New parts can stick out like a sore thumb in an. . . aging. . . engine compartment. Those shiny new parts might restore the function but sometimes ruin the look. Want the best of both worlds? Here are a couple tips to make new parts blend in without losing the function.

Of course, these tips are highly dependent on the goals of your project. Not everything deserves or needs restoration. In fact, the desire to keep things looking well-worn or authentic to the rest of the car can keep the whole operation from looking half-finished and more like a survivor. No one needs to know that survivor has had a heart transplant.

Don’t use new parts at all

Known good used parts can sometimes be found cheaper through a junkyard, eBay, or other resellers than new parts. If the right look matters it could be worth going through the effort of gutting a new alternator and putting all the important bits in the “seasoned” housing, yielding restored function without the look of restored parts. Win/win.

Flat clear or paint match

For items like suspension and steering, there isn’t the option to only use the good bits to make the part right again. Since almost everything new comes slathered in gloss black paint it is easy to make them blend in a bit by simply knocking the gloss off by spraying a flat clear coat over the new shiny parts. This will instantly put a bit of age on without removing any of the corrosion protection of the factory paint.

If you want to get even fancier, lay down a coat of matching paint. Most automotive paint stores can mix a custom color into an aerosol can. Take in the old part, have them mix up some paint, and before you know it that new piece will disappear—but in a good way.

Careful cleaning

One of the things that gives away where I have been and haven’t been is the clearly defined line of where I stopped cleaning. A spotless section of the car right next to 50 years of built-up road grime sticks out like a sore thumb. By cleaning only the absolutely necessary bits and areas to ensure safe and proper function it will create a less obvious fingerprint as to where repairs happened.

“Curated wear”

Call it fake patina if you want. A few carefully placed scratches, dents, or smears of oil can go a long way in transforming something brand new off the shelf and camouflaging it into the larger picture. Some Scotchbrite, steel wool, or sandpaper can take the paint off an area to match an old piece that has lost its paint after years of wear. Alternatively, a little bit of polish to brighten one spot on a dull part can accomplish a similar result. Is it slightly disingenuous? Sure. This technique can also look quite tacky if done poorly, but when done well, this is a real option for keeping the right feel to your vintage ride while also keeping it in top running condition.

Reuse hardware

Even if the part is new, the bolts and nuts don’t have to be. Shiny new hardware is a dead giveaway of where a mechanic has been to those who know where to look. Shiny new grade-5 bolt heads from the local hardware store will stick out immediately. If your old hardware can be cleaned up and reused it will hide most repairs far better. Focus on the thread with a wire wheel or thread chaser to ensure the hardware works like it should but leave the head alone for maximum sneaky factor.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 5 Ways to Hide New Parts in an Old Engine Bay appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The weekend before Memorial Day, I took my customary road trip down to “The Vintage” in Asheville, North Carolina. This is the biggest vintage BMW event on the East Coast, with 600 cars in the village of Hot Springs nestled in the mountains north of the city, and the event hotel in Asheville is a non-stop, three-day hoopla where walking round the parking lot is as much fun as the official event itself. I’d missed it last year due to a family health issue, so I was looking forward to returning.

In addition, I decided to drive Hampton, my 49,000-mile survivor BMW 2002. I’ve written quite a bit about Hampton in these pages, describing how I’d bought the car from its original owner in 2019, how I revived it while taking care not to disturb its remarkable originality, how it didn’t sell on Bring a Trailer because people may say that they love survivor cars but what brings the money are shiny powder-coated vapor-honed mirages, and how I gradually warmed to the car’s survivor vibe. It’s not a quick 2002 like my 2002tii, but it’s an incredibly solid car, virtually free of the usual thunks, klunks, and rattles that haunt 50-year-old vehicles.

Even though it appeared that I would be keeping the car, the 50,000-mile rollover strongly affected how I used it. I know, it was stupid; it’s not like it was some ultra-low-mileage vehicle. It was already a survivor car, not some Cosmoline-coated hangar queen, but I still felt that the mileage was something to be hoarded like Bitcoin or virginity or something equally silly. But between one road trip to Vermont a few years ago and the required back-and-forth to the Monson warehouse on the MA/CT border where I store cars, the mileage had crept to 49,900. I had this epiphany: Do you want it to roll over on the way out to Monson, or do you want it to happen when you’re doing something big and fun?

So big and fun it was. Hampton was going to The Vintage. I took it for a shakedown drive, found a sticky front brake caliper, replaced it, drove it again, and by the time I got back, I was within 28 miles of the big rollover.

Then something unexpected happened. Two days before departure, one of my two road-trip companions called me saying that his BMW 2002 had problems and couldn’t make the trip. I thought about how I have these cars in the Monson warehouse gathering dust, and offered him my ’73 BMW Bavaria. After all, the Bavaria ran fine when I used it a few years ago for a mini-road trip to upstate New York to be used in a movie, and in my recent piece about how all my cars seemed to be rising in revolt, the only issues with the Bavaria were a dead battery from sitting and low-rpm buffeting from imperfectly synchronized Webers.

However, something occurred to me. I’m a big proponent of replacing convention mechanical ignition (points and condenser) with an electronic triggering unit such as a Pertronix (you can read about the debate here). The main reasons are A: points can wear down and close up, causing the car to die, and B: the quality of new points and condensers is absolute garbage these days. And yet I was about to head off on a 2,000-mile round trip in my only two vintage cars still running points. Why? Well, when I was trying to sell Hampton, I wanted to keep it original, and now there wasn’t time to order a Pertronix. With the Bavaria, after its first trip to The Vintage in 2014, I tried installing Pertronix, but for reasons unknown, the car didn’t want to rev over 4000 rpm with it installed, and I never figured out why (I’ve never had this happen on any other car), so I reversed back to points. So both of these cars were not only running points, but were still running the points that were in them when I bought them. (Spoiler alert: Point gap would figure prominently in repairs on this road trip, though not in the way I expected.)

So early on a Wednesday morning, my two companions met me at the Monson warehouse. We put a charged battery in the Bavaria and checked the fluids, then I checked the point gap in both cars with a dwell meter and adjusted it. Then we headed south for Asheville.

Oh, Hampton’s big mileage rollover? It happened 30 minutes into the trip. Over and done. I did my best impression of Paul McCartney singing “Let Me Roll It.” She’s a road trip car now.

We made it to the night’s destination Winchester, Virginia, a little over halfway, without incident. Hampton seemed genuinely happy to be free of its cloistered stored-in-a-barn-in-the-Hamptons-for-10-years-then-treated-like-a-wallflower existence.

When we were about to go to dinner, I got a phone call from a friend—professional vintage BMW mechanic Paul Wegweiser. He said that his friend and customer Mike was about 30 minutes south of me with a dead 2002, and asked if I could help. I called Mike and learned that he and the car were safe in a gas station parking lot with several hotels within walking distance. I said that it made the most sense for me to look at the car in the morning (daylight, it’s on my way to Asheville, auto parts stores are open, etc).

So the following morning I found Mike and his 2002. I’ve written over and over about the common things to strand a vintage car on a road trip (ignition, fuel delivery, charging, cooling, belts, and to a lesser extent clutch hydraulics). A car that goes from driving to dead is highly likely to be a victim of one of the first two. You can give a blast of starting fluid down the carb throat to test which it is (if doesn’t start, it’s ignition, but if it starts and runs for a few seconds, it’s fuel delivery), but for some reason I went right for the points—I yanked off the distributor cap and watched them while Mike cranked the engine. They clearly weren’t opening.

Setting the point gap is usually easy, as points usually have a notch that sits between two little bumps on the distributor plate that allows you to put a screwdriver in the notch and lever it against one of the bumps to increase or decrease the gap. However, the nylon block on these points was so badly worn that the slot wasn’t between the two bumps, and they didn’t really fit right on the plate. Plus, these were the unusual left-opening points used on 2002s with vacuum-retard distributors. I didn’t have a spare set of these with me, and the odds of any AutoZone having them was zero. It took quite a bit of fettling to get the point gap dialed in. When it was, Mike tried starting the car. The carb let out such a loud belch-and-backfire that it startled us all. I theorized that Mike had probably flooded it trying to get it to start with closed points. Eventually it started and idled, and a test drive verified that the car appeared happy. Mike joined our caravan, and we made it down to Asheville without further ignition-related issues.

It was a wonderful event. The organizers of The Vintage refer to it as “a gathering, not a car show.” It’s not a concours. There are no trophies. No one “wins” anything. While there certainly are some lovely restored high-dollar vintage BMWs there, it’s far more about shared passion and enthusiasm irrespective of budget. It’s the kind of event where, on the drive down or in the parking lot, if you need a part or expertise because your car is broken, there are hundreds of people who have your back, and that is a beautiful thing. My having helped Mike was part of the spirit that naturally flows out of the event.

There’s also a long history of my friend Paul Wegweiser pranking me at The Vintage. One year, he bombed my Bavaria with yellow chicken feathers that I’m still finding inside the car. Another year, he actually zip-tied burned-out wires under the dash of my 2002 and a burned-out fan motor under the front seat so I’d smell it on the drive home and wonder where the electrical fire is. He has threatened to put zip-ties on my driveshaft and half-axles so he can read about me going crazy trying to find the source of the noise. However, this year, he said that, since Hampton is such a lovely survivor example, he wasn’t going to screw with it. Like an idiot, I believed him.

The drive home hit a bump on our first stop in southern Virginia. Mike’s car had the good fortune of dying literally as we were heading into a gas station parking lot. Again, it was due to the points having closed up, but this time things were worse—the inside of the distributor cap was coated with soot, the points were noticeably more pitted than before, and I found that the thin braided wire grounding the distributor plate to its body had detached from its connector. And, to add insult to injury, we appeared to be parked near a leaking sewage line or septic tank.

My theory was that the detached ground strap was causing a much stronger spark across the points, which in turn caused both the pitting as well as the soot on the inside of the cap. I got everything buttoned back up, and we continued heading north. I rechecked the distributor on Mike’s car whenever we stopped, and it appeared to be soot-free with the point gap holding stable. One of my travel companions noted that another service area was also, uh, fragrant, but we were parked next to a drainage culvert at the time.

We arrived that night in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. While we were unloading our bags from our cars, someone noted that the smell of Virginia rest stops appeared to have followed us. While we were waiting in line to check into the hotel, the red light went on in my head: It was my “friend” Paul. After all, someone who zip-tied burned wiring into my car certainly wasn’t above putting something foul-smelling into my BMW. After I checked in, I went back outside and did the nose test under the hood, along the rocker panels, and at the tailpipe, but nothing jumped out at me. I thought that maybe, whatever he’d done, it was heat-activated. He’s a clever guy.

Before we headed off in the morning, I re-checked Mike’s car. I pulled off the distributor cap and was relieved to see both the absence of soot and that my repair of the little ground strap was holding.

Then I borrowed his key and went to start the car so I could check the dwell. It clicked but didn’t start. I pulled out my voltmeter and measured the battery voltage. It read 13.1 volts. Standard resting voltage of a fully-charged battery is 12.6 volts, so it had plenty of voltage.

To make testing easier and eliminate the car’s ignition switch as the source of the problem, I connected a jumper wire to the starter solenoid. I touched the other end of the jumper to battery positive. Again, click but no start.

The no-start decision tree is pretty easy to follow and usually quite definitive. This was beginning to look like a bad starter motor. Pulling the starter isn’t a 10-minute job like the alternator, and we didn’t have a spare one with us anyway, so I wanted to be sure. I was about to swing my car in front of Mike’s to jump it when one of my other companions said he had a new fully-charged lithium jump pack. We hooked it up, it buzzed, and still… click, but no start. Just in case there was a bad connection in Mike’s battery cables, I used my jumper cables to connect the battery directly to the starter. It made no difference. And Mike’s car is an automatic, so there was no way to push-start it.

I lit the Hack beacon and posted a the “2002 down, 2002 needs starter motor” message on the Facebook page for The Vintage, then began removing the starter. With it out, I did the on-the-asphalt test of connecting it directly to the battery. It did spin, but the spin-up time seemed unusually long. Two people quickly answered the post, one of whom had two used 2002 starters at his repair shop just 20 minutes north. He said that we’d actually met once in the parking lot of a Sheetz convenience store nearby. When I got home after the trip, I looked through my old trip photos to The Vintage and found pics of the meeting. Incredibly, it was 10 years almost to the day, and I was driving the same Bavaria.

I tested both used starters by jumping them with Mike’s car’s battery. They both seemed to spin up a bit slowly, but one was obviously faster than the other. Installation, however, was a bear. The solenoid on the replacement starter was fatter than on the original one, and it couldn’t get past the bracket for the kick-down cable for the automatic transmission. I had to loosen the bracket to move it out of the way. It was the kind of bent-over pulling-up-wrenches work that angers up my aging back, but I seem congenitally unable to say “Good luck with AAA” when there’s a problem I can diagnose and fix.

Finally, with one of the starter’s bolts holding it snug enough to the bell housing to verify the repair, I reconnected the battery cables and again touched the jumper wire to battery positive.

Click, but no crank.

No. NO. Not possible.

My first thought was that the engine was seized or otherwise prevented from turning. I chocked a rear wheel with one of the other starter motors, had Mike put it in neutral, and manually rotated the engine (it’s easy to do this on a BMW 2002 by just grabbing the cooling fan and leaning on the belt with the heel of your hand). It rotated easily.

Stumped, I jumped in my car and swung it nose-to-nose with Mike’s to jump it. Why? Don’t know. Just to try something, I guess.

It spun instantly.

Wait, what?

As I put the car back together, I began to accept the idea that I’d gotten the diagnosis wrong. It probably never needed a starter motor. If it started with a jump, the problem was likely the battery. Just because the battery had more than the necessary 12.6 volts, that doesn’t mean that it was able to deliver the cranking amperage to spin the engine. I hadn’t suspected the battery since it looked new (Mike said he’d installed it when he bought the car last year). But it was a mystery why it didn’t start with my friend’s jump pack.

With the starter fully secured and the ignition switch reconnected, the started instantly with a jump and a twist of the key. I re-checked the point gap using the dwell meter, and it was still fine. I verified with my voltmeter that, with the engine idling, there was about 13.5 volts at the battery, indicating that the alternator was charging it. Mike and I said our goodbyes as he was peeling off to drive home to Pittsburgh, about 250 miles. I advised that, as long as he didn’t shut it off the car, he’d likely be fine.

Does anyone get it? Anyone see what I missed? I’ll give you a hint: It’s as plain as the nose on your face.

A few hours later, this text appeared on my phone: “Update! The good news: I am safe at a rest stop off the turnpike. Bad news: I am kaput! Car puttered out and battery is fried. Smoking and a little stuff coming out. I am 96 miles from home, which puts me within the free 100-mile tow! P.S. I think that [expletive deleted] smell was ME!”

Oh. My. God.

The smell! I can’t believe I missed this.

An old-school voltage regulator is designed to to rapidly open and close (not unlike ignition points), bringing the alternator in and out of the charging circuit so that the average voltage to the battery with the engine running is about 13.5 to 14.2 volts. When a regulator fails, it can fail in two ways. They usual “fail open,” which means they never bring the alternator into the charging circuit, so the battery runs down and eventually the car dies (or won’t start). But if they “fail closed,” they cause the alternator to always feed the so-called full-field voltage (about 17 volts) to the battery. This over-charging boils the sulfuric acid in the battery and produces gaseous sulphur which smells like rotten eggs. THAT’s what we all were smelling. It wasn’t sewage. It was the battery being fried.

If someone had said “I smell sulphur,” or “I smell rotten eggs,” my voltage-regulator-stuck-closed neuron would’ve fired, but I missed it. This is why the car’s resting battery voltage read 13.1 volts instead of 12.6 (I can’t believe I missed this one too). And, most important, this is why the battery wouldn’t crank the starter in the car—it was ruined. It’s also why, when removed, the starter was slow to spin up. Had I dropped my own battery in Mike’s car, or used my battery to bench-test his starter, it would’ve spun fine. It was also likely a contributor to why the points were pitting and the distributor cap was coated with soot.

I think that part of the reason I got it wrong was that it was just a few months ago that I wrote about buying a new battery for Hampton when the problem turned out to be a bad starter motor, but I felt like an absolute idiot. The entire episode could’ve been avoided had I simply jump-started the car like anyone who doesn’t pretend to be a know-it-all would’ve done, and if, once it was running, I checked the battery with a voltmeter both while the engine was idling and while it was revved up. I would’ve seen the over-voltage. I had a spare regulator in my trunk. That and a trip to an auto parts store for a battery… it would’ve been so easy.

I still, though, didn’t understand why the car didn’t start off my friend’s lithium jump pack.

A day after we got home, my friend messaged me:

“So I figured out why the starter didn’t crank with the jump pack. It’s a ‘smart’ jump pack that sensed that the battery was at 13.1 volts. That’s the buzzing we heard when you hooked it up. Per the instructions: ‘HOMPOW [brand] car jump starter with intelligent clamps provides protection against over-charging, over-discharging, surge voltage, overload, over-voltage, short-circuit, reverse polarity, and high-temperature protection, making your devices jump faster in a safe way.’”

Oh, my two cars, with their decades-old points? Flawless. Absolutely flawless.

When you blow a diagnosis, all you can do is learn the lesson, and hope that the consequence of being wrong isn’t too painful in time, effort, money, and the degree to which you’ve caused yourself or someone else a pain in the butt. At least this one made for a good story, and two good arrows in the diagnostic quiver.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Blowing a Diagnosis on a Road Trip appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Buying tools is an addiction to some. The seemingly endless utility of these objects designed to enhance our lives and abilities can be intoxicating. Hence why even when we don’t need them, new (and new to us) tools find their way into passenger seats, truck beds, and backpacks as the artfully organized cache in my workspace grows and grows. I could probably just name my toolbox Audrey II, though my garage is only occasionally full of horrors, and the ‘box feeds on tool steel and carbide rather than human flesh.

My toolbox is not overflowing, but that only speaks to my self-restraint and judicious control over how often the solution to a problem is using the credit card versus my brain. We all want to own one of every tool. They are just fascinating. But even with one of everything, we would likely still want more. Some jobs simply require duplicates. Or at least I have convinced myself that occasionally having two of the exact same tool is the solution to my problems. Whether the logic makes sense or not, here are seven tools that I must have two of inside my shop:

Vice grips/clamps

Despite years of trying and a few consultations with my doctor, I have yet to grow a third hand. Something about evolution taking millions of generations just really puts a damper on me getting the extra holding power I could use most days.

Luckily, not only does a solution exist, but it’s affordable and easy to store. Years ago I resigned that anything that is locking or clamping should be purchased in pairs. This realization followed a discussion with a fabricator friend who hammered into me that it is impossible to have too many clamps. He was right.

Screwdrivers

To be clear, I’m dialing in the discussion of duplicates to exact duplicates. Two of the same tool. My drawer full of screwdrivers is surprisingly full when you consider there are relatively few popular styles and a minimal number of usable lengths.

Maybe it’s my use, but I always fear damaging a screwdriver tip just as much as damaging the hardware. A damaged screwdriver stalls a project as once the head is stripped the options for removal get destructive quickly. A spare screwdriver is a security blanket I shouldn’t need, but won’t wrench without.

10mm

You thought I wouldn’t include a 10mm joke? Impossible. A lot of my projects these days were built in countries that believe in base 10 measurement systems. If you have a more American bent to your tooling needs this might be the 1/2″. Regardless, not having a 10mm socket or wrench could easily stop a few of my projects in their tracks, thus duplicates make sense.

Extensions

The easiest to justify on this list might be the extensions for a socket set. Stack them on each other to reach the depths of the engine bay that was previously reserved for engine-out services. It’s also convenient to have multiple to so I’m not constantly disassembling my tooling mid-job.

Wire brushes and cleaning supplies

Cleaning parts is one of the tasks that I do not seek out and only after some time have I figure out that any tiny roadblock in the process will flip the switch in my brain that says “not worth it. Just reinstall the part as is. It’ll be fine.”

But I want to do higher quality work than that, so having a surplus of cleaning supplies and materials has helped eliminate the feeling that cleaning things has a barrier that must be met. I keep these brushes and supplies around to not only remove the perceived barrier but ensure that it does not return unexpectedly.

Flashlights

Having worked on cars in situations ranging from ideal to downright dangerous, I’ll say one thing I have never heard is, “Wow, it’s too bright. I can see everything I need and it’s frustrating.” No, more light is often a cure for frustrations while working on cars. Small LED flashlights have gotten downright cheap, so a few in various sizes, shapes, brightness, and magnetism are just downright handy. It’s a struggle to work on something you can’t see, so light up your project.

Drill bits

They break and dull, and when you need one there is pretty much nothing else that will do the job. Drill bits are wildly affordable for the function they serve and having a duplicate set, or even just a few of the most commonly used sizes in your shop, allows a certain peace of mind that your projects will move forward even if an unfortunate happenstance breaks a bit. Good setups and usage will make drill bits last a very long time, but it’s not if things go sideways, it’s when. Preparation for that takes a lot of frustration out of your projects.

This is just the list for my shop and, of course, every shop is unique. I typically only have one major project apart or being worked on at a time and the tools go back into the box after each working session. In a larger shop or for someone with many projects running it might make sense to duplicate common tools just so things don’t get lost in the shuffle. What tools do you have to have duplicates of in your toolbox?

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 7 Tools I Will Always Have Duplicates Of appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I’ve been measuring the progress of the rebuilds for the pair of Honda XR250R engines on my home workbench in fractions of an inch. It may sound like the whole situation is going nowhere fast, but the project is going quite quickly: After fitting and sizing new valve guides into the cleaned and prepared cylinder heads, it’s time to take a seat—or eight.

For me, the cylinder head of the Honda XR250R is the gift that keeps on giving. Back in 2020 I brought home an absolute piece of junk that immediately dropped a valve and made a paperweight of the piston. Back then my goal was simply to have a running motorcycle, so the engine got a new piston, along with a a new valve and some fresh gaskets. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so I shoved that new valve into place and crossed my fingers that the engine would work properly. Somehow, it did.

The further I get from that project, the clearer it becomes that the engine ran again because of pure luck.

The two engines on my bench now are a far cry from that project. Four years on, I understand the importance of the smallest aspects of an engine and know the risks that come with throwing an engine together with half used parts, half new parts, and zero real preparation. This pair of cylinder heads has taught me to do things the right way, to understand not only what I am doing but the proper way to do it, and which tools to use along the way. With a fresh set of valves sitting on the workbench, my most recent job was to mate each set of four valves to their seats: four ring-shaped surfaces in the hardened metal of each cylinder head.

The second stroke in the four-stroke cycle is often underappreciated. So much of the power potential in an engine comes from compressing the fuel and air mixture before burning it. Leaky valves bleed off that compression, and leaks are often due to bad valve seats. When functioning properly, seats help limit wear and tear on the valves, which open and close thousands of times per minute.

The tools for cutting valve seats can be relatively affordable all the way to wallet-draining. I elected to go on the more affordable end of the price spectrum and picked up a kit from Neway Manufacturing. After trying it out by refreshing a very poorly running engine, I was impressed with how simple the three cutters made the process of cutting the perfect valve seat: Install the pilot into the valve guide with a light twist, dab a bit of oil onto the pilot to reduce friction, slide on the first cutter, use the T-handle to rotate the cutter clockwise just a few turns, slide the cutter off and check the work.

