Triumph over Adversity

Welcome to the second chapter of this nostalgic visit to my youth. If you have not done so already, may I recommend that you read the first chapter (Triumph and Tribulation) by clicking on the link, after which, I hope you will come back here and read on...

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After the glamour of a Tiger 110, my new mode of transport is all about functionality. In its earlier life this dull grey sedan was a former taxi. It has faded red plastic upholstery, and the only splash of chrome is the grab rail across the back of the front seat (also known as the orthodontist’s delight). All the same, I become fond of it and through 1964 and 1965 it serves me well.

However, I’m not quite ready to give up on motorcycles. It is a trip to Ayr later that year that leads to the final tale in this brace of stories about 19-year-old Mike and it is one which I hope provides the logic behind my choice of title for this chapter.

Two previous attempts to ride a motorcycle to Townsville having both ended in disaster, I set out by car one Friday afternoon to meet up with a few motorcycling friends, and spend the weekend drinking beer, enjoying some dirt track racing and generally hooning about on borrowed machines. In the interest of full disclosure, I will mention that an added incentive for me is the prospect of catching up again with a girl I had met on an earlier visit, and for whom I have been long carrying if not a torch, at least a warm spark.

Insofar as I am neither involved in any motoring accident, nor arrested, the trip is pleasantly uneventful. Travelling by car also provides the added bonus of a back seat to sleep on, obviating the need to look for someone’s couch to crash on or worse, to contend with sleeping under the stars. This is particularly significant, given that it turns into a rather wet weekend resulting in the racing fizzling out by the Saturday afternoon. For those interested in my romantic pursuits, I do briefly see the lady in question. However any warm glow she may have nurtured from previous visits has petered out, and all that transpires is a brief hello before she disappears on the pillion of a Rocket Gold Star, whose owner clearly has much more to offer.

I decide to head for home, but responding once again to an irrational whim, I decide that instead of driving the slow and boring five or six hours north along the Bruce Highway, I will take the western route and travel via Hughenden, a four or five hours journey from Ayr depending on road conditions. There, I hope to overnight with my old motorcycling mate, Daryl, who having left his Speed Twin in Cairns is currently working as an auto-electrician in that town. To add to my sense of adventure, I think it will be a great plan to travel from Hughenden to Cairns along the Kennedy Highway, another seven or eight hours along largely unsealed gravel roads – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I leave Ayr early on Sunday morning and after a couple of hours driving west along the Flinders Highway I am in the former gold mining town of Charters Towers in time for bacon and eggs at one of the milk bars on the main street. Charters Towers is now, and was then, a pleasing town with its own rich history.

At its height in the 1880s and 90s, it was the largest city in Queensland after Brisbane with its own stock exchange, a hundred pubs and a population of 30,000. The town has about a quarter of that number of people now and I assume a few less pubs. Determined to make Hughenden in time for a few beers with Daryl, I continue on my way.

I am about 50 miles west of Charters Towers, the bitumen having long since been replaced with unsealed gravel, when I strike trouble. One minute, the car is running as smoothly as can be expected on a corrugated road, and then it isn’t. The engine simply dies. As the engine stops, I slowly come to a halt on the side of the road.

Although I had filled up before leaving Ayr, my first thought is that I have run out of petrol. I have plenty of fuel, however. Perhaps it’s the fuel pump. I try a few times to start the car, but although the battery is clearly healthy and turns over the engine, there is no response, not even a sputter and if I keep this up, I will have a flat battery to add to my woes.

I get out of the car and lift the bonnet. I’m a fourth year apprentice fitter and turner, I should know all about these things. I start asking myself some questions about the internal combustion engine.

What makes the engine go?

A small explosion in the cylinder caused by the sparkplug igniting the petrol.

What makes the spark?

The power comes from the distributor which contains a rotary device (known as the rotor) that sends power to the sparkplugs. As the rotor turns it closes a set of contacts points, which causes electricity to travel through the lead to the sparkplug.

