Okay, so I’m quite possibly 27 years too late here but hey, don’t tell me I never actually got round to warning you – if you own a 1988 Nissan Pintara (or are considering purchasing a 1988 Nissan Pintara sometime soon) then you might want to get the locks changed over..
Yeah I’m talking about this late 80’s lunchbox:
Back when I was having a punch on with puberty and when the kid with the mobile phone was king of the school grounds, high school students who had their own cars were rarer than students who actually enjoyed home economics. Thankfully my good mate Kenny Keyholder (name changed to protect the innocent) was one of the few – he had both the mobile phone and a 1988 Nissan Pintara which meant that he was King, Queen and the full deck of cards including the joker of our school and all schools in the near vicinity.
It was bright red, had a Godzilla roaring head on the dash, a cigarette lighter powered disco ball and usually caused more damage to things that it hit than what hit it (again, those strong straight lines coming in to play). Kenny took it everywhere and one day (purely by accident) he discovered a interesting trick that it could do..
…actually it wasn’t the car, it was the key that came with it that gave Kenny hours of endless entertainment. One drunken dark night when he was trying to fish some cigarettes out of his Pintara, he actually managed to open up someone else’s Pintara with the same key accidentally. When he tried it on a completely different Pintara, it worked again.
After a bit of teenage trial and error, Kenny Keyholder worked out that he somehow possessed a key that could open 4 out of every 5 Pintaras in his neighborhood. Now either he somehow had some magical key, a master key or a key so worn down that it worked with most of the barrels he could find but it didn’t matter – his key of wonder led to many amusing nights of unlocking Pintaras, knocking off any smokes he could find, taking the handbrake off, pushing it a few parking places down the road and then locking it up again for the pure shits and giggles factor and utter confusion of the owner the next morning.
Thankfully for other 1988 Nissan Pintara owners he soon moved on to a Toyota Celica and ended up with a set of keys that only that specific car.
Now we’re not saying that all the keys are the same here (maybe Kenny was just lucky) but if you own a 1988 Nissan Pintara and you have a mate with one, maybe a little experiment in what opens what might be in order. See if you can test your key on as many locks (with owners permission of course) as possible.
Possibly before some bored teenager and his crazy mates unlock it one night and park it somewhere where you least expect it..