On Saturday , July 20th 2002, my wife Karen & I arrived at the Vancouver Airport to meet up with my cousin, Deidre & her family, to fulfill a dream of buying a special car I had found through the internet & drive it back home to Winnipeg. I was very excited to be living out my dream. We drove directly to Ft. Langley to meet the owner, Peter Silva, & finalize the deal on the car. I have trouble describing the feelings as we drove up over a hill & first spotted the car. It is a 1970 Big Bad Orange SST Javelin. Peter had spent the day working hard at detailing & polishing the car & it really took my breath away the moment I saw it. It was all I had hoped for and then some.

Over the past two years or so, Peter had leaded the total restoration process & it was approximately 90% complete. Most of the work was done by Peter himself. The body was stripped down & rust removed, & it was reassembled with mostly new parts from the ground up. The engine & tranny were not rebuilt but had been checked out, detailed & new seals installed. Some of the features of this car include the original Big Bad Orange special paint colour with black interior complete with console floor shift, 360/4 Barrel automatic with dual exhaust. Peter had done a lot of work on the car up to this point but it needed some work to prepare it for its 2,500 km journey home.

With the assistance of my cousin, Chris, we set out to check the car over. Because it hadn't been driven since the reassembly process, we discovered a number of problems that had to be solved before hitting the road.

A short was discovered in the brake light circuit that kept blowing fuses. We ended up hot-wiring a new set of brake lights in the back window. The charging system wasn't working. A nearby parts store helped us out ordering in a voltage regulator & alternator. I set the dwell & timing & adjusted the car to smoothen out the idle a bit but couldn't get the choke working. An adaptor ring was required to adapt the air breather (not original), to the carb. We noticed oil puddles on the ground so I new we had to watch the oil levels. The speedometer wasn't working so we had to install a tachometer to give us an idea of how fast we were going. The spare had to be repaired & we didn't have a jack or lug wrench. The front needed to be aligned but this proved to be a challenge as all the repair shops were equipped with new computerized machines that didn't have the specs. for this old a car. We got a lead to check out a front end guy that works on vintage cars. He did a great job & we were on the road home at approximately 3:00 pm Tuesday afternoon,
July 23rd.

Our first stop along the way was a junk yard to pick up a jack & lug wrench. We were overwhelmed by the attention the car was getting. At one point in our journey through the Rockies, a truck pulled out to pass us on a tricky switchback two lane mountain highway. He pulled up along side us & in the passing lane, slowed to pace us & ask several questions like " what year is that?, how long have you had it?"etc.

The second day in a town in Alberta called Ft.McCloed, we stopped for gas. It wouldn't restart. We got a boost & tried to get into a service station but every place in town was too busy. We found a hardware store & bought a new battery & a charger. We begged for use of a power outlet to charge the battery up & went for lunch. Getting back to the car an hour later, a fellow car buff pulls up in a mint 69 Impala convertible & wants to see the car up close & asks us if we are going to a car meet or show. I suspected a loose connection & redid the connectors on the voltage regulator. Bingo, we had charging & we were back on the road. The temperatures encountered in Alberta & Saskatchewan were extreme ( 35deg + ) but the gauge stayed in the low normal range.

Around Regina, we started noticing a smell from under the hood. It was from the battery (gassing). We kept on going though & that evening we arrived home. On my driveway at home, I discovered the battery had finally quit on me & the car wouldn't restart!

Would I do again? Absolutely! Would I recommend someone else do the same thing? Not likely unless you are very mechanically inclined.

This is a start of a new chapter in my life & I look forward to doing the finishing touches to the car. I am grateful for those that made it possible for my dream to become a reality.

Thank you, Karen, Peter, Deidre,Chris,& Andre.

Robin Carruthers.