I purchased this 'muscle car' in September of 1973. It was yellow with black trim and had 29,000 miles on the odometer. I got a real deal on the Cyclone as the salesperson didn't like 'going sideways around corners' and just wanted to get back to his office.(no more test drives!). I drove the car daily from September 1973 until July 1978 when the timing chain jumped a cog and I had to shut it down. I rebuilt the engine starting in '78, over a period of 1½ years, it took this long due to having to search far and wide for the right parts. This included ordering parts from Hallandale, Florida and making a trip to Lincoln, Nebraska (thanks, Dave and Gwen). During the rebuild time I stored the bare block in our spare bedroom disguised as a night stand table (complete with doily). There was always a cloud of carbon dust in the basement as that was where I did most of the cleaning and polishing on the smaller parts. This particular engine requires the head bolts to be torqued to 190 ft. lbs., it took both myself and my wife to operate the torque wrench on occasion. Finally late in '79 I shoe horned the big block back into its space and fired it up. It took an hour of runtime before it quit stalling below 2200 rpm due to the close tolerances on all the parts. Since the engine rebuild I only drove the Cyclone 1 year and 3000 miles. It now sits on blocks in my garage. Sometimes I think of selling the Cyclone -- then I think of the times when I lit up the tires -- white smoke billowing -- pedal to the metal -- and that deep throated sound of high performance power .... Nah - not for sale!!

The Cyclone has been in three accidents in it's lifetime, all of which occurred while it was parked. I arrived on the scene just seconds after one of these events, it was very frustrating to just stand there and watch as the other car slowly backed into my Cyclone. As a result of these bumps I had the Cyclone painted Dark Metallic Blue in '75 and then Black in '80. All rust and body putty was replaced with new sheet metal when it was painted Black.

In the early 70's we made many, many trips to Ormiston Saskatchewan, my wife's home town. The first trip to Ormiston was for my brother-in-law Rick's grade 12 graduation, 90 miles from nowhere and the power steering pump blew, one big cloud of white smoke (I was later thankful it was only the power steering pump!).
In the winter of '75 the Cyclone spent a night completely buried in a snow bank in the middle of the street. I got stuck in the snow so deep that I couldn't open the doors and had to climb out the window. The next day I had to shovel snow from inside and outside the car !!
The Cyclone was our wedding car in '76, this was the only occasion when someone else was allowed to drive the Cyclone (brother-in-law Dave). Later the Cyclone wasn't used much as our children and dog were scared to ride in it. On one rather quick trip to Ormiston, Toby (our dog) managed to squeeze under the bucket seat which has only 3 inches of clearance from the floor. We had quite a time extracting her!
My father-in-law enjoyed trips in the Cyclone to Orr Lake, as we rounded the last turn to the lake I would always put the pedal to the metal and his cowboy hat would fly into the back seat ( I won't write what his usual remark was at that point).