What makes the rotor turn?

The rotor is attached to a small shaft connected to a gear known as the timing gear. The timing gear is connected to the engine’s crankshaft. As the timing gear turns, the rotor also turns thus generating the electrical spark.

So engine turns, timing gear turns, rotor turns, spark is generated, sparkplug flashes, fuel in combustion chamber of engine (the cylinder) ignites and causes engine to keep turning – simple.

OK – let’s see if the rotor is turning and sending a spark through the contact points.

I remove the distributor cap and place it to one side so I can see the rotor. I reach in with one hand craning my neck around the open bonnet, watched closely as I try to start the engine.  The engine turns over. The rotor doesn’t move. Uh oh! 

No rotor turning means nothing is turning the shaft which connects it to the timing gear. I have solved my problem – the timing gear is not turning. 

Actually, I have not solved the problem at all. All I have done is found out what the problem is. It appears that the timing gear is no longer turning. I have no idea what to do next.

Just before the car had broken down, I had driven past a small collection of houses and a tiny school. It is probably a mile back down the road. Maybe I can get to a phone and call someone. I am a long way from home, there is almost no passing traffic, and it is getting close to the hottest part of the day. No calling Dad for this one, Mikey boy.

More in hope than anticipation, I head back on foot along the road.

Next to the tiny school is a small roadside store which I learn also serves as the local post office. The screen door gives a little “ting” as I walk in, and a middle aged woman comes to the counter from a room out the back. She seems to be the only person around and when I explain my situation, she offers me the use of the phone and hands me a small directory of the local region.   

I know that Darryl works at the Holden dealership in Hughenden, so I call the only one I see in the book and ask whether he works there. Yes he does, but he is away until later in the afternoon. I explain my predicament and I am soon talking to the proprietor of the establishment, Daryl’s boss.

“Well,” he says, “it’s no easy job. Have you got a pulley puller?”

No I do not have a pulley puller and yes, I do know what a pulley puller is.

“Well, you’re going to have to change that timing gear, and since you are at least three hours or more from here and we can’t come to you, you’ll have to fix it yourself.”  “See if you can get to Hughenden, we’ll sell you a new timing gear and lend you a pulley puller, you can return it via Daryl.”

How hard can it be?

The first challenge is getting to Hughenden. It was by now early afternoon, and it seems that my only choice is to hitch. The lady behind the counter tells me that I might get lucky, although not many people will stop for a hitchhiker. The other option she says is to try catch the train when it comes through later that evening. If I’m fortunate, I might be able to get on the Inlander, the airconditioned passenger train that travels once or twice a week between Townsville and Mt Isa. It comes through at about 5 o’clock.   

I thank her and decide to try to hitch a ride. I head back to my stranded vehicle and leaving the bonnet up so that passing motorists can see my distress, I stand beside it and wait for a good Samaritan. During the next hour, one car comes along in my direction, I stick my thumb out and wave beseechingly – he doesn’t stop. Neither do any of the other few cars and trucks which continue past me as if I were invisible. So much for Queensland country hospitality. I blame those Victorians and New South Welshmen who come here and murder our innocent motorists.

By four o’clock I’ve had enough. I lock up the car, head back to Homestead and make my way to the small siding which sits alongside the small single track railway line which runs parallel to the main highway.

After waiting for about an hour on a small wooden platform no bigger than a landing stage, along comes the big blue diesel electric pulling eight shiny blue and white passenger carriages. On the front of the locomotive are the words INLANDER in big black letters. As she gets closer, I wave my hands over my head. She slows down and as she comes alongside a friendly face leans out the window of the cab, looks down at me and says with a grin, “You must be the bloke Marge called about. Jump into the first carriage, there’s plenty of room.”

The train slowly moves along until the first passenger carriage is alongside the platform and stops. I look back at the driver, give him a wave and climb aboard. The train gives a couple of toots and we’re moving again. I’ve hitched a ride on a train!

