trips we have had two flat tires. In those days new tires were difficult to get and one had to rely mostly on retreaded tires. Retreaded tires would look like new tires but sometimes the retreaded part would just peel off. I remember a journey in our 1947 model Studebaker Champion during a cyclone and ours was the only car on the road.  At Lower Anicut the fan belt snapped and we were helpless as all the shops were closed. The local PWD engineer helped us by requesting the local automobile shop to open and soon we were on our way. On another trip the mechanical fuel pump started giving trouble and we had to stop every 10 kilo meters to cool the pump.

As I grew up and had a family of my own  I started using the car for all our family vacations. As a family we have driven to many places on our vacations and made trips as far as Goa and back. Today with our modern cars we just zip by covering distances of over 300 kms in less than 5 hours.  I do not remember to have had any breakdown in any of our trips. When I was telling my son of the several adventures we have had in our road trips in our father’s cars this is what he had to say “Yes we never have breakdowns nowadays not even a flat tire but you have had so much of fun and adventure”. Probably he is right.