How I Nearly Broke My Back Driving A Ford Pinto

hey guys before the video starts i want you to see a fundraiser that's attached to the link below uh this video is gonna have one on it because of those who were affected by the tornadoes in kentucky now fortunately while we were filming this we were up in indiana and we didn't see as bad of inclement weather even though there were still some tornadoes up there we didn't get to see as much damage until we got through bowling green kentucky where everything was just leveled in a lot of places and it was heartbreaking to see all these businesses and homes just absolutely destroyed so this fundraiser is going to go to those who are in need living in kentucky to help them out so if your heart leads you to and you feel compelled please just leave a little bit of a donation and all of that money is going to go straight to them thank you water you ever think hey maybe i shouldn't do something maybe it's a bad idea i think i'll pass on this round let the next guy handle it you know i'm gonna stay safe in this situation yeah i should have done that this weekend but i bought this 1976 ford pinto it does not have any type of rear suspension besides two torched and bent leaf springs and 2 blocks of wood holding it up that's it i drove it 500 miles home stick around to the end of the video and see why i suffer from permanent back problems every year my buddies and i traveled to indianapolis to attend the performance racing industry show or pri for short this year we thought it'd be funny to drive something back home that shouldn't be possible and that's when we saw this lousy pinto it barely ran the suspension was held up by wooden blocks and there were no shocks in the rear not only that but it was a hundred miles in the wrong direction from home so we're already off to a bad start that's where our story begins 100 miles north from our hotel in the middle of a rainy night uh so we're kind of in the middle of nowhere rochester indiana and i found the pinto on marketplace uh i don't know what why but we're about what seven hours seven and a half hours from home and it's dark it's raining tornadoes came through here there's uh mud everywhere i mean we're in the middle of a place i've never been before in my life so we're going to try and get this old pimpo to run and take it back home with us hit it again hit it with the spray again okay [Applause] so we got a leak on the accelerator pump [Music] [Music] you got two of them right there's no shots in the back or at least there's just one but it doesn't work great you know i'm quite impressed with the interior i mean that headline yeah yeah you don't see that very often absolutely well would you care if i just took it down the street back come back it's kind of a loss of words right now it's got lights it's got brakes it runs enough let me pull around here and see if we can get this thing out of here [Applause] [Music] so he put blocks in the rear end to compensate for the fact that the frame was hitting the rear end and it rides like that wait till you feel this bump wait that's gonna be a long way off is it squat on this side as far as i have the pedal to the floor and that's all it's got because the throttle cable is broken that second gear right there that's the third wow oh my gosh it's like driving in a bouncy house i don't know if it's just manual steering or the fact that the power steering is really that bad we have three gears though i mean that's enough to get at least back to where we're coming from where did i go this way or is it that way this one oh there's a curve and we have wipers which is terrible we'll need to get some blades when we go i've got three gears i can i'm doing a solid 20. the problem is is that it's on a four-lane highway all the way back to indianapolis and then mostly interstate which we wouldn't hopefully take that the way we're going back to tennessee but it's gonna be a bumpy ride made it to the o'reilly it's only maybe 500 feet before i just bought the car got an accelerator pump issue where it leaks we have a brand new one but when i say we have zero tools i mean we have nothing we have absolutely not a wrench from the screwdriver so we're gonna bomb this o'reilly here just down the road and hopefully they'll be kind enough to us they've always been kind to me in the past we're gonna run in here get a few parts get a few tools and hope the best yeah it was leaking pretty good at the bottom of that gasket it doesn't look bad but it was leaking pretty good [Music] what do we do if this doesn't fix it couldn't help me did we leave it probably should probably not a bad idea [Music] time you got just now seven just seven okay they close at nine so that means we'll probably get back about three tomorrow morning and i mean back to indianapolis not even the back back home because once we get to indianapolis it's still another five and a half hours you know what i did that'd