>Do NOT get inspired by ownership of a Renault wrench to go out and buy one
Oh, but it is such an adventure in motoring.....
My dad briefly had a Renault Caravelle on his car lot. The Caravelle was Renault's attempt to rebody the Dauphine in a sporty-car, with styling that owed a good deal to the same design cues that inspired the MGB and the Datsun Fairlady:
He let me borrow it for a country picnic date with my then girlfriend. In checking the water level before the date, I dropped the radiator cap and broke it; but I could still put it back on, so I did. Little did I know. The radiator was fed through a flexible hose, fastened to a bracket that held the radiator cap on the filler (imagine cutting the radiator cap part off a radiator, soldering some large-diameter tubing to it, mounting this assembly to the underside of the hood - in the back, for those not familiar with the Daupine - then hose-clamping a small section of fire hose to the tubing, leading to the radiator). Clever French: when the hood was closed, the radiator cap was directly above the distributor, so as the car warmed up, went around corners, etc., water sloshed out of the cap and got the points wet*. My patient then girlfriend believed me that it wasn't just a ruse to get some country canoodling.
There was plenty of room on the other side of the hood to put a radiator cap; but this would have been too, too simple. I never looked at the arrangement on a Dauphine; don't know if it suffered from the same design brilliance in that area. I do know that the (floor) shifter on a Dauphine/Caravelle was apparently assembled from spaghetti that was way past the al dente stage, and well into the pasta mush stage. Shifting into fourth gear in a Renault with any significant mileage on it could easily be construed by a female passenger as an attempt to get overly familiar, as the shifter had to be moved far, far over to the right, and just as far back.
On the other hand, they did have a cool two-stage horn ("Town horn!" [beep-beep] "Country horn!" [BEEP-BEEP]).
But I'm getting distracted. This was about wrenches, right?
*For those too young to have lived with points-and-coil ignition systems, this is a Bad Thing, as the electrons get distracted by all that fun water, and don't flow to the sparkplugs.
