I got my first deer with a Rolls-Royce
I bought my house in the country in autumn. Driving up from the city I was puzzled by the smashed and bent guard rails along Route 17. The weather was clear, the road was reasonably straight, the traffic was light. But more than one car appeared to have deviated from this well maintained road and smashed into the armco. How could it happen? In time it would all become clear — too clear — but at the moment I was ignorant.
I was heading up from the city in a Caribbean Blue, two-door, Mulliner Park Ward straight shell, rag top Rolls-Royce. (Rolls calls it a "drop head".) I had previously toured the South in this car and once, at a truck stop in Alabama, the owner jokingly offered to trade the truck stop for the car. After he explained the misery of running a truck stop (he couldn't leave for a day without his employees robbing him blind!) I decided to keep the Rolls-Royce.
Of course I had my dog with me, in the back seat where he had been trained to travel. It was evening or possibly night and we were tooting along, me not giving a thought to the less than perfect brakes. They did work and I had driven hundreds of miles with them but, by Rolls-Royce specs, they weren't quite right.
What "not quite right" means is that they probably weren't adjusted properly. They probably hadn't been since the car arrived in the USA and you might say these brakes were "over engineered." There were three systems that all had to work together to properly stop this heavy car.
On an American sedan of the same vintage, brake adjustment is simp0ly a matter of bringing the brake shoes into proximity with the brake drums. On the Rolls-Royce, due to the exaggerated width of the brake shoes and drums, a second adjustment is necessary to insure that the surface of the brake shoes is parallel to the surface of the brake drum. It was possible — and, in America, probably common — for the mechanic to set the brake shoes at an angle so that only the edge of the shoe comes in contact with the drum when the driver stands on the brakes. The car will stop, but not as quickly as it might. My car probably suffered this mechanical oversight.
So we were speeding along at a not legal but mostly acceptable speed (within the limits of what friends had told me was okay), the dog stretched out comfortably in the tan leather of the back seat -- now this dog, as a puppy, had only ridden in cars with leather seats. On his first encounter with a vinyl, he barfed. But, after licking up what he had thrown up, he adjusted -- but this night he was lying on soft Connolly leather.
Then a deer jumped out in front of us. I hit the brakes, I hit the deer -- smash! -- and the dog hit the windshield.
Another interesting quirk of the Rolls-Royce. The front seats didn't lock in place. They're not anchored. Maybe the designer just felt that, because they were so heavy, it wasn't necessary. In any case when I slammed on the brakes, too late to avoid the deer, the passenger seat back nose dived forward so, instead of blocking the dog, it allowed him to go flying over it until his nose was against the front windshield. He was surprised to be awakened so abruptly but, fortunately, he wasn't hurt.
The good news. The body shop told me the deer had missed the front grill. That would have been another five thousand dollars.
Did I mention I was driving with dealer plates? To get dealer plates I had to have a garage policy and some of the quotes I had been given to get that insurance came to more than the cost of the car. I needed to keep the policy so to keep things clean I paid the repair bill out of pocket.
After that incident I went back to Ferraris and the Chevy Suburban. The Rolls got sold to a dealer who put it up for sale at the New York Auto Show at the Javits Center. The next deer I hit was with a Volkswagen.
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