been good this is our throttle cable it's split in half whenever we got the accelerator pump issue fixed try to pet the throttle split in half so we bought this universal setup here i'm going to try and run this through the firewall and hopefully don't lose my mind while we're in the process of it goes here down right there there's a bolt okay that holds out another handy dandy new tool set with this ball well on a positive note the brakes work great at least for the 500 feet that i drove it um that's about it think that'll work oh no no no no it's going that's it oh let me put a zip tie around and then make a makeshift holder that's wrong to secure it in place oh my good lord it works perfect i swear we could have an engineering degree so you have the fan straight wired it's about as not safe as it gets um i want to put some kind of toggle switch just in case we have an issue there we go man we still got a long drive back you can still see the guy's house from here that is true that's the most unfortunate part about this entire event [Music] i think well we do need to add fluids it does need oil and uh that hose right there that fuel [Music] that's full i've done a lot of stupid things in my life but this is pretty high up there we're driving into a thunderstorm right now i've got a spoon for a wiper it broke off i'm flying down the road well please say a prayer for me as the miles ticked on and the dry erotic tires hummed i began to relax and feel a little bit more confident in my new pinto i've been driving for maybe an hour and 40 minutes my back hurts so bad i believe that the throttle cable is starting to slip on the set screw i don't know if we tighten it up enough because i just about have to hold it to the floor just to accelerate anymore every time you hit a bump it's like the car it just jumps it's like kit whenever it hits the turbo button [Music] it jumps so the problem is is that one of the shocks it's got air shocks in the back you know left rear shock is not even bolted in anymore you took it out it's in the back there's a block of wood between the frame and the spring every bump that i hit i hit that spring and it hurts so if i'm bouncy i'm sorry but it's been tough [Music] we're getting there we're probably 30 more minutes away and i can finally go to bed we were fortunate enough to see how well this car was optioned i didn't realize how many good things it had and down here we have an original fresh air vent at the floor that's pretty cool you don't really get to see that very often pretty rare option first quarter of the trip is done we made it back to indianapolis except we still have to get to the hotel these roads are pretty rough for you [Music] about the time we made it to the hotel i felt invincible maybe it was a lack of sleep but my pinto and i were unstoppable [Music] we're in the parking garage pull the hill okay thank you my back hurts my neck hurts my body hurts my attitude hurts my pride my ego my sanity it all hurts my legs have never hurt so bad in my life over home back to a hotel at least and not even five seconds later as soon as we hit in park the rain is pouring down now my wiper situation worked pretty good i had a pretty good wiper over here but as we were leaving my wiper over here on this side broke so i went to the gas station asked for a spoon i learned this old trick from a thunderhead 289 on his maverick if you've ever seen it to keep from scratching the glass so that just rides on there and it'll it'll stay for as long as i need it to i'm hungry cole's in shock i think i'm in shock let's get something to eat and go to bed and think about this tomorrow well it's the next morning the car looks to still be here and i just realized i still have to drive this thing another six hours home add another two hours just because it's slow maybe another hour for breakdowns what were we thinking honestly well this morning i have to work on the throttle cable and we have to make it to a tire center i bought a set of tires at a used tire lot here in indianapolis and there's snow tires but they're new they're the only 13s that i could find around but uh they might have come off a wreck or something but they have like hardly any miles so we're gonna put those on when we get there and then just cannonball the rest of the way home before we take off i figured we could maybe talk about the car just a little bit because i never really got the chance to under the hood is a v6 it's a 2.8 liter i believe the guy put a brand new battery in it uh brakes all around so that really helped out a lot and this electric fan i don't know if it's factory or not but it's something and it works surprisingly well i hope it works i don't have a temp gauge that does work so we're just going by faith and faith alone on top of that i mean it's it's a wagon i mean how cool is that it's a two-door wagon uh i mean i think that makes it 10 15 times cooler just because of that and