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r. i. p. a 1991 Festiva L.."Ol' Blue"
Well, the forces of natural attrition here have lead to a rare ignominious loss; with our dead sky blue fester getting towed as an abandoned vehicle we had to pay off a towing fee of $300 to avoid a $2000 fine. Off to where the police and firefighters get to play with their 'jaws of life' used to rescue folk trapped in their vehicle after a car wreck.
Phew, off the street by the spring of 2013, on to obliteration November of 2022. Often a handy rig for catnaps or overnight while traveling, we could still sleep in the back while packing a 150# Stage 73 electric piano an iconic musical instrument, and that's amplifier a 78# thug with 15" bass speaker. We weighed in around 230# at 5' 8" or so, so a logistical miracle at 50 horsepower.
We've always did nearly all the mechanical work on any vehicle we've owned, proud to've been able to sell a rig in running condition whenever we felt need for a change..our only earlier snafu a '75 Chevy half-ton panel van purchased for $600 with a chattering clutch, we had to replace a seal on the end of the crankshaft to stop an oil leak, clean up the clutch after that using acetone, when also changing all the seals on the three-speed tranny and doing a 'mickey rebuild' by dropping the oil pan on the inline six-banger and then changing all the rod & main bearings, which at an intelligent neighbor's suggestion I'd checked with Plastigage, were very worn. Dramatically 13,447 miles later the rod & piston of the #one cylinder exited the block about ten pm one evening crossing Eureka, CA April of 1996 traveling from the east bay where we'd been a homeless 'vehicular resident' with our own post office box using the address of a pal's bicycle repair shop in Berkeley we used to volunteer helping out, as an 'official' residence. Which rig we finally gave to a local wrecking yard for $100 after selling the nearly new front tires for $100 too.
What a loss, however; as a mechanically oriented person we'd fantacized immensely about customizing while retaining the nondiscript appearance..a classic sleeper, an aged pale yellow which looked like something kept around for occasional use for chores and such: with a hot rodded inline 6 with dual Weber carbs and a four speed using a Hurst floor shifter they made especially for that use, which had had a 'three on the tree' 3-speed previously.
Well, perhaps the dual Webers and hot rodding in general, not to mention that Hurst 4-speed were impractical: however, other plans were far more succienct to our purposes. By the time we'd landed so ignominiously in Eureka, using sleeping bag ground pads I insulated the interior walls and ceiling to make a reasonable environment to sleep in, with an amazingly solid plan for creating three minature crash pads inside with cooking space in the middle apartment so three people could live out of the van together clandestinely..like The Three Stooges, as buskers traveling while entertaining as a trio..I'm also into puppets a little, with a design in mind for an interesting wooden stage combining marionettes and screen puppets inspired by trained puppeteer and professional community and labor organizer Sarah "Fred" Sherburn-Zimmer's summer of 2005 three day Lost Coast Puppet Feast in remote Petrolia, CA.
This would've been made using the same materials planned for the Chevy van, which we'd been fashioning beautiful homemade shelves for our second of two Eureka apartments once part of a horse facility built during the 1880s to serve an adjacent tiny brewery. 3/8" plywood, 6' cedar fencing slat seconds, 1" x 2" eight foot long fir furring strips, plus lots of wood glue, sheetrock screws, and carriage bolts, nuts & washers.
The idea of the puppet stage eventually planned to mount atop and behind the Festiva, with a couple puppeteers in an enclosure on the roof laying on their stomachs to control the marionettes, with one or more folk inside for the screen puppets. All sort of mounted on the rear bumper to face an audience. The roof enclosure done atop a simple two-bar metal roofrack capable of carrying gargantuan and also very heavy loads. Thanks to the car's FMS 'racing-lowering' springs, which really were nice only on the rear as the stock front springs were entirely adequate we'd driven that way about 10,000 miles..the rear springs profoundly inadequate, very dangerous with stock 12" rims or not much better with 13" rims those cars were designed for we'd soon intuitively mounted stock on some sort of Mazda, long before discovery of www.ff.com.
