DIRTY STUFF
WILLIAM PORKERI
’M WRITING this month’s column painfully in
longhand. You see, I have this new bug. It’s
called Guillain-Barré Syndrome. It only hits
four out of 100,000 people, and the medicos
don’t know if mine is caused by a virus or
bacteria. So I’m mostly horizontal now in a
really beaut hospital, where the nurses are great
and the food is hot and healthy. But I don’t know
exactly when I can manage to escape from here.
They lock all the doors and windows every night,
and they’re muttering about chaining me into the
bed if I don’t behave.
All of this began when my hands went numb- and no, I did not bash my knuckles with a
ball-peen hammer; I’m too old and smart like the
cunning red fox to do that anymore. Then my
feet turned into lead boots, followed by my lower
legs, which just had to get into this act. Suddenly,
massive pain hit me and my legs turned into jelly. I
could only stagger upright for a few steps before
grabbing a hand-hold, and if I missed that, it was
an instant faceplant into the floor.
After six of these, I looked like my old dog
Flatnose, who got this way from chasing parked
cars. So about then I figured I had best do
something about this weird situation, and get
my old body to my regular GP. He diagnosed
Guillain-Barré and said: “You are going straight
to hospital.” Which is a pleasant fix-it place if
your system is buggered, although I’ll be here
for a while yet. Apparently this damn thing is
incurable and the medicos cannot tell me when
I will go into remission. It may be a year or more
down the track. So there you are.
I heard a strange story from my old mate Kevin,
who said a guy he knows bought a shiny new
aftermarket alloy rocker cover to drop onto
his six-pot engine. So he installed this, and
sometime later he had maintenance to do, so he
ran the mill until it was hot and carefully lifted the
new rocker cover off with rags, ’cos it was a tad
warm and heavy and he didn’t want to scratch
it. Put it on the bench to cool and dropped out
the sump oil, which was past the use-by date.
Then he bolted the flash rocker box back on and
got a tub of Castrol Edge to refill the sump. But
as he was still dribbling this into the filler hole it
was pouring out the back of the rocker cover and
flooding down over the slushbox.
Bloody gasket, he said to himself, and went
and bought a new one. Sorted that, sure hehad fixed the problem. So then he began to
pour in more oil and there was another Edge
avalanche at exactly the same rocker-box end.
Bugger! Ripped the cover off yet again, sat it
on the bench and it wouldn’t sit flat. Bloody new
shiny cover had warped heaps, just from being
pulled off hot!
Thinking of slushboxes – auto transmissions,
for the uneducated – I once drove a 1950s
English-built Invicta Black Prince sedan, which aguy found in South Africa and shipped across to
Australia. The engine was a two-litre twin-cam six
by Meadows, and the designers of this strange
car had the brilliant idea of bolting a Brockhouse
transmission behind the alloy engine, probably
because it was the only one available. This thing
was really weird – no gears, just eight torque
converters in line inside.
The poor little Meadows engine really struggled
to move the Invicta along. From a standing start,
with the right foot smashed on the go-pedal, this
proper English carriage would move gently off,
and run through the eight converter stages in
eerie silence, until cruising speed was reached.
Then it would move happily along.
But this pukka people-carrier had one major
flaw. Reverse gear was achieved by levers and
rods shifting a sprag piece inside the gearbox,
which locked into an epicyclic gear, so the
output shaft turned backwards. Okay on the flat,
but if you pulled reverse to run backwards down
a sloping driveway, stuffed up the approach
and then tried to go forward again, the slushbox
stayed locked in reverse. So you needed five fit
blokes or a Fergie tractor to heave the car into
a forward direction. This took the load off the
reverse-lock sprag and brought sanity back into
this incredible situation!
So after filling four-and-a-half A4 writing-
pad pages with barely readable words, I have
managed to achieve the almost impossible
with my crippled hands. But I’m a determined
bastard, even to the stage of doubling up on
my physio exercises when the instructors aren’t
looking so they won’t yell at me. I’ll eventually
make my escape from this hospital haven, as
fast as I can make my body behave. But I have
not had a can of lunatic soup in 21 days, so it is
a real cruel life in here! sI COULD ONLY STAGGER
UPRIGHT FOR A FEW
STEPS BEFORE GRABBING
A HAND-HOLD, AND IF I
MISSED THAT, IT WAS
AN INSTANT FACEPLANT
INTO THE FLOORR
I CO