we got the nice exhaust tip with apologize for the bumper sticker there look at all this room i mean you can fold down the back seat there's there's all sorts of space to use just to you know haul whatever we need to got plenty of room for luggage plenty of room for tools and it had air shocks in the back and that's kind of what was actually holding the rear end up problem is those air shocks don't work anymore and if you look up under there there's not a shock on the other side the biggest issue we have with ride quality is that's our suspension right there two blocks of wood on each side the springs have a bend in them so they're level and they go whoop like that and that's where the arch is so it's a really really bumpy ride i was hoping to possibly find a set of shocks to take out a lot of the harshness of every single bump that you go over but finding a set of rear pinto shocks is not really the easiest thing in the world to do but on the inside it's a pretty nice car believe it or not these seats i mean everything's kind of nasty but the seats are comfortable i mean look at that the back seat looks good to match i mean everything back there is pretty clean that seat was probably my saving grace because every time we hit a bump that cushion in the seat would soak a lot of it up in a nice looking little dash pad good looking interior i mean a good carpet set maybe some patching on the floors and you'd have a solid car but obviously we're not going to do that we're going to drive the fool out of this thing and see if we can make it all the way home and that we did for about 10 minutes to the nearest walmart we're gonna put a gas tank in it she sounds mean we went through all this work only for them to tell us our tires were too old they looked brand new yet there was somehow 20 years old with absolutely no sign of dry rot or wear i was in shock so we left the walmart with a new fuel tank and some ratchet straps have a situation the car just keeps running worse and worse i popped this rear filter out and it was bad i mean the car has an electric pump on it already and the filter was just brown gas so it was it was really bad i mean this is what was on it that that looks nasty so i'm going to replace the filter back here put a new piece of hose and then just bypass our tank all together we have a cooler hit in the back that i hope won't melt when we put gas in it but we're going to try it luckily we have pop out windows here walmart and go home i'm just going to have it towed i hate to do it but i'm just i'm out of options at this point wasting so much time this might have been the fastest this car's been since i drove it just don't tell the rental company what we did we're here i don't know what that says or how to pronounce it over here and it's going to stay here we didn't make it what 10 miles outside of indianapolis drove two hours last night flawlessly and can't even make it ten more miles i'm just going to cut my losses here go home [Applause] or just try to sell it to somebody else here i don't know anyway i'm getting in the car where it's warm see you later pento couldn't be bothered i'm back drove home five hours turned around and came back another five hours a few days later and i have parts i have things to fix but the thing happened was the gas tank was so bad that it gummed up all the original carburetor and i just was so mad i was tired of it you can tell that i'm sick now because of the weather that we were encountering there's a thunderstorm going through here freezing cold wind and rain but i have new parts here this is the carburetor that was on my mustang this is the cobra 2 that you guys all remember i brought this with me because i know it's a good carburetor i'm going to put this on here it's pretty much the identical carburetor that's on here swap everything over get that fixed probably new spark plugs i even rob the throttle cable off of my mustang so that way we can put that on there you can buy them new but i couldn't get one in time so we'll swap all that back over and uh hopefully this thing can actually fire up and run this time uh i think it was just by the time we realized that we needed to change gas tanks it was too late so let's get this old carburetor off and throw this one on oh yes the gas gets saved [Music] the throttle linkage is a little bit too big for the v6 compared to the v8 carb so i'm having to do some sawing action here i've almost got it all the way through and then hopefully that'll make it fit perfect you really gotta throttle it to make it move we're trying to drive around the lot see if it's good enough because if not i'm hauling it home i'm working on it there oh so it just starts to die for it oh never mind we'll go out to the light we're coming up to a stop traffic it is it's do you feel it's shaking it's about god no it's getting bad don't explode on me there's a bus i'm stopping i'm stopping there's a bus coming i'm not gonna