Well, perhaps a good place to stop and post, to begin this thread: feasibly an account of our various motored wheeled conveyance, beginning with a first car while in high school, a 1957 $100 Rambler Metropolitan and ending with the '91 Fester L.
By the way, this sight now amazes me? Only two members online and over five hundred guests!! Perhaps many guests are bots made to haunt the site created by punks craving a Fester of their own, waiting for someone trying to sell one?
Punk myself, we've had one good review "I know Festivas, and that's a really good Festiva" from an annonymous youth on the sidewalk in Olympia, WA passing thru moving from Eureka, CA to Bellingham, WA from January to June of 2008, eight huge loads clearing out a 10' x 15' storage with a high ceiling filled to the ceiling with serious belongings. Due a hostile takerover of that Eureka place, from the folk we'd rented from October of 1999 who'd liked us, remodeling that residence to qualify for HUD rent assistance, in their family since 1954 promising we could stay there as long as we wanted to.
Where Fred had been our three hour once week I. H. S. S. caregiver while in a fulltime A. F. S. C. M. E. union worker trying to organize other caregivers, in notoriously anti union Humboldt county.*
* Fred for president 2028, Amy Denio vice-president.
The S. C. A. M. ticket: acronym for Survival Coalition of Artists and Musicians aka Scabrous Contagion of Assholes and Mendicants.
The plan, get both women elected as representatives to congress during the 2026 election cycle; while openly stating the presidential ambitions. Fred identifies now as an anti-authoritarian socialist, once an anarcho-syndicalist, in YouTube twice addressing the San Francisco city council in their capacity as executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco: while Amy's a millionaire and Buddhist also one of the world's best musicians and current president of the famed Tiptons Saxophone Quartet, first rehearsed November 11th, 1988 as Phlegm Fatale'. www.thetiptonssaxquartet.com also a member of two other bands also touring internationally, Gypsy punk rock band Kultur Shock www.kulturshock.com , and Italian based septet OU led by trumpeter Erisilia Prosperi easily found in YouTube she calls her most beloved band, now with three albums out, or nearly so..plus a plethora of Seattle bands Amy performs with.
Someone with over 5,000 Facebook friends, about as many as Mumia Abu Jamal. The S. C. A. M. battle cry & slogan 'Resist Feral Humanity' inspired by a dream of embracing a young Swedish woman nude below the waist, with their tongue in my mouth kissing, the night after seeing Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg the first time, on YouTube we thought up and remembered waking up that morning..a canidacy in my mind since the 2016 election cycle, in one dream their inaguration takes place in Yankee stadium, while in a strange clairvoyant visualization as Parisian Lebonese alto saxophonist describes those, in another inaguration apparently at a race track Fred is presented with "the president's horse" which is traditional though probably not the most recent winner of the Kentucky Derby whose jockey handing her the reins warns to make sure to keep her animal healthy by not riding the horse too fast..she hops on for a lap exactly equalling the winning derby time to a millisecond.
Then addressing the assembled afterwards Fred admits to cheating, since knowing how to levitate thus not even a normal jockey's load. She goes on to talk about herself and Amy being birth sisters from the same womb, growing up often riding horses together occasionally racing them Fred usually won..she's forty-eight now, while Amy is sixty-three ten years our junior: discovered when finding a caseless cassette of her saxophone band in a big box of those in a Spokane pawn for a quarter each circa 1990.
The quartet's other surviving cofounder Jessica Lurie once early in our acquajntence emailed Amy forwarded to me "I guess all bands must have at least one wacko stalker" we had done up years later in yellow vinyl on a red teeshirt quoting her, given to the quartet's baritone saxist Tina Richerson to give Jessica..Tina then a gay woman now after thirteen years celebacy looking for a fellow also a Mormon.