I quickly developed a feel for how much material was removed by each clockwise rotation of the adjustable carbide cutters. Setup took seconds, then it was two quick passes with the 60-degree and 30-degree angle cutters to establish the rough geometry before sliding the 45-degree tool in place and dialing in the surface against which the face of the valve would actually sit.

A three-angle valve job is more or less the bare minimum for valve seats these days. A machinist would have happily lightened my wallet and added two more angles, and the additional cuts would help airflow, but a five-angle valve job is overkill for the agricultural nature of the Honda XR engines. I was able to do a three-angle job at home, and the performance of these engines will likely be very close.

After marking the seats with Prussian blue and checking the width of the 45-degree seat after the final cut, everything got cleaned before I re-blued and lightly lapped the valves against the fresh seats to check the contact on the valve faces. Once everything fit perfectly, the only thing left was the final cleaning and preparation for installing the assembled cylinder heads on the engines.

This marks the end of an adventure that was at times a nightmare but in the end was so rewarding. Every step of the top end of these engines was done right, by my own hands, in my own shop: Disassembly, parts selection and replacement, fitment, assembly, and soon break-in. Just four years after stumbling through a rebuild hoping the engine would run at the end of it, I am now staring at the possibility of two rebuilt engines that are stronger than they were before I worked on them and that, because of that work, will last longer than I can probably imagine. The contrast makes me laugh at who I was then, and that person would likely laugh at me now, panicking over a fraction of a millimeter of additional valve seat width. Neither is more correct than the other: We were both just having fun making broken engines work again. Neither completely right nor completely wrong, just happy to be fixing things.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Eight Fresh Seats and Nowhere to Sit appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I often think about the bare minimum number of tools required to do a job. Not the ideal tools. Maybe it comes from watching Saturday morning TV shows, where everything took 10 minutes and fit together flawlessly. Watching those projects take shape encouraged me to pick up tools and try my own. But what do you need to just get started? 

If we waited until we had a full toolbox to dive in, none of us would ever get anything done. We’d just be sitting around staring at tools. Instead, let’s take a look at the tools that compose the minimum kit required to safely and successfully tackle a project on a daily driver—or at least allow you to do most of a job and then rent or borrow any specialty tools needed for to complete specific tasks. These don’t need to be fancy tools; in fact, this might be a list of items that are best purchased at garage sales, flea markets, or secondhand stores.

Jack and Stands

Sure, there are a lot of projects that do not require lifting a vehicle, but sooner or later you’ll need to do it. I’ve done oil changes by putting the front wheels on a curb to get enough clearance to roll under and access the drain plug and oil filter, but that practice doesn’t work in all situations. A jack and stands do. These are the right tools for every job that requires lifting a vehicle. That’s why they are something to get early in your wrenching journey.

Screwdrivers

Applied properly, screwdrivers have thousands of uses. We would never tell you to use them improperly, of course, but in a pinch a screwdriver can be used for all sorts of stuff that might very well render them one-time-only tools that, for better or for worse, will get the job done. Screwdrivers also can last a very long time if well taken care of, so adding these to your toolkit early will make for a solid base that rarely needs replacing, which leaves you with funds to buy more specialty tools to grow your kit—or you might just get through a handful of jobs without buying anymore tools at all. That’s a great feeling.

Socket Set

There is a reason every “mechanics toolset” sold in parts stores or home centers has sockets and ratchets as its main component. Ratchets and sockets are a highly efficient method of removing hardware without damaging it. A basic kit is enough to get started, and you can easily add bigger or longer pieces as needed.

Hammer

You thought I wouldn’t include the hammer? It’s an inarguable necessity. Judicious use will make for a better wrenching experience, but when force is required, a mass at the end of a stick is just the right tool for the job.

Multimeter

“If you can’t fix it with a hammer it’s an electrical problem” is a good joke, because occasionally it’s based in fact. Electrical issues are more common than ever as cars feature more and more sensors and connections. To be a mechanic and not a parts replacer requires diagnostic tools, and diagnosing electrical issues is difficult to do consistently with only your eyes and hands. A good multimeter—and understanding how to read it—is vital.

Drain Pan

Want to do an oil change? You’ll need to catch the used oil somehow. Even a makeshift catch pan is good idea, but many of the drain pans designed for automotive projects are affordable and have features that seem trivial, until you are without them: A pour spout makes emptying the pan easier, and the ability to seal the fluids inside for transport is helpful, too. An open container of used oil is just waiting to be knocked over. Or it’s a magnet for tools or parts or worse, a spark. A good drain pan makes jobs cleaner and safer.

Penetrating Oil

Cars are built from a couple dozen different materials and the vast majority of them are susceptible to corrosion. Penetrating oil helps limit the need for big tools like impact drivers. Is an aerosol can technically a tool? Maybe not, but a good can of penetrating oil should be something you reach for before grabbing tools, so we are going to say it’s a critical part of the toolkit. Besides, if you’re limited on tools, you want to be able to stack the deck in your favor, and that means trying to break fasteners loose using science rather than force.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 7 Tools You Basically Can’t DIY Without appeared first on Hagerty Media.

In late April, Larry Webster, he who brought me on briefly at Road & Track eleven years ago and then here at Hagerty, contacted me and asked for my help. It began with, “How far are you from Groton?” a question I can’t say I’ve ever been asked before.

The story was that the turn signal assembly (the housing and stalks) for Webster’s Ferrari Dino was being rebuilt by Unobtainium Supply Co., a one-man operation in Groton, Massachusetts, but it had been there for a year without completion. “I’ve talked to him every week for the past six, and it’s been a constant ‘one more step, about a day,’ but I’m starting to think it’s never going to get done,” Webster texted. “I might need you to do a rescue.”

The deeper story is that Webster has been restoring his 1975 Dino 308 GT4 (see part I and part II) for the past three years, and many things have gone wrong or gone long or gone over budget along the way. In addition, there were issues over and above the normal project delays, things like specialists passing away with Webster’s parts still in their possession. The project is nearing the point of the car being whole, so he really wants the turn signal assembly back, but he was beginning to fear that dark fate might strike a third time: He wondered if there was some personal situation, such as a poor turn of health, preventing the gentleman from getting the work done on the assembly. This is a fine line to walk. While you don’t want to be “that guy” who’s a pest in the middle of someone else’s hardship (as the saying goes, be kind—you never know what battles people are fighting), you’d also hate to lose an, um, unobtanium part if things went south.

“The turn signal assembly can be bought,” Webster texted, “but not the housing that is the bulk of the steering column. He is rebuilding #37 in this diagram (the stalks and switches). I can buy a new one which looks not original. That’s the situation I’m in. I would leave #37 with him, as it is useless to me and maybe one day he’ll finish. What I desperately need is #16, the cover.”

In subsequent texts, more frustration came out. “I’ve talked to him every week for the past six. Dude who owns the shop [Verell] is nice and his heart is in the right place, [but] I have no idea if he even knows the status of my switches, even though he’s said for a month ‘Just one more day to finish.’ 75% [of the time] when I call, I get voicemail. When he answers, he’s been great. I spoke with him Tuesday. He [says he’s] recovering from a cold and he’d email me the final estimate on Wednesday. No dice. I emailed back that I want to send somebody by to pick up my parts. No response. I’d appreciate someone simply knocking on the door and putting eyes to what is going on.”

Groton is a pleasant 50-minute drive for me, so I told Webster I was glad to hop in one of the fun cars and shoot out there and see what was what. He texted me “Operation: Save My Parts is now engaged!” along with a representative photo of the piece I needed to rescue.

So on a lovely day a few days after “OSMP” had officially commenced, I drove out to Groton in my white ’73 BMW 2002. The Ferrari sign on the garage indicated that I was clearly in the right place, but unfortunately, my door-knocking at both the garage and the front door went unanswered. I did run into a neighbor, who offered that Verell’s wife’s car was in the driveway but his wasn’t. I tactfully posed the question, “But he’s usually here, right?” and didn’t hear anything back that sounded like a personal crisis. I went into town, grabbed a bite to eat, came back, still no second car, still no one answering the door, though I did see what looked like a content well-cared-for cat through the side glass. I left a note in the mailbox, reported back to Webster, and headed home.

A week later, Webster texted me saying he’d still heard nothing from Verell, and was considering flying out to do an in-person intervention, or at least a friendly stalking.

“Let me try again,” I said. “Really, it’s no hardship for me to take another one of my cars through the twisties on the way back out to Groton.”

So I did, this time letting my ’79 Euro 635CSi enjoy the countryside (like I said, no hardship). And this time, to my surprise, Verell answered the door. I was suddenly face-to-face with a stocky late-70s-looking stone-faced gentleman in overalls. I explained who I was and why I was there, and said as non-confrontationally as possible that Larry Webster had asked me to collect the turn signal assembly for him in whatever condition it was in.

The terse response from Verell’s craggy New England face was, “He’s going to have to pay me first.”

“Um, just a minute,” I said. Figuring that being an intermediary might be more productive than simply dialing party #1 and handing my cell phone to party #2, I went out to the privacy of my car, called Webster, and said that I’d just had a face-to-face with Verell.

“No way!” Webster said. He was thrilled that I’d actually made contact.

Then I explained the “He’ll have to pay me first” part.

“I’ve tried to pay him several times,” he said with some degree of frustration. “I’ve asked for an invoice. I’ve offered half now and half when done. Whatever the delay is isn’t because of payment.”

Webster then repeated Plan B from our initial conversation: “See if you can just get the housing back. If he wants to keep working on the switch, that’s fine.”

I went back inside and proposed this to Verell. He softened a bit. “Well,” he said, “it’s not that simple. There’s a wiring harness that’s still attached to the housing. I have it pulled out just enough to work on the switch. It’s extra work to detach the harness from the housing. Besides,” he said, “I’m almost done. It’ll be done tonight, tomorrow at the latest.”

This was all cordial and to-the-point. I’m a sucker for cordial and to-the-point. I’m also a big fan of “it’s not that simple.” Tell me anything in a reasoned, experienced voice and I’ll believe it. And yet, Webster had sent the part to the guy a year ago, and had given me some pretty specific instructions regarding coming back with some physical goods. It was an awkward position to be in as a middleman.

“I don’t know any of the details of the housing and the switch,” I said, “but I wouldn’t want to cause you extra work.”

Then I joked, “Anything Ferrari-related is way above my pay grade anyway.” Verell’s stone face relaxed a bit.

Then I offered—truthfully: “I actually write for Larry’s magazine, so I owe him several favors. And, I don’t know if you know, but a lot has gone wrong with him putting this car back together. I’m just trying to help him out with this one small part of it.” This wasn’t any sort of a strategy, but afterwards I recalled reading that a technique for dealing with people in charge of their fiefdoms is to candidly explain your need and ask for their help, because deep down, people want to help, but they want you to ask and want to be acknowledged as helping.

“How about this,” I said. “Can you look me in the eye and tell me that it’ll be done in the next few days?”

Verell sighed, then looked me in the eye. “It’ll be done in the next few days, maybe even tonight or tomorrow,” he said. Then he added, “It’s the only thing I’m working on right now.”

“That’ll be a good thing for me to tell Larry,” I said. He smiled. I thanked him, we shook hands, I went back to the car, and reported all this to Webster with the recommendation that he give the gentleman a few more days.

A few evenings later, when I was eating dinner with my wife, I got a text from Webster. It said:

“WOOOOO HOOOOOOOO! I just got a bill from Verell, which I paid. He said he’ll ship it tomorrow. You could definitely be a hostage negotiator!”

Still, the fat turn signal assembly hadn’t sung yet. I recalled the scene in the movie Proof of Life where hostage rescuer Russell Crowe tells Meg Ryan and David Morse “Don’t you DARE celebrate until the wheels of the plane touch down in the United States.”

Five days later, Larry texted me: “Yayssssss! Thank you Rob!” With it was a photo that was not only proof of life, but proof of release.

So there you have it. My new third act in life. Rob Siegel: Hack unobtainium parts hostage negotiator. I’m certain there must be a few BMW 2002tii Kugelfischer mechanical-injection pumps out there in need of my services.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post My New Side Hustle: Hostage Negotiator for Captured Parts appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Adding tools to a home shop is a never ending affair. There are staples though and a drill press is one of them. It’s handy for a whole host of reasons other than just being more convenient to use for drilling compared to a hand drill, and if you follow these five tips you will find that you might use your drill press even more.

Not just for making holes

Jacobs chucks and the spindle bearings in a drill press are not designed for the kinds of side loads encountered when attempting to mill with a drill press. Even with the limitations, chucking a wire brush into your drill press can be very helpful in cleaning up small parts and hardware. This has gotten me by without owning a bench grinder with a wire wheel for years, though a wire wheel in a drill press is slower and less efficient.

Check your table for square

Drill presses are great in the way they eliminate the human error that creates wonky holes when drilling with cordless or corded drills. Well, it should. If you haven’t taken the time to adjust the table and ensure all the parts of your drill press are correct it’s likely not much of a step up from hand drilling.

It’s easy to check that the chuck is square to the work table is with a short section of round stock. Bend the stock into a pointer and hold it in the chunk then rotate it by hand to check where it does and does not contact the table. Adjust until even. It might be tempting to use a bubble level or similar, but the key here is that the chuck and table are positioned properly to each other, which a bubble level cannot tell you.

Get used to changing speeds

We know most people put the belts on the spindle to set the speed in the middle of it’s range and use that speed for everything from 1/8″ holes in aluminum to using large Forstner bits in wood. Does it work? Kind of, but proper speeds and feeds make for better and safer results. Maybe you shelled out big bucks for a variable speed machine, but most of us are getting by with a well-maintained vintage piece that has a belt and pulley system for changing the spindle speed.

It can be slightly cumbersome to swap out the belts and shuffle everything just to drill one or two holes and switch the belts again. That’s why it’s best to practice a few times on how to do the switch and make sure you keep the space avaliable to make the swap easier.

Get a decent vise and use it

As tempting as it is to leverage the “constantly set up” nature of a drill press by just putting a bit in the chuck and making a hole in your project, that comes with a surprising amount of risk. Bits can and will grab workpieces which can whip them out of hand and cause damage to the drill press, the stuff around it, and you. A simple vise will make drilling precision holes easier and safer. Even cheap import vises like this one are better than nothing if you are still searching for the right vintage one.

Consider upgrading chucks

The Jacobs chuck is all but ubiquitous for drilling, especially on vintage equipement. The design makes grabbing tooling quite easy but the need for a special key can be annoying while also opening up safety risk when users leave the key inserted in the chuck. Accidentally power up the machine with that key hanging on the chuck and it’s going to be a bad day.

Think about upgrading to a keyless chuck. Most drill presses use a Morse taper to hold the chuck in place, meaning swapping the chuck out for a keyless one that is easily tightened and loosened by hand take no more effort than knocking the keyed one out and matching the machine’s taper to a new chuck. No key to lose or forget, plus ease of use.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 5 Drill Press Tips and Tricks appeared first on Hagerty Media.

After recovering from my failed attempt to ream the new valve guides in my Honda XR250R cylinder heads with a few strong pours and a few days away from the garage, I found myself plopping said chunks of aluminum onto the counter of Thirlby Machine Shop. The man behind the counter told me not only that he didn’t have the tooling for the job, but also that the shop was not interested in buying it. But then we struck a deal. 

The valve guides in question are made of C63000 bronze and the manufacturer says the best tool for machining them is an adjustable diamond hone. If you ignore the incredible precision required to make the final product, the setup is relatively simple: a diamond abrasive fits into an attachment that can be driven by hand drill. The system is set up in two main parts: the drive head and the mandrel, the latter sized to the valve guides in question. My friendly local machine shop had the $450 drive head from a job a few years ago, but its assortment of mandrels did not include anything small enough for the 5.5mm required by the valve guides in the cylinder head of my Honda. The shop offered to loan me the driver head if I would purchase the $400 mandrel.

I know a good deal when I hear one. The proper mandrel arrived quickly, and I dove headlong into learning how to use an adjustable hone. The process became a bit intimidating after I read on machining forums that small-diameter mandrels can be delicate and, for a new user, tough starting points. Plus, I would be following the recommendations from the producer of the tooling only loosely: I would not have a pump to circulate the cutting oil, and my workpieces would not be solidly mounted. Knowing I could be lighting $400 on fire on a Saturday morning, I picked up the driver head from the machine shop and prepared my workbench. 

The tooling itself is a really sweet piece from Goodson. It has only one simple adjustment: a knob with four marks. Turning the adjuster clockwise a quarter turn from one reference mark to the next pushes the diamond stone out to contact the valve guide. Not so scary after all, then. The process was as follows: Retract the diamond stone to its lowest setting, insert stone and mandrel into valve guide, then adjust the stone to put light pressure on the guide. Attach a hand drill, flood the hone with cutting oil, run the drill through the guide in a handful of long, smooth strokes, retract the stone, remove the mandrel, measure the diameter of the valve guide. Simple, right?

Sure sounded like it, but it was also an oddly scary proposition since I was using two tools that were new to me, one of which was also borrowed. The diamond stone needed to be broken in at least a little—the manufacturer of the mandrel says the stone won’t really hit its stride till it has machined several hundred guides—so I put an old guide into my bench vise and used that to get a feel for how the day was going to go.

Holding a small squeeze bottle of oil in my left hand, I held a cordless drill in my right, plunging in and out of the guide at a nice steady pace while squeezing a steady steam of oil into the valve guide and keeping a keen feel for how much drag the hone had. Using the cordless drill made the process almost too easy; the hardest part was mentally adjusting to the fact that very glittery oil was, in this case, a positive thing.

Even in the slower speed setting, I didn’t have to run the drill wide-open to get a smooth feed, so no oil was slinging about the bench. To get the full stroke of the diamond stone, I had to make a small spacer for the cylinder head to sit on, which had the added benefit of keeping things cleaner, too.

It was a slightly hypnotizing process. The concentration required mixed with repetitive movements would have lulled me into honing away an entire guide if it weren’t for my fear of blowing past the perfect diameter for the valves.

When it came to measuring the progress of cutting, I felt as though I was getting crafty, but I was just being resourceful. A proper bore gauge for valve guides would be a one-trick pony in a stable of tools already overrun with horses for countless courses, so instead of buying a new tool to measure the inside diameter of the guide, I used one of the pilots from my valve seat cutting kit. The pilot has a very mellow taper that is meant to center and lightly wedge it in the valve guide, and by fitting the pilot into the valve guide, and noting how far it extended into the guide, I could figure out where I was at in the machining process and how much material I had left to remove. Once I reached a point where the valve stem would insert through the guide, I made a final pass to machine a nice slip fit that will keep these valves running smoothly for what I hope to be hundreds, if not thousands, of hours.

After the first four valve guides, I had the process just about locked in. The second cylinder head took a fraction of the time and the results were likely slightly better. Now that these heads have smooth valve action, the next step in prepping them is mating the valves to their seats. A proper three-angle valve job is the only acceptable way to do that, so the next installment of this series will be getting the seats cut and some final prep items before I make the final preparations for installing the valves and closing up two engines that have been haunting my workbench for over a year. The sound of them popping to life is so close, yet so far away.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Diamonds Are an Amateur Machinist’s Best Friend appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Alan writes:

I have an original Ford Taurus SHO from 2010. Your recent comments on cheap plastic parts hit home. Within about three years, I noticed that the “chrome” surrounding both taillight lens covers were peeling.

On later models, Ford didn’t bother with this detail, apparently it just wasn’t worth it.

The chrome peeled about halfway around the taillights, then stopped. The part that remains sticks well and won’t come off, so I’m left with an ugly taillight that is rare and low enough volume as to be considered an orphan. Is there an option to re-chrome plastic?

Sajeev answers:

The short answer is yes, some chrome shops are equipped to re-chrome plastic trim. While you might not find one locally, there’s always the option to pull the offending item off the vehicle, stuff it in a box, and ship it off to a specialized shop.

But the short answer is also the wrong answer, in the case of a 2010 Ford Taurus SHO. I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer a better alternative.

Take it from this NOS Ford parts huntin’ fool with a Project Valentino: Finding Ford replacement parts online or from NOS parts vendors is a wiser move. Just because the dealership says it’s no longer available doesn’t mean the parts aren’t collecting dust elsewhere. They are hidden in remote corners of the internet, while the intended recipients are depreciating themselves right into the junkyard. It is the opposite of low volume, high demand vehicles like a Porsche 911: I still feel a smidge guilty for speaking this truth in another Hagerty article, as it feels like rubbing salt in their wounds.

The first thing you need is a part number, like BG1Z13404A for the right side tail lamp. Plop that into a search on eBay Motors. If you don’t find what you need (at a fair price) immediately, make that a saved search in your account and get notified for new inventory by email.

We got lucky with this particular part. Only $90 with free shipping for a bit that’s new in the box? Sign me up, and never think about re-chroming again. You can expect freshly plated chrome to be more than double the price, and that might be me being generous.

But let’s say eBay Motors brought you no joy. It’s then time to check the NOS vendors just waiting for you to Google them. Here’s the link, and you’ll find the most luck if you scroll down to Green Sales, Inc. first. They have the most stuff, and are a well-kept secret for Ford nerds. (Sorry about that, Ford nerds.)

Here’s the important thing to keep in mind: This advice changes if Alan was restoring something like the little chrome strip around the top of the dash of a 1969 Dodge Charger. But for a 2010 Taurus SHO owner? The world is your oyster: The Internet will serve up just about anything you need. From there all it takes is a phone call or a few mouse clicks to seal the deal.

I’d wish you good luck finding new tail lights with fresh chrome, but I have a feeling you don’t need it!

Have a question you’d like answered on Piston Slap? Send your queries to pistonslap@hagerty.com—give us as much detail as possible so we can help! Keep in mind this is a weekly column, so if you need an expedited answer, please tell me in your email.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Piston Slap: No Bull on Sourcing a NOS Part vs. Refinishing the Original appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The three critical systems of a car, in order of importance, are: Steering, brakes, and the drivetrain. If you question this ordering think no further than how many times you have heard someone tell stories of driving a vehicle with no brakes. I’ve never heard a story of someone intentionally driving a vehicle that had no steering.

Now that we agree that steering is critical, we therefore also all agree that maintaining your steering components is important. For those of the DIY proclivity it is a relatively simple system to understand and work on. To get you started, here are five tips for tackling the system of tie-rods, drag links, and idler arms, steering boxes, and pitman arms.

Check your threads

There aren’t many areas on a car where left- and right-hand threads are mixed together in an assembly. Steering is one of them. With modern impact tools capable of twisting the threads right off a nut or bolt, going the proper direction is important because you might not get a second chance. Trace the threads with your finger or a pick to confirm if “righty tighty, lefty loosey” still applies.

Careful with your castles

While it sounds like advice pulled from a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook, it’s also true for cars. Castle nuts get their name from the crenellations cut into the top which allow the use of cotter keys to keep the nuts from turning. They work well too, but unfortunately, they are often relatively delicate. Failing to get a socket fully seated can easily strip a castle nut, and a misplaced hammer blow can deform it enough that it will be difficult to remove. If you need to use a hammer for persuasion on one of these, remove it completely, flip it over, and thread it back on. This gives you a flat surface to hit with a hammer that will also not damage the threads.

Get the special puller

There are a couple of tight-fitting joints on the steering components. This means getting things apart can be frustrating—but it doesn’t have to be. Buying a proper ball joint press or pitman arm puller can be a steep investment considering this work is not done weekly or even monthly for most at-home DIY’ers.

