My friend Cletus (not his real name) is a bit of an eccentric. He owns some horse property nearby and allows me to clutter it up with various half-baked rotary projects. He does so because he’s cluttered it up himself with a multitude of quarter-baked automotive and aeronautical projects. Last Wednesday he sent me a message about a secret project I wouldn’t be able to resist. This is the story of me not resisting.

The view from the phone booth, so-called because it’s the only spot on this road where you can get a cell signal.

Highway 33 in Southern California is a delightful place to take a motorcycle or a sports car. It’s twisty, has a ton of elevation changes, very little traffic, and smooth pavement. People have been going too fast on this road for decades, and occasionally they fuck it all up. One day, at least 30 years ago, but probably many more, someone overcooked the corner at the “phone booth” in an MG-A Twin Cam and careened over the side. The car went off the road backward, crushed the left rear corner on impact, rolled at least once, and finally came to a stop after smashing the front end into the next plateau down. At some point, someone showed up and removed the drivetrain and suspension. Then it sat for decades, about 300 feet off the road, and about 100 feet down, hidden by brush and a drop in the terrain. Wind, rain, snow, and a couple of forest fires later, my friend Cletus discovered it on a motorcycle ride, while stopping to pee in the weeds. Many a great adventure has started out with your dick in your hand, and this was no different.

There it is!

Cletus worked his way down the slope and rediscovered the old gem. It turns out you can just barely see it from the overlook on the road. I’ve indicated the spot with an arrow for those of you who don’t want to play Waldo with an old car.

It’s also visible in satellite images that happened to be taken after the Thomas fire burned the brush away.

Cletus decided this car needed to be rescued, but he couldn’t do it alone. Now, what kind of idiot would help him pull an unrestorable MG-A up a 30-degree slope? He called me as soon as he got home.

We made two trips up to the wreck to devise a plan. The car is just a shell, so we needed some sort of rolling dolly to put it on. And we needed a path of least resistance for all the rolling we’d have to do. Oh, and for added difficulty, we wanted to do this as cheaply as possible. The car isn’t worth anything, so there was no sense in spending any money recovering it.

Two winches, soon to be pulling one another together, just like a Captain and Tennille song.

Cletus set to work. He took the tires off a disused 3-wheel ATV he had laying around. He took the ATV’s rear axle and brakes, cut it in half, added some pipe, and welded that to a frame made out of scrap box steel, C-channel, and plywood. My old trailer winch was bolted to the nose, add a battery, et voilĆ . All carefully calculated so the rear of the car would fit between the two front tires, and the rear tire would nestle into the MG-A’s engine bay. Unfortunately, the ATV tires wouldn’t hold any pressure, so he spent $10 on replacement inner tubes. Other than fuel, and a whole lot of beer, that was the only money spent on this project.

Cletus also built a roller for the trailer cable’s winch so it wouldn’t drag over the dovetail. This was made out of two jack stands and an old motorcycle front rim and axle. We done rednecked this good.

This is the only image that gives you any sense of the slope. That’s the bottom of the trailer hanging over the edge.

It rained Wednesday night, so we decided to let things dry out a bit and give it a go on Friday. Up the mountain we went and then down the mountain the dolly went. At first, things were going quite well. To reduce complexity, the dolly has no steering wheels. To turn it, you either pick up the tail and drop it where you like, you slide a jack under it, lift, and shove. Going downhill, with gravity on our side, and no extra weight, this worked easily enough.

We couldn’t do this in a straight line for a couple of reasons. Not enough winch cable and the terrain made a straight shot impossible due to a number of large rocks and a gully. So we had to zig-zag our way, and that meant a lot of direction changes, which meant a lot of jacking and shoving. It also meant we couldn’t stay tethered to the trailer for the duration.

So we needed mobile anchor points for the dolly winch. The plan, such as it was, involved driving old fence posts into the ground at strategic positions, hooking the winch to the post, and pulling by turning on the winch. What could go wrong?