Luxury! There are no more than a handful of passengers in the carriage, all looking a lot more respectable than I am feeling, but it definitely beats waiting forever for a car ride. I’m lucky to have chosen a day to break down when the train comes through. Any other day, I would have been in trouble. I find a seat, settle back, breathe in the air-conditioned smell of Queensland Government Railways and relax.

About three hours later we pull up alongside the long concrete platform that is Hughenden Railway Station. I give the train driver a cheery wave and head on out through the station building and into the street. It’s starting to get cool, the way inland towns suddenly do bumping around 30 deg C most of the day, and swiftly dropping to the mid-teens not long after the very short twilight ends and night sets in. I call Darryl from the public phone outside the station, and he says he’ll meet me at the Royal Hotel. He is living in a boarding house where there won’t be room for an overnight visitor, so he suggests I try to find a room at the pub.

They do have a room and within a half hour, I’ve checked into the pub, paid my five pounds for a night’s accommodation and I’m enjoying a few cold beers with Darryl while we reminisce about the previous pleasures of being Triumph owners.

After more beers and a few games of pool with the locals, we arrange to meet at his workplace in the morning, and I’m tucked up in bed and asleep by 11 PM – it must be the outback air.

The next morning, as good as his word, Darryl’s boss, Graham is there at the garage with a new timing gear and a pulley-puller, a heavy steel three-armed tool which hopefully will solve all my problems. I have decided against any further adventure this weekend and when the job is done, I will head back home via Townsville and the coast road and will not be returning to Hughenden. I will send the tool back via post. Graham gives me a brief lesson on what need to be done to replace the broken gear after which Darryl gives me a lift to the cemetery which, like all good outback towns is on the main road on the outskirts just about at the point where the bitumen would end, if there were any. He wishes me better luck on hitching a ride back to Homestead, we say our farewells and I’m on my own again, feeling less optimistic than I probably sound and look.

After an hour or more standing on the side of the road, I’m beginning to feel that it’s going to be a long day. I start walking thinking that the further out of town I am, the more sympathetic passing motorists are likely to be. My discontent is not improved by the fact that at 10 or 12 kg, this pulley-puller is not getting any lighter.

Vehicle traffic is light and much of it is either heavy trucks or locals who are clearly not going as far as I am.

After I’ve walked a mile or so, I see a late model Holden station sedan coming towards me. This looks promising. I put down my bag with the gear and puller, stick out my thumb and putting on my most supplicatory face look straight into the eyes of the driver as he comes towards me. The vehicle has Victorian number plates and is driven by a white haired man who stares straight ahead going out of his way to ignore me. Sitting next to him is an elderly lady, who I assume is his wife. She looks towards me and gives me a sympathetic smile as they drive past. Is it my imagination or is the car slowing? If it does, it’s not for long and they continue on their way toward the east and away from me – so much for highway courtesy.

This all happens of course, much more quickly than it takes me to write this down, and I am soon once again alone on the highway. I pick up my burden and continue along the road.

I’m beginning to trudge a little now, and the sun is starting to feel distinctly unpleasant. After another half hour or so of this, I see ahead of me a couple of shady trees and as I get closer I can see that there is a car parked under the tree. It’s the Holden wagon with the Victorian plates, and the couple are sitting outside under the tree drinking from a Thermos flask. It must be a Victorian custom.

As I get closer I can see they are getting ready to leave. I increase my pace, and as soon as I think they will be able to hear me, I call to them, “Hello, can you help me?”

They wait for me to get closer, and I can see that they are looking a little uncomfortable. Do they think I have a weapon in my carry bag?

“I’m sorry,” I say, “my car is broken down, about three hours down the road, and I desperately need a ride so I can fix the car and get back home to Cairns.”

The man looks me up and down as says, “we don’t stop for hitchhikers, especially out here, we’ve heard a lot of stories.”

“But you don’t look very dangerous. We were going to stop when we first saw you and talked ourselves out of it. What’s in the bag?”