Luckily most chain auto parts stores are happy to rent the special tools to people like you and me. This often requires putting down the full price and getting a refund upon returning the tools, but compared to the frustration of using the wrong tools the hold on some of my cash is very much worth it. Be sure to find proper instructions on use online as the rental tools rarely include them.

Match the new tie rods to the old ones

Nearly everything in your steering system has some form of adjustment, and the most critical and obvious are the tie rods. While it is possible to just assemble them and ignore the horrible toe in or out just long enough to get to the alignment shop, your alignment guy is going to like you a lot more if you take the minute to thread the new tie rods together to roughly the same length as the one being removed. This puts the adjustment in the ballpark and also makes the drive to the alignment shop much more pleasant.

Assemble with anti-seize

The hardworking components of your steering system are sitting on the underside of your car under constant assault from every size and type of road debris. Water, road salt, dirt, rocks, and radical temperature changes can supercharge the hold of corrosion on threaded parts. A dab of anti-seize goes a long way in keeping this at bay. It will also help the parts last longer as there is the option of doing a second alignment later. Ask anyone who has argued with stubborn, crusty tie rods and you’ll learn that anti-seize can be the small difference between a routine job and testing your patience while mangling tie rod sleeves.

Don’t forget the cotter pins

Torquing hardware to spec determines both clamping pressure and helps keep things from loosening up. Because many of the parts in a steering system see a rotational movement that could potentially loosen the threaded fasteners, many steering components have the additional positive retention of a cotter key going through the bolt and castle nuts to keep them from turning. Aligning the castle nut to the hole through the bolt can be annoying, but it’s an important step to keep your steering from unintentionally coming apart. No one wants that.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 5 Tips When Replacing Steering Components on Your Project Car appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It’s one thing to win a competition with an unlimited budget. It’s quite another to bring home top honors when you’ve got a strict cap on what you can spend. In this circumstance, it’s usually the most innovative and creative competitor that prevails, and Material Girls Racing proved that in this year’s Grassroots Motorsports $2000 Challenge. The team, made up of four high school seniors, evolved their vehicle over years of competition and came up with a winning formula that just happens to wear a Ford Ranger body.

This pink pickup actually sits on a 2013 Ford Taurus Police Intercepter chassis and is powered by a twin-turbo V-6 that sends power to all four wheels. The team says in a forum post that the police interceptor’s Ecoboost factory turbos and fuel pump are maxed out, which means there’s somewhere in the range of 400 hp on tap. It’s no slouch.

The project came together for the Grassroots Motorsports $2000 challenge, which pits builders against each other with a budget cap of $2024 (it goes up $1 each year to match the calendar). The event scores participants by quarter mile and autocross times, along with a concours presentation that allows judges to discuss how the cars are built with the people who turned the wrenches.

Material Girls Racing are repeat participants in the $2000 Challenge. Their ongoing pursuit of speed was the impetus for the body swap—they maxed out the heavy stock Taurus in last year’s competition. Budget constraints made finding more power in the Ecoboost difficult, and suspension tuning would have been another heavy spend. Tight purse strings meant the team had to get creative, so they took a page from Colin Chapman’s book and focused on adding lightness. Even after last year’s competition where the car ran almost fully stripped and only sporting the driver’s door, there was still a lot of weight that could be trimmed and still fit inside the rules for the competition.

After figuring out what models could match the Taurus’ wheelbase, the team found a $300 Ford Ranger on Facebook Marketplace. They got to work with sawzalls and other cutting implements, trimming away the Taurus’ unibody until a tractor could help drop the shell of the truck on top of what was left of the chassis. A roll bar tied to the Taurus chassis adds stiffness back into the structure. After lengthening a few panels and relocating the radiator to the bed of the truck, the team sprayed the Ranger in a coat of pink paint. According to the team, their efforts ended up shaving an impressive 900 pounds from the vehicle’s weight.

The team says they were inspired by Shirley Muldowney and other female legends of motorsport, and we think these Material Girls would have made Shirley and others proud by building a truck that not only looks pretty sweet but also performs incredibly well. The truck ran a 12.1-second quarter mile (enough for sixth overall out of 53 competitors) and completed the autocross with a 44.3-second time (good for ninth overall). It also posted with a solid “concours” score, and their performance across all disciplines was enough to put these high school seniors atop the leaderboard, narrowly edging out a 1990 Nissan 300ZX and 1985 Chevrolet Corvette.

As all four members of the team are about to graduate high school, squeezing in a first-place build in among schoolwork, college applications, and the rest of their busy schedules had to have been quite a feat. With the creativity, speed, and skill they showed with this project, we wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see one or all of these young women on a Formula SAE team in the near future—it’s probably a safe bet that this isn’t the last time we’ll see them in motorsports.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post How 4 Teens Won GRM’s $2000 Challenge in a Low-Buck “Truck” appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I’ve written numerous pieces about storing five of my cars in a warehouse in Monson, on the Massachusetts/Connecticut border. The advantage is that it’s cheap—$70/month per car. But the disadvantages are substantial: It’s an hour and ten minutes from my house if there’s zero traffic (which is rare); I have to coordinate access with the owner; my cars are blocked in over the winter by RVs, boats, and trailers; there’s no electricity; and a particularly rainy summer last year caused mildew problems. Last fall, I did a full-on desiccant attack, putting two DampRid containers in each car, plus an industrial desiccant brick used on cargo vessels to help prevent “container rain.” I hadn’t been out there since November and was waiting for the big rigs to vacate the premises so I could deal with the fleet.

At a bare minimum, all five of the cars needed inspection stickers and the desiccant refilled. I expected them all to have needs. I didn’t expect what was perilously close to a full-on revolt.

First on the list was “Lolita” the ’74 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special. She’d actually been sitting out there since September. I’d finally gotten the car registered in Massachusetts (a long story I’ll tell another time) and was anxious to get her inspected and back home.

The lack of electricity in the warehouse means I can’t put the batteries in the cars on trickle chargers. I used to pull the batteries out and bring them home for the winter, or move a good battery around between cars, but my back no longer allows that. However, my experience has generally been that if I simply unplug the negative battery cables, when I return three months later, the cars usually start up, and if not, I have a battery jump pack I use. The hour-plus drive home usually does a decent job of recharging the battery, and if not, I have chargers and battery testers at the house. Of course, when three months turns to six, things can be more difficult, but the Lotus started up fairly easily.

While the car was idling, I put it through its inspection paces and found nothing wrong. But inspection notwithstanding, part of my post-storage procedure is to check all fluids as well as look under each car for leaks, both stationary and running. I shined a flashlight beneath it and saw fluid dripping into a spreading puddle. I shut the car off and swiped a paper towel through the puddle.

Gas. Damn.

Even under the best of circumstances, fuel leaks are something one should have zero tolerance for, and things are worse on the Lotus, because any leaks from the Stromberg carburetors or the lines feeding them drip directly onto the starter motor, which gives me the heebie-jeebies about restarting the car until I’ve waited long enough that any fuel has evaporated. Plus, for all the just-in-case stuff I’ve accumulated in the trunk of my BMW Bavaria in Monson (tools, paper towels, oil, coolant, jumper cables, starter fluid, etc.), I didn’t have a fire extinguisher. So, everything ground to a halt, especially the idea of getting the car inspected.

If I couldn’t diagnose and repair the source of the leak there, I’d need to tow the car home. It turned out to be coming from the two plastic plugs in the bottoms of the Strombergs’ float bowls. I did a little searching on my phone and learned that the leak is fairly common in Stromberg-equipped British and Swedish cars and can be stanched by simply replacing the O-ring. I unscrewed one bowl, gently squeezed the plug’s plastic prongs together, and popped it out. Suddenly, it seemed that I could rescue my get-the-Lotus-inspected-then-drive-it-home plans by going to a nearby hardware store and matching up the O-rings. Unfortunately, when I tried to pull the 50-year-old O-ring off the 50-year-old plastic plug, one of the prongs broke off in my hand.

Okay. No inspection for Lolita today. There were still four other cars in the queue. I turned my attention to “Sharkie,” the ’79 BMW Euro 635CSi. Like Lolita, Sharkie started up easily when I reconnected its battery. Unfortunately, when I went through the inspection checklist, I found that something was wrong in the handbrake lever’s ratchet—it wouldn’t stay seated. A non-functional handbrake is a certain inspection fail. I pulled up the rubber boot and found that the anchoring bracket for the ratchet had broken off from the transmission hump.

I decided to cut that day’s warehouse adventures short and beat it home in Sharkie, where I had the equipment necessary to fix the handbrake ratchet.

I thought about welding the bracket back in place, but although I own a welder, my skills are poor, and I wasn’t certain if I needed to pull up the carpet, which would be fairly involved. So instead, I settled on pop-riveting the bracket. Three drilled holes and three rivets later, and the job was done, and I got Sharkie stickered.

The plugs for the Strombergs were plentiful enough online that I searched for the lowest-cost vendor (about $18 per plug), clicked, and waited for the shipping confirmation. Unfortunately, the following day, the vendor called me to say that the plugs were out of stock. I then stepped through four vendors in increasing order of cost, calling each one, and finding that they too were out of stock. I eventually climbed to the top of the cost curve and called the venerable Moss Motors in Virginia, from whom, shipped to my house, the two plastic plugs and O-rings set me back 80 bucks. As they say, sometimes you just have to pay the man (or woman).

With float bowl plugs and a fire extinguisher in tow, I piloted Sharkie back out to Monson and again had at Lolita. I snapped the first plug into the already-removed float bowl and reinstalled it.

Since there was no downside if I broke the second original plug, I pried it out of the second bowl without needing to drop it. It came out easily, and I replaced it with the second new one. I re-checked the fuel lines, and with the fire extinguisher at the ready, started the car. No leaks. The Lotus appeared ready for inspection.

I took the car to a nearby inspection station and parked it in front of the service bay like you’re supposed to. The six-foot-tall inspector came out and stared suspiciously at Lolita. I ran down the car-specific details: “The horn button’s not in the middle of the steering wheel; it’s under the dash and to the left. The headlight switch is to the right. You have to pull it out and then turn it clockwise. The wiper and high beam stalks are very fragile. Oh, and you literally need to take off your right shoe to move the car, otherwise you’ll hit the gas and brake pedal at the same time.”

The inspector in this very small town, who, to put it mildly, doesn’t see a lot of Lotus Europas, was not happy with this. He barked “I don’t even think I can get in the (bleep)ing thing. Just drive it in and do the lights-wipers-horn for me.” They’re supposed to drive it in, not you, but I complied. Then, for the jack-up-the-front-wheels-and-check-for-play test, I handed him a hockey puck and told him exactly where to position it and the jack so he didn’t tear up the fiberglass, but advised that the car is so low that if he didn’t have a low-rise jack, he might not be able to get it under the car at all. Rather than take my head off, though, he seemed to warm to my thoroughness and my knowledge of my own car, and offered that they have a similar issue with Corvettes. The Lotus emerged without damage and with a Massachusetts inspection sticker. I celebrated with Lolita’s first-ever fully-legal drive—five miles to the CT border and back.

With Lolita finally stickered, I turned my sights on the three early 1970s BMWs in the warehouse. First was “Louie” the ’72 2002tii (the Ran When Parked car). Its reconnected battery barely had enough juice for two cranks, but the jump pack got it started. While warming it up, I didn’t see any leaking fluids but was astonished to find the brake fluid reservoir essentially empty. The level was down past the feed to the clutch cylinders, so any leakage had to be coming from the brake hydraulics. I crawled under the car with a flashlight and double-checked to see if any fluids were leaking down the tires, and found none.

Then I remembered: This same thing happened last year. At that time, I refilled the reservoir, hammered on the brakes, took the car for a short drive, found no leakage, carefully drove the car home while stopping several times to check, made it without incident, and tried to diagnose the problem. Leak-free vanishing of brake fluid typically means that it’s going into the brake booster, but I dipped a long zip tie down into it and it came up dry. At some point, I put the car back in the warehouse. Here I was, a year later, faced with exactly the same situation, reinforcing the adage that problems like this rarely cure themselves. For now, I did the eyes-on-the-prize thing and simply got the car inspected. The vanishing-brake-fluid-mystery will again have to wait.

Next was “Bertha,” the heavily patinated, massively modified ’75 2002 that my wife and I drove off from our wedding. Even with the negative terminal disconnected, its battery was drained down to 10.5 volts, so the starter solenoid didn’t even click until I connected the jump pack. As I thought about it, I realized I hadn’t rotated Bertha out of Monson and brought it back to my house in a couple of years, so the car didn’t have the benefit of a highway drive to recharge the battery, just an annual run to the CT border and back, so the dead battery didn’t surprise me.

The low brake-fluid reservoir, however, did. This one was down just slightly below the clutch line, indicating that the leak was likely in the clutch hydraulics.

As with Louie, I didn’t see any evidence of fluid beneath the car, so the issue wasn’t acute. It was probably coming from the clutch master and going into the pedal box, but post-1974 2002s like Bertha have a one-piece carpet, so peeling it back to check isn’t trivial. So, as with Louie, I left the mystery for another day. I filled the reservoir, made sure the car wasn’t peeing fluid, and got it inspected. The inspector had warmed to me to the point that he was kind enough to leave Bertha running during the inspection so I wouldn’t need to re-jump the car. Then I tried to take it for the same five-mile-to-the-CT-border run I did with the Lotus, but I quickly found that it ran absolutely horribly. Whenever I bring Bertha home, I may need to do so on a rented U-Haul auto transporter, which would be good in that it’ll help justify the existence of the Nissan Armada.

That left just the ’73 BMW Bavaria. Its battery was the deadest of the bunch, discharged down to a damaging 9 volts. Like Bertha, this was due to the car not having been driven further than to the CT border and back last year. The Bav has typically been hard to start after a winter-long sit, as the original mechanical fuel pump takes a while to fill the Webers’ float bowls. I usually go out there with an electric fuel pump I use to prime the bowls, but I’d forgotten it. No matter, I thought—I keep a can of starting fluid in the trunk for just this purpose. Unfortunately, when I tried squirting it down the throats, I found that the can had no propellant left in it.

I could’ve run to the AutoZone one town over for starting fluid, but I elected instead to put the time into changing the DampRid in all five cars. This process—bringing the two containers from each car outside the warehouse, dumping the water and the desiccant, cleaning the containers, and refilling them—is surprisingly time-consuming. By the time I was done, it was almost 3 p.m., and any window I had for driving the Lotus home before rush hour had vanished (hey, you drive a car with all the crashworthiness of a Pringles can in stop-and-go traffic and see how you feel).

So the Bavaria’s inspection and Lolita’s long journey back home would need to wait until next week, during which I could do some serious thinking about why I continue to own these cars that I’m not driving further than to the inspection station and a 5-mile romp into Connecticut and back.

Of course, it doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post My Cars in Storage Are Revolting (Part I) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The most basic understanding of an engine centers around how air flows through it. Air gets drawn in, compressed with fuel, then pushed out. The idea is simple enough, but the physics behind it are incredibly complex. Decades of debates have turned half-truths into facts, and Banks Power has swooped in to correct the record and clarify a few of the myths, specifically about exhaust, that have been parroted for a long time.

I know these myths exist and can catch anyone, because I have been guilty of saying things like “an engine needs some exhaust backpressure” with a straight face myself. I’ve since learned better but the books that taught me aren’t as illustrative and clear as this Banks video breaking down the ins-and-out of exhaust backpressure.

Backpressure is created by any restrictions or impediments to the flow of exhaust gases on their journey from the combustion chamber to the tip of the tailpipe. Some are necessary, like bends in the exhaust to route around suspension or running gear, while others are not required but sure are nice, like mufflers or turbochargers. Backpressure is nearly unavoidable but can also be leveraged for our benefit. The force to push exhaust gas out from the combustion chamber comes from the power stored in the crankshaft, and short of somehow creating a vacuum that pulls the exhaust out (we’ll get to scavenging in a minute), there will always be a little power loss from expelling exhaust gases.

Which means the attempt might be to eliminate backpressure but the reality is trying to minimize it. Maybe that is where the myth of needing a little resistance comes from. Banks theorizes that the myth started with exhaust salesmen in the 1950s who were tasked with selling mufflers that were more restrictive than stock and said anything to make the sale. Could this have worked and worked well enough that people are still repeating it 70 years later? Maybe. We may never know.

What we do know for certain is that backpressure is not needed and cleaning up the path of exhaust flow is a relatively easy way to free up some horsepower. A well designed exhaust will actually use the pulses of hot gases to help evacuate other cylinders which allows even more efficient running. This is called scavenging and is actually negative backpressure. It can be great, but takes a lot of engineering to achieve. Log style manifolds will never have this, and most affordable header designs don’t do it either. Banks has a great bench-top demonstration of how a header can scavenge.

So, is backpressure needed? Short answer, no. It’s not always the lowest hanging fruit to freeing up power, but if you get into tuning your engine on a long enough timeline you will probably end up thinking long and hard about your exhaust. I know I did and am currently enjoying an increase in performance along with the great sound.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Is All Exhaust Backpressure Bad? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Valve guides are a very hardworking part of internal combustion engines. These small bearings keep the poppet valves moving freely and center them in their seats. Valve guides play a large part in the impressive longevity of valves and cylinder heads in modern, high-rpm engines. Perhaps due to their relatively low rate of failure, valve guides are not brought up much in discussions between mechanics. This might have been why I decided to replace the valve guides on my Honda XR250R motorcycle engines at home. It did not go smoothly.

How Hard Can It Be?

In the simplest terms, a valve guide is not much more than the precisely sized sleeve that holds the intake or exhaust valve in the cylinder head. To make manufacturing easier, guides are often made from a material different than that of the cylinder head and pressed into place within it. That press-fit often means that the final inside diameter of the guide needs to be machined to a proper slip fit of the valve after the guide is pressed into the head. Valves, guides, and cylinder heads are each manufactured to a range of tolerances, and those tiny variations can add up to be problematic; machining the guides with those pieces assembled essentially allows you to correct for those flaws when they would potentially be at their worst.

In the aluminum cylinder heads on my Honda XR250Rs, the valve guides are machined from bronze. For the last two engines built on my bench, I had the cylinder heads done by in outside shop but selected C63000 bronze valve guides for their durability. The C63000 formula includes bronze, nickel, and aluminum, a combination that makes the material very stable at higher temperatures, such as those that the cylinder head of an air-cooled dirt bike sees during slow-speed, low-airflow trail slogs.

All that is fine and dandy, but this alloy is also really difficult to machine. The same traits that make this metal hold up well in an engine make it difficult to make the small cuts that bring the inside diameter of the valve guide to that perfect fit with the valve stem. We are getting ahead of ourselves, though; before we make things the right size, we have to get things assembled.

Installing the Guides

This is actually the easiest step in the process on these heads; it only requires a little patience. The first step with anything related to building an engine is cleanliness, so I kicked things off with a deep scrub after putting the valve guides into the freezer on Friday night. After breakfast on Saturday I popped the bare cylinder head in the toaster oven for a little pre-heating. The temperature differential made the guides shrink ever so slightly in outside diameter while the bores in the cylinder head expanded ever so slightly to make the job of driving the guides into place just a little easier. For all the precision work that happens as part of this process, this step requires nothing but brute force, a big hammer, and a special driver to prevent damaging the guides.

First Attempt at Reaming

One of the things that is virtually always free and saves so much stress in doing projects like this is simply finding, reading, understanding, and following the instructions that come with the products you are using. There is something addictive about the feeling of successfully reverse-engineering the thing without needing the instructions, but as fun as that is, reading the instructions also keeps you from making ignorant moves. I’ll let you guess which route I took when it came to my high-speed reamer.

A high-speed steel reamer is the cheapest way to size valve guides, because reamers are single-size, but a fluted reamer is not the correct tool to size the C63000 guides I purchased: The manufacturer tells you as much if you take the time to find the information on their website. I didn’t, and on my first attempt, the guide dulled the reamer, got hot, and grabbed the reamer in a hug like your grandma used to give you—tight, and potentially inseparable.

Separating the two was not even worth the effort. The reamer was a total loss and so was the guide. They will live on as an artistic reminder to do the damn research. After consulting the valve guide manufacturer with an inquiry regarding the method or process they recommend, I learned that my plan to save any money on this project was gone. Learning costs money sometimes, but the $2200 in tooling that the manufacturer suggested was a tough pill to swallow. Two grand would have been about the total cost to have a pro handle these heads completely—not just the guides, but everything—and the project would have been done four weeks ago.

With my tail between my legs, I set these two cylinder heads on the oily front desk of the local machine shop. Joey, the man behind the counter, took one look at them and said, “Nope.” He denied the work not because he didn’t want to do it, or because I wouldn’t pay his price, but because his shop didn’t have the tooling for the teeny, tiny valve guides used in the XR250R. Most of the engines this machine shop sees are traditional V-8s which have valve stems significantly larger than the 5.5-mm toothpicks in these Hondas.

I was in a bind. Luckily, Joey’s advice was free, and the machine shop did have a solution, or at least part of one., It wasn’t going to come easily or cheaply, though. Joey and I put a replacement valve guide on order, along with a new tool. When the mail truck drops it all off, it’ll be time to try again… this time, significantly more prepared. You know, like I should have been the first time. Even the tasks that appear the simplest—remember, all of this was to make eight 0.216-inch holes for valves to slide into—are rarely what they seem, and occasionally we need to be reminded of that.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post When Ignorance Costs You Both Money and Time appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I hadn’t had my ’57 Corvette long before it helped me accumulate a couple of tickets and a one-month license suspension. It was the kind of car that encouraged exuberance, and as a teenager in a car-crazy era, I couldn’t get enough of it.

Naturally, I used that enforced break from driving to modify my ‘Vette. I started by investing summer-job money in a Duntov cam and a set of solid lifters. Next came a manual gearbox. I couldn’t afford to swap in a four-speed, so I settled for a three-speed and paid a mechanic to install it and its clutch mechanism.

Then, once my license was restored and the ‘Vette was ready, a friend and I picked it up from the shop and test drove it out of town. We headed for a long, straight stretch of divided parkway with no houses or traffic where someone had painted 1/4-mile start and finish lines on the eastbound side. We wanted to try a fun run, so approaching that section on the westbound side, just cruising in third, I decided to punch it without downshifting to see how it pulled from low rpm. I was watching the road, not the speedometer, but we were likely up to 90 or so (in a 35-mph zone) before I backed off and braked for the stop at the next intersection.

When we got there, a pair of angry cops were waiting. “Do you know how fast you were going, kid?” one growled angrily. “No, officer,” I grinned, thinking they had merely heard the engine at high rpm and didn’t really have anything on me. I was not about to confess.

“We clocked you at 80,” he snarled. “Let me see your license.” It turned out they had radar hidden halfway down the road (unusual at the time) and were monitoring it from the corner. “Is that as fast as that car will go?” one officer sarcastically enquired while his partner was writing maybe the best ticket of his career. “Yeah … in first gear,” I snarked.

Before this ‘Vette, I had a well-used ’57 MGA, which was cool for school but slow, unreliable, and a little rusty. I lusted for something cooler and quicker and started threatening to trade it for an older Corvette. I even checked out a couple of not-so-cherry ‘54s and ‘55s.