Miller Time for Cletus

We managed to get the dolly to the wreck in just over an hour. It didn’t take much longer to get the car onto the dolly and “secured” with several ratchet straps. Time for a beer. With things going this well, we’d be out of there in a couple of hours, right? Right?

Our fence post stake plan seemed to work well when the dolly had no car on it, but those extra few hundred pounds was too much for the soft soil. So we’d move the car several feet, drive the stakes back in, move the car several more feet, drive the stakes back in… Eventually, we got the car upslope enough that it was time to change direction.

Out came the jack, lift, SHOVE. Reposition makeshift rocks as wheel chocks. Jack, lift, SHOVE. Reposition rocks…

“Hey, Cletus, I think we’re twisting the dolly’s frame now that we’re perpendicular to the slope.”

(no more) Hammer Time

We spent quite a bit of time repositioning ratchet straps in attempt to move the tension to different parts of the dolly’s flimsy C channel frame. It took a couple of hours. After all that, Cletus demanded more beer. I tromped back up to my truck and recovered two bottles of his favorite Miller High Life. Mental note: when going on adventures with Cletus, remember to pack your own beer. After polishing that off we were all set to drive more stakes into the ground and start the precarious transverse leg of the slope. That’s when the inevitable happened. The head on the hammer had been loose before we even got there. It finally snapped off. Now we had no way to drive the stakes. Cletus suggested pounding with rocks. I….declined due to the nature of the crumbly rocks in the area. We tried tying off to a largish boulder with a tow strap but ended up tumbling the boulder down the hill instead of moving the car very far. The boulder took the tow strap with it, and rolled to a stop on top of the strap. Now the angles were all wrong, but at least the strap was secure, so we managed to move the car another 20 or 30 feet in mostly the right direction. There were no more boulders to tie off to. Cletus demanded more beer to solve this problem. I informed him there were only two left. He said he’d settle for water. I made a snide remark about Miller being the same thing.

Daisy chained stupidity

We still needed to zig across the face of the hill at least a hundred feet before zagging uphill a hundred more. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I climbed back up to see how we could improvise. I dug another 20′ tow strap out of the trailer’s toolbox and a pair of 20′ ratchet straps. Now we were able to daisy chain the trailer winch cable to a tow strap to a ratchet strap to a tow strap to a ratchet strap to the dolly’s winch cable. That’s putting more faith in Harbor Freight nylon than I’m in any way comfortable with. But what were we supposed to do? Give up? No fucking way.

Winding the straps around the stump of a small tree meant we were able to pull the car vaguely in the right direction. So we pulled with the dolly winch and, one by one were able to shorten the distance enough to do away with the straps altogether.

That tree is in the way.

Before too much longer we had dispensed with the zig and had the car directly below the trailer, which meant another round of jacking up the dolly and turning it a few degrees at a time. Up the hill a bit more and the only thing blocking success now was about half of a burned-out tree. I’m glad we brought a hand saw. I wish we had thought to bring a battery-powered reciprocating saw.

So close!

Eventually, we had the car dangling just over the side of the hill. I pulled the truck and trailer forward and, after some strategic digging on the edge of the hillside, the car emerged, after unknown decades, back above the rim.

Triumph!

I mean, MG-A!

10 bucks spent unwisely

We removed the jack stand/motorcycle wheel contraption and winched the car onto the trailer after a mere 8 hours and at least 20 trips up and down the hill, not to mention a few blisters, several sore muscles, an untold number of burrs, and an aching back from slipping and landing on a rock. We were nearly out of daylight. Some guy in a BMW had been cheering us on for the last hour and wanted photos of the car. We got the last ratchet straps on securing it to the trailer. It was finally time for that last Miller.

So what are we going to do with this heap? The car has been on fire at least 3 times. It burned when it crashed. It burned in the Wheeler fire. It burned in the Thomas fire. It’s annealed. It’s useless. It’s a lawn ornament.

I stopped by to see him today and discovered he’d been using the trailer winch to take the major bends of the frame. He mentioned the Gambler 500 several times. You know, I’ll bet we could squeeze in a CJ3 drivetrain…