Posted on 12/04/2023 1:04:34 PM PST by Red Badger
I still have a crap load of 60 & 40 watt incandescant bulbs. And a few 75 & 1 or 2 100.
When we were cleaning out my late mother’s house, we found a photograph of a late 1950s car that had been devoured by flames and a newspaper article about it. Seems the gas lines in my stepfather’s car had frozen and he put a space heater in the engine compartment to thaw them. He achieved his objective but not in a good way. The strange thing is that the newspaper article still existed. Had that happened to me, the newspaper article, photograph, and all other memories of that event would have “disappeared” and I would have never mentioned it.
Having a 100w light bulb in the well house will keep the pump from freezing quite nicely.
They can set bread on fire too.
A friend told me.
“Cold battery,” means reduced mileage?
First time I’ve seen that..... WOW, reason # 19 to never think of buying an EV!
Come to think of it, when I was stationed in Northern Maine, Loring AFB, We used to take our batteries into our quarters, overnight. When on alert,the alert vehicles were plugged into power to heat the head bolts, therefore keeping the oil viscosity up! Those were the days!
Hey dad another transformer exploded what do you think is causing it?.
Why didn’t they just start a pan of charcoal under it? I remember Grandpa saying they would start a wood fire under a tractor to warm them up to start. No cheap antifreeze in those days so they filled the radiator with kerosene.
Which coal spontaneously burns when wet? is it lignite? perhaps that is a better choice if you are ‘oldasrocks’ :)
Back when I was a teen I was up at the family cabin (no water, outhouse and no insulation) in the winter with a buddy.
The car wouldn’t start the next morning as it was too cold. We covered the hood with blankets draped down to the ground and had to space heaters going.
By noon it was warm enough to get started. Barely.
It was a record cold of -42 that night. Probably warmed up to -30 by noon.
(Idiot kids. Although looking back I do wonder why my folks didn’t say anything about not going when it was that cold. Maybe they did and I said “Oh it will be fine!”
I don’t ever recall looking at a weather forecast back then.
I can’t imagine cold like that. Heat has never really bothered me, but cold always has. I’m a hot house plant :-)
(I was wondering if putting some down duvets over the hood might help...)
A priceless stash you have there...
My dad had a late ‘60s-early-’70s Volkswagen station wagon (not even the beetle, this was even weirder) for a few years, through some hard western PA winters in the mid to late 70s.
Six takeaways from that:
1. We never cleaned out our single-bay detached unheated garage to put an actual car in it until we had that Volkswagen. We never bothered to put another 4-wheeler in there afterwards (except maybe his old Farmall tractor, once or twice).
2. The Volkswagen was one of the smallest cars we ever had, so it actually fit inside the “single” car detached garage. Most of our other Detroit V-8 monsters would’ve knocked the structure down. And probably not scuffed the chrome front fenders...
3. Dad placed an incandescent bulb under the hood (or maybe the boot? - I can’t remember, I was a kid, and it was a station wagon) to keep it warm at night so it would start in the morning. He may have even draped a blanket over it to keep the heat in at night.
4. Wasn’t Germany also a cold-weather nation? Why would we need to put an incandescent bulb near the motor to keep it warm?
5. We never had to treat any other vehicle we owned with such delicate warm-garage care as that finicky Volkswagen.
6. I’ve never been interested in a German vehicle ever since.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane!
I still use incandescents in some lamps.
They are not helping with the cold here, now; and I’m dreading this month’s electric bill :-)
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