My folks were not wealthy, but my father, a Nebraska farmer’s son, loved cars and was a skilled driver who had wheels as a kid. He believed his sons should, too. His affinity included Corvettes, and on a business trip to Detroit, he found this nice ‘57—a black base car with a detachable hardtop, a 245-horse twin-four-barrel 283-cubic inch V-8 and a Powerglide two-speed automatic. He talked the seller down to $1500 and brought it home. So, as a car-loving high-school senior, I ended up with the only Corvette around. Truly bad-ass!

Not only did the Corvette encourage my assertive driving habits, it also brought out my creativity, serving as a blank canvas that my teenage car-crazy self couldn’t help but personalize. When the inevitable big ticket that came after my 80-mph test run earned me a second license suspension, this time for three long months, I decided I would use the time off to customize my ‘Vette.

Growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I had always had a thing for customized cars. I lusted over the best ones in magazines and built plastic car models with every cool modification I could manage. Why not apply that (questionable) skill to my own set of wheels? In those days, it was just a used sports car, not yet a coveted collectible.

I started by painting white racing stripes nose-to-tail. Then I removed every other tooth from the grille and blacked out its horizontal bar, leaving half as many teeth floating twice as far apart in the oval opening. I thought that was a good look for a toothy C1 Corvette (and still do). I also pulled off both front and rear license-plate brackets and the rear-fender chrome trim and added twin antennas, custom (’68 Olds wagon) taillamp lenses, and triple (’64 Pontiac Tempest) chrome strips in the coves. I also installed short lake pipes with removable caps, which tended to drag on driveway ramps and break off every week or two.

We didn’t have an abundance of aftermarket alloy wheels way back then, but we did have hubcaps. I tried chrome “moon” discs for a while, then switched to spun aluminum “racing” discs. Tire choices were limited to black- or whitewall bias-ply, and I didn’t have money for new ones anyway. The ho-hum, half-tread set of whitewalls that came on it would have to do.

I two-toned the orangey-red dash and seats, the latter with white upholstery paint, then paid a body shop to Bondo chrome exhaust tips into the rear fenders. Finally, I painted the inside of the trunk white and sweet-talked my visiting artist cousin into painting a cartoon skunk in there because we had christened my newly striped and customized ‘Vette “Li’l Stinkie.”

The doors and dash did look better painted white, but it wasn’t long before the paint on the seats began to crack and look awful, so I bought a set of seat covers to hide them. And the tightly restrained exhausts soon vibrated through the Bondo. Otherwise, I thought it looked pretty good. And it got a new white convertible top, which our family cat walked all over leaving indelible paw prints on it the first night it was home. I love animals but never liked that cat.

Because it still had the numerically low axle ratio that came with the Powerglide automatic, it was incredibly long-legged, good for 65 mph in first, over 100 in second and I don’t know what in third. I pushed it to 100 a couple times where I thought it was safe but had the good sense never to exceed that speed.

I even took it to the local drags one Sunday and won a trophy. It was a bit of a dog off the line, but while the other cars with their numerically high gear ratios were already in fourth halfway down the strip, Li’l Stinkie and I were cruising by in second gear just before the finish. Hilarious!

It also nearly killed me more than once. It suddenly slid sideways on a wet curvy four-lane during Friday rush-hour traffic on my way home from my summer construction job. I caught the slide and avoided getting battered, but that was a scary lesson for a teenager.

Scarier still was a near disaster on the night of my senior prom. After dropping girlfriend Marty home, I stupidly decided to try a late-night run on that makeshift drag strip. Well into second gear, a large dog suddenly appeared in my headlamps trotting down the middle of the road. I jammed on the brakes and swerved to miss it, which sent me into a series of left-right-left tank slappers.

Very fortunately, I knew enough even at 17 to understand that getting off the brakes would help me regain control, so I did and somehow avoided both the dog and the high curbs that likely would have flipped me into the puckerbrush on either side of the road. Whew!!! I was probably wearing the Sears seatbelt I had bought and installed but had no roll bar to keep the car off my head if it went belly up. Another very scary lesson—one I wouldn’t forget.

When it came time for college, my ‘Vette had to go because my dad needed the money. But my customization had badly damaged its value. “Your son pretty much ruined that car,” one dealer told him. Another who specialized in used Corvettes finally bought it for $1,200, as I recall. Years later, I encountered that guy working as a salesman at a different dealership and asked whether he remembered Li’l Stinkie. “Hell, boy,” he said, “I lost my ass on that car!”

Looking back, modifying that future classic was a major collector Corvette sacrilege, but this was an era before phrases like “matching numbers” and “period-correct” had much significance. In the moment, Li’l Stinkie embodied my car-crazy tastes, and I don’t think I’d change a thing.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Adventures in My High-School-Cool Custom ’57 Corvette appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Snow-wise, it was an exceedingly mild winter here in Boston. A few weeks ago, I put away the snow blower and rid myself of the winter wheels and rubber. Doing so on both my and my wife’s daily drivers (my 2003 BMW E39 530i manual and her 2013 Honda Fit manual, respectively) is always a joy because the winter rubber just kills the handling on both cars. The BMW, in particular, is wearing a set of used brand X snows that make it feel like it’s cornering on water balloons. Once the three-season rubber is on, it feels like we’re both driving slot cars again.

As I’ve said before, a side benefit to the seasonal wheel swap is that you can give the car a well checkup, particularly under the engine. After all, with the nose in the air, you can skooch under and see what fluids are amassing. In particular, I always look for the tell-tale drips of antifreeze doing the canary-in-a-coal-mine thing, before a water pump or a thermostat grenades.

The other big part of the front-end checkup is to look for play in the steering and wheel bearings. Sit in front of the wheel and grab the tire at 6 and 12 o’clock and pull with one hand while you push with the other. Any play pretty much has to be coming from the wheel bearings. Then do the same at 3 and 9 o’clock. If there was no wheel bearing play, then play here is from the steering, which includes the outer and inner tie rods and whatever other steering components there are. On a car with a steering rack, the play can be internal. On an older car with a steering box, play can be coming from the box, from the center link, or from the idler.

Having said that, it’s rare I find steering or suspension issues during one of these checkups that I wasn’t already aware of by driving the car. I’m usually pretty attuned to wandering steering or thunks and clunks. Of course, as the guy who found two broken springs in the front end of his Armada, I may not have my credibility jar topped off.

Enter the steering check of the 2003 E39 530i, where the 3-and-9-o’clock test revealed substantial play that was easily isolated to the right outer tie rod. When I found it, I recalled that the car did have a bit of a mild clunking sound from the front end, but whether I’d been in denial or whether it was a case of the frog in the slowly heating water pot, it just hadn’t crept onto my radar. I’ve long made a distinction between ball joints and tie rods in terms of urgency of repair, because ball joints sit at the bottom of the struts or wishbone assemblies and thus take all the pothole pounding, whereas tie rods are steering components rather than suspension components and thus are spared much of the violence. On modern cars with camber-maintaining front suspensions, however, the line between the two is blurred. Nonetheless, having found a clearly worn-out tie rod, the thing to do was change it posthaste. I put the E39 up on the mid-rise lift so I wouldn’t be tempted to drive it.

Next, I went inside, sat at the laptop, searched for parts, and put a pair of Lemforder tie-rod assemblies on order. Why Lemforder? I’m virtually certain they’re the manufacturer of most of the original equipment (OE) steering and suspension components in the car, and thus buying the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) Lemforder-branded parts rather than the “genuine” BMW parts saves money while, in theory, preserving quality.

Actually, let me expound on this. As with many repairs, you can allow a job like this to mushroom or contract in both scope and expense. From the scope end, if you so desire, you can take this opportunity to rebuild the entire front end—struts, top bearings, upper and lower control arms, tie rods, sway bar links. Or you can go as minimal as possible and replace only the bad component, which was the right-side outer tie rod. On my previous E39, I took the systemic approach, only to have the car continually break and bleed me, so on this car I’ve been more circumspect about fixing things that aren’t broken. I will replace suspension and steering components in pairs, but I won’t necessarily mission-creep my way into other components. To that end, I replaced the lower control arms years back when one was obviously worn, and I left the upper ones alone until they showed wear three years later.

And expense-wise, how deep are your pockets? Replacing all normal-wear-and-tear suspension and steering components with genuine BMW parts might set you back two or three grand. A Lemforder steering-only kit is about a thousand bucks. Two OE BMW tie-rod assemblies cost about $300. The Lemforder kit with tie rods boots and clamps was $90; that was the right scope and the right amount of scratch to throw at it. But I could’ve gone even cheaper—a single unbranded outer tie rod on eBay is about $17. This is another advantage of finding something like a loose tie rod in your own garage during a well checkup—you can make the choice of which approach to take and not get goaded, guilted, or arm-twisted into a choice you don’t want by a dealer or repair shop.

With the new parts’ arrival slated for the next day, I began removing the old parts. Surprisingly, I’d never replaced tie rods on a car with a steering rack; I’d only done it on old-school steering-box cars where the tie-rod assembly consists of inner and outer tie rods that are identical or nearly so, connected with a threaded metal tube. On cars with steering racks, the outer tie rod may be a conventional one just like on a vintage car with a tapered end that passes through the steering knuckle and a nut threaded onto it, but the inner tie rod lives inside the rubber boot at the end of the steering rack. It has a ball, but there’s no taper—it threads directly into the reciprocating steering rack instead.

OK, outer one first. The impact wrench made short work out of the nut pulling the tapered shaft into the knuckle, so on to the extraction. One of the nice things about working on cars for 45 years and buying tools rather than renting them is that you eventually accumulate a milk crate full of assorted pullers. I found one that fit around E39’s outer tie rods, figured out that I needed to crank the steering all the way to one side to optimally orient things for the puller, tightened it down, and waited for the BANG! when the tapered end released its 21-year grip in the hole.

The inner tie rod came off even easier. I cut off the crimped-on clamps securing the boot, pulled it back, and figured out that I needed to nudge the steering wheel so the inner tie rod’s attachment nut was just clear of the rack housing. Initially I thought that I was seeing both a nut and a lock nut, like there is on the toe adjuster, but it’s just a place to grab it with a thin 32-mm wrench, which fortunately is the same size as the viscous fan clutch on these cars, so I had the exact tool needed.

On a 220K-mile lifelong New England car like this one, the whole “you’re always one broken bolt away from a five-minute repair being a three-day ordeal” thing is particularly true. Fortunately, the fact that the inner tie rod is shielded from the elements by the rubber boot made the 32-mm nut give it up without incident.

As is often the case, having done one side, the other side went a little quicker. The next day, when the parts arrived, I set about the installation. One also similarly expects installation to go quicker than removal (no rusted fasteners and all that). That, however, proved not to be the case.

The problem was threading the inner tie rods into the steering rack. In this situation, getting new threads started during installation was far more difficult than unscrewing old threads during removal. The reason is a combination of angle and tightness.

The movable part of the inner tie rod is the cup of the ball-and-cup assembly with a threaded tip. When the components are well-used, the inner tie rod cup moves on the ball easily. But new components are very stiff, you can barely move them with your hands. You’d think the thing to do is orient everything so the inner end sticks straight out and then use the whole assembly like the handle of a screwdriver to thread the inner end into the steering rack, but you can’t, because the other end (the outer tie rod) hits the strut assembly. So instead, you need to do it sort of like a ratchet wrench, at a 45° angle. However, the inner tie rod is so stiff on the ball that it won’t stay with its threads facing those it needs to mate with in the rack. Oh, and while you’re doing this, you need to hold the rubber boot back from the inner tie rod. As you can imagine, it was maddening.

First, I twisted and rotated the inner tie rod with the wrench until it loosened up enough to be able to move it for installation. Then I used two techniques: On the right side, I employed the wrench to orient the inner tie rod and turn it and get the threads started, but on the right side, I used the turn-the-whole-assembly method. I think it was the difference in strength between my right and left arms that made them different.

Lastly, alignment. If you’re replacing only the outer tie rods, people talk about counting threads, or the number of turns until the old outer one comes off, to install the new one in the same location as the old one. But even a quarter of a turn makes a significant difference in toe-in, so there’s really no question that after tie rod replacement the car needs an alignment. Nonetheless, to get it in the ball park, I tried to get the new assemblies as close as possible to the same length as the old ones by putting them side-by-side, with one end against a wall and the other against a convenient straightedge (what’s shown is actually a shelf bracket), then measuring both sides with a tape measure.

I’ve been doing my own alignment for years, but mostly on vintage cars with skinnier tires. I’d never tried it on a car like this with wide meat. But it worked well enough that I could drive the car, feel that it was toed slightly out, and tweak it until the darty feeling went away. The steering is now tight as a drum, and thunk-and-clunk free.

And, as far as finding that well-checkup coolant drip, funny story …

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The Daily Driver Needs Tie Rods appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A properly running car is a finely tuned system of parts working in harmony. Any component, then, can make the difference between a running and driving machine and a coughing, spitting garage ornament. If one critical component is a bit persnickety, it often earns a bad reputation it may not deserve. If you know (or are) someone who’s into old cars, you probably know the love/hate affair with carburetors.

We all know the holy trinity of engine worship: Fuel, air, and spark. These three elements must exist in the right proportions for an engine to run. Because “holy quaternary” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, compression gets shoved off into the corner, to be discussed only by those who have ascended to a higher tier of diagnostics beliefs, like that guy with the long beard who is still remarkably adept at spark plug reading. He diagnosed a distributor gasket leak from across the parking lot once. I was there.

Maybe I’m misremembering, but it’s precisely that kind of guru mechanic people picture when want someone to work on their carburetor. It doesn’t take a wizard to have a great-running carbureted car, however. Just about anyone can have it. To get there and stay there takes a little bit of care, but the basics boil down to five things.

Use Clean, Non-Ethanol Fuel

Although ethanol-blended fuel does have big power potential, it is also the root of more than a few headaches for those of us with a vintage bent. Gasoline will evaporate at the temperatures most of us like to cruise in, and that means the gasoline disappears and leaves the residue of the ethanol behind. It clogs the multitude of precision passages that make a carburetor function. Most carb tuning and advice is rooted in pre-ethanol times, so even using jetting and setup advice can be tough, as ethanol fuel behaves differently compared to “pure” gasoline.

A Well-Tuned Choke

Listen to the arguments against carbs, and cold starts are oft cited as being a runaway victory for fuel injection. It’s a fair point; fuel injection has won the smooth-running game handily, but a well-tuned choke on a carb works really well considering how simple it is. After all, it carried us through when our hobby cars were simply daily drivers.

Thermostatic chokes often use a bimetallic coil, which is just two different metals bonded together that expand differently when heated or cooled. Pump the throttle once before starting the engine to set the choke, and the engine should start and set at a high idle. Consult your shop manual to get exact settings. Tuning a choke can be finicky, but when it’s all sorted, there is nothing quite like a smooth start-up on a crisp fall morning.

Happy Distributor

A professor of mine from college once told me “90 percent of your fuel problems are ignition.” People will be chasing “carb problems” for hours before realizing the damp spark plug that seems to be running too rich is actually just a plug getting weak spark or not firing at all. Keeping the ignition in top shape helps to keep many other components running smoothly—and it also assists with diagnostics for rough running.

Smooth Linkages

Binding linkages can make chokes stick and accelerator pumps function inconsistently. It’s wild to think that the carb’s exterior cleanliness is just as critical as its cleanliness inside. Road grime is attracted to oily or damp surfaces, and it only takes a small amount of oil mist from an open breather or leaky gasket to attract a surprising amount of junk, which will damage small seals or gum up finicky linkages.

Clean Air

It seems there are actually three sides to a carburetor: the fuel side, the air side, and the outside. Does that make sense? Maybe. Regardless, the air coming into an engine is the easiest pathway for all the stuff that should stay outside of an engine to get inside of it. Dirty throttle blades and intake manifolds can cause interesting problems in both carbureted and fuel-injected engines. All the delicate and small air passages that help keep carbs balanced and flowing can get clogged quickly. Keep an air filter on the intake, and your carb will be happy for a long time.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 5 Things That Make Living with a Carburetor Easier appeared first on Hagerty Media.

My readers will certainly recall The Case of the Mouse-Infested Truck—the 2008 Silverado I bought from my ex-employer for a song because mice had used it as both a bathroom and a casket (Google “Rob Siegel Hagerty mouse infested truck,” but be sure you don’t have a weak stomach).

So imagine how I felt when I had to admit to myself that my recently-purchased 2008 Nissan Armada—ostensibly the replacement for the Silverado—had a rodent contamination issue.

When I bought the Armada, it had been sitting on the owner’s property for a few months. As I explained here, it had a number of problems that I was aware of and several more that I wasn’t. During the short test drive, I thought I caught a rodent-tinged whiff, but it was nothing close to the gag-inducing stench from the Silverado. There was, however, an obvious climate control issue—a clicking sound emanating from the heater box. This is the characteristic mating call of worn-out plastic gears on the actuator controlling one of the blend doors. But with all the truck’s needs, these two issues didn’t even make it onto the punch list.

Once the Armada was largely sorted out and I began driving it, however, the slightly acrid, rodent-infused background smell was like a thistle thorn in a sock—annoying as hell for short periods. However, when my wife accompanied me on a short errand, she of the exquisitely sensitive sense of smell said that nothing jumped out at her. So I went to my backup position—denial. There is no smell. There. I dealt with it. Done.

Until one night. I had a gig, my daily-driver E39 BMW was sidelined in the garage, and my wife needed her Honda Fit, so I drove the Armada 40 miles in the rain each way. The combination of the closed cabin and the need to run the blower fan with fresh air to defrost the windshield made the eau-de-mouse smell jump to the foreground. My state of denial crumbled.

Damn.

The mouse-infested Silverado had been a nightmare scenario, as mice had crawled up the A-pillars into the headliner, urinated and defecated and died there, and did the same inside the heater box. To deal with it, I removed the headliner, threw it in the garbage, cleaned every metal surface on the roof and pillars with enzyme-based cleaner, and installed a new headliner. Unfortunately, I read that removing and reinstalling the heater box was something like a 12-hour job, and I wasn’t willing to do that, so instead I snaked an inspection camera down the vents and into the box, located the mouse nest, drilled an opening with a hole saw, pulled out the nest and the body of a dead mouse, and tried to clean the box using multiple treatments of pressurized disinfectant that washed out through the drip hole for the A/C condenser. It worked well enough for me to be able to use the truck (and for my wife to even ride in it with me, if necessary), but it also made me think that I would never knowingly buy another mouse-infested vehicle unless it was something I really REALLY wanted and was a smoking-good deal. The Armada was neither of these things, so the fact that I had to admit that I was facing the possibility of going through all this again really frosted my behind.

And then I had a thought: Maybe this time I’d get lucky. Yeah, let’s go with that.

Any vehicle built in the past 30 years has cabin air filters. It’s not uncommon for them to be a poster child for lack of maintenance—that is, for the filters to never be changed, and for all sort of nasty stuff to accumulate on them. Including mouse nests.

So, I said to myself, “Self, don’t panic. Check the cabin air filters.”

The location of cabin air filters varies car-to-car, but they’re usually up high on the inside of the cowl. Thus, it’s not unusual for them, or for one of them, to be above or behind the glove box. That’s where they are in the Armada. On many cars, you can reach the filter with the glovebox installed. On some, you need to unclip the glovebox so it drops further down than it normally does. But in the Armada, you actually need to unscrew and remove the entire glove box assembly, including the frame the glovebox pivots on. It was surprising, but not too bad

Once the glovebox assembly is removed, the filters are accessible. The filter cover is held in place by a single 10mm bolt.

I withdrew the two filters. They were, as we used to say in junior high, grody to the max. If they were ever replaced, it certainly wasn’t recently.

In case you need a close-up, here it is. No wonder the cabin air smelled like rodent. I became very hopeful that this was “it,” and ran inside to the laptop and put a $12 pair of filters on order for next-day delivery.

As Ron Popeil used to say, “But wait! There’s more!” Once the filters were removed, I looked back at the fresh air vent above them.

Jackpot.

This mouse nest appeared to have been completely above the filters, giving me hope that, unlike the situation in the Silverado, contamination hadn’t extended into the heater box. My iPhone inspection camera had stopped working for some reason, so instead I pulled out the blower fan to gain inspection access to the heater box. This was fairly straightforward, as it’s only held in place by three 5.5mm bolts. With the blower fan out, I could stick my phone inside the heater box and photograph it, or at least the core that the fan blows through. I saw a few stray leaves and stems, but no evidence of rodent contamination—no nests, no pellets.

Once I’d confirmed the apparently limited scope of the contamination, instead of doing the full-on pressure-washing with enzyme-based cleaner approach I did with the Silverado, I simply reached in and wiped every surface I could reach with Clorox disinfecting wipes. I also sprayed and wiped each blade of the squirrel cage of the blower fan.

Although I hate the smell of Lysol, this was good time to use it in moderation. Let me be clear about this: If there is a mouse nest, or piles of dung, or an actual carcass inside, unloading a can of Lysol into the vents as some people propose online is never going to make the smell go away. Unless you’ve located and removed the bulk source of the smell, all that spray disinfectant is likely to do is mask it. However, using a bit of spray disinfectant to chase down residual reengage molecules either above or below the actual contamination isn’t unreasonable. I reinstalled the blower fan and the filter cover but didn’t install the filters yet. I then turned the fan on high, set the climate control to fresh air, gave a blast of Lysol into the fresh air inlet in the windshield cowl, and let the blower fan suck it directly into the heater box without the filters blocking it. I let it run in my driveway for 15 minutes. Then I installed the filters and let it run for another 15.

Finally, with trepidation, I took the Armada for a drive. Windows up, fresh air selected, blower on full.

The smell was gone.

It took me a while to notice that something else was gone too—the clicking sound. Either it’s an utter coincidence, or what was happening was that the sound was coming from the fresh air vent being unable to close because it was hitting the mouse nest on top of the filter, and with it gone, it now could move unimpeded.

As I said, sometimes you get lucky.

Next, I need to look at the air conditioning. Maybe I’ll get lucky with that too.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Déjà Vu: The Mouse-Infested Armada appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There are a lot of projects in my garage at any point in time. Often my celebration upon walking into my shop on a Friday evening is sullied when I am forced to pick from the options—and especially when I realize that there is a project sitting in the back corner, covered in dust, a sad hulk of what it once was. For the last year, the saddest machine in my garage has been the 1989 Honda XR250R. It’s the machine that somehow survived a lot of racing before losing compression and becoming hard to start. Now is the time to deal with it. 

Any project like this starts with diagnostics—or, if you’re lazy, parts replacement. I threw a head gasket at this engine last fall thinking that would address the problem, but I did no checks prior to tearing off the cylinder head, scraping the surfaces clean, and reassembling everything. In a tale of true karmic beauty, this evening of work fixed nothing. I knew better but apparently needed the reminder to walk through the steps rather than skipping straight to the fun part. 

Lack of compression and hard starts can be due to a number of problems. To rule out a few, I checked the adjustment of the valves, along with the camshaft timing, before going out and buying new tools. Somehow, up until this spring I’ve managed to get by without owning a compression or leak-down tester. A few weeks ago, I took the plunge.  

The gauges on the leak-down tester told a bad story. Over 30 percent of the air that should have been trapped inside the cylinder with the piston at top dead center of the compression stroke was whistling right out into the exhaust pipe. The leak drained my little pancake air compressor faster than I could understand what was happening. When I hooked the tester to my friend’s heavier-duty compressor, I realized I was asking a doctor to diagnose a stab wound that was spurting blood across the exam room. 

