If you are talking about cars from the fifties and sixties you are talking to the right person.
The early VWs had a swing axle rear suspension so that if you invested in expensive tyres that didn’t slide easily the outside wheel in a corner would grip and jack up the whole suspension. As a result the C of G of the car would be so high that it would roll over. There was no fuel gauge. Turn a tap or press a button and a sight glass would show you how much fuel was in the tank. Later models dispensed with this and fitted a reserve tank so that when the engine stopped you had sufficient fuel to find a petrol station. Changing the plugs involved removing the engine.
Everybody had vacuum wipers apart for early post war British cars where it was manual or a wiper box attached to the top of the windscreen. It the late fifties the auxiliary vacuum pump siamesed with the fuel pump on the Ford Zephyr enable the wipers to have some sort of effect in that they overcame the lack of vacuum from the manifold.
One of my squadron cohorts had a Mk2 Zephyr similar to mine. He found that he was putting large amounts of engine oil in it so he went to the main Ford dealer in Bury St. Edmunds. They advised him that he needed a reconditioned engine as it was obviously too worn.
Bleating into his beer he asked me if there was any other way. Out to his car and I lifted the bonnet. On the starboard side of the engine bay was a generous coating of oil. This was from the vacuum/fuel pump combination driven by the camshaft and isolated by an oil seal. The seal had gone so the vaccum pump side was extracting air from the engine sump, including the suspended oil, and spraying it all over the engine compartment.
The seal cost 9d and took fifteen minutes to change.
Last edited by Fareastdriver; 3rd Mar 2017 at 08:21.