So how do you get started in working on cars?

So how do you get started in working on cars? And what kind of pain...or fun...is the experience?

My dad liked cars, but by far his interest was owning and driving them and not working on them. For a kid growing up in the 1950s I got what I think was a wide exposure to brands which were not exactly the norm in mainstream America. While there were many which could be seen in a large number of American garages (not that anyone ever really used their garages as...garages), but I remember a neat little Hillman Minx convertible whose top could be either partly or fully rolled back, and which in that intermediate configuration made it into a mini-limousine look.

Cute, but very odd for 1950s America
I found no photos of the car with the top in the "mini-limo" position

There was also a Simca Aronde,

I never saw anything attractive about the car

 and, by the time I was a driver, not one or two, but three Corvairs, as I spoke about in an earlier post. Yeah, these were built by Chevy, but c'mon...they were small, air cooled, rear engined oddballs in the era.

We also had more “normal” machinery, of course, starting (at least in my memory) with a post war Buick Roadmaster.

As shown in this Hemmings Magazine Cover
The thing was all teeth about to eat you
and iconic, though silly, portholes

This was in 1948 or so when we returned to New York from Chicago, where I was born and where the family spent the war years. This thing was a monster, with that big toothy grill and a motor which might not have been a killer in terms of horsepower (144), but was an impressive lump as it was the straight eight that was more typical of the pre-war luxury cars than the V8s which were to become the wave of the future, leveraging off of Ford's leading edge offering in 1932. 

Dad had a thing for luxury cars at that point, and the next one was a 1950 Cadillac Series 60 Fleetwood.

Pretty impressive even today

He never bought a new car for himself, which makes his gift to me of my 1966 Sprite all the more poignant and impressive.

I also remember an Oldsmobile Rocket 88, A 59 Ford, and, for my sister and me, a 55 “Plain Jane” Ford, my 54 Dodge, my 57 Chevy, and others. Even at his death he was still a sort of car guy...his last ride being one of the last Bill Mitchell designed Chevy Camaros. 

Dad's was pretty "plain jane"
and certainly did not have big, wide wheels
But I always thought this style, particularly from the rear
Was more awkward compared to the first Camaros, from the 60s

But I only remember his head under the hood of a car once or twice. So I suffered through a series of mechanical disasters feeling that cars were somehow magic...or maybe even voodoo, with no clue how they functioned. Since we were barely scraping by at the lower end of the middle class, the cars were always at the needy, and perhaps even end of life, part of their cycle of utility. That didn't help calm down my fears.

It was only when I got my Corvair Monza Gold Bug, described in an earlier post, that I suddenly decided to become, at whatever level I could, mechanical. I have no idea why. Perhapa I was just tired of being scared to death of something I was coming to love...the joy of driving. Or maybe it was just the influence of delving into the pages of magazines like Road and Track, Car and Driver, and Sports Car Graphics. But then, I have no clue why I started reading those either. But they quickly got me hooked on the idea of nimble handling machinery, and you didn't have to do much “reading between the lines” to see the clear emphasis on DIY maintenance.

Of course, the nature of these little beasts in terms of build quality, lack of dealer support, and poor parts availability sort of made a level of individual competence a necessity. Just ask anyone with a British MG or Sprite how long it took to learn to carry a hammer to give the fuel pump, which lived just on the other side of the bulkhead behind the seats, a whack every so often when the points got stuck. It was either that or wait by the side of the road for a tow to whatever dealer might or might not be within a hundred miles of you.

It's hard to remember that far back, but I think I began with oil changes...and racing stripes. The Corvair wasn't the MG I really wanted, but I could do a bit to make it somewhat more “cool.” And I managed to do a pretty straight and decent job laying down the vinyl...in fact I even think it was a double stripe, though perhaps that is just the way stories age to make a person look better over time.

I do know I managed things like changing plugs, which was no big deal, and points, which of course involve a bit more skill. They are fussy little things and were the start of that sort of gynecological precision needed for so many automotive tasks. Of course, once you changed points you were into resetting the gap, and then, if you were wise, measuring and adjusting dwell, and checking and adjusting the timing. So it must have been about then that I purchased the SunPro electronic tach and dwell meter I still have and, on occasion, use.