One or both of the exhaust valves were no longer valves but restrictions. Disassembling the top end of the engine—a simple enough process—hurt a bit: The engine had only run for a few minutes since I assembled it last fall, before the snow flew. The snow is barely gone and the cylinder head is again on the bench. Once I had compressed the valve springs, pulled the keepers, and removed the valves, I became impressed that the engine ran at all: The valves were the picture of burned, and carbon build-up on both the seats and valves was preventing them from sealing properly. Thanks to some parts-ordering for a future project, I had two brand-new exhaust valves on hand, along with the tooling to refresh the valve seats: A perfect trial run for the future project. 

I used a Neway Manufacturing valve seat-cutting kit that allowed me to put a fresh, three-angle valve job on both exhaust seats in the time between leaving the office and eating dinner. I’m going to dive into the nitty-gritty of this tool and of the process in a few weeks; for now, I will say this challenge was both slightly intimidating and exciting, a perfect trial run for the two cylinder heads waiting for full rebuilds and installation onto two freshly rebuilt engines.

I could have left the XR250R sitting in the corner, finished up the two engines, then put one in the bike (as I had initially planned). Doing so would both fix the hard-start problem and allow me the chance to dig deeper into a damaged engine that was out of the bike. However, when the weather got nice this spring, and a friend called me to go riding, the idea of leaving the bike out of commission much longer just felt icky. I knew if I shuffled off the project one more time, the Honda would be buried forever. 

The decision to do the bare minimum—for once—and just get the engine running again felt forced, and the thought of not indulging a single “while I’m in there” inclination patently absurd. But who was I to turn down a challenge? 

Since I’ve had the top end off an XR250R about six times in the last four years, the whole process took about five hours over Friday evening and Saturday afternoon. By dinner time on Saturday, I was puttering around the yard on an XR250R that ran as well as the day it went together the first time back in 2021. The bike didn’t need a new engine; it didn’t need anything more than the bare minimum. (Well, proper diagnostics and the bare minimum.) Leaving well enough alone is not always a bad decision, and realizing just how little is required to fix something is helpful from time to time. This XR250R project only got six new parts: two valves, two valve seals, two gaskets. Not too shabby.

I’m still excited to get a fresh engine into this bike, but between here and there are some real interesting experiences: The last step of the engine-rebuild process is machine work on the cylinder heads. Machining new valve guides, installing new valves, and fitting up the whole works are tasks I intend to do 100% at home in the next couple weeks. Part two comes next week with a dive into the process of installing and preparing valve guides. Let’s just say, I’ve learned a lot in the process.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Attempting a Bare-Minimum Repair appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Back in February, I wrote about troubleshooting a no-start condition. It was, I thought, a useful piece that walked you down the decision tree that delineates car-won’t-crank, car-cranks-slowly, and car-cranks-quickly-but-won’t-start problems, and tells you how to test for each and which component is likely bad.

However, I didn’t delve deeply enough into the issue that a weak battery and a weak starter motor can mimic one another. How do I know? Because I just got bitten by it.

Here’s the deal. As I said in the no-start story, what cranks the engine is the battery, the starter, the cables connecting the two, and the ignition switch that feeds 12 volts to the starter solenoid. If you turn the key and hear weak cranking or nothing at all, the first thing to do is check the voltage at the battery with a voltmeter—that’s exactly what AAA will do if you make a service call. A fully-charged battery should read 12.6 volts, and for every 0.2 volts it drops, it loses about 25 percent of its capacity, so by the time it reaches 12 volts, it’s fully discharged. So if you check the battery voltage and find it’s 12 volts or lower, you’ve definitely found the problem. Or at least you’ve found a problem; you still need to find out why the battery is discharged. If it’s winter, the battery is five years old, and the terminals are badly corroded, replace it. Done. If it was drained because you left the dome light on, recharge it, see if it’s OK, and don’t do that again. But if it’s drained because the alternator wasn’t keeping it charged, the charging system needs to be repaired or the same thing will happen to the new battery.

However, if the battery is fully charged but the engine cranks slowly, the problem is a little harder to diagnose, as it can be caused by the battery (it’s possible for an old battery with sulfated plates to take a full charge but not be able to deliver sustained cranking) or by the starter motor going bad. In my first story, I wrote:

“If the battery posts are clean and the ground paths are good but, even once the battery is recharged, it still won’t crank the car, or only does so for a short amount of time, you can use a battery analyzer that uses resistance as a measure of battery health. I’ve found they work pretty well. But really, the gold-standard test is to remove the old battery, clean the clamps, and install a new or a known-good battery. If the car then cranks and starts, the battery was the problem. Note that, particularly in winter, due to low temperatures sapping battery strength and corrosion on the battery terminals causing high resistance in the contact with the jaws on the jumper cables, the failure of a car to crank with a jump-start can be highly misleading. Time after time I’ve experienced no-crank conditions that vanished immediately when a good battery was dropped directly into the car.”

Later in the piece, I added: “If you’re certain that the battery and the current paths are good, and the starter won’t spin or sounds labored, and it’s hot to the touch, odds are that the starter has reached the end of the line.”

The idea here is that it’s waaaay easier to replace a battery—or at least to drop in a known good one—than it is to replace a starter, so first you rule out the battery and cables, and if slow-cranking persists, then you look at the starter.

I just was faced with this. And I got it wrong. Here’s how.

My 49,000-mile survivor 1973 BMW 2002—the one I call “Hampton”—has had a longstanding hard-starting problem. Whenever I think I’ve solved it, a few weeks later the problem rears its ugly head and laughs in my face. Cranks-but-won’t-start problems are tough on batteries, especially when the battery in the car is some off-brand “EconoPower” battery that’s sat all winter—disconnected, but not on a trickle charger (too many cars, not enough chargers). So it didn’t surprise me when, during trouble-shooting the hard-starting problem, I cranked long enough to hear the characteristic sound of slower and slower cranking that’s characteristic of running the battery down.

I recharged the battery overnight, came back in the morning, and the car fired right up. This had little to do with the battery and more to do with the intermittent nature of the hard-starting problem, which I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of. But a few days later, the hard-starting was back, and repeated cranking again became slower and slower. I again recharged the battery overnight, and in the morning still had the same set of problems.

As I mentioned previously, I have one of those resistance-based battery testers—a CenTech that I bought at Harbor Freight about 10 years ago. My experience with the tester has been positive—charge the battery, put the tester on it, and if it shows that the resistance across the terminals is less than 5 milliohms, the battery is fine. If it’s over 10 milliohms, the battery is bad, meaning its ability to hold a charge is severely diminished. If it’s somewhere between 5 and 10 milliohms, it’s a gray area, as was the case when I was testing the battery on my 95-year-old neighbor’s car last winter.

I used the CenTech tester on Hampton’s battery, and the reading was below 5 milliohms, indicating that the battery was good. However, it seemed to me that the battery was clearly not holding a charge, and besides, it was a five-year-old value-priced battery, so my conclusion was that my 10-year-old moderately-priced Harbor Freight battery tester had gone bad (shocking, I know).

BMW 2002s take a group 42 or group 47 battery, both of which are on the small side by modern standards, but the 2002tii has less room for the battery due to its larger brake booster, so it takes a tiny little group 26R battery. Since I own three 2002s, one of which is a tii and one of which is a modified car with a tii braking system, and since the Group 26R also fits the Lotus, using 26R batteries in all of them makes sense to me. An EverStart Value Group 26R battery was only $69 at WalMart, so I picked one up. (True story: The guy behind me in line asked me how long that little battery lasted for my trolling motor. He seriously didn’t believe me when I told him that it was the correct battery for an early ’70s German sports car.) Since it had been sitting on the rack for an unknown amount of time, I put it on charge in my garage overnight.

That morning, I yanked out the old battery and dropped in the new one. Imagine my surprise when I found that the same thing happened—the car cranked but didn’t start, and with each turn of the key it cranked slower and slower.

What the?

As you’ve undoubtedly guessed, the problem was the starter motor, not the battery. I hadn’t ever checked the starter by putting my hand on it because it seemed so obvious to me that the battery was the problem. And I hadn’t done the “drop a known-good battery into the car” test because neither of the other 2002s nor the Lotus, with their little Group 26R batteries, are here at the house. I would’ve had to have muscled the larger battery from either of the two other cars in the garage (my 3.0CSi or M Coupe), and with my back issues, I really avoid lifting batteries out of their recessed trays unless they’re dead and need to be replaced. The irony was obvious—by not thoroughly testing, I yanked a still-good battery and muscled an unneeded new one off the rack, into my trunk, into the garage, and into place. Really, it’s a wonder y’all believe anything I say.

So. Bad starter. OK. Fortunately, I had a brand-new starter motor in the garage, one of the smaller, lighter, inexpensive Chinese-made gear-reduction starters that became all the rage for installing into vintage BMWs a number of years back. I installed it, and Hampton’s engine spun like the dickens.

And then I remembered why I had this new starter sitting in a box in the garage. Years back, when I thought that Hampton’s 49,000-mile, one-owner survivor vibe was going to rain money on Bring a Trailer, in preparation for listing the car I did a compression test and found that the repeated cranking caused the starter to slow, which resulted in lower compression readings. Of course, when you’re selling a car, low compression readings are bad, so I bought the $90 gear-reduction starter, installed it, did the compression test, photographed the readings, and then reinstalled the original starter, as I thought it better fit the car’s original survivor vibe. I never interpreted the symptoms as the starter slowly dying. It was just old and a little slow, like me. And then I completely forgot about this little episode.

I’d tell the larger story of Hampton’s hard-starting problem, but it’s still a work in progress. On the positive side, I’m almost positive that it’s not the battery or the starter.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Getting a No-Start Diagnosis Wrong appeared first on Hagerty Media.

While it may seem like the car has been unchanged for decades at this point, with only bold new shades of gray and larger screens creating selling points and “value” for would-be buyers, the fact of the matter is there has been so much innovation over the years. However, much of it is taken for granted because just about every driver on the road today has little understanding of just how far the automobile has come. To provide a little perspective, here are six parts of a car that were revolutionary when they first debuted, but are now so common that they go entirely unnoticed.

Hydraulic lifters

The way a lifter works by interacting with a camshaft to transform rotary movement into reciprocating movement is an under-appreciated aspect of an engine in my opinion. The forces, tolerances, and speeds involved are often difficult to grasp. Tolerances between the pushrod, rocker arm, and valve stem are tight enough that there needs to be a part that can take up the expansion and contraction that comes with the difference between cold and running temperatures.

Hydraulic lifters take that space up to help keep wear down and also make for a smoother and quieter-running engine. They are powered by the oil pump and hold oil pressure in them. Some lifters can leak down while in storage and make quite the clatter on startup until oil pressure builds fully. It is a price worth paying for not having to get the feeler gauges out every few oil changes.

Insert bearings

The many rotating parts inside an engine all need some type of bearing surface to maintain proper friction or lack thereof. When cars were overbuilt, it was common to pour the bearings into the block and connecting rods, making large and relatively soft bearings once machined to final dimension. It’s a time-consuming process though, and requires a lot more material than a comparable insert bearing.

The insert bearing is a much thinner shell of similar material that snaps into the engine block to create the perfect surface for the crankshaft to spin in. They’re also much easier to assemble than poured bearings, which is always appreciated.

Tubeless tires

Modern tires are amazing; More durable with more traction than sometimes seems physically possible. The durability of a tire with no inner tube is a given these days, but certainly wasn’t always. Tubeless tires have been the standard since the mid-1950s, though the idea had been attempted earlier than that. The materials and design did not really work until the mid-1940s. The fact that tubeless tires only took a decade to become standard should say a lot.

Platinum spark plugs

Platinum and other rare earth materials changed the ignition world with their durability. Previously, the metal of choice was copper, which would erode from the arc and would often wear out in just a few years of regular driving. Platinum or iridium plugs, on the other hand, can last up to 100,000 miles.

Longer service intervals, and to a point separating the driver and mechanic into two people, were a side effect of better materials and processes being used during production. Modern cars can go tens of thousands of miles without even opening the hood, and that is mainly thanks to modern ignition systems and oils.

Cruise control

The concept of a self-driving car has likely been around since the second drive of the first car, although even a century later, that has proved to be a difficult problem to solve. However, engineers were able to at least remove one part of the equation and make long drives easier by having the vehicle hold speed on its own.

Early automobiles like the Model T Ford have cruise control baked in by how the machine operates; the throttle is a lever on the steering column that does not return to idle unless the driver moves it. Now systems incorporate a rife of sensors that not only hold the throttle input steady but also match that to vehicle speed and engine load which can make for a much more relaxing road trip.

With how interconnected the systems of modern cars are, cruise control is a matter of software today, not hardware. That usually makes it cheaper to incorporate on cars, which is why it’s now standard pretty much across the board. Once a luxury, now commonplace.

Disc brakes

Brakes are all about the relationship between friction and heat. More friction makes for quicker stopping but also creates more heat that needs to be dissipated. The wooden block pressed against a steel-rimmed wheel didn’t create a ton of friction, but it was better than nothing. Drum brakes were a massive step up, but disc brakes are the clear winner when it comes to balancing the two forces noted above. With modern materials, we have continued to evolve the design to the point that disc brakes are the standard on everything from economy cars to race cars at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

There are certainly more, so tell us what you think is an amazing piece of technology that often gets overshadowed in modern cars. Leave your favorite in the comments below.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 6 Cutting-Edge Innovations We Now Take for Granted appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The elation of acquiring the garbage car warehouse of my dreams has since come and gone. Now, *gulp* it’s really mine. In my pre-ownership dreams, I envisioned signing the documents and then leaving the closing attorney’s office in a parade through downtown Statesville, North Carolina. In this exhaust-fume hallucination, my horde of terrible vehicles would ascend into clean and dry sh**box heaven. There, my friends and neighbors would be waiting to celebrate with a keg of Red Buffalo brew.

As you may have guessed, the reality was somewhat more mundane.

Just prior to closing, I was busy with a few things at the ex-foundry. The big ones: restore power and do a massive cleanout of the place. In preparation for the sale, the owner, his scrappy crew of one, my real estate agent, my wife, and I all roamed the grounds in a conga line to decide the fate of every item in the place. We recorded our verdicts in a notebook. My logical flowchart for what would be allowed to live depended on intrinsic value, scrap value, story value, and difficulty of moving. Some items of questionable functionality and considerable bulk—a very dirty industrial deep freezer comes to mind—were marked with an ignominious X.

• Piles of trash and White Claw cans … X
• Paint booth made of tarps … X
• Clawfoot tub …✓
• Air compressor …✓
• Multiple disassembled shop vacs … reluctant X.
• A Chevrolet Stovebolt Six…obvious ✓
• Former cannabis growing room… X. No, wait, ✓. I could turn it into a garden!

Did I mention this activity took place in the dark?

Let’s back up. About three days before the papers were to be signed, the building’s electrical service still hadn’t been activated. Why the complexity? Well, a few months back, in order to snuff out the marijuana-growing operation, the owner got the police and city involved to physically cut power to the building.

The city of Statesville runs the utilities in the area and neither its officials nor I were particularly keen on switching everything back on until the building passed code inspection. Luckily, I had written a small note in my purchase offer stipulating that “three-phase power must be restored in addition to all outlets and lighting with work performed to code.” In the meantime, the city passed an ordinance dictating that all power needed to be run underground for new services. This netted me a new shutoff, panel, sub-panels, and a few thousand linear feet of Romex—all free of charge.

Not satisfied with this shift in my favor, the universe decided to even the score the moment the lights turned on. In perfect light, I could now see a rather large roof leak. Nice one, universe. I guess I better start cleaning up and fundraising.

We signed the papers, and with the keys now in hand, my wife and I let ourselves into the foundry for the first time. I was overcome with dread and remorse. Maybe the junk removal exercise wasn’t as thorough as I imagined it would be. Perhaps I was daunted by the lake around the base of the smelter. Or was I disappointed that I couldn’t immediately empty my backyard of cars into this place?

I shoved those feelings and questions deep inside of me, until they died, replacing them with a furious energy to fill each of the five city trash cans I found hiding in the building. I had friends drop by to help with other stuff, too. Jon sprayed the side of the building with a 40-ouncer to ward off evil spirits, and Johnnie came bearing a homemade shelf and a bourbon bottle to sit atop it. Bring on the productivity!

As the cleanup continued, I remembered how much I love a good scrap run. Every stray car door or bent chain link fence rail cha-ching’ed my internal register, and I mentally subtracted dollars from my first mortgage payment or roof repair bill. I borrowed “Fuggles,” my buddy’s Dodge D-100, and filled it to the brim for multiple drives across the weigh bridge at Gordon’s Iron and Metal. Included in the scrappage scheme were two busted floor sweepers, several very smelly burn barrels, a significant percentage of a Dodge Charger, loads of conduit and electrical breakage, multiple hoods, and fenders, a fridge … the list could continue. What’s important is that I netted $465.32 and cleared some car space.

Something that didn’t get red Xs during that pre-sale inventory: a sad pair of Chevrolet trucks. I initially thought that the remnants of the 1950 Chevy 3100 could be some kind of ratty project and the ’87 1500 would make a workable shop rig. But I had enough to deal with, so I immediately listed them for sale online. I must’ve let my desperate cleanout streak shine through in the form of bargain basement prices, because both cars were someone else’s problem in less than 24 hours. In my pocket was even more roof money and parking space for my own crapcan cars.

Just as I was jamming out to Tanya Tucker and feeling pretty good about starting to pull in cars, my wife hinted that I may still be overlooking something: she held up a large, bent nail between her fingertips.

The delusional parade would have to be delayed yet again.

At Harbor Freight I picked up a sizeable rolling magnet. Over the next two days, we took turns pulling roughly 50 pounds (or $4 if you’re me) of hardware off the floor. Points for the wife: That was a great idea.

In other, more boring news, a long string of inspections by fire, insurance, water utilities, and so on have kept me on my toes for weeks. Aside from the shock of seeing my first bill, I think I’m finally at the end of the truly hard parts.

So am I ready to start filling the place with cars? Almost. Roof repair starts in just a couple of weeks. Then, the final step will be donning a Tyvex suit and respiration gear so I can leaf blow the foundry sand, wood debris, and Bondo dust into a pile.

I’m feeling hope, not regret. It won’t be long before you hear me scream, “Let the sh**tbox parade begin!”

The post Car Storage Part 4: Sh**box Heaven in an Empty Foundry appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Adam writes:

Sajeev,

I have a 2011 Ford Ranger Super Cab 4×4 4.0 Sport with 52,000 miles on it. I bought it in 2014 with 7000 miles, so I know its history pretty well. Recently, the power mirrors stopped working. I checked the fuse, and the 5 amp was burned out. I replaced the fuse, and the power mirror started to work again. However, when I started up the truck, I immediately heard the 5 amp fuse blow again.

I checked, and it looks like the power mirrors are the only thing on the circuit, per the wiring diagram on the Internet, so I know I have to take that with a grain of salt. I decided to unplug the power mirror switch and replace the fuse. I thought the switch could be the cause. When I went to get back in the truck (the fuse box is on the passenger side footwell) I swear I heard it blow again as soon as I opened the driver’s door.

Do you have any suggestions on how I could track down this issue? I have Googled several videos, but most find dead shorts like this due to body damage or a wiring harness that was compromised due to corrosion or something really wild.

I saw a YouTube video on the South Main Auto channel where the fuse kept blowing on an Altima and after replacing the throttle body. A new fuse box and it was brought to him to replace the ECM. He decided to run down the wiring and traced it down a comprised wire in the cowl. Apparently, the factory did not clip in the wiring harness, and it was resting on the wiper armature and eventually cut through the one wire that controlled the throttle body.

Besides something crazy like that, any thoughts of what it could be?

Thank you,

Adam

P.S. I do have an official 2011 Ford Ranger Work Shop Manual and Wiring Diagram I ordered off of eBay last night.

Sajeev answers:

No, that wiring issue you saw on YouTube is not a “crazy” thing to happen. A short to ground fault is likely your issue, but before we go there, I suggest wiring problems are downright commonplace with modern cars.

There are plenty of fail points in a modern supply chain, so you have to be ready for anything. The factory can forget to fully push in a retainer, install a clip, etc., which eventually causes a wire to chafe on something else. Or perhaps a wiring harness vendor can forget to add said clip or retainer at a specific location? Sometimes the automaker even “forgets” to design it into the wiring harness in the first place!

This is why I am glad you bought the shop manual and wiring diagrams, since you absolutely need them. And since this might one day apply to my 2011 Ford Ranger, I dug into my wiring diagram to see what should be done. At least in theory.

Page 124-1 suggests you need to check a BR-RD wire (Brown with a Red stripe) from the fuse box, inspecting its entire length for a problem. The first connector (C527) to check for damage is the one at the switch that you already disconnected, so it’s probably not your issue. But look at the condition of the BR-RD wire at the plug, and examine the harness for signs of damage.

The second connection for the BR-RD wire at C210, inside the dash, above the pedal assembly. The BR-RD wire at C210 is the first pin in the harness. (Look at page 150-26 of the manual to see what I see). Inspect and disconnect C210 and test again. This is also a good time to note there are better tools for testing a short to ground than a handful of new fuses.

This video will get you the rest of the way, but usually a short to ground happens when accident damage repair, aftermarket parts, or general sloppiness in labor causes a wire to wind up in a place it doesn’t belong. Best of luck to you, though it should be quite easy in a vehicle this simple.

Bonus! A Piston Slap Nugget of Wisdom

YouTube is a great motivator and educator, but nobody ever pulls up wiring diagrams to show you wire colors and locations of where you need to go. I mean nobody. Who would be that detail oriented in a YouTube video?

Well, except for this dork who can’t even hold a phone while making a video. What an amateur!

Bottom line: Use Facebook Groups, YouTube Videos, and even car forums for the advice to set you in the right direction. But when its your turn at the problem, getting factory shop manuals and ESPECIALLY wiring diagrams are mandatory for any do-it-yourselfer. They aren’t cheap, but they pay for themselves after a few repairs on most any vehicle in the last 30-40 years.

Have a question you’d like answered on Piston Slap? Send your queries to pistonslap@hagerty.com—give us as much detail as possible so we can help! Keep in mind this is a weekly column, so if you need an expedited answer, please tell me in your email.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Piston Slap: The Need For Repair Manuals in Modern Internet Times appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Last Monday, two friends and I headed south from Ann Arbor to intersect with the solar eclipse path of totality, which cut across northwest Ohio. This was a last-minute trip so once we freed ourselves from work commitments, we only had about two hours to make the 70-mile trek. That’d be easy on a normal day, but the major highways were already clogged. Time for the backroads.

Southern Michigan is so flat that the rural roads, many of which are gravel, are laid out in a grid. I figured they would be lightly traveled so we headed south on the first unpaved road we encountered. When it ended, we jogged west until we hit another dirt road going south. We rolled down the windows to enjoy the warm air and aromas from the surrounding farm fields, which had that early-spring green sheen. Delightful. Our haphazard route was slow, but we didn’t worry about missing the total eclipse; the point was our spontaneous journey, not the destination. (Better to be moving than stuck in traffic, says the bloke who writes a column called “Never Stop Driving.”) We’d get as far south as possible, see what we could see, and just enjoy this mini adventure during a workday. It was like playing hooky (if you’re too young to know what that means, look it up).

