Vehicle Maintenance #2of9

1977 Dodge Cobra Van, driven in 1979 and 1980,

We found this vehicle, owned by a Colonel in the US Army, in the PX parking lot at the US Army’s Benjamin Franklin Village in Mannheim, Germany. The Colonel’s wife warned us that sometimes the choke in the carburetor would stick, so we had it checked or cleaned at Trondheim, Norway; Amersfoot, Antwerp, and Brussels, Belgium; and in Paris, where the man had to work in the street, since the Van was too high for his garage. But none of them solved the problem.

Over the two years we owned it, and the 267 days we traveled in this Dodge, we had horrible starting problems in the mornings in campgrounds maybe a dozen mornings. (Bern, Switzerland; someplace in England; somewhere in Norway; in Berlin, Germany; and a several other places). It only happened when we tried to leave the campsite without disturbing the people nearby, and did not let the engine warm up long enough. If it was not warmed up properly, sometimes it would stall, then by the time we got it started and warmed up well enough to leave, a couple of tents would have been fumigated by the terrible gaseous exhaust fumes.

While it never seemed dangerous, the steering felt a little “loose.” In Trondheim, Norway, they checked the steering in Amersfoot, Belgium, they replaced the wheel bearings and aligned the front wheels, and that helped a little.

In Brussels, the Chrysler dealer announced the transmission was bad, but that was never the problem.

In Rome we went to a Chrysler garage to have them check the brakes. It took them an hour to remove the wheels, then they told me they would order the parts, and for us to come back to Chrysler in Rome in two months and they would repair the brakes. I could see the brake pads were still OK, so I said, “Forget it!” It took another hour to replace the wheels.

A couple of weeks later as we were leaving Vienna for Budapest, we stopped at a Dodge Truck garage (the only garage where we saw the word Dodge) and they had the parts, and a mechanic with nothing better to do than replace the brake lining. The cost was $353, just for linings. At least three times what it would cost at home. As we left Austria, on our way to Hungary, the Austrians refunded the 18% (tax), so that helped.