D's Amazin' Stuff: The Hairy Eyeball

When I was 16 or so and living in Calgary, I shelled out a whopping $75 for a 1971 Datsun 510. I drove the thing for over 10 years. I built an engine for it in shop class in high school. The old one ran fine, but the new one was bigger (Ooooh!). It was the first engine I had rebuilt from the ground up. I never even expected it to turn over and start, let alone drive back and forth across the country a number of times. The car was a little rough around the edges and not big on creature comforts, but it was easy to fix and it never really left me stranded anywhere. Of course, my definition of stranded was different back then when I didn't have kids or a real job. Back then I had no problem sleeping on the side of the road waiting for daylight so I could see to fix something myself.

When I lived in Calgary, I drove it to Ontario for the summers. Later when I lived in Northern Ontario I would drive it out West in the winter. In the final year I drove it from Parry Sound to Vancouver, then all the way back across to St. John's for Christmas, then home to Ontario. It was so cold driving through Quebec that winter that I had to drive in my sleeping bag to stay warm. The car was pretty rusty and the wind came in a lot. So in winter, it would warm up nicely sitting still, but the heater couldn't stay ahead of the drafts at highway speeds, so it would slowly cool down as you drove. The sleeping bag made it a bit of a bitch to use the clutch, but it was fine once you were going in 4th gear on the highway.

In my early 20's I gave it the fine paint job you see here in the pictures. I also named it the Hairy Eyeball because driving it sometimes reminded me of that really hung over feeling you get when you're so dehydrated that it feels like there's fur on your eyelids scratching your eyeballs, and you wonder who's cat shit in your mouth while you were sleeping.

The first year I drove to St.John's with the new paint job, I was stopped by the OPP crossing the top of Toronto on the 401. Really, I think they just wanted to make sure I wasn't stoned or something. When I told the cop I was on my way to Newfoundland I think he said something like "yeah that figures". Then he made me promise not to drive into Toronto and let me go.

That same trip, on my way home, I drove it into the ditch in a snowstorm at night somewhere out on the Rock. It ripped up some of the exhaust, but I was trying to make the ferry that night so didn't want to wait for the next day to get it fixed. You don't realize quite how loud a car with no muffler can be until you drive it onto the enclosed car deck of one of those big ferries. Later, in Nova Scotia I stopped to have some welding done to try to make it a bit quieter again. The punk at the shop kept staring at me, then eventually said "that's an interesting paint job, are you what they call a hippie?".

Even though the engine was still strong, I finally got tired of trying to locate parts to keep the rest of the car going. Ontario doesn't have the same pick your own part junkyard scene that Alberta did. Here they had long ago crushed all the cars I wanted to pick parts from. So I bought a truck one spring and coldly turned my back on the Eyeball. It lived in a boat shed for the summer at the marina where I worked because I had nowhere else to put it at the time. That fall the guy up the highway who ran a tractor trailer shop agreed to take it away. The shed had a damp dirt floor and the rear brakes rusted and seized up, so I had to use the forklift to get the car out. The pictures were taken while I waited for buddy to come with his flatbed.

I know it's getting boring, but the story's not quite over. Buddy was pretty handy with the tools and the welder. He took the engine and transmission from the Eyeball and built them into a frame he had made for a little yard tractor. He even put a hydraulic pump and scoop bucket on the front for clearing snow. I have a picture of the tractor somewhere but I couldn't find it. If I ever do I'll put it up. Buddy moved away a few years later and sold the tractor to someone in Parry Sound. Maybe it's still running...