Dixie Plays Again

When we went to look at the R54, I noticed a few things like the antler fastened to the shifter and the fox pelt draped across the back dash.  I noticed the less than spectacular paint job and the cracked glass in the driver and passenger side doors.  I noticed the GPS and new radio installed in the dash.  But it’s what I didn’t notice that pretty much sealed the deal.

The guy selling the car had a disclaimer before he showed me this particular feature. 

He told me he was from Puerto Rico but since he was living in The South, he felt like he needed to immerse himself in it.  I have literally no idea what he’s about to show me.  As far as I know, I somehow missed the fact that the roofliner is actually a Confederate flag.

He reaches into the car and pushes a button on the dash.  Before I know what’s happened, Dixie comes blaring out of the front end of the car.  For all of us that grew up loving when the General Lee came flying off of whatever implausible jump it hit in order to escape the bad guys or save the good ones, you can’t help but have a big ol’ grin put on yer face.  I think both my wife and I looked at the guy and said, “Sold.”

Over the next week, I noticed all kinds of things that you don’t ever notice on the first go around.  One of those things was the humongous puddle of oil that appears under the car after it’s been driven a while.  The other was the carburetor spewing gas all over the scalding manifold.  But the icing on the cake was when the horn stopped working.

A good friend of mine, Jon Acuff, has written a bunch of great books (yes, this is a shameless plug) and has a program called the 30 Days of Hustle.  During those sessions, one of the things he hammers on is you will experience paralysis towards meeting your goals is your goals are too big.  You start off by setting small reachable goals and those little victories lead to other little victories that culminate inside your brain to create an aura of success.  So many of us are so used to failing, that these little successes become addictive and it encourages us to keep reaching and pushing ourselves.

I’m going to stop talking about that, because all the good things Jon has said and written, I’m going to ruin them.

Regardless, I needed a little victory.  There’s so much that needs to be done to this car, I don’t know where to start and paralysis is setting in, big time.  I thought, I betcha I could fix that horn and restore the glorious anthem it reports.

I got up under the dash and started messing with things to figure out what was going wrong.  I pulled the wires out of the button and touched them together.  Immediately, the siren’s song was sung and I knew the issue was not with the horns or the compressor, but in the switch.  So, I did what my middle child would do and tore it apart trying to figure out what was wrong.

The contacts in the button were burnt to a crisp.  Even if I could have put it back together, it wasn’t happening.  So I marched myself over to O’Reilly Auto Parts and purchased a 20 amp switch and installed that sucker in my dash.

I came back in the house with a big ol’ grin on my face, “I got my first little victory, baby!”  Next stop, rebuilding my carburetor!

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