Bloody Knuckle Auto Repair

I read articles all the time where guys reminisce about rebuilding cars when they were barely old enough to drive. They almost get watery-eyed and sniffly talking about that car and that project. Many of them still spend hours in the garage working on a mechanical beast that currently inhabits their sacred space. It’s almost a religious experience.

I was never one of those guys. Yes, I’ve spent plenty of time fixing cars, but not necessarily because I wanted to. I was either too broke or too cheap to pay someone else to fix my car de jour. Looking back, I’m glad I did those repairs because today it helps me both diagnose problems and appreciate the guys who fix them. But I have little to zero desire to do the work. I like watching others, and yes, maybe that’s the voyeur in me.

Don’t get me wrong, I love cars and I love to drive them. I love the engineering, the industrial design, the art of them. I just have completely had my fill ever wanting to work on them. They are not a labor of love. I have bad memories dealing with them, diagnosing them, trying to heal them. For me, they are torture.

Please tell me, because I want to know – what is satisfying about bloody knuckles, tearing off skin, or getting grease into cuts that later have to be scrubbed out? About snapping off a frozen bolt, finessing an easyout into its carcass and straining to extract its ass from a marginally accessible part of an engine block while once again smashing your fingers? About spending 3 hours trying to do a simple oil change in a spot only a leprechaun can access because the moron before you has the filter on so tight it’s frozen in place? The filter wrench deformed the canister, but it didn’t budge. Yeah, I love creative automotive servicing and repair.

There’s a zillion service manuals (and now, YouTube videos) to tell you how it should go. There’s only one problem – it almost never goes that way. These manual and YouTube guys live in a perfect world, where everything is where it’s supposed to be and everything works like it should. All the bolts come off with a simple turn, nothing breaks and they have all the right special tools for that job you will need to do probably twice in your life.

It seems almost every car repair job I ever did was a misadventure. Maybe that’s because most of the cars I worked on were someone else’s cast off. They were tests of patience, battered hands, and brut force usually conducted outside in less than ideal conditions. The ones I remember most were done over weekends when there was no choice but to fix the car right now so I could either get to class or my job (or both) on Monday. Invariably it was cold, windy or rainy, or all three. There was the day in November I got to spend in the gutter replacing the starter on my ’67 Ford Galaxy 500 while it poured down rain. Nothing better than being soaked to the bone trying to ignore your shivers while removing one and installing the other, all the while laying on your back in a river of freezing water that’s headed for the storm sewer. Yeah, man, those were the days!

Then there were the changing of drum brakes, rebuilding brake and master cylinders, and bleeding brake lines by myself. Seems I did all these jobs by myself. It gets very interesting when you don’t have an extra set of hands or all the right tools or the money to buy them. Some of those drum brake springs are pretty damn heavy to stretch and with only a pair of regular pliers it can be a real challenge. I knew it – skinned knuckles again! And all this out in the street and the cold. By the way, why does all this stuff only break in the winter?! Maybe I only remember those because the memories are so pleasant….

One of the best repair jobs came up after I returned from a December vacation to Hawaii. My parents had given me that trip as a college graduation present and it was amazing. What I came home to, not so much. My musician roommates (I had three of them) had permission to drive my ’72 Ford Pinto while I was gone. They had gone shopping and were returning home when the oil idiot light came on. They dutifully pulled over and checked the dipstick – oil was right up there. Puzzled, they got back in and drove until the engine seized. I came home to my car in the alley and their apologetic faces. With little money, I rented a hoist, pushed the car into the garage and pulled the engine. I headed to the junkyard with it in my roommate’s Datsun 510 station wagon where I found a replacement for $150. By myself, I wrestled with that damn engine and transmission for a couple of weeks before finally getting a local mechanic to help me finish hooking them up. Outside of the three cars I painted, that’s the only stupid repair job I ever remember doing in a garage. And of course, it was 30 degrees with no heat; just a crappy, old, world war II single car garage. If it was an apartment parking lot, a slot beside a service station, or in the street, that was me – Mr. Curb-side auto repair; disaster waiting to happen.

Over those lean years I changed water pumps, radiators, timing belts, mufflers (that was bloody awful – heat fuses everything together), steering wheels, door windows and latches, disassembled and rebuilt whole dash boards, and several other things I have simply chosen to forget. I generally stayed away from body work – that required skills I knew I didn’t have.

You may well love cars as much as I do. And yes, I really do. But working on them is a pain in the butt. If you remember they were designed to be put together, not taken apart, it will help you understand my aversion. Maybe you already know this. If you don’t, beware.

So, when your buddy says he likes to work on cars, think of me and run the other way – he’s probably looking for a volunteer and an extra set of hands to scrape the skin off of. Happy motoring. May your car never break.