The Beloved 1964 Ford Econoline Van Lives

There is renewed hope for The Beloved 1964 Econoline Van. I have been feeling guilty about it ever since I essentially abandoned thing for my equally-beloved 1996 Geo Metro, which transports me in five times the comfort at about nineteen times the gas mileage, which gives you an idea of the delights of the Econoline.

Yet it was my principal form of transport since I bought it in 1980 from someone who lived on the same street in Pittsburgh as Andy Warhol once did for four hundred and fifty bucks. I'd been looking for a van for weeks to replace my seriously ravaged VW Beetle, and after about five tries came upon the Ford. It had problems, the fellow said, and he just wanted to get rid of it. The problems were that it wasn't charging properly, was running poorly when you tried to accelerate it, and had begun to get terrible gas mileage. But I checked over the engine, which seemed sound, and determined that the rest of it was something I could fix.

And so it was: once I'd replaced the fan belt so the generator would work, and unclogged the tiny accelerator pump in the carburetor so the thing would get its requisite shot of gas when needed, and improved the gas mileage by repairing the hole in the gas tank, I had a truck, and I reveled in it.

It's had a lot of work. That gas tank has been coated inside and fiberglassed outside. The engine has been rebuilt twice (the second time it got the rebore that it should've had to begin with) and the body was sandblasted into perdition in a winter-long exercise that filled our garage with rust and sand. I rebuilt the rear spring mounts as a project to distract myself during graduate school. The old generator has given way to a GM alternator, the radiator has been rebuilt, there are new body extensions to hold up the engine mounts so the engine doesn't fall out, and there are various new seals and universal joints and a stainless steel exhaust system.

When I was in the college professoring business, I drove it on week-long commutes from Athens, Ohio to McKeesport, Pennsylvania and from Starkville to Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I've parked it under the George Washington Bridge on E 181st St in New York City in the days when I was exploring that splendid town with one female or another. I rode it from Connecticut to New Mexico and back, sleeping inside the whole way on a trip I still haven't quite figured out.

And now it is parked in the back yard, a victim of when gas prices rose to two dollars per gallon and I panicked over it, not bothering to figure out that the incremental price increase was fairly negligible. But the Geo Metro was more comfortable, and I didn't need earplugs to drive it.

All along the truck never ran quite the way I'd wished, and I've always thought that it might be the carburetor. I'd cleaned it and replaced its insides and adjusted it according to the various books, but the truck always smelled a bit like gas, and the mileage was always worse than it should have been, and the tailpipe was always filled with carbon: the thing would always run rich. I even put a fuel-pressure regulator on it. A carburetor that was supposed to have been factory rebuilt made things even worse, and I longed for some form of fuel injection.

I've kept the Econoline registered and insured, but time had caught up with it and me. When I had to replace the battery at long last, I was sort of unhappy that it had cashed in until I looked at the date code and found that the old battery had exceeded its warranty by something like eight years. Time does pass, and I've had the truck for 26 years now.

One odd aspect of this little vehicle--besides the fact that it is but nine inches longer than my old Volkswagen Beetle and is capable of carrying virtually anything for any distance, including my ego and ambitions--is that it was manufactured at the same time and shares many parts with the legendary Ford Mustang. Both vehicles were based on the Ford Falcon, and when I look at someone's lavishly-rebuilt 'pony car' at an auto show, I have to laugh, for the dash knobs and engine parts and the lousy old heater match those found in my old truck.

In point of fact, the standard Mustang engine was the straight six that's in the Econoline. This has helped a few matters: I was able to replace my exhaust manifold with one meant for a Mustang. And I just this week discovered a firm which has long specialized in the repair of the Mustang carburetor, which it turns out mine is.

So I studied the situation, and wrote to them, and indeed they will rebuild my carburetor properly, which the factory rebuilds seldom were. The problem, they say, was that the Autolite 1100 carburetor was never much good from the beginning and was a constant source of grief even when the cars were new. The four-barrel carbs from that period were superb, but the little 1-barrel job that came with the old Ford sixes was decidedly not. The company has spent a good deal of time and effort, they say, in correcting the original difficulties inherent in my carburetor and they'll restore it to what it should have been for about two hundred bucks.

That's real money, but I think it's worth it if it'll make the truck a more viable enterprise, and I'm looking forward to the transaction.

M Kinsler