This was pretty brave stuff for a 20 year old kid who had never before more than looked under the hood of a car. It meant buying a decent tool set, for example, and some pretty sophisticated items like timing lights and dwell meters. I still did not own a pair of jack stands, no less a jack, but I did manage somehow to scrape together the $100 it took to buy a Craftsman tool outfit which included both metric and SAE (“American," to me) open end and socket wrenches. The set had feeler gauges and even included a set of points wrenches.

Of course, I had to learn what “dwell” was before I could set it. Wonder where I managed to do that?

The next challenge was that the Corvair was a pretty basic Monza, without options like...a tach. So I used the one in the SunPro to adjust the idle and also get the right RPM at idle for the dwell reading. I rather doubt I had the tools, skill, or knowledge to do anything about full advance timing.

I even bravely got into the electrics...at least a little bit. Again, I was probably after the “cool” factor a bit, though less so than with the stripes. With my reading of sports car magazines I could not imagine how to drive effectively without a tach, so I got an aftermarket one, built a console for the Gold Bug out of plywood, covered it with woodgrain-look contact paper, cut a circular hole in it (how the hell did I manage that?), and hooked that baby up. Wow...it actually worked!

From that meager beginning to doing my first car rebuild (and first engine build) was many years, but doing basic maintenance on the Corvair, two Sprites, and the 914 laid the groundwork and built my confidence. That maintenance added things like setting valves, which required getting into the innards of a motor for the first time and, in the case of the 914, also meant figuring out how to connect a remote starter, since you could nor simply use the old put-it-in-gear-and-roll-it-until-the-valves-close...as those valves are...underneath the car!

And talk about bravery? Timing a 12 cylinder Ferrari with 24 valves, throttle linkage which ran right down one of those lovely cam covers, two coils, two distributors, twin points per...and what I recall as at least four timing marks on the flywheel. Once I learned to look at it as two six cylinder motors on a single crankshaft, and to time those “motors” separately, things got a lot easier. But it did take my mentor Ernie Mendicki to tell me that.

A lesson that came out of these experiences was the development of a mantra of mine my friend Lee Cohee reminded me of the other day. Seems there was this rather lovely Ferrari 550 Maranello which had just listed at Bruce Ternery's “Fantasy Junction” for under $90,000. Lee thought this was a (relatively) inexpensive way to join the Ferrari “club.” I don't know a lot about the model, but I don't think, just given the era (1999), that minimization of maintenance costs was yet on the mind of Ferrari designers. So I told Lee the mantra goes “it is often easier to buy them than maintain them.” In other words, better figure out what it is likely to take to keep a classic running before your lust gets the best of you (I guess that could be applied to other social situations as well, eh?). Which resulted in Lee reminiscing about his own experience in that regard. I'll let him tell it in his own word, about the E Type Jag he owned (briefly) as a young man:

“When I saw that red E Type roadster with chrome wire and an instrument panel full of toggle switches maintenance never crossed my mind.  I opened the bonnet a couple times and looked at the three 2” SU carbs and thought how pretty they looked never thinking about whether the mixture was correct or whether they were all drawing the same amount of air.  I had no experience whatsoever with maintaining cars and didn’t even own a wrench.  In fact, my first socket set that I bought for the MGB was metric me not knowing metric from SAE let alone Whitworth.  Fat, dumb, and happy until the first repair bill equaling my monthly salary at IBM.  Your mantra is spot on.

 it was the second repair bill again equaling my monthly salary that caused me to put it up for sale less than three months after I bought it.  DiMaria* was kind enough to let me out of the Jag for only $500 less than what I paid for it , $4,500, provided I bought a new MGB from him.  Easiest sale he ever made.  At $69/month in payments and no repair bills I was a happy boy.  I still remember how tight the drivetrain was when the MGB was new and the engine felt peppy enough even after coming out of the Jag”.

There's not much I can add to that. It ended on a happy note for him. My own happy memory about my growth in mechanical knowledge came all those years later, when the engine I built for the Siata started . It leaked everything it could leak at first, from everywhere it could leak it, and later proved to have no more than stock power (which is likely the same grunt or lack thereof it had when being raced in 1952), but I was so ecstatic I was literally hopping around the driveway grinning like the Cheshire cat. One of the best days I ever had.

*This was DiMaria Sports Cars in Miami, Florida. Lee and I connected through another friend, largely due to two facts: we were both “from” Florida, and we both were car guys. We later learned there were more ties than that...both went to UF and therefore lived in Gainesville for a time, and both bought cars from DiMaria, though mine was from the Porsche dealership in Coral Gables.