No, about $2500 to do all the work I did.

I did driveaxles, changed the seals in the transmission and a few other things. It would have ran the bill up for sure. Most shops charge $90-120 an hr for labor now.

 

Some manual-transmission cars, years ago, had an emission-control device that either spiked engine-RPM or prevented it from dropping when the clutch pedal was depressed (you would probably know more about it than I do). That was done because of the emissions "spike" that often occurred with an abrupt throttle-closing. Perhaps that device (I think it is some kind of solenoid) is either not working properly or simply allowing the RPM to remain too high and run away. Since then, of course, the latest engine-computer technology has made those RPM-retaining devices unnecessary. Anyhow, it might be worth a check.

 

Nope I figured it out, The accelerator cable was getting stuck because of a rubber grommet. It was hanging up on the throttle body.

 

What kind of car? This is a ford escort. LOL

 

Those damn throttle cables, lol. My dad had a motor mount break (one of several that broke) on his 67 Firebird 400 that caused the engine to lean forward and pin the pedal to the floor.... In a parking lot :O. Not fun.

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in San Diego we just drive right across the Mexican border, get filled up with R12 for $40 and come on back. You can also buy cans of R12 in any NAPA auto parts store down there for about $5 a can. I believe in the US its about 10x the cost and almost impossible to find a shop that has any.

There are better R12 replacements available in the US now that are 100% compatible though. However, nothing beats ice cold R12

 

my 2007 Porsche Cayman has a solenoid to detect clutch in the floor AND another to detect fully released. So Porsche still does it. Some people tape the one that detects fully released and report a peppier, albeit less smooth, engine response

 

I had the old slant-6 in my '61 Valiant go to WOT unexpectedly. Having driven to Austin from Houston, I was approaching my apartment when the light changed at the bottom of the hill in front of me. Downshifting the 3-spd to second, the engine ran away, Fortunately I managed to travel the last block starting and stopping the engine while slipping the clutch to prevent the engine from self-destructing.

The culprit was a large natural rubber grommet that connected the throttle arm to the quadrant on the carburetor butterfly. It's motion was rotary, rather than linear, so when the I blipped the throttle for the downshift, the throttle arm rotated "upside down", allowing the bent end of the rod where it entered the grommet, to fall out. That grommet had been soaked in gasoline by a leaky float bowl for several hours on the 3 hr trip from Houston, so most of the rubber dissolved in the gas and the rod end fell out when it inverted. To make things worse, the butterfly was so balanced that it would fall wide open when released from the throttle arm - a serious design error, matched only in it's stupidity by using a product that dissolves in gasoline to connect a critical control to the carburetor.

I temporarily tied off the throttle arm to the butterfly with a length of baling wire (the redneck predecessor of duct tape) and went parts shopping. MoPar had made a running change in that grommet to a Viton product that would not be affected by fuel - although why this was never a matter for recall I don't understand to this day. After rebuilding the carb, I raided my stash of chem-lab tools for a small screw clamp I attached to the linkage as a weight on the butterfly quadrant to make the thing fail-safe by falling shut in the event the throttle rod fell out again.

 

You said it was a 1961 Plymouth??? That was before Nader, before NHSTA, before any significant government regulations on car safety.

 

Did you ever have any trouble with the manual transmission itself, Bob? On the 225 c.i. (3.7L) Slant-Six Valiants (my late father loved that engine...he was sold on it), the engine and TorqueFlite 3-speed automatic were as tough as nails (I later found out that the iron-block Slant-6 was built to military standards, though some of the earlier ones had an aluminum-block instead). But the rather awkward-shifting Three on the Tree was another story. We had a '68 Valiant in the family with that manual tranny, and it didn't have anywhere near the TorqueFlite's toughness. Not only that, but it had a notoriously sloppy shift-linkage, with weak synchros, that would grind a little on the 2-3 shift unless you moved the lever down slowly. And, with no synchro at all in first gear, even with the clutch fully-depressed, it required you to come to almost a complete stop before dropping the lever down into first. Ford, in contrast, had a fully-sync Three-on the Tree as far back as the original Falcon in 1960-61.

 

My Valiant had 3 on the floor, OEM. The shifter had an odd crook in it to clear the bench seat while putting the **** in just the spot you'd want. To the driver, it sorta looked like a reverse question mark. The three-speed was quite adequate at the time, remember that big long-stroke 225-cubic-inch (3.7-litre) could produce a LOT of torque for its displacement.

It was known as the toughest engine the US ever produced, and I'll believe it. I'd done a bit of hot-rodding to mine, replacing the head and intake manifold with Offenhauser parts, installing a 4bbl AFB Carter carburetor, a cam, larger split exhaust header that looked more like a sewer pipe, and it all ran through a beefed up clutch, but used the standard transmission and rear end. A lot of Valient owners went a whole lot farther with a factory-available "Hyper-Pack", but the odd thing was even with blowers and high-compression domed pistons, the engines just wouldn't quit.

Produced from 1959 to 2000, the slant 6 was not what you'd think of as a powerhouse. That long inline 6 block hosted a 4 main-bearing crank that was cast, rather than forged. You had a mental picture of that thing turning up 9 grand (on a friend's rail dragster) with the crankshaft wiggling all over. But it didn't. Somebody at MoPar knew what they were doing when they designed that powerplant. Later hot-rod artists would add a blower, more lately a turbo, and produce staggering amounts of power.

As an indication of their survivablity, NASCAR opened a new class of racing in 1960 that would pit the "economy cars" of the day against one another. Engines were limited to 170 CID, and serious mods had to be "homologated", produced as a regular (but little known) OEM option. Thus the Hyper-Pack was born. They ran the first race of these economy sedans at Daytona that year, with Lee Petty driving one of seven Valiant entries. It was a parade, one of the more boring races NASCAR had ever produced. Plymouth came to race - and they finished 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. Nothing else was close. NASCAR quickly dropped the class, and Chrysler Corporation never mentioned the victory in their advertising. Go figure.