[Frank Lee]

OK it ain't much but I found this:

Smilin' Jack on February 14, 2009 at 08:05 PM

My first new car was a Grabber Green '71 Pinto hatchback. Bought it for $2375 cash when I was in the service. It had some quirks, but I liked it. Gave the Colonel a ride in it one day and he said, "What you have here is a tin can filled with plastic." Didn't bother me a bit as I thought, "Heck, it doesn't pretend to be anything else. That makes it more honest than 99% of everything else on the road."

There was a heat shield over the exhaust manifold that would sort of bark at you at certain RPMs during acceleration. Took awhile to find that and come up with a fix. Also, the points had to be regapped at least once a month. Distributor cam must've been rough. The points would slowly close up, timing would become greatly retarded, and performance would go to h*ll.

Also, one of the overhead cam lobes started to self destruct at about 45K miles. Probably due to running the valve lash too loose on the 2.3 engine. Figured out where the racket was coming from, replaced the rocker arm, dressed out the lobe with extra fine emery cloth and ran it with no further problems until I scrapped it due to rust in the early '80s.

The car got 28 to 29mpg regularly with its little 2 barrel (Weber?) carburetor. I thought this was great after coming from a gas guzzling '66 GTO.

It wasn't a bad car at all. I really liked the crisp little 4-speed transmission and the rack & pinion steering. The Vegas were better looking, but their engines were serious crap. After the Pinto, I bought nothing but Fords until 2003.

Thanks for this article. It brought back memories.

It's the m/t but still, the a/t shouldn't (couldn't!) be 50% worse! I know of no car where the a/t version is that much worse.