My first car was a 1960 Corvair - red. Loved driving it but my dad made me sell it, "unsafe"
. In high school I learned you could be going downhill, turn off the ignition briefly and turn it back on to get a POW! explosion from unburned gases in the exhaust system - great fun if you did it next to someone. After a few of these demonstrations, I blew the muffler off. Went back to pick it up... OW! OW! HOT! The explosion also broke a piston ring, causing smoking. Scored the cylinder. Oh dear. But being air-cooled with individual cylinder barrels, the head could be removed, rings and individual cylinder replaced with the engine in situ and we're good to go
.
Another little adventure with the Corvair involved the gasoline heater. Air-cooled engine, remember. So the heater burned gasoline from the fuel tank. Which was situated just above your feet. One winter day (in Kentucky) I'm driving along with the heater on and I hear WHUMP! WHUMP! little explosions under the (front) hood. Thinking this thing is gonna blow, I whipped the car over to the shoulder, jumped out, flung open the (front) hood and started ripping wires out. Whew! Disaster averted! So now everything was calm but for the remainder of the winter I had no heat. Well, I want to take girls out, I gotta have heat! I came up with the brilliant notion of placing a can of Sterno (lit) on an asbestos shingle on the floor of the car, with a clay flower pot placed over it to radiate the heat and protect the flame. What could possibly go wrong? And it did work fine for heat. But I had neglected to consider that a byproduct of combustion is H2O, which condensed heavily and instantly on the inside of all the windows. And my hasty removal of heater wiring had left me without a defroster... so I could be warm and not see... or see and be cold... and lonesome.
Later, on a curve on a country road, I was hanging the rear end out a bit too far, and the tip end of the rear bumper snagged the fender of an oncoming car in the other lane, making a neat horizontal slice. I lost the end of my bumper but no other damage. I got the hell outta there, but had some 'splainin' to do when I got home. That's when Daddy made me sell the Corvair