pull it further [Music] do you see that it's dead i don't look at me [Music] [Music] all right i don't think it's gonna work i'm throwing back the truck it's angry i think i've actually made it worse it idles great but as soon as you put any gear and i feel i think i smell gas leaking anyway so i was discouraged but i refused to put the car on the trailer well if you've watched the channel for a little while you know that i have a mustang too which just so happens to be the same bolt pattern as this pinto because it's basically a pencil so i have these wheels that came off that car and i put brand new tires on it and then if you saw the end of that video i put a totally different set of wheels and tires on it here we are perfect bye george we're doing it i'm not giving up yet got to sit there and put it in neutral every time you come up to a stoplight but i don't care i'll sit there and rev it up all day long we're doing about 60 down the highway here almost to the interstate please say a prayer for me that i make at home [Applause] i just want to make mention i don't have a single gauge as it works right now no gas gauge no tip no alternator no any of that i'm just going by the faith of god get me home and we talked about how dangerous the gas tank is i think i made it a little bit more dangerous it works don't worry about it it works [Music] my [Music] my oh my good lord i'm passing somebody this is one for the record books go pizza [Music] so the car kind of has this factory feature where you start getting tired and trying to doze off it just bounces you around until you wake back up it just shakes you so it occurs whether or not you're about to fall asleep so every time you hit a bump it just rattles you wake up don't stop the sun started to set but we were still a few hundred miles away from making it home sucks when you miss the gas station pull into here and have to uh fill up with two gallons at a time but that's okay we'll hop the fence keep going we're almost to louisville i wanted to fill up before we hit that because i knew that was going to be fun our little fuel tank system here is working okay the only problem is that once you get about maybe a quarter of a tank the fuel hose just quits picking it up so we've got to be careful [Music] we're going through louisville [Music] oh gosh we're in stop and go traffic i'm having a drive with two feet right now hold my foot on the gas and the brake at the same time i'm a little a little bit nervous okay all right traffic is opened up more we're doing okay now once we get past louisville things start to kind of clear out as far as traffic goes and things get a little bit easier until we hit bowling green and nashville once we hit nashville though i mean we're basically home free i shouldn't say once i really should say if we're getting there guys look how fast we're going [Applause] so far i've been able to do you know around 65 70 miles an hour but i haven't pushed it past that these really short tires that are on this car you know really makes the engine just scream the thing about it is i can really tell where 65 and 70 is because that's when the valves start to rattle and the rockers are just screaming i think there's a lifter that just doesn't want to act right but we're just going to keep going i mean that's all you really can do we made it this far i'm not going to give up yet i may have spoken too soon i know you can't see me but i think this has got to be the most miserable drive i've ever been on in my entire life the roads even though they may not seem that bad in a regular vehicle when you don't have shots at all and your springs bottom out on your train every single time you hit a bump it hurts really bad i think that right there the back wheels just came off the ground i'm not even joking right now oh my good lord after a little bit of encouragement i soldiered on i wrote a song it's called southbound and pinto south bound and down pinto wheels are rolling we're gonna do what should not have been done we got a long way to go and we probably won't get there i'm southbound just watch all pinto run thank you just a good winter it doesn't have any shocks he tall you never saw been in trouble with the law since the day it was fun well i drive a pinto and my wife she loves me but she don't understand me people getting some gas and i gotta be b we're on gas stop 704 maybe 705 at this point and that was a long stretch it was probably about 70 miles just then i'd like to see if our hybrids do it as well as i think it is not bad not bad we're probably doing about three quarters of a water cooler for every 70 miles somebody just get the fight with a gas pump we obviously only put the highest quality octane rating in our pinto let's see how much gas we used how many gallons did we use five gallons not bad old pinto we put the gap back on we're ready to go the little tree's doing all it can do right now fill it up with gas you