With just minutes to spare, we joined some 30 other cars in a dirt parking lot in Liberty Center, Ohio (population: 1100). The glow of the full eclipse was moving as was the partial darkness that traveled like a wave over the countryside. The thing that really caught my eye, however, was a vintage military truck parked nearby with a roof-mounted generator and 20-foot antenna.

The owner explained that his green M109 truck and its two generators could run on cooking oil, diesel, used motor oil, and—I think he said—kerosene. The huge antenna was driven skyward via air pressure supplied by an onboard compressor he installed along with many other DIY modifications. The thing had A/C, a fridge, a stove, a bed, and 10 wheels mounted on three axles. He’d set up in the lot that morning, because the local police and emergency responders, who were worried that the crowds uploading eclipse photos and videos would clog cellular signals, deployed a network of radio operators like him to ensure communication.

Impressive, right? I joked that if the proverbial s&^% hit the fan, I would come groveling. That dude knew how to do things, to build things. Which reminded me of our ongoing shortage of folks like him.

I’ve written many times about the gap between the need for skilled tradespeople and the supply, a situation brought into focus by my ongoing effort to bring a $25,000 Ferrari back to life. I’ve struggled to find experienced and willing craftspeople to do things like paint and interior work. The tide, however, may be turning.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that vocational school enrollment is surging. One 20-something interviewed for the article trained to be a welder instead of going to college, saying that he didn’t want to follow the lives of his parents, who stare at screens all day. More and more teenagers, the WSJ reporter observed, see burgeoning AI, mass corporate layoffs, and student debt as signs that a physical skill could be a recession-proof job.

The WSJ article follows an earlier one that described how a Maine lobster town fought to bring shop classes back to the local high school. I am emphatically in favor of this. Even if students don’t find a career in shop class, they’ll gain useful, lifetime skills. Don’t we all need to know how to do things? When are we, as a society, going to chuck the whole white collar/blue collar distinctions and career paths?

This is personal, and not just because I want to get my old Ferrari back on the road. I was steered away from high-school shop classes simply because I had good grades, even though I had a small business repairing lawnmowers. I loved cars and mechanical things, so I went to an engineering college only to learn that engineering had morphed into a desk job. I hated it, but we’ve all been told, “you have to have a degree” so I stuck it out and spent the first decade of my adult life paying off the loans.

You might be thinking, doesn’t this guy Webster have a dream gig typing about cars in front of a screen? Admittedly, America’s imperfect educational and vocational training systems did just fine by me in the long term. Since I work on my own cars, however, I long ago learned that what I enjoy as a hobby is actually hard work, which makes me respect the folks who do it for a living all the more. I also spent a sweltering summer mixing cement in Newark, New Jersey, so I know the risk of unduly romanticizing physical labor. We do, however, need to get rid of the stigma that the trades are a consolation path for those who don’t go to a four-year college.

Thanks for reading!

Larry

P.S.: Your feedback is very welcome. Comment below!

Please share this newsletter with your car-obsessed friends and encourage them to sign up for the free weekly email. The easy-to-complete form is here. And if you’d like to support the efforts of Hagerty Media, please consider joining the Hagerty Drivers Club.

The post Never Stop Driving #94: Eclipsed appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There are a lot of ways to get things done when working on project cars, but few methods are as handy as leveraging heat to do work for you. Whether disassembling crusty things or creating new pieces by joining metal with the heat of an electric arc, the judicious use of heat can unlock new avenues and techniques of solving common problems faced by DIY enthusiasts everywhere.

First off, let’s make something clear: We aren’t really talking about heat itself in most of these, we are talking about the powers of temperature differential. It’s that one part heated or cooled to a temperature different than the other parts creates advantages for the task at hand. For instance, it’s not the mere fact that the bolt is hot that helps you, it’s that the material of that bolt expands when heated. But we are getting ahead of ourselves: Here are five ways heat can help unlock your superpowers in the garage.

To Diagnose

There are a lot of moving parts in an automobile. Friction is the universal enemy of almost all of them. When friction starts winning the battle, it often shows in the form of heat buildup. This is also true for electrical connections and relays too. When something doesn’t feel right even though it all passes visual inspection, it is easy to start poking around and seeing what is warm. A prime example is diagnosing wheel bearings on trailers.

Small infrared heat guns are a really handy tool now that the prices are nearing novelty purchase territory. Even just feeling things by hand can be telling sometimes, but using non-touch methods allows much more capability, as you would burn the heck out of your hand if you wanted to confirm if a particular cylinder was running right by checking header temp. There’s a tool for every job.

To Break Corrosion

Cars are built from a mulitude of different materials. In modern manufacturing, the usage of appropriate fasteners and hardware is figured out during the design process to ensure that they will not react adversely with others in the assembly. We often aren’t working on vehicles straight off the line though, and the facts of life tell us that everything corrodes, it’s just that some things resist it better.

For rusted hardware, heat helps break the bonds between that surface corrosion and the base metal, allowing things to move freely again. To prove the point made earlier about temperature differential, those who have the ability to freeze hardware rapidly know that can be just as powerful as an oxy-acetylene torch. The key to making it work is that the subject metals expand or contract with big swings in temperature. It works for breaking the bonds of corrosion but we can also leverage that fact…

To Aid in Assembly

The other day I needed to press eight bronze valve guides into two aluminum cylinder heads. The setup instructions for the parts called for .0015″ to .0025″ press fit, and with everything prepared and reamed to size, the guides were put in the freezer overnight and the heads were put in the toaster over at 200 degrees for 20 minutes. I used a special punch to align the guide and took light taps with a hammer to set them home. When the metals normalized to the 60-degree garage temps, everything was pressed and secured solidly.

The exact physics of it are a bit murky to me yet, but luckily you or I don’t need to understand that to know exactly what to expect from heating things. Thermal expansion coefficients can be looked up in resource materials like Machinery’s Handbook, or the internet—whichever is more handy.

To Add or Remove Hardness

The materials we work with are fascinating when you get down to it. Even as at-home mechanics, we have the power to alter the properties and behaviors of steel or aluminum. This can be great for making tools, fabricating, or even reusing parts. Annealing a sheet of aluminum makes it much easier to form, and also works for copper gaskets or washers to help make them a little more malleable and thus seal small imperfections better. The process involves heating to high temperatures then cooling either rapidly or slowly and controlled in a heat sink material like sand.

To Weld

Add enough heat to a part or material and it will likely liquify. Doing so in a very controlled method with the addition of a filler material gives the ability to create a strong bond between what was formerly two different parts. Welding is a garage superpower that comes with great responsibility—mainly that we be realistic about how good we are at it. A great weld is extremely solid and strong, but a mediocre or bad weld is downright dangerous in the wrong spot or place. Know the limits of your skills, machine, and materials in order to utilize welding in the most effective way possible.

Heat is a superpower in the garage that we can use for all these things, and quite a few more. There are a multitude of methods to add or subtract heat which range from totally normal to unconventional, but they’re all effective. Regardless of what method you use, know that heat can be your best friend if you know how to use it.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 5 Things Heat Can Do for You and Your Projects appeared first on Hagerty Media.

During a recent garage chat with a friend about tools, I finally talked myself into purchasing a Milwaukee M12 right-angle die grinder. It’s a great upgrade to my current shop: I really enjoy the handiness of a die grinder with Roloc discs for cleaning and the small amount of fabrication that pops up in my projects, but I am too cheap to make space or budget for the air compressor it would take to run hungry tools like a die grinder. While air tools absolutely have their place—I’ll still make trips over to a friend’s shop to do the next porting job—this little battery-powered tool has been a wonderful stopgap. Compromise when understood and expected rarely feels like such.

Adding this die grinder to my tool set forced me to rearrange a few drawers in my toolbox. In them I found the evolution of my capability to cut, sand, and grind: a set of mismatched files from an estate sale, bent and scraggly wire brushes, wire-wheel attachments for a drill, a corded angle grinder, a cordless angle grinder, and now a tidy little die grinder—all added in that order.

At some point, as you develop the skills to use the tools you have, a set of cascading switches trip in your brain. You want to do the job a little cleaner next time, or for the components to fit up better—in short, you want less evidence that a repair was done at all. When rebuilding my 1989 Honda XR250R during the year that I raced it, I took an odd amount of care to make it appear as though I hadn’t taken the thing apart seven times in as many months. Keeping hardware from rounding off doesn’t really require some crazy amount of care, but we have likely all been under a hood where the last person there certainly didn’t take the time.

The evolution of my toolbox’s contents happened incrementally rather than in big steps. Over 15 years passed between my first project car and when I bought a set of digital calipers. For a good number of years I worked with a single hammer, basic socket set, and some screw drivers; I did full motorcycle rebuilds with not much more. The most noticeable changes were not those in tool count but in quality: Tools that allowed me to perform more delicate work.

Each addition improved my ability to remove or address flaws or problems with increasing power and speed—and most importantly, with increasing precision. I could focus more and more on the process of creating a higher-quality finished product. I used my time more efficiently because the tool was helping me, not holding me back. Rather than putting a ceiling on my capability, the right tools enabled the more advanced ideas and plans in my brain to come to reality.

If you can measure something, you can usually perfect it. Years ago a tape measure was appropriate for the work I did; now, the projects on my bench require the ability to read a Vernier scale on a micrometer. While it is possible to work on vintage machines without being slowly strung out to a line of atoms entering the black hole that is true precision, there will always be a ceiling to what you can do with basic tools. It is possible to assembling an engine that lasts a long time using only rusty tools you found on the side of the highway; but that rebuild will involve a lot of luck.

Anything worth doing requires some level of effort and carries at least a little risk. The strange thing is that measuring is the most likely place for human error to enter and wreak havoc on your project. Transposing a few numbers in my head led to throwing out a couple chunks of aluminum and about an hour of work last time I was standing in front of a lathe.

Working on projects can be frustrating for any number of reasons, but occasionally that frustration reflects a standard of quality we happily imposed upon ourselves. Working on project cars is like running on a treadmill. It is possible to quantify how far you have come by the hours spent, the distance traveled, or the average pace per mile, and measuring and quantifying that progress made can be rewarding at the right times; but so often we forget to look back at how we have improved—and how much smarter we’ve become along the way. After all, now I can measure my project progress down to the thousandth of an inch.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The Blessing and Curse of Precision appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I’ve made many references over the past 18 months to my back issues. It’s nothing acute—no smoking-gun bulged discs showing up on the MRI—just the usual 65-year-old-man-stuff of easily-triggered low back pain and sciatica. But it’s annoying as hell.

A four-month-long stint of physical therapy to strengthen my core has helped enormously, allowing me to reach the point where I was able to do all that wrenching on the recently-purchased Nissan Armada without reinjuring myself. However, I feel like I’m always one bad decision away from a relapse, so I try not to make those bad decisions. I lift very little without help (as difficult as that is when you’re used to being a lone wolf working by yourself in the garage), and I don’t yank on things when I’m in a bent or crouched position.

The winter/summer wheel swap has become a bellwether for me—e.g., if I can’t do this, I can’t do anything. When my back issues reemerged in 2022, the combination of rolling a floor jack, skooching down to properly position it under the car, working the jack handle to raise it, cracking the lug nuts, dismounting and mounting the wheels, and using a torque wrench in a bent-over position was difficult enough that I was beginning to think that this part of my life might be over. Fortunately, there are back-saving tricks that allow me to cruise through wheel-swapping. Yeah, I know, this sounds like that “one weird trick” online clickbait. But trust me.

First, let me offer a warning that is crucially important. My college physics professor was killed when the car he was working on fell on him. That’s all the more tragic considering he was my mechanics professor, which, in addition to “mechanics” applying to both the physics as well as to working on cars, has the unbearable irony that mechanics is the study of how physical objects move in response to forces on them, and part of mechanics is “statics,” which analyzes the forces on stationary objects that keep them from moving. Ever since that horrible tragedy, I have been assiduously careful never to work under a car that isn’t properly supported by jack stands and a floor jack as backup. Swapping wheels is a gray area where many folks argue that they’re not technically under the car, so they feel that they can jack up one wheel without taking the time to set that corner of the car on jack stands. I see garages and tire-change shops do this all the time. I’ll admit that there have been times when I’ve done it myself, but in what I describe below, it’s absolutely imperative that you support the car on stands, because there’s no question that part of you is under the car, and you don’t want to get your legs crushed if the jack slips.

I’ve identified four aspects of wheel-swapping that are problematic in my AARP years. I’ll address them each below.

Moving the wheels

I keep the off-season wheels for both my and my wife’s daily driver under the back porch, which is on the opposite side of the house from the garage. Both are slightly downhill from street level. So wheel-swapping both cars requires rolling eight wheels up and down the path a total of 16 times. This bending-while-rolling effort eventually triggers back pain. For a while I was asking my kids to do it for me while I grumbled, “You mean I can’t even do this?” but I found that by keeping my back straight and doing a Groucho-Marx-like duck walk (for those old enough to know the reference), I can keep my dignity and move them myself.

Jacking up the car

I have a mid-rise lift, but it’s usually not worth using it for a simple wheel swap. In the first place, there’s always another car parked over it, often in mid-project. Plus, it takes time to position a car on the mid-rise. The vintage cars get lifted by their frames, which allows a lot of slop in their placement, but it’s difficult to lift my daily-driver 2003 5 Series BMW by anything but the jacking points on the rocker panels, and there’s perhaps two inches of positioning leeway for the lift’s arms and sliding jack pads to be able to reach all four. Plus, as I’ll get to below, the low-back-pain key to all this is keeping the car as close to the floor as possible, so the added height capability of the lift is a detriment, not an advantage.

That means that I swap wheels the old-school way—on the garage floor with a floor jack. In the past, I’d raise the nose of the car by putting the jack in the middle of the front subframe, swap both front wheels, then do the same in the back, but for back-pain reasons, it’s easier for me to do one wheel at a time and use the jack points at the corners. That way I don’t need to crouch down to get eyeballs on where the floor jack is contacting a point deep under the car.

Using the jacking points on the corners of the wheel wells has the added advantage that the lever arm of the floor jack is well-clear of the body of the car, which lets me pump it up and down using my foot. This is another big wear-and-tear savings on my back. I can also do this if I use my long-reach floor jack on the middle of the front subframe, but it probably weighs four times as much as my small aluminum jack.

The back-saving key is to raise the wheel just enough to set the corner of the car on a jack stand and swap it. Don’t put the car up any higher than it needs to be.

Loosening the lug nuts

Before you jack up the wheel, if you don’t have an impact wrench, you need to crack the lug nuts the old-fashioned way with a breaker bar. By all means, save your back by putting one foot on the end of the breaker bar and standing on it, but be careful not to lose your balance and twist funny when it lets go. An air-driven or electric impact wrench is a major back-saver, as you can position yourself directly in front of the wheel and zip the nuts off. Leave one nut on finger-tight.

Finally, the “one weird trick.” When you mount or dismount the wheel, don’t ever lift it with your hands, arms, and back—lift it instead with your knees and legs. With the corner of the car safely supported by a jack stand, sit directly in front of the wheel and slide your legs around it. Then slide your feet toward you and raise your knees until some part of your legs contact the tire. It could be your shins, knees, or thighs. Whatever feels comfortable to you. Loosen the last lug nut and tip the wheel onto your legs. Then slide your feet forward, lower your knees, and roll the wheel onto the floor.

Removal is easy because you have gravity working for you. “The trick” is far more important on installation—roll the wheel onto your legs and pull your feet toward you to raise your knees to get it onto the hub. If the hub has studs, rotate the hub or the wheel to get them through the holes. It’s a little tricker if the hub has threaded holes and the studs are part of the lug nuts. Most hubs have a raised ring in the center that the bore in the wheel sits on. You need to use your knees to maneuver the wheel onto it, then rotate it to line up the holes and spin the nuts on.

Use your foot on the torque wrench

Get the lug nuts seated with a ratchet wrench. If you have an impact wrench, you can put it on its lowest setting and give a quick blip of the trigger to snug each nut down. Then lower the car, set a torque wrench to the appropriate setting, and use your foot instead of your back to torque the nuts down. You can hear and feel the click of the torque wrench just as easily as if it’s in your hands. You still need to bend down to move the torque wrench from lug nut to lug nut, and with five per wheel, four wheels, two cars, even this needs to be done with care if your back is sensitive, but it’s still way less wear-and-tear than forcing your upper body to crank the torque wrench.

Although I didn’t have to swap seasonal wheels on the Armada, I did have to pull the front wheels off and put them back on to do the front struts. They’re 20-inch wheels, a full three inches bigger than anything else I’ve ever owned. Using these steps, I got them off and on again without so much as a sidelong glance from my back.

I hope some of you find this as helpful as I have.

Dealing with those four transmissions under the porch, though, is another matter.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post How to Swap Your Wheels Without Wrenching Your Back appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I never expected a rambling notion I published over a decade ago could have this much staying power. But we’re indeed talking about upgrading an analog car phone with digital guts in the year 2024, and the person behind it shares his efforts across platforms for creators (like GitHub) and enthusiasts (like his YouTube channel) with pride. Thankfully, this generosity also includes an update for Piston Slap readers! —SM

Jeff writes:

I have a big update for my car phone project: everything now fits inside of the original car phone, making it fully functional on its own. There are no external adapters, and no visible signs of modification.

I’ll probably also make a new full tour/demo video in a few weeks when I take my car out of winter storage, but I couldn’t hold in the excitement. I had to share this news with someone that would appreciate it. (I am glad you didn’t hold back! — SM)

I spent the winter learning how to design custom PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) and developing a new version of my adapter. This completely replaces the original electronics in the car phone’s transceiver, instead of previously piggybacking off of it. In addition to being able to hide everything inside the original car phone, there are some technical benefits to being in control of power supply/management:

• I’m in control of when the phone turns on/off, which means I was able to replicate original behavior where the phone remains on if you turn the car off during a call. The phone then automatically powers off when the call ends.
• I’m using modern rechargeable Li-Ion cells (3 AA-sized cells) for portable power instead of the original giant NiCd battery pack (10 A-sized cells). The original battery packs are all long dead by now and would need to be rebuilt with new NiCd cells (expensive and tedious) if I stuck with the original car phone’s power supply and battery charging circuitry.
• Total weight is reduced by 12.2 ounces.
• The original Mitsubishi transceiver is no longer wastefully consuming power itself in addition to powering my Bluetooth adapter. This particularly helps with battery life in portable mode. Even though the batteries I use have a lower capacity (1100 mAh) than the original battery pack (1400 mAh), battery life is now better than the original phone:
• There’s about 20 hours of “standby time” compared to the original 14 hours.
• Probably most impressive is the roughly 5–6 hours of “talk time” compared to the original’s 50–80 minutes.

I have documented my progress on this new phase of my project in a forum thread. Towards the end of the thread, you will find many photos of the new adapter installed in the car phone, comparisons to an unmodified phone, etc. Unfortunately, I have not yet finished updating my GitHub project with new designs/code/info/documentation, but I should have that updated within the next few weeks.

After more testing and refinement, I plan to offer either a conversion kit or a mail-in conversion service (details/pricing TBD) for anyone who has a Mitsubishi DiamondTel Model 92 phone and is willing to accept the risk of purchasing amateur prototype-quality electronics with no warranty. (Better buy a donor phone while you can, before Jeff’s hard work raises their asking prices! – SM)

I expect it would also work for the Mitsubishi Model 1500, but I need to get my hands on one to confirm it. Conversion is unfortunately not “bolt-on” easy. It requires transferring a couple connectors from the original transceiver (de-soldering and de-pinning) and grinding a bit of metal from the inside of the transceiver case for clearance.

Sajeev concludes:

I’d like to once again thank Jeff for keeping us in the loop with his progress. I look forward to Part VII of this series, showing off this consumer-friendly option for upgrading a Mitsubishi cell phone with modern Bluetooth technology. We truly live in an amazing world, don’t we?

Have a question you’d like answered on Piston Slap? Send your queries to pistonslap@hagerty.com—give us as much detail as possible so we can help! Keep in mind this is a weekly column, so if you need an expedited answer, please tell me in your email.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Piston Slap: New Tricks for an Old Car Phone (Part VI) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

“I think I cross-threaded it.”

The voice on the other end of the phone was sullen. It belonged to a friend who had just emerged from under the hood of his 1999 Chevrolet pickup. As he was putting the #4 spark plug back into the aluminum cylinder head after performing some maintenance, the plug had bit and started threading at a slightly wrong angle.

Nobody wants to deal with damaged threads, but with a little prep and know-how you can save the thread, the part, and your sanity.

Threads are a critical part of the assembly of pieces we call automobiles. The spiral-incline plane that creates a bolt, nut, or threaded hole allows for easy disassembly and generates a strong, durable clamping force. The effectiveness of threads relies on a smooth and well-fitting assembly which means any bit of corrosion or damage can be a big problem.

When—not if—some damaged threads appear on your project, there is a lot going through your head: Everything from horror stories of drills and threaded inserts to tales in which the hero was a wire brush. In the middle of the chart of options is chasing the threads to clean them and remove damage. You might be tempted to reach for your tap and die kit … but that might not be the best idea.

When I dropped by my friend’s driveway for moral support, we pulled the inner fender and got a decent look at the reality of the problem. Luckily, my friend has a good feel for how spark plugs start, and the thread was only barely miffed. However, the idea of getting the plug started correctly and powering through to make it fit again was just not on the table. We needed to chase the threads.

Method #1: Use a Tap

I had an appropriate M14-1.25 tap that would theoretically match the aluminum heads on his engine—a 5.3 LM7—but there is always the chance that whatever tap you have is slightly different than the one that originally cut those threads. Any differences between the two would be settled by force, and in our case the hardened tap would easily bite a chunk out of the aluminum cylinder head to declare victory. We were not interested in that.

Method #2: Buy a Thread Chaser

If you’re looking at that thread chaser and thinking, “Kyle, that looks an awful lot like a tap,” you’re correct. It does, but a couple key features are hiding in plain view that make a chaser different than a tap—and better for this situation. The first is right on the nose: A pilot section, which helps align the tool into the thread bore. Taps lead with a cutting edge in most cases, which means if the tap starts slightly crooked, you’ll have a harder time feeling the misalignment. If you try multiple times, you will start to remove material. Remove enough, and the chance of stripping the thread increases significantly.

Notice that, behind the pilot, the threads do not have the same lead-in as a cutting tap. Again, since a chaser is only meant to restore damaged threads, the design is just less aggressive overall. Using a chaser means less chance of swarf falling into your project, too, and we certainly didn’t want any aluminum in the combustion chamber of my friend’s 5.3. Just to be cautious, we coated the chaser with grease to catch any debris it might loosen.

We got real lucky: The threads got reshaped perfectly and the plug threaded in and tightened up nicely, a reminder that using the right tool always makes a job easier. A good quality set of thread chasers is under $100 and covers a variety of pitches.

This is actually the first thread chaser I’ve purchased. It’s a tool that has always been on the shortlist, but it was never in the cart come checkout time. Any time I need a thread chaser, I usually just make one.

Method #3: Make Your Own

Making a thread chaser is not difficult, and the skill is a nice trick to have up your sleeve. Just take a grade 8 bolt and file down the first few threads to create that pilot and lead-in threads. If you are really motivated, use a hacksaw or small cutoff wheel to create a few reliefs that can collect any debris that will be forced out of the threads as it re-shapes and cleans them.

