Upgrading to the 500

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This is my favorite picture of my ambulance.

You've got:

  • Paul, the Northern Irish mechanic in the foreground.
  • Bob, the convict, just visible under the cars (16 years of hard time--something like that.).
  • And Mr. Louie, my McNab Border Collie, up top.

The blue tape around the non-existent windshield on the Criterion causes me to think Ed Renstrom was standing beside me when I took the picture. Had to be, because he was the person who spray-painted the firewall black when the blown 472 was pulled out. This Criterion sat for 19 years in a wrecking yard with a lien against it. It was photographed behind a chain-link fence so someone associated with the PCS knew it existed. I found it on Craiglist. The junkie would not come down off $4,000. Not a cent. I so infuriated him with my attempts to get a better price (even though I was required to buy it to gain entrance into a trade show for work) that he kicked me off his lot . . . but not before I hit him with this logic: "OK! OK! Four grand, but you deliver it to Burlingame by flatbed tonight!" 120 mile tow? He agreed.

We replaced everything except the Turbo400 which we serviced and the motor which got a new timing chain and oil pump. But everything else was 100% new. Including the radiator. Before I shipped the rig out to the East Coast for the show, I had a small emergency: the lower radiator hose came loose at low speeds. A pain to fix in work clothes, but I sanded down the black paint--over spray--on the lower fitting: an error by the rebuilder or my mechanic. I was in a rush, so I did not think to check the upper radiator hose inlet pipe.

The ambulance was trucked 3,000 miles from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. where the night before the show I was told the executive management team of the 19th largest company in the U.S. at the time assembled around the Criterion considering it the coolest exhibit at the show. For three days I never took a lunch, but stood beside that coach and pitched pharmacists on our solution until I was hoarse. After the show was a trip along the Eastern Seaboard too memorable to recount here.

I left the Criterion in Boca Raton with some business associates who, driving the rig at freeway speeds, lost the upper radiator hose and just kept driving. The Criterion arrived home with a death rattle. I found a 1975 coupe in the Santa Cruz Mountains and sent Convict Bob up with specific instructions: A. Start the car. B. Gun it. C. If no smoke in the rearview tell him we will take it. I think for $900? Oh, there was a catch. It's now an art car! Note elevate fins. And stucco smeared all around it. The guy wouldn't sell it to me. Too emotional to let go of it. I think I had to write an essay about how I was going to improve upon his handiwork and drive it in parades. Honestly! He agreed. I think a girlfriend and I scared trick-or-treaters during one night of joy-riding and then all of us converged at yard in San Jose to perform the engine swap in one day. The front bumper went to Shep but other than that I did not do too good a job salvaging parts off that coupe as I might today. I was rattled, frankly, that this could have occurred to me.

The Christmas Photo you have seen from a decade ago of Robert Shepard's Criterion nose-to-nose with mine occurred days after this motor swap when Ed posted the walk around video on YouTube of his installing the window and most-important the impossible-to-install Ambulance Sign seal on the roof. The lower lip was to low from the factory. No glass place I took it to could figure out how to do it.

"Fly in Ed," was the advice.

That is how I came to upgrade to a 500 which is now being professionally rebuilt.

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That had to be just before i got there. Don't remember the car. But the engine was on a stand when we got there and bob ran me around getting paint for it and engine conpartment. Don't beleve that man in DC could not tell you had to trim that inside lip in the grommet to get the sign in the car. Fun trip got to to see snow on palm trees that run.
 
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