I show him the timing gear and the pulley puller, and he tells me to jump in the back. They’re heading to Townsville, so at last I’m in luck.

It turns out that they are really a nice couple. Brian and Barbara, recently retired, and taking some time to visit Australia. I’m even offered some of the coffee from the Thermos and I must say it goes down splendidly.

When we arrive at Homestead, the sun is directly overhead, and we are the best of friends.

So now the time has come to get on with the job of replacing the timing gear.

What I really needed was not a pulley-puller, it was a time machine. All I would then have to do is skip forward 50 or 60 years, borrow a mobile phone, search for “how to replace a timing gear in a 1957 FE Holden”, take a few notes, hop back to 1964 and fix it. Obviously that thought occurs to me in 2024, not 1964. In 1964 not even Dick Tracy had access to the internet, and it would be another nine years before the births of Larry Page and Sergey Brin and another 20 years after that before they would meet and become co-founders of a search engine called Google.

However, Graham had given me a few notes about what to do. He had earlier asked me whether I have any tools of my own.

Do I have tools of my own?

I am a fourth year apprentice fitter and turner with a Dad who has been a motor mechanic since he was knee high to a torque wrench and whose own car carries enough tools to guarantee that no one needs the RACQ when he is around. So yes, I do have a few tools of my own. I don’t have a pulley-puller in the car (I’ll bet Dad has), but I do have a toolbox containing screwdrivers, spanners, a hammer and yes, even a set of feeler gauges.

This is not going to be an easy job.

The first thing I have to do is remove the grill and the radiator so that I can get to the front of the engine. I begin by disconnecting all the hoses around the radiator. Next I remove the twenty or so small self-tapping screws under the bonnet which hold the front fenders to the main body of the car. They are not all in great condition, and a couple of them break off as I try to turn them, but that’s a problem for another day. Eventually I have removed them all. I have to get the grill out and there are a number of brackets and screws that attach the grill to the fenders and the radiator frame, so I get to work removing them. It’s no easy job either, and there are bruised knuckles and cursing involved before I have the front fenders prised apart and the grill lying on the ground giving me access to the radiator.

That’s the next thing that has to come out. I doubt it has been moved since the car was manufactured and some of those bolts really do not want to move. If only there was a product available that would free them. (actually there was – WD40 was invented in 1953, but I wasn’t to know that; and while there was nothing wrong with good old Degreasol, that wasn’t one of the items in my toolkit).

Eventually, more brute force and bruised knuckles won out and the radiator was soon there on the ground, leaning against the grill.

Now the cooling fan assembly is accessible, and I can remove the fan belt and the fan with relative ease. The only item stopping me now from getting to that timing cover is the grooved flywheel on the end of the crankshaft which connects to the fan and the fuel pump. This is known as the harmonic balancer, and this is where I need the pulley puller which I been carrying with me from Hughenden – now where did I put it?

More to the point, where is the bag that I have been carrying all this time containing the pulley puller and the new timing gear?

Is it in the car? No. 

Is it in the boot? No.

Then it hits me like a punch in the mouth. I must have left it in the back of Brian’s car. In which case, at this very moment it is half-way to Townsville.

I have never felt so quite without hope. Here, stuck on an outback road, surrounded by pieces of my car, I have no clue what to do next. I simply want to sit here and cry. I feel utterly alone. I’m low on cash, miles from home and have a feeling in the pit of my stomach which is part fear of the unknown and part hunger, since apart from half a cup of Barbara’s coffee, I have had nothing since a hurried slice of toast in Hughenden a lifetime ago.

I sit with my back against the front wheel, staring out at this miserable road feeling desolate. Finally, I get to my feet. There is no way I am going back to Hughenden but what else can I do? I can’t leave the car here on the side of the road and go home. I stick the radiator and the grill in the boot together with my tools, put the bonnet down, lock the car and start walking back along the road to the Homestead store about a mile down the road.

