NEWS FLASH!: BLUEBELLE BREAKS SOUND BARRIER!

Those of you who know me, know of my "mistress" Bluebelle. Bluebelle is a 1935 Plymouth, four door, touring sedan. When I bought Bluebelle three years ago, She was in solid drivable condition, though mechanically well worn. The drive home was a wild one as the steering was loose, the clutch needed adjusting and the engine needed serious tuning up.

As I worked on her, she ran better and better. The first things to be taken care of were safety items. Tie rod ends were very loose, the clutch and brakes needed adjustments, and a spring shackle needed replacement. Once it was safe to take on the road I focused on getting the engine to run smoothly. A major tune-up was needed plus the carburetor needed rebuilding. Somewhere along the line, the oil filter had been eliminated so I installed a new one.

I would make an adjustment then take her out for a spin to see if she performed better and usually she did. After working on her for six months, I had her out on the highway and pushed her harder than I ever had before. I got her up to 60 mph! She sounded like an earthquake in a junk yard and it was a frightening experience. But I did get her up to 60 and I've told people ever since that she did 0-60 in six months.

Early on, I would never stray far from home as I had no confidence that she would make it back. Three times during the first year and a half she stopped running while we were out. Once I managed to coax her back on her own power but twice she came home on the back of a tow truck. Well I kept at her. One winter I removed every working part in the engine compartment, tearing each unit down to the last bolt, replacing anything that was not up to spec and refurbishing everything else. I had pulled the engine's head and oil pan and checked everything I could reach to assess its condition.

Well she ran better with each ounce of work I put into her and became more and more dependable. By the end of last summer, we were taking her on trips close to 100 miles round trip. During all these trips I tried to stay off the highway. First of all, once you started going past 50 mph, it sounded like the engine was wound too tight but more importantly, with the steering still loose and the shocks not working properly, she became very squirrelly to control at higher speeds.

This past winter I started to work on the front end, steering and shocks. I replaced the king pins, made adjustments to the steering box and got the shocks and sway bar up to snuff. It was after I had finished the shocks and sway bar that I took her out for another test ride. I started out on some windy, bumpy roads to see if there were any improvements and she ran just fine. Then I took her out on the highway to see if it would make any difference there. I expected there would be improvement on the highway also, but never did I expect that degree of improvement. All but gone was the squirrelly handling above 50 mph. I was going down the highway at 60 mph and she felt better that ever. I decided to take her further down the highway to make sure this was not just my imagination. While I was rolling down a long hill, I looked at the speedometer and it was at 65 mph and she still felt fine. I came down to the where the road flattens out expecting the speed to drop but it stayed at a steady 65. It was then that I decided to push the envelope and gave her some more gas.

The pedal wasn't floored, but it wasn't far from it either. As I watched, the speedometer started to climb. I'm on a flat road and the speedometer was touching 67 and still climbing! Keeping a steady pressure on the pedal I watched her climb past 68... 69... and then up to 70! It was right then, and it may have only been in my mind, but I heard that loud sonic boom! I finally knew what it was like to be Chuck Yeager when he first broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 rocket plane! Like Chuck, I held her there at that mind numbing speed for an eternity, maybe seven seconds, before I backed her off back down to 60 so I could take another breath.

Now we all know that sound travels approximately 750 mph, but you have to remember, Bluebelle was born in 1935, I was born in 1949, Bluebelle is 71 years old, and I'm 56. So if you do all the math, the sound barrier for Bluebelle while traveling west on highway 40 through Gumbo flat, comes out to real close to the 70 mph that I was traveling, so I'm sure that "BOOM" that echoed through the Missouri bottom land that night was, indeed, the sound of Bluebelle breaking the sound barrier!