"Thomas Prufer" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 22 Jul 2018 22:11:08 +0100, "NY" wrote:

You were offered three choices:

- yank on the handbrake
- put the car in neutral
- turn off the ignition

The "correct" answer was to put the car in neutral. Turning off the engine
would lock the steering. Pulling on the handbrake would lock the rear
wheels.

I'm not sure I agree with their answer.

I was a sometime passenger in a clapped-out VW bus where this happened
fairly
regularly.

The driver would press the clutch and remove his flip-flops (or, once,
clogs),
wrap his toes around the back of the accelerator, and pull it back up.
Sorted.

An old VW engine doesn't get up to much speed in the moment that practiced
driver took to do this. And the possibility of the car accelerating
violently
because of throttle stuck fully open was hoped for, but zero.

When it happened to me, I tried that after I'd got the car safely stopped,
and it was a dismal failure. The pedal just came up, leaving the cable where
it was: the way the linkage between pedal and cable was designed meant the
pedal would only exert a *pull* on the cable, not a push. It relied on the
spring in the linkage at the carburettor to return the cable to its normal
position and push the accelerator pedal back up.

And the strands of the cable had frayed close to that carburettor linkage so
that only about half of them were pulling the linkage; the other half were
jamming the cable against its sheath. No amount of pulling or pushing would
move the cable in the sheath: it was buggered.

My dad drove home very slowly: he jammed the throttle slightly open and then
varied the speed by varying how far he pulled the choke out, using the
slow-running control of carburettor choke mechanisms.


I must have had a jinx on that car because on another occasion the linkage
between the lever and the gearbox broke, causing the gear lever to flop
upside down as I changed from reverse to first. My dad claims I uttered the
immortal words "Is is supposed to do that?" :-) There was an
over-the-engine rod from the dashboard-mounted gear lever knob (this was a
Renault 6 which had the same type of gear lever as a Citroen 2CV) and this
engaged with a conventional-looking gear lever rod sticking out of the
gearbox which was in front of the engine. A plate with a large hole was
welded to the horizontal rod and this went around the vertical rod, so as
you pushed and pulled the knob, or rotated it, this translated to
forward-backward or side-to-side movement of the gearbox rod. The grommet
between the two had come out, allowing them to become unmeshed.

https://s22.postimg.cc/wy7o900yp/Image1.png (1 is horizontal rod from
dashboard, 2 is vertical rod from gearbox, 3 is plate which engages between
one and the other)