So, moderators; no surprise if this thread may be moved to the off-topic forum, though basically focused on our personal means of motorized conveyance. Next post we'll list all the usual suspects, each a long term daily driver now a highly desireable classic. One $500 monster made during 1937 we had just after high school, when a pristine example then we looked at too, was selling for $2,000.
Phew, off the street by the spring of 2013, on to obliteration November of 2022. Often a handy rig for catnaps or overnight while traveling, we could still sleep in the back while packing a 150# Stage 73 electric piano an iconic musical instrument, and that's amplifier a 78# thug with 15" bass speaker. We weighed in around 230# at 5' 8" or so, so a logistical miracle at 50 horsepower.
We've always did nearly all the mechanical work on any vehicle we've owned, proud to've been able to sell a rig in running condition whenever we felt need for a change..our only earlier snafu a '75 Chevy half-ton panel van purchased for $600 with a chattering clutch, we had to replace a seal on the end of the crankshaft to stop an oil leak, clean up the clutch after that using acetone, when also changing all the seals on the three-speed tranny and doing a 'mickey rebuild' by dropping the oil pan on the inline six-banger and then changing all the rod & main bearings, which at an intelligent neighbor's suggestion I'd checked with Plastigage, were very worn. Dramatically 13,447 miles later the rod & piston of the #one cylinder exited the block about ten pm one evening crossing Eureka, CA April of 1996 traveling from the east bay where we'd been a homeless 'vehicular resident' with our own post office box using the address of a pal's bicycle repair shop in Berkeley we used to volunteer helping out, as an 'official' residence. Which rig we finally gave to a local wrecking yard for $100 after selling the nearly new front tires for $100 too.
What a loss, however; as a mechanically oriented person we'd fantacized immensely about customizing while retaining the nondiscript appearance..a classic sleeper, an aged pale yellow which looked like something kept around for occasional use for chores and such: with a hot rodded inline 6 with dual Weber carbs and a four speed using a Hurst floor shifter they made especially for that use, which had had a 'three on the tree' 3-speed previously.
Well, perhaps the dual Webers and hot rodding in general, not to mention that Hurst 4-speed were impractical: however, other plans were far more succienct to our purposes. By the time we'd landed so ignominiously in Eureka, using sleeping bag ground pads I insulated the interior walls and ceiling to make a reasonable environment to sleep in, with an amazingly solid plan for creating three minature crash pads inside with cooking space in the middle apartment so three people could live out of the van together clandestinely..like The Three Stooges, as buskers traveling while entertaining as a trio..I'm also into puppets a little, with a design in mind for an interesting wooden stage combining marionettes and screen puppets inspired by trained puppeteer and professional community and labor organizer Sarah "Fred" Sherburn-Zimmer's summer of 2005 three day Lost Coast Puppet Feast in remote Petrolia, CA.
This would've been made using the same materials planned for the Chevy van, which we'd been fashioning beautiful homemade shelves for our second of two Eureka apartments once part of a horse facility built during the 1880s to serve an adjacent tiny brewery. 3/8" plywood, 6' cedar fencing slat seconds, 1" x 2" eight foot long fir furring strips, plus lots of wood glue, sheetrock screws, and carriage bolts, nuts & washers.
The idea of the puppet stage eventually planned to mount atop and behind the Festiva, with a couple puppeteers in an enclosure on the roof laying on their stomachs to control the marionettes, with one or more folk inside for the screen puppets. All sort of mounted on the rear bumper to face an audience. The roof enclosure done atop a simple two-bar metal roofrack capable of carrying gargantuan and also very heavy loads. Thanks to the car's FMS 'racing-lowering' springs, which really were nice only on the rear as the stock front springs were entirely adequate we'd driven that way about 10,000 miles..the rear springs profoundly inadequate, very dangerous with stock 12" rims or not much better with 13" rims those cars were designed for we'd soon intuitively mounted stock on some sort of Mazda, long before discovery of www.ff.com.
Well, perhaps a good place to stop and post, to begin this thread: feasibly an account of our various motored wheeled conveyance, beginning with a first car while in high school, a 1957 $100 Rambler Metropolitan and ending with the '91 Fester L.