I’m about halfway along when I see a car coming towards me in the opposite direction. As it gets closer, I see that it’s a late model Holden Station Sedan with Victorian plates. Surely, no.

 Yes! It’s Brian and Barbara. He pulls up alongside me.

“We thought you might be wanting this,” he says, as he hands out of the open window a small shopping bag containing a treasure worth more than anything else on the planet.

“We stopped for a sandwich in Charters Towers and Barb saw it when we got back to the car. Good job, eh? Don’t know what we would have done if we’d got all the way to Townsville!”

Neither do I, but I don’t care – this time I want to cry tears of joy. Maybe I do, just a little bit.

I jump in their car, and within a few minutes, I am back, looking at my car with renewed enthusiasm. This time Brian asks me do I want any help, but I tell him he’s already done more than enough. I profusely thank them again, and they are soon back on their way east with a new story to tell their family about a Queensland hitchhiker.

I would like to be able to say that it is all plain sailing from here, but it is not. That harmonic balancer does ultimately come off, but not without a struggle. There is no way in the world that I would have accomplished this without the puller. It is tricky and stubborn, but it eventually begins to move and is at last there on the ground along with the other parts. Now I just have to undo the screws and bolts that hold the timing cover in place. This is more awkward than I expect. These bolts have not moved for a long while and they are determined to make my life difficult. To make it worse, no two of them seem the same size or length and I’m going to have to be very careful not to mix them up.

Finally I am able to remove the cover, and there it is. It’s about six inches in diameter. The outside rim of the gear is a fibre material, and I can clearly see that most of the gears are stripped. The replacement gear I have is made of steel, so I am most unlikely to have this issue again although Graham said it will be noisier (not something that I am ever likely to care about). There is more tinkering to do, but with care, I am able to free it from the shaft and soon the offending gear wheel is in my hands.

Now is the time for reassembly. One thing that Graham insisted upon was making sure I put everything back in its right place and this is very important with the timing gear.

“Make sure the timing marks on the gears line up and also on the rotor inside the distributor”.

There is a mark on the gears as I line them up and it seems to go together nicely.

I don’t have any new gaskets, so I am most careful as I replace the timing cover, and I make sure that I put the bolts back exactly the way they came out.  

I don’t need to go step by step through the reassembly process, but after another hour of struggling with grills, radiators and fenders, I actually have the car looking like a real one again. Of course, I lost most of my cooling water when I removed the radiator, so I’m going to have to replace that pretty quickly.

I make sure that the little line on the rotor lines up with the mark on the outside, I put back the distributor cap and snap the clips into place and, I think I’m just about ready to give it a whirl.

The moment has arrived. Will she start?

You have been very patient, dear Reader so I am not going to drag this out any further. After a few hesitating sputters, my beautiful Holden engine roars to life and I immediately have a smile on my face which could only have been matched by the girl of my dreams not riding off on the back of some other dude’s Rocket Gold Star.

I carefully lower the bonnet of the car, place my tools, the borrowed puller and the stripped timing gear (proof of my achievement) into the boot of the car, slowly turn around and at a snail’s pace so as not to overheat the engine, I drive back to Homestead.

I top up the radiator with water (no leaks!), check the oil level, thank Marge for her help yesterday (was it only yesterday?) and as soon as I can, I am back on the road to Townsville and Cairns, but not before I have packaged up the puller, written a brief thank you note to Graham and Darryl and arranged for it to be delivered back to Hughenden.

There has been enough adventure this weekend, but I feel pretty good about myself.

Footnote:

There are going to be a few people much more knowledgeable and accomplished than me who will tell me that I went about it all the wrong way and I’m sure I did. For example, this all happened over 50 years ago, and I can’t be sure whether I removed the grill first, or the radiator! However, the fact that I recall the incident all these years later, is evidence of the impact the event had on me at the time. It taught me that when you are in strife, and there is no one else to do the job for you, no matter what it is, then the keys to success are surely persistence, focus and resourcefulness.

To this day, I believe this was a turning point for that 19-year-old youth.