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A LATE night fog slowed my progress as I drove home from a distant church meeting. Each time the fog rolled in I tried to use the high beam headlights. The mist would glare back so that only low beams would allow me to wend my way. Occasionally, the road could not be seen through the clouds at all. I kept stepping on the brake, but the fog’s swirling made it look like the car was rolling right along. I opened the driver’s door and looked down. The car had indeed stopped. Then rolling slowly with the door’s interior light shining on the roadway’s double yellow line, I felt pressed. Remaining there stopped in the road was not an option… for fear of another driver crawling up behind me. I was tense in the darkness, but kept going. By the time I could see and arrived at my hometown street it was close to midnight. My car rolled up the street toward home, and I became aware that a glow highlighted a garage doorway in a house located about three doors before my own. Knowing the gear head that called the bi-level place his own, I knew that I’d find Nick beneath the hood of his favorite project. And sure enough, the door to the garage was open. Dressed in a NASCAR tee-shirt and droopy jeans, Nick was draped over the engine housed beneath the open hood. Plenteous fender covers protected the deep metallic paint of his Mustang. Engulfed by the V-8 beast beneath the hood, he worked intently on the ignition system. The engine was beautiful. Tasteful appointments of stock and aftermarket baubles and beads accented two chromed, custom rocker arm covers. A tricked out high-performance 4bbl carb nested on top of a hi-rise aluminum |
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manifold. I knew that the manifold sat ever so lightly between cylinder heads that had been ported, polished, relieved and tulip valve matched by Nick for maximum air/fuel flow. He had built this engine over the period of a year, with countless hours of exacting and painstaking work. Indeed, like the rest of the car, most work in the engine was done personally by Nick. Several years of late night hours had indeed formed this gorgeous set of wheels from a hand-me down Ford that his father |
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Clouds Surrounded |
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had given to Nick while in high school. “Watcha doin, Nick?” I asked. Deeply committed to the task, he didn’t even look up to see who it was. He said, “I just reworked the distributor. It had a bit too much play in the shaft bushing, so I thought I’d do the whole job once over. While in there, I re-curved the stock centrifugal advance and shimmed the vacuum advance at |
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“Now the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made.” Genesis 3:1 |
