July is the hottest month of the year, so this will be totally different, and may be of help during these hot days. On the 4th of July, I was in Silverton, and ran across a guy filling his radiator from a fast running creek with an empty Coke can. I stopped to ask if he needed help, and he said that his car kept losing its water, and overheating, and he couldn’t find any leaks anywhere. Blown head gasket? That would be damned expensive. The car had 150,000 miles on it, and looked to be in virtually perfect condition. I asked him that at a lower elevation, it lost water, and the answer was no, but he did notice a bit of anti-freeze on his driveway last week, after a drive in hot weather. That was the answer. I told him to go to a gas station and get a new $5 radiator cap, and his problems would be solved. Why? Simple.
Modern cars’ cooling systems operate under pressure, and the radiator cap has two functions. One is to keep the top sealed, and the second is to keep the pressure maintained. If the radiator cap spring or washer is worn or lost tension, the top of the cap will appear to keep the water from coming out, but what may not be obvious, is that the pressure maintaining section may have not done its job, and water has escaped from the overflow pipe, which may not be easily visible. At high altitudes, pressures are radically different than at lower altitudes, and Silverton is 9200 feet in elevation. I saw him later, he had done as I told him, and the cap was $4.88 plus tax. He took a run up to the top of Red Mountain Pass, altitude 11,006, and didn’t lose a drop. It might just be a good idea to carry a radiator cap in the trunk, if your jalopy has over 100,000 miles on it. The cap spring might have lost its tension, or the rubber gasket may be prone to leak. Why not spring for five bucks and put a new one on anyway. You might save yourself a lot of trouble or expensive repairs in this hot weather.
(I’m thinking about making Wednesday’s column something other than economics)
Meantime, in Texas, a white guy shot two black burglars, while the cops were on the phone, to protect himself. The Grand Jury refused to find him guilty, and now the black female congresswoman wants a federal investigation. Why not investigate her for being such a phony? Why not convict the NAACP for racism? I am a racist, and not a bit ashamed of it. After being robbed numerous times by blacks, and being left for dead after being mugged by three black animals, and watching thousands of black crimes and black criminals on TV, I am a racist. Of course there are many decent negroes, and I am proud of them. But unfortunately, 50% of America’s crime is committed by 2% of the population, and that is black males between the ages of 15 and 35. Why are white people afraid to enter black neighborhoods? Why are black neighborhoods rife with crime, rubbish, graffiti, abandoned houses and cars? It isn’t difficult to be a racist. Most white people are, they just have difficulty to admitting it!