By the way, this sight now amazes me? Only two members online and over five hundred guests!! Perhaps many guests are bots made to haunt the site created by punks craving a Fester of their own, waiting for someone trying to sell one?
Punk myself, we've had one good review "I know Festivas, and that's a really good Festiva" from an annonymous youth on the sidewalk in Olympia, WA passing thru moving from Eureka, CA to Bellingham, WA from January to June of 2008, eight huge loads clearing out a 10' x 15' storage with a high ceiling filled to the ceiling with serious belongings. Due a hostile takerover of that Eureka place, from the folk we'd rented from October of 1999 who'd liked us, remodeling that residence to qualify for HUD rent assistance, in their family since 1954 promising we could stay there as long as we wanted to.
Where Fred had been our three hour once week I. H. S. S. caregiver while in a fulltime A. F. S. C. M. E. union worker trying to organize other caregivers, in notoriously anti union Humboldt county.*
* Fred for president 2028, Amy Denio vice-president.
The S. C. A. M. ticket: acronym for Survival Coalition of Artists and Musicians aka Scabrous Contagion of Assholes and Mendicants.
The plan, get both women elected as representatives to congress during the 2026 election cycle; while openly stating the presidential ambitions. Fred identifies now as an anti-authoritarian socialist, once an anarcho-syndicalist, in YouTube twice addressing the San Francisco city council in their capacity as executive director of the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco: while Amy's a millionaire and Buddhist also one of the world's best musicians and current president of the famed Tiptons Saxophone Quartet, first rehearsed November 11th, 1988 as Phlegm Fatale'. www.thetiptonssaxquartet.com also a member of two other bands also touring internationally, Gypsy punk rock band Kultur Shock www.kulturshock.com , and Italian based septet OU led by trumpeter Erisilia Prosperi easily found in YouTube she calls her most beloved band, now with three albums out, or nearly so..plus a plethora of Seattle bands Amy performs with.
Someone with over 5,000 Facebook friends, about as many as Mumia Abu Jamal. The S. C. A. M. battle cry & slogan 'Resist Feral Humanity' inspired by a dream of embracing a young Swedish woman nude below the waist, with their tongue in my mouth kissing, the night after seeing Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg the first time, on YouTube we thought up and remembered waking up that morning..a canidacy in my mind since the 2016 election cycle, in one dream their inaguration takes place in Yankee stadium, while in a strange clairvoyant visualization as Parisian Lebonese alto saxophonist describes those, in another inaguration apparently at a race track Fred is presented with "the president's horse" which is traditional though probably not the most recent winner of the Kentucky Derby whose jockey handing her the reins warns to make sure to keep her animal healthy by not riding the horse too fast..she hops on for a lap exactly equalling the winning derby time to a millisecond.
Then addressing the assembled afterwards Fred admits to cheating, since knowing how to levitate thus not even a normal jockey's load. She goes on to talk about herself and Amy being birth sisters from the same womb, growing up often riding horses together occasionally racing them Fred usually won..she's forty-eight now, while Amy is sixty-three ten years our junior: discovered when finding a caseless cassette of her saxophone band in a big box of those in a Spokane pawn for a quarter each circa 1990.
The quartet's other surviving cofounder Jessica Lurie once early in our acquajntence emailed Amy forwarded to me "I guess all bands must have at least one wacko stalker" we had done up years later in yellow vinyl on a red teeshirt quoting her, given to the quartet's baritone saxist Tina Richerson to give Jessica..Tina then a gay woman now after thirteen years celebacy looking for a fellow also a Mormon.
So, moderators; no surprise if this thread may be moved to the off-topic forum, though basically focused on our personal means of motorized conveyance. Next post we'll list all the usual suspects, each a long term daily driver now a highly desireable classic. One $500 monster made during 1937 we had just after high school, when a pristine example then we looked at too, was selling for $2,000.