Next time you are in the middle of that project and miff a set of threads, you are prepared to handle the problem the right way … or at least understand the risks of doing it the other way. Like I said, there is a place and time for each, and having more skills and understanding of what you are doing is always a good thing.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post How to Re-Form Damaged Threads appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Simply sitting behind the wheel of my newly repurchased ’64 GT Hawk, it turns out, wasn’t going to make it roadworthy. In order to properly rekindle my fondest high school memories, I’d have to break out the elbow grease. So what had been done to it in the last 20-odd years since I last owned it? Very little, it seems. The pesky exhaust leaks at the manifold had been rectified, and an electric fuel pump and generic voltmeter were installed. Other than that it was preserved in full, a rolling monument to my dumb teenage self. Follow along as I remedy my own juvenile hackery. (Hawkery, maybe? I dunno.)

The first task at hand: mount up a set of late-’60s Crestline Mark II wheels, already shod in new tires. These were last installed on an old Concord, then an AMX. I figured they’d add a nice, period-correct hot rod vibe to the Stude. Indeed, they looked good mounted. Then I arrived at the car’s front right corner, noticing where a massive chunk had been bitten out of the front drum—large enough for one to catch a glimpse of the brake shoe on each rotation. I recalled the precise moment that the Hawk collapsed upon losing a wheel, sending an array of sparks from the scraping metal that is, I imagine, still sprinkled across the right northbound lane of US-1 near Sanford, North Carolina. Due to my previous missteps, I’ll be finding a new brake drum or better yet, discs. At least for now, I broke two hub pullers, threw on some rear shoes, bled everything (with help), and adjusted the spur wheels to their satisfactory, unassisted standard of performance.

Once tired of addressing problems that made my car neither faster nor louder, I moved on to the fuel system. Yikes. In my defense, I had no part in this horrific fuel pump installation. Breaking out my terminal kit, ratcheting crimpers, and heat gun, I reworked the wiring into something more presentable. The Edelbrock carb still wasn’t having it: the accelerator pump circuit seemed entirely non-functional, and the mixture and idle screws were in complete disagreement.

I suspect the younger Matt Anderson, unfamiliar with the arcane mysteries of the vacuum gauge, is to blame here. Knowing better now, I pulled apart the carb into its smallest pieces, cleaned its nooks and crannies, and reassembled it with components from a fresh kit. Using the assortment of tools now at my adult disposal, I dialed in the carburetor to my satisfaction.

In the spirit of rectifying past sins, I turned my attention to the hose clamps on the rotten fuel lines, as well as the doubled-up fuel filters that looked like they came off a radiator hose. Without admitting to being directly responsible, I can say it possesses my former hallmarks: foraged parts and obvious impatience. Needless to say, I went ahead with all-new hoses, clamps, and a singular filter. I made sure to pump the fouled gasoline into lawnmower cans for my Wheel Horse to consume.

Alas, I knew in my heart that I wouldn’t be able to avoid the wiring department for long. None of the turn signals worked, nor did the brake lights, horn, or reverse lights. (Memories of sailing through state inspections on cool-factor alone came back to me.)

I got started on the most safety-critical functions. For starts, the brake light switch had only one wire on it, and my strategy of propping up my iPhone to shoot video from a fence post indicated that only the left lamp was functioning. While I was replacing the bulb (to no avail), I noticed that the reverse light bulbs had been removed. In their place were permanently illuminated reverse lamps. Then it dawned on me: When I swapped the Powershift auto to Borg-Warner overdrive in the heat of summer in 2002, I had committed crimes of the reverse-light-switch variety and bailed myself out by removing the bulbs. Stupid kids. Someone after me must have come up with the “fix.”

After lots of probing with a multimeter and alligator leads, I determined that the real problem with the brake light was the turn signal switch! Off came the steering wheel, exposing an indicator and canceling mechanism that appeared to be installed either by a thumbless animal or, more likely, by me after school. With a heat gun and pliers, I managed to straighten out the whole mess, bringing the signal switch contacts into their correct positions and the blinkers and brake lights into working order. At the same time, I noted that the wheel had been torqued down on top of the horn wire, which seemed to explain the non-functional horn.

Oh, how naïve to think that a self-generated wiring problem was going to be that simple!

Upon testing the horn, I found it to be non-functional. Replacing the horn and fixing the steering wheel wiring did nothing. I traced the hots and grounds back to their origins, which wasn’t easy given my past wiring misadventures that involved changing the wire color no fewer than three times. More 11th-grade than automotive-grade work. The ground to the relay, which should be switched by the switch at the wheel, was permanently grounded to the bolt holding the voltage regulator down. My mistake. So, with the circuit doubly earthed, why didn’t the horn blow all the time? Beats me.

In laying recumbent beneath the dash, I also sussed out why the speedometer wasn’t working and why the mileage looked eerily … familiar. I do vaguely remember getting annoyed at the rodent-esque racket it was making, which led to disconnecting it at a rest stop on the way to Wrightsville Beach. I decided to just leave it for now.

With my past transgressions acknowledged and somewhat addressed, why not drive it to work tomorrow? The next morning, I made sure my wife was available to rescue me just in case. She agreed but saw fit to remind me that I am, mentally, still a high schooler. 

Loaded up with my lunch, laptop, access badge, and tools, I hit the road. My first hint that things might not be right? Total lack of power immediately upon exiting the driveway. As we’ve established, I’m still the same idiot from 2004, so I continued along anyway. Maybe it was just cold, I rationalized. It didn’t take long—about 0.75 miles—before the universe caught up to my false confidence. The Hawk sputtered to a halt in the parking lot of a fried fish joint. I popped the hood to begin diagnostics, at which point the radiator core urinated on my khakis and dumped a quart of coolant on the ground. I picked up the phone and dialed.

“Hi love … whatcha doin’?” 

I made sure to ask my wife to please grab a gas can, just in case. As you may remember, all of my jerry vessels were recently filled with stale sludge. Five gallons of it didn’t help. I gave up after it blew backward through the fuel filter and limped the car home to my foundry storage, with my wife following in her 4Runner. I grabbed another car and went to work, sad.

Following my day at the office, Dana and I took a stab at bringing the Hawk the half-mile home. The failure had all the telltales of a fuel sludge problem—likely due to the elimination of fuel filter #2 and its rejected particles sitting on top of fuel filter #1—so I pulled the needle valve filter assembly on the side of the road. “Ok, turn the ignition on,” I asked my wife. Exceeding the call of duty, she fired the 289 right up. With fuel gushing everywhere at a steady idle, I did the most productive thing I could think of; with needle valve and filter assembly in my left hand and my thumb over the 5/16-inch garden hose on the right, I pressure-washed the cruddy parts clean and jammed the fuel hose down the carb while I reinstalled the filter assembly. Dangerous, yes, but I did have a fire extinguisher and precious few cranking amps left. 

It was enough to get the car home. Now, with the Stude in my driveway and the radiator off for a re-core, I felt an odd sort of nostalgia amid the thrill of a real breakdown on the way to somewhere important. It really does bring back memories!

The post Hawking for My High School Studebaker: Part 3 appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It was early February that I bought the 2008 Nissan Armada with 183,000 miles on it, along with a bunch of known problems—and several unknown ones. If my intent was to buy something that would generate a solid six weeks of content for these columns, it was successful beyond measure. But although I may be strategic, I’m not actively masochistic. Now that I’m through with the big slug of wrenching and I’ve largely gotten the Armada on its feet, I thought I’d step out of the garage and write something a bit more philosophical.

In a world full of inexpensive needy cars, I do have standards. I either buy things that my right brain craves or that my left brain convinces me that I need. This one was squarely in the latter camp. My rationale for buying the Armada was that last September I sold my giant, low-mileage 2008 Chevy Silverado 3500 Duramax duallie because: a) it was way more truck than I ever needed, b) in the 2 ½ years I owned it, I hadn’t used it to drag a single car home anyway, and c) I’d rather have the money than the truck. That all made sense, and I didn’t regret selling it one iota, but as soon as it was gone, I felt that my style had been cramped. So I decided to look at other vehicles capable of towing a car and dragging home other stuff (I did need a workbench). Given the choice between a pickup and a large SUV, I settled on the latter.

I’ve owned six Suburbans, and for a number of reasons, didn’t want a seventh. I was attracted by Toyota Sequoias’ excellent repair record, but the first-generation ones had frame-rot issues, and the second-gen ones were way more than I wanted to spend. I certainly never craved an Armada, but I came to them as the other full-sized Japanese tow-capable SUV, sort of the Pepsi-Burger-King to Toyota’s Coke-McDonalds, and I was thrilled to find that there were a fair number of them in my $4000-ish budget.

I don’t know about you, but when I buy a car, there’s an internal calculus that occurs regarding the asking price, what I paid, and what it took me, time-and-money-wise, to sort the thing out and get it road-worthy. The proportions of these variables depends on whether it’s an enthusiast car or more of a commodity-like daily driver. With enthusiast cars, the older I get, the less I feel like haggling. It’s not that I don’t have the energy. It’s more that, for example, everyone knows that a dead but rust-free, round-taillight BMW 2002 has a lot of value, so do I want to be the person who knows and respects that fact, or do I want to be another time-wasting lowballing jerk? But with daily drivers, most 15-year-old high-mileage needy cars—particularly those with rust (which is ALL OF THEM here in the Northeast)—don’t have a lot of value, and thus it’s reasonable to expect flexibility from the seller to come up with a reasonable price if they really want to move the thing out of their driveway.

Let me zoom in a bit more on that point. In a high winter-salt environment like New England, at some point, most cars that are daily-driven through the winter simply turn into pieces of junk. Some makes and models are better about it, some are worse, but the tin worm catches up with most. Even if there’s no visible rust on the outer body, and the frame and floor pans are solid, every other bit of undercarriage metal—springs, shocks, trailing arms, brake line fittings, and everything down to the hose clamps—rusts, presenting a continuum from minor surface rust, to deeper scale, to full-on rot. Having to replace a single component, like a trailing arm, due to rust-through isn’t that big of a deal, but when there’s an upper and a lower trailing arm on each side, front and back, deciding to go all-in on a project like that on a car that isn’t worth much becomes prohibitive.

So in looking for a vehicle like I was at a $4000 price point, there’s a threshold for rust beyond which, even if the rust itself isn’t catastrophic, the effect it has on the value of the car is. That is, if a vehicle not only has a rust hole in the outer body but also has, say, rotted trailing arms, unless there’s some other big compelling feature about it like a rare color or option package, it probably isn’t worth buying even if the seller drops the price to $800. When you’re looking for a vehicle and are confronted with these things, the choices are to keep looking and hope you get lucky, or raise your budget to find something with fewer rusty miles—or settle.

The Armada was initially listed on Facebook Marketplace for $4500. I liked the look of its black-on-black-leather and the fact that it was an LE with the tow package and wood accent trim. When the seller dropped the listed price to $4000, I went and had a look. The truck was off the road (his family had bought a new Tahoe), so I could only drive it slowly on back roads. This less-than-thorough test drive added a measure of risk, but it ran and drove well, other than banging in the front end likely due to bad struts and less-than-reassuring brakes likely due to rusty rotors, though they did begin to bite more as I stomped on them. I also found an exhaust leak, though I couldn’t tell from where, and plugging in the code reader revealed catalytic converter-based codes from both banks, but when cleared they didn’t immediately re-light. It did have one rust hole in the outer body (you can’t see it unless you open the right rear door), but the truck was only about 40 minutes from my house, and it was big and comfortable and had a small turning radius. I had the feeling that I could end my search by simply buying it and then, rather than continuing to look, I’d have the tow-and-stuff-hauling vehicle I said I wanted, as well as something my wife would drive if the weather turned sour. In other words, it was never about wanting the truck—it was wanting what the truck was for. So I asked the seller my favorite “What do you need to get for it” question. He said $3500, I went home and thought about it, offered him three, and we quickly settled on $3250.

With that in mind, you can see why, after I bought the truck, I felt like I had $750 to play with to get it to the point where I felt comfortable driving it a few hours to tow a car home, or loaning it to my wife if a lot of snow was predicted.

So, how’d I do?

I got out of the leaky exhaust for $46 worth of parts needed to splice a woefully-botched weld joining the muffler to the tailpipe (and I really don’t understand why some of y’all gave me grief for using steel adapters, big U-clamps, and muffler cement to seal it up and pass the second-most-stringent vehicle inspection in the country).

A whining/rumbling serpentine belt tensioner pulley resulted in my replacing the whole tensioner system (belt, tensioner with pulley, and idler pulley) for $115. Rumbling from the power steering pump made me think that it was bad too. I bought a low-mileage used OEM one for $81, but the noise went away after I replaced the tensioner and stanched a power steering fluid leak.

The original radiator’s upper and lower plastic tanks were both leaking. A new aluminum radiator was sourced for $172, which, by the time I added new upper and lower radiator hoses, coolant, and clamps, rose to $248.

I didn’t try to cheap out on the front struts at all, using Bilsteins and replacing every rubber bushing and spacer, setting me back $305. Finding out that both front springs were broken added another $115, for a total of $420.

Added up, the parts bill came to $910—slightly higher than my meaningless mental budget of $750. I could’ve easily kept it in line had I dialed back my choices with the front struts, or replaced only the noisy tensioner pulley instead of the whole tensioner system, but I’m comfortable with those choices, as I am with the repairing the exhaust as opposed to replacing it.

I’ve long said that I don’t know how anyone affords to own a vintage car if they have to pay someone else to do the work, but the same holds true for high-mileage daily drivers. Although doing all of the above tasks took time, none were really that big of a deal (it wasn’t, for example, drivetrain replacement), plaus my labor is free and I enjoy doing it. But it certainly made sense for the previous owner to sell it when he did—if you had to pay someone to do everything I did, it would’ve substantially exceeded the value of the truck.

There still are, of course, some unresolved issues. I haven’t yet looked at the car’s self-leveling rear suspension to see if I can get the back level with the front. There’s an asymptomatic P0011 engine code (“camshaft position timing over-advanced, or system performance bank 1”) that comes back every 40 or so miles. You can generally look up codes on a user forum and get a crowdsourced diagnosis (e.g., “that one’s usually the MAF sensor”), but this appears to be an odd one. I’m not certain whether the car’s A/C is working or not—I haven’t yet hooked up a manifold gauge set or fed 12V directly to the compressor—and there’s a clicking sound that I assume is the blend door inside the climate control box trying to move. And—dare I say it with my history with the mouse-infested truck—I’ve noticed that the car has a faint rodent smell.

Regarding having a 4WD beast that I could give to my wife if she was going on one of her quilting retreats up in New Hampshire, it’s been such a mild winter that that was a complete non-issue.

But, you’re thinking, with it road and tow-worthy, I must’ve hauled home some right-brain-satisfying passion car that’s really worth my wrenching time, right?

Yeah, about that.

I’m sure the Armada’s towing hour will come, but it hasn’t come yet. So far, the only thing I’ve hauled with it has been a free office desk I’m now using as that long-desired workbench in my basement. I suppose you could say that the free workbench cost me $4160. And, in truth, I grabbed it right after I bought the Armada, before I’d done a single repair on it.

But I do feel better having the Armada in the driveway, knowing that if I need to drop everything and take a look some right-priced TVR or Avanti or Fiat 124 Sport Coupe, and need to show up with a truck, trailer, and money and make it go away, I can make a beeline to U-Haul, grab an auto transporter, and hit the road.

Or begin thinking of a place to put another work bench.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Wrapping Up the Armada appeared first on Hagerty Media.

After sealing up my recently purchased 182,000-mile 2008 Nissan Armada’s exhaust, dealing with a noisy serpentine belt tensioner pulley, squelching power steering leaks, and replacing a leaking radiator, it was time to deal with the banging in the front end and the ox-cart-like ride, both of which were likely caused by worn-out front struts.

First, a quick class in Suspension 101. Basically, a shock absorber is a simple, easily-replaceable damper held in place by a long bolt that goes through a hole at the bottom. The top can be secured by the same kind of eye-bolt or with a threaded stud that protrudes through a shock tower. The main thing to note is that shocks don’t hold up the weight of the car—there’s always a separate spring nearby that does that.

In contrast, a strut assembly is a suspension component that has a spring with a damper going through the center of it, together which bear the weight of the vehicle. A MacPherson strut is a particular type of strut assembly that’s also part of the steering (turning the steering wheel causes the front struts to rotate, and the wheels are mounted to the bottom of the struts). The MacPherson design is more complicated because the front hubs, wheel bearings, rotors, calipers, steering knuckles, and ball joints are all attached to the strut.

The MacPherson struts in my vintage BMWs have a housing that lasts the life of the car and use an integrated stub axle on the bottom, and when you buy “front struts,” you’re buying cartridges that slide into the housings. On later cars, however, the MacPherson strut housings and cartridges are a single unit to which the other components attach.

Struts always have a spring perch to hold the bottom of the spring. During assembly, the spring is placed in the perch, then a variety of rubber bushings, bump-stops, and metal sleeves and spacers slide over the that extends from the strut cartridge. The very tip of the piston is threaded, and some sort of upper-perch “hat” is slid over it and held in place with a nut. On a MacPherson strut, because the whole assembly needs to rotate for steering, the “hat” has a bearing in it, but in a non-MacPherson strut, it’s just a fixed upper perch. With either design, the problem is that during assembly, a spring compressor is needed to compress the spring while the hat is slid over the threaded tip of the piston and the nut is tightened.

The Armada doesn’t have MacPhersons—it has a double-wishbone front suspension, so the front strut assemblies are each held in by three 14mm nuts at the top and one beefy bolt and nut at the bottom. But still, to replace the struts, the whole assembly needs to be removed on both sides, then the springs have to be compressed to remove the tension on the hats, and then the springs, metal spacers and sleeves, and the rubber bushings have to be removed and and transferred onto the new struts.

Because of the supposed difficulty of compressing springs, and the ubiquitous urban legends about people who have had terrible accidents with springs or hats being launched into their face, many DIY mechanics and even some purported pros are afraid to do it. It’s really not a big deal unless you’re an idiot and try to do it using hose clamps. Just buy or rent a spring compressor.

But it’s for these reasons that “quick-struts”—pre-assembled units combining the strut, spring, hat, and all spacers, sleeves, and bushings—have become popular. The appeal is that you remove the old ones, throw them in the recycle bin, and install the new ones without ever having to deal with a spring compressor. A search on eBay shows that a pair of unbranded quick-struts for the Armada can be had for about a hundred bucks shipped. Man, that’s cheap.

One of the interesting things about becoming interested in a new vehicle is that you get to check out a new user forum and see if it, like the car, fits you. I live mainly in forums for vintage BMWs, but also interact quite a bit with the Lotus Europa and Winnebago Rialta forums, all of which are made of my sort of people—kind, patient, and thrifty but not to the point where the go-to position is installing the cheapest-possible parts in the car. So it was interesting to read that the hive-mind opinion on ClubArmada was not to cheap out and buy quick-struts but instead to purchase a proper set of Bilsteins. The Armada has a common problem with bump-steer, and the Bilsteins reportedly solve it. Inexpensive quick-struts reportedly don’t, and you get what you pay for in terms of performance and longevity. I did find some branded quick-struts on eBay and RockAuto—Monroe, Gabriel, and KYB—but several folks on ClubArmada said that after they installed the KYBs, their Armada was several inches higher in the front and looked like a boat on plane.

Now, I’m firmly in the “real men compress their own springs” camp. I own three different spring compressors, I don’t regard it as in the least unsafe, it’s not a back-breaker, the time it takes to swap the springs over onto the new struts isn’t a big deal, and there was a ringing endorsement of Bilsteins (which I use on all my BMWs when it’s suspension-refresh time) from ClubArmada. Comparing that with the low opinion of low-cost unbranded parts in general and the lack of any consensus opinion vis a vis “buy these quick-struts” on the Armada forum made it an easy choice to buy the Bilsteins.

The next choice was between Bilstein 4600s with a fixed lower perch or the more-expensive adjustable 5100s meant for lifted applications. I had zero interest in lifting the Armada, but I found a set of open-box 5100s on Amazon for a great price, even less than the 4600s. I confirmed with the Armada forum that the lowest setting on the 5100s puts the truck at the same height as the 4600s, and ordered them. I also ordered new upper hats and all the rubber bushings, sleeves, and spacers, as the odds of them being reusable in a 183K New England vehicle were slim. All-in, it was about $300, which felt great.

With parts on the way, I positioned the truck in the garage to begin removing the strut assemblies. As I explained in the article on the exhaust work, there’s no way to fit the Armada completely in the garage and jack up the nose without kicking out not one but two cars. I checked the forecast, found a stretch of several days of 40°+ degree snow-free weather, and pulled the Armada inside and canted to the left so I had clearance against the right-hand garage wall.

I jacked up the truck, set it on stands, pulled the left front wheel, began eyeballing the scene, and noticed something that stopped me cold.

The spring was broken and the bottom coil was missing.

I reflexively moved to the right side of the truck to check the other spring. It was broken, too. The banging I was hearing wasn’t due to blown struts. It was from the two broken springs. A simple look would’ve told me that before I ordered parts. Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!

The strut assemblies needed to come out regardless, but I was faced with an immediate choice of whether to buy a pair of springs, or return what I’d bought and go the quick-strut route, which was suddenly had some appeal. Had there been a well-reviewed option on the Armada forum, I probably would’ve done it. However, I found a set of Moog springs on Amazon for $88 for the pair, confirmed on ClubArmada that they’re OEM-equivalent and not lifting springs, and put them on order for next-day delivery.

So, on with the repair itself. The non-MacPherson strut configuration with the big nut and bolt at the bottom and the three 14mm nuts at the top made removal look trivial, but I immediately ran into trouble, as one of the top nuts on each side was seized, and despite soaking them in SiliKroil penetrating oil overnight, putting an impact wrench on them rounded off the corners.

In my first book, I have a chapter on “stuckness,” in which I describe a variety of techniques including heating the nut with a MAPP gas torch and applying wax to the threads, really heating the nut with an oxy-acetylene torch, hammering a smaller-sized hex or Torx socket onto the nut, and cutting off or drilling out bolts. But over and above that, over the years I’ve developed a philosophy where I look at fasteners, think “How deep will the doo-doo be if I snap this off or round its head,” and then act accordingly, and didn’t do that here, as I’d never had anything remotely like this happen to a nut that size on a strut stud. After several oxy-acetylene torchings, the nut on one side came off by hammering a smaller socket onto it, and for the other side, I had to use the trick of carefully positioning a chisel on its circumference and smacking it with a hammer to apply a tangential impact force.

Although I was basically assembling my own not-so-quick struts and didn’t need anything off the old ones, I was curious if the old struts actually were bad, so I disassembled them to check. Because both springs were broken, there was no tension on the hats, so I didn’t need to use a compressor; I could just put the impact wrench on the strut top nut and spin it off. One strut was fine, but the other one was completely blown.

Assembly of the new struts with all-new parts was very satisfying. There were numerous reports on the Armada forum of front-end banging after installation of new Bilsteins due to people misunderstanding the assembly instructions, so I triple-checked the location of all the bushings, sleeves, and washers, and made absolutely certain that I had the adjustable spring perches at their lowest setting.