can see our gas gauge is working perfectly fine we've got about two hours left until we make it home i have to sit here and hold the pedal down or it tries to die that's great everything's great guys everything is fine go bento it's to the floor [Applause] welcome to tennessee old pento hope you enjoy your new home i swear i believe the pinto was designed for tennessee roads these are amazing let's see how much this car likes to party and we're back to stop and go north of nashville so that's great i had an attempt to make sure this thing doesn't overheat get the heat on full blast so what this is going to do is circulate cool into the heater core blow that fan on it and you know at least get some of that heat out of it we got off the interstate and maps took us the sneaky way around through goodwinsville here cute little town not gonna lie we'll join back up with the interstate here in a minute and we're just about home free guys i can't wait to get out of this car oh my sweet lord above it's nashville i feel like i'm home already i can't get out oh that was good oh man wow oh bubba ah i can't wait to get home i want to go to bed i'm fading fast for the last stretch of this drop i mean it's got to be 30 more miles and i get to go to bed wow things developed an exhaust leak and uh it's burning my eyes pretty good i've got the windows cracked i heat her on full blast so my head's starting to hurt but i got this jacket so i guess we're okay i really just needed to say something so i wouldn't fall asleep oh my good lord we are off the interstate oh this is the best feeling i've ever felt in my entire life thank you lord thank you lord i walk from here i don't care i don't know what just happened but i was driving down the highway here and it just shut off completely i've got two gallons of reserve fuel that i just put in the tank i don't think it's out of gas it was kind of concerning the fuel line was still submerged completely let's see if it'll start again it is [Music] [Music] i must have got it too hot anyway i'll get it running let's go it died again but i zip todd the choke wide open this time because i think it keeps sucking itself shut [Music] i don't know boy she might be dead well i've suspected that either the pump has burned itself up or the wiring wherever it is has come unconnected or whatever so i'm just going to rig it up get up under here with this roll of wire that i got because i was able to run it on starting fluid and that made me realize the pump isn't doing anything anymore perfect seems to reach the battery let's listen if we can hear the the pump work oh that's the blower motor why are you working now if it doesn't work this way our pump's bad if our pump is bad i don't have another so we're dead in the water and here's the moment of truth if we don't hear anything when i put this ground wire on it's going on the trailer it's dead i killed the pump i don't have another well that's all she wrote just kill it kill it i am not giving up i refuse to put this pinto on the trailer i will not haul this thing home if it does not make it it's staying here i bought a new electric fuel plug i'm going to put it on and i'm going to attempt to make this thing work i have maybe 10 15 miles to get home i'm not coming back for it keep it down please neighbors new pump is on the key it's not doing anything well maybe the fuel pump wasn't bad this thing works are you joking me we're this close to home and this is the worst possible way to wire this thing but it's going to get us there we're here working now oh yeah yeah it's working now hold that there hopefully that doesn't get pitched it's cold but it runs so [Music] i'm bound to determine to make it home this time we can do it bento i believe in you i'm about to pull into our driveway this has been a long few days wow man does it feel good to have the pinto home we made it here i'm gonna pull right up next to the mustang too as it dies we are here good lord we have made it home when the daylight comes back we'll do a recap check over the car and then figure out what to do next but it looks pretty good sitting next to the old mustang 2 here i forgot to do an outro for this video but i hope you enjoy this i'm doing the next video right now i just touched down in an airport that i'll talk about here in the next video but until then check this out [Music] [Music] i've always loved you [Music] you

Channel: Dylan McCool

Views: 157,415

Keywords: dodge, ford, chevy, plymouth, motor trend, roadkill, hot rod, revival, abndoned, rescued, restoration, rebuild, first start, old start, cold start, 1320, cleetus macfarland, drag race, ls swap, ls1, challenger, charger, dart, demon, hellcat, redeye, helephant, d100, d150, ram, chevelle, nova, c10, camaro, mustang, f100, f150, car, truck, dodge charger, dodge challenger, dodge demon, dodge ram

Id: SgrsZxVgOL4

Length: 47min 1sec (2821 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021