Installation was a bit challenging. Though there were no stuck fasteners to deal with, the combination of the new stiff springs and the new stiff struts made the strut assemblies difficult to get into position. Even unbolting the sway bar and having one of my kids stand on the lower wishbone, things didn’t want to line up. It took some persuasion with a big lever and smacking the lower bolts with a hammer to get them in place.

With everything buttoned up, I took the Armada for a short drive on a nearby torture-track back road that I use to diagnose rattles, thunks, and clunks. The front-end noise was gone, the truck was blissfully quiet, and it rode and steered great. But when I got back home, parked the truck, and looked at it, there was no ignoring the fact that the space above the front tires was abnormally large, and the nose was high.

I checked the photos I took before the repair, and it definitely wasn’t my imagination.

Now, there’s likely a few things going on. The Armada did have two broken front springs, so it definitely was sitting lower on the nose than it should’ve. Gas-pressurized shocks and struts like Bilsteins do exert an upward force on the body of a vehicle and can make it sit slightly higher than when it’s on fluid-filled shocks and struts. I’m hopeful that it’ll settle down a bit with time and mileage. Of course, the opinion on the Armada forum about both the zero setting of the Bilstein 5100s and the Moog springs being equivalent to stock could simply be wrong. And had I gone with quick-struts, I would’ve likely selected the KYBs, and as folks reported those raised the front, it might have been even worse.

Another possibility involves the truck’s rear suspension. When I was looking at Armadas, friends on social media who do a lot more towing than I do advised me to try to find one with the tow package, as it has a shorter-geared differential, a transmission tow-mode setting, and a pneumatic suspension with air-pressurized shocks that self-levels the rear to deal with the weight of a trailer sitting on the hitch. The one I bought has all that, so imagine my surprise when, now that I own it, I find that most of the talk on the Armada forum about the self-leveling rear suspension is in regards to removing it. I guess that shouldn’t surprise me, as my BMW E39 528i sport wagon had the same dynamic. When I start up the truck, I hear the compressor running to pressurize the rear shocks, but it’s unclear to me whether it’s actually doing anything, so the shocks might be bad or a line might be leaking. I’m going to live with it for a while, then trouble-shoot it to see if anything is wrong. If it’s working, I believe you can adjust the sensor to raise the back a bit.

So we’re now close to the Armada exiting the sort-out phase of our relationship and entering the “let’s do stuff” phase. We’ll see how it goes.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The Not-So-Quick Strut appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Any car is an assembly of parts. Since bolted joints are both strong and easy to assemble, just about any service or maintenance on a car or truck requires you to remove some type of bolt. Anyone who has worked on a car for more than three minutes knows that even a larger project is not so bad if the hardware is not difficult to deal with. Those with many years of experience know how difficult corroded and stuck fasteners often give up, but convincing them to surrender requires force. How you generate that force is defined by the severity of the situation. Let’s look at the levels of bolt persuasion, from least to most aggressive, and some of the reasons why they fall in this order.

Level #5: Open-End Wrench

An open end wrench is nothing more than two parallel surfaces that meet two sides of a fastener. This often means only truly gripping near the corners due to tolerance in production of both the hardware and the tool. Sometimes, the fit is plenty tight and less than one foot of leverage is plenty. There is a reason wrenches are standard in every automotive toolkit since people started working on cars; wrenches pack light, are simple to produce, and are durable for many years if not abused. Sure, long-handle versions exist, but most of those are box-end, which means they are basically a worse version of a …

Level #4: Socket and Ratchet

The combination of a socket and a ratchet steps things up in a couple different ways: First, by providing additional contact points with the stuck fastener. Whether 12-point or 6-point, a socket provides more even contact with the fastener, and a ratchet allows us to shift the angle of the lever to maximize the force applied by our muscles. That handle can easily be exchanged for a …

Level #3: Longer Ratchet

The socket is giving us good positive engagement on the hardware, so if it hasn’t moved yet, we must add force. Long-handle ratchets are handy, because it can be difficult to reposition a long wrench multiple times just to rotate a fastener one turn. Sadly, the most helpful part of a ratchet—the rotating head—is also the weak point, and if you treasure your tool you will likely grab one with a longer handle before adding a cheater bar or hitting the handle of your ratchet with a hammer. Sure, you can buy rebuild kits for some ratchets … or you could avoid stripping out the catch pawls inside the head in the first place.

Level #2: Impact Wrench

Leaning your weight on a long lever is one way to impart force. The other is to apply it suddenly with a spinning hammer. That is the basic function of an impact wrench, which generates high amounts of force in short bursts to help break loose the corrosion that forms inside threaded joints. Better yet, impact wrenches are powered by compressed air or by batteries, not by elbow grease, making them the hot ticket when dealing with stuck stuff. The only problem is that the torque capabilities of an impact wrench are limited by design, as the motor, hammer, and anvil can go get so large before the tool becomes unwieldy. You might have to switch back to brute force and grab the …

Level #1: Breaker Bar

At the end of the day, physics always wins. While inconvenient compared to the luxury of an impact wrench, using a long bar to apply torque to a proper-fitting socket is by far the best way to put absurd amounts of torque onto a stuck fastener.

A long enough lever will snap the hardened head off every breaker bar you can find. And that is what you are often hoping for, at this point—the sweet release of tension by any means necessary. Just break already. The drill and tap set are already on the workbench.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Ranked: 5 Ways to Break a Stuck Fastener appeared first on Hagerty Media.

After sealing up the exhaust in my recently-purchased 183K-mile 2008 Nissan Armada well enough to get it through the second-most stringent state inspection in the country, I dealt with noise from the serpentine belt. The problem turned out to be bad bearings on the timing chain tensioner, but there was also noise from the power steering pump, which led me to fix a leak from one of the PS hoses by replacing the constant-tension spring clamp with a worm-screw type clamp that could be tightened. That wound up slippery-sloping into fixing other under-engine leaks (the power steering uses automatic transmission fluid, so I needed to be certain the leaks were from the PS and not from the transmission), and that led me to a place I didn’t expect to go.

Fluid leaks should be looked at in terms of both substance and severity. That is, for lubricants, you can grossly triage them into drips, patches, puddles, and gushes. Drips are isolated “marking their territory” dots. Patches are fried-egg-sized stains on the garage floor. Puddles are things that have enough depth that you can swipe a finger through them and actually move fluid like Moses parting the red sea. Gushes are where you actually see fluid streaming out of the car and can follow it directly back to its source. Obviously you’d be foolish to drive a car that’s gushing any fluid further than down the driveway and into the garage, but the others are more of a judgement call. Anyone who owns a vintage car knows that it’s in their nature to leak engine oil, gear oil, and transmission fluid, and enforcing a zero-leak policy may not be possible. My Lotus Europa leaks fluid from the transaxle in quantities between a patch and a puddle, and I’ve replaced the transaxle seals twice in a misguided attempt to squelch it, only to learn in the forums that, basically, they all do that, and loving the car means living with its incontinence, placing a drip pan under it, and topping it up with a frequency usually reserved for engine oil.

But substance—which fluid is dripping—is critical. There should be a zero-leak policy with gasoline. Weeping a little gas isn’t acceptable. Any fuel leak should be found and fixed immediately, otherwise you risk your vehicle burning and you dying.

I regard coolant leaks as a big notch back from fuel leaks, but they’re still unacceptable. If coolant is leaking, even dripping, something is failing, and you can be certain that it’ll get worse over time. It won’t kill you, but it can kill your car by depleting the engine of coolant to the point where it overheats and warps or cracks the head. Driving a car that you know is leaking any amount of coolant any more than around town isn’t dangerous, but it’s dumb. Don’t do it. In my BMW-centric world, where I road-trip 50-year-old cars thousands of miles and daily-drive 20-year-old cars with plastic-laten cooling systems that crack at any moment and dump the coolant, I’m hyper-vigilant about cooling leaks. The cause could be a loose hose clamp, or corrosion on a metal coolant neck not allowing a hose to seal, or a bad water pump seal, or an actual hole in the radiator or heater core, or, in a modern car, failure of a plastic component. Visual inspection with the engine running usually reveals the source. Pressure testers that screw in in place of the radiator cap can also be helpful if the leak only occurs at operating temperature.

So, back to the Armada. There were two other places where the rubber PS hoses were leaking where they’re pushed over metal lines and secured with spring clamps. The worst of them was where two lines ran through the engine compartment on top of the left frame leg. It was the lower one that was leaking, and the upper one blocked the access to getting vise grips on the spring clamp. I wound up having to remove the inner fender liner in order to get at it from the side. As with the first PS leak, installing tighten-able worm clamps stanched the leak.

The remaining PS leak took me a while to find. A drip kept forming below the steering rack on the frame. To find the source, I had to lie under the car with the engine running and watch. Unfortunately, it’s coming from where the input shaft goes into the top of the steering rack, and replacement of the seal likely requires removal of the rack, which in turn requires removal of the front differential. Further, the seal is in the middle of—get this—a seven-sided nut for which I’ve yet to locate any reference to a removal tool. Fortunately, it’s a small leak, so for now I’m going to let it go.

But while I was under the Armada’s nose, I found, to my surprise, drops of coolant at the bottom of the radiator and stray ones higher up. When I bought it, I knew about the wetness that was likely from the power steering, but the coolant leak was not something I was aware of.

It turned out to be leaking from two places. The first was from below the radiator cap, where a thin hose attaches that feeds the overflow tank. Like the PS hoses, it was leaking from the spring clamp, so I replaced it with a worm clamp, but it continued to leak from the brass fitting to which the hose was attached. At first, I didn’t understand what I was seeing—the fitting seemed like it swiveled. Then I realized that there had originally been a little plastic coolant neck there, it had snapped off (a very common problem on plastic radiators), someone had jury-rigged it with a screwed-in brass fitting and sealed it with Teflon tape, and it was now loose and leaking.

I first tried Permatex Thread Locker. That leaked, so I went to Gorilla Glue. That leaked too, so I was prepared to go nuclear with J-B Weld when I discovered a second leak.

This one was from someplace more serious—where one of the automatic transmission lines went into the plastic tank at the bottom (the radiator also acts as a transmission cooler, as it does on many vehicles). It wasn’t leaking from the hose, so replacing the spring clamp as I’d done elsewhere wouldn’t matter. It looked like the leak might be coming from a seal behind the fitting that ran through the plastic tank, but my attempt to loosen or tighten the nut only caused the plastic to flex and the leak to increase.

In addition, one of the things I read about the Armada is that the radiator’s internal transmission-cooling plumbing eventually cracks, allowing ATF and coolant to intermix. This creates the dreaded “strawberry milkshake” that causes the transmission to fail. I checked the date code on the radiator, and it was original to the car. Taking these three things together, I would’ve been an idiot to not replace the radiator, and as I often say, I try not to be an idiot. Seriously—it’s one thing for something to break with no warning, and quite another to be stranded and sit there thinking, “Yeah, I should’ve replaced that.”

As with everything I do, I looked at the cost. Folks who routinely tow big trailers install a separate heavy-duty transmission cooler. Others replace the radiator, either with the original Nissan part, or a less-expensive aftermarket choice, or an aluminum one. RockAuto has several cheap radiators, but these things are big, and with shipping they came to about $150. The correct Nissan radiator with its known shortcomings could be had on eBay for as low as $180. These days the world is full of decently-priced Chinese-made aluminum radiators. I’ve used them in a variety of cars. The weld quality varies from decent to cringe-worthy, but I’ve never had one leak. Whether or not to use one is a question of fit and vibe. I think they look completely out of place in my beloved BMW 2002s, and besides, they’re too thick to use without deleting the original cooling fan, which I refuse to do, but I have one in my Lotus Europa and use them in some of the later BMWs. The Armada forum said that there’s plenty of room for a three-row or even a four-row aluminum radiator, but fit-wise, the fan shroud needs to be fettled with.

I would’ve preferred to buy an aluminum radiator on Amazon so that I could return it cost-free if it wouldn’t fit, but the cost there was $250 for the same radiator that was $185 on eBay. Then I found a new eBay vendor with zero feedback selling the same radiator for $165 (drop-shipped from the same port in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, as nearly every other seller). There was the risk that the vendor wasn’t real, or the radiator was damaged or open-box, but I clicked and bought, and I was relieved when an intact new radiator arrived two days later in a sealed box.

As the box sat in my kitchen, I thought, “Damn, this thing is big.”

Replacing a radiator on a vintage car consists of draining it, removing the upper and lower hoses, removing the four bolts holding it to the nose, and done in 15 minutes, tops. But on newer cars, it’s typically far more complicated. On the modern BMWs that I’m familiar with, it’s like one of those interlocking rope-and-ring Chinese puzzles, where an odd dance needs to be done with the fan, the shroud, and the expansion tank. On the Armada, the fan and shroud were straightforward, but it turns out that the power steering fluid cooler and the A/C condenser are attached to the front of the radiator, so the dance involves unbolting the condenser, then tilting the radiator forward so you can unbolt the PS cooler.

Despite its size, I expected the original plastic-tanked radiator to be fairly light, but a combination of fluid remaining in it and it sticking to its rubber mounts made it a “don’t do that” to my 65-year-old back, so I elicited help from one of my kids to muscle it up and out. I test-fit the shroud on the new radiator and did some cutting to get it to seat around its upper tank.

When you replace a radiator, there’s the question of how much of the rest of the cooling system you should prophylactically replace, even if there’s nothing wrong with it. If the water pump or the thermostat or the fan clutch go south on me, I’m certainly going to be pissed that I didn’t just replace them while they were all accessible, but the fan clutch feels fine, there’s no play or leakage in the water pump pulley, and the car warms up perfectly. I did, however, inspect the hoses at the front of the engine and found that the aluminum neck to which the upper radiator hose is attached was badly corroded. I replaced the hose and cleaned the neck. The lower radiator hose looked OK, but for symmetry I replaced it at the same time.

Dropping the new radiator in wasn’t nearly as bad as removing the old one, as I had gravity on my side, but getting the cooler and condenser reattached was challenging. I dropped the condenser attachment bolts down into the nose multiple times and had to fish them out with a magnetic wand.

When the radiator, shroud, and fan were all installed, I spun the fan by hand and heard it hitting the shroud due to lack of clearance on the left side. I could’ve pulled it back out and trimmed that side, but the only bolt-on attachments are at the top, so even if I created clearance, there was nothing to hold it in place. So in true Hack Mechanic fashion, I installed a very stout zip tie at the bottom corner that pulled it where it needed to be.

I did the drive-park-check cycle a few times to be absolutely certain no coolant was leaking and the only remaining leak was the trickle from the steering rack’s input shaft, then deemed it roadworthy.

So in terms of the Armada’s punch list, that leaves the front struts. I’ll get to that next week.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The Armada Springs a Leak appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There are multiple ways to interpret the word “bearings.” In the midst of a recent garage work session, it became clear I was maintaining not one set of bearings, but two.

The task at hand was a mock-up of the rear wheel assembly on my Honda XR600R project. The bike I purchased is a 1988 model year, which was factory-equipped with a drum rear brake. There was nothing wrong with the drum setup. It functioned and was certainly restorable. The wheel and hub were fine as well. I just wanted to “upgrade” to a disc brake.

For the type of riding I do, a restored and well-adjusted drum brake is perfectly suitable. It’s relatively sealed, low-maintenance, and extremely durable. By comparison, a disc brake setup is quite a pain. The caliper needs a guard, the rotor requires protection on the underside, and the whole operation is exposed to the weather, allowing it to be coated in a constantly refreshed, abrasive slurry of dirt and water.

But the heat management is worth the trouble. That large rotor happily hands off heat to the atmosphere in a manner so true it’s a law that long predates brakes of any kind. A disc setup produces consistent stops, and the increase in effectiveness far outweighs any decrease in durability. So, of course, I decided it was high time I had a trail bike with this newfangled technology. I’d also been wanting to do a project that involved a little more fabrication, and the conversion from drum to disc brake seemed perfectly designed to teach me a few new things.

So after checking a few fitment details between the first-generation, drum-brake XR600R and the second-generation, disc-brake bikes, I began pillaging the halls of eBay, slashing at the buy-it-now button with a plastic sword 16 numbers long. The spoils arrived at my doorstep in a handful of boxes. The largest of the treasures was a swingarm from a 1994 XR600R, followed by a rear caliper and mount from a 1992 XR600R and a rear brake master cylinder from a Honda CRF450X.

The hardest part of the process would be hanging the master cylinder, so I started with the easy bit. The swingarm bolted right into place and even included the linkage that connects the shock to the swingarm. This was a nice bonus, because the linkage is comprised of the same parts as the ones coming off with the drum brake swingarm. Having a second linkage allows me to rebuild one while the other is still bolted to the bike, allowing me to test the fitment of other parts. Plus, spares. Everyone loves spares.

The needle roller bearings in a linkage pivot are some of the humblest parts of a motorcycle. They take a tremendous amount of force while being subjected to the brutal environment that is the bottom of an off-road motorcycle. The linkage gets bounced off rocks and roots while being pelted with everything flung off the front tire.

These bearings always put up a fight coming out. Always. The hardened steel shells, which reluctantly joined the links on their high-pressure first date, become nearly inseparable from the cast aluminum with time. The union is so strong that I had to use my bench vise as a press to break the two free, adding heat and tension until the aluminum expanded and allowed the bonds, formed over decades, to break. Only then could a new relationship begin, with new bearings.

Items like bearings are not meant to last forever. They are consumable things, meant to be changed when the time is right. Just like our personal, figurative bearings. Desires and directions shift and evolve. It is best to take a step back, reassess, and reorient ourselves with where we are going—and if that is indeed what we want.

The idea of doing a fair amount of extra work just to fit a disc brake to an aging motorcycle is slightly absurd, and as I mock up the assembly and measure for the spacers I’ll be making, I reminded myself that the whole disc-brake project is irrational. However, while none of it makes any real sense, we are granted the freedom to be absurd. That freedom includes making the decision to solve problems that don’t exist. I didn’t lose my way and wander off into the weeds. No, my bearings are well-maintained, even if one type is leading me down the more difficult path.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Maintaining One’s Bearings appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The last two weeks, I wrote about repairing the exhaust in my recently-purchased 2008 Nissan Armada and getting the car inspected. With it legal, its intermittent Check Engine Light (CEL) issue faded into the background, and the punch list of needs became: 1) replacement of the front struts (it banged loudly over uneven terrain), 2) diagnosing and addressing a number of minor leaks, and 3) dealing with a loud metallic rattle from the front of the engine, almost certainly associated with the serpentine belt path. As belts are part of my “Big Seven” things likely to strand a car, I addressed this one next.

The so-called serpentine belt on a modern car is a very different beast than the quaint “fan belt” on a vintage car—that old narrow V-profile belt that spins the alternator, water pump, and the pump’s pulley-mounted fan. Unless you own an air-cooled Volkswagen, where belt tension is changed by removing washers to make the groove in the pulley shallower, V-profile fan belts are manually tightened by pivoting the alternator on a tensioning track. Loosen the bolt that holds the ear of the alternator to the track, pivot the alternator to slide it on the track until the belt is snug, tighten the bolt, done. It takes maybe a minute. If the belt snaps, replacing it is trivial. You just need to pass the new belt around the fan, loosen the alternator’s tensioning bolt, put the new belt on the crank, water pump and alternator pulleys, and tension it. If the radiator has a fan shroud, it’s a little more challenging to get the new belt around the fan, but it’s still an easy roadside repair.

Manually-tensioned V-belts are simple, but they do have issues. Both the alternator and the tension track typically have rubber bushings in them, and with age, heat, and oil, they wear out, causing the alternator to cock forward at an angle, which makes it so the belt will never stay tight. At some point the belt may begin to slip, which can cause the water pump to stop spinning and the coolant temperature to head into the red. In addition, cars that had what were then luxury accessories like power steering and air conditioning typically had separate V-belts for each, whose tension needed to be adjusted individually.

In the 1980s, things swung in the direction of cars having a single, wide, automatically-tensioned, grooved serpentine belt—so called because of the snake-like path it takes through all the pulleys. Serpentine belts don’t require tension adjustment. Instead, a spring-loaded or hydraulic tensioner has a pulley that leans against the belt. In addition to the pulley on the tensioner, there may be another idler pulley that routes the belt. Generally, if a car has a serpentine belt, there’s only one and it runs everything, but there are exceptions—my 2003 BMW E39 530i has two, with the second one running the A/C compressor, and each having its own tensioner.

The big advantage of serpentine belts is that they’re maintenance-free (if by maintenance you mean manually adjusting the tension). And, because the alternator doesn’t need to provide the tension adjustment, it mounts rigidly, so it’s far less likely to cock from worn bushings. But as with most things, there’s no free lunch, and a serpentine belt creates several challenges.

The first is that the serp belt, like any belt, is a normal-wear-and-tear part that needs to be replaced, and as is the case with many things on newer cars, that’s far more difficult than with an old-school V-belt due to the tightly-packed nature of components in modern cars and the torturous path the belt often takes. On rear-wheel drive cars with longitudinally-mounted engines, the tight access makes it difficult to even see the belt, much less remove it, without first removing components like the air box.

On front-wheel-drive cars with a transverse-mounted engine, because there isn’t a belt-driven fan aimed at the radiator, electric radiator fans are used. You’d think that would translate to an advantage that the belt isn’t hidden inside a fan shroud, but on our Honda Fit, the belt is so close to the side of the engine compartment that it’s necessary to remove a wheel and the inner fender liner to access the belt and pulleys.

In addition to the belt itself needing to be periodically replaced, the tensioner pulley (and the idler pulley, if there is one) spins on bearings, and over time, they wear out. The indication often starts as a high-pitched whine, transitions into a marbles-whipping-around-a-metal-bowl sound, then settles into a screechy metallic howl as it nears failure. And the tensioner itself can fail, though that’s less common.

The third issue is that replacing the belt requires relieving the tension by rotating the tensioner in the opposite direction it’s using to tension the belt, and that’s often not easy, both because it’s not clear where or how to grab it (some tensioners have a hex-head bolt you put a socket on, others have an Allen key or a Torx socket, and on some you grab the central nut on the pulley itself), and because accessing it and being able to move a long-handled ratchet wrench far enough to de-tension the belt is difficult. You typically need to search an enthusiast forum to find out which technique your car requires.

Another thing to be aware of is that while V-profile belts always sit in the V-groove of a pulley, one of the things that enables serpentine pulleys to be so, uh, serpentine is their ability to wrap around pulleys in either direction. The crankshaft pulley that supply belt power and things that use power (the alternator, power steering pump, A/C compressor) always have a grooved pulley with the belt’s grooves sitting in it, but the tensioner and idler pulley may be grooved or may have a flat surface that presses against the back of the belt, depending on the belt routing that’s required.

I encountered all these issues on the Armada. Something in the belt train was clearly making noise, particularly on cold start. It wasn’t yet at screechy howl; it was more like a hollow metaling ringing. I used my mechanic’s stethoscope and found that both the tensioner pulley and the power steering pump were loud (the steering also groaned when cold, further implicating the PS pump). However, other things in the belt chain—the alternator, the water pump—can certainly make noise as well.

There’s a technique you can use to isolate the problem, or at least get data that corroborates that of the stethoscope. The trick is to de-tension the belt, carefully lay it to the side of one component at a time so you don’t lose the belt routing, and test each component by spinning its pulley by hand as well as grabbing the pulley and checking it for play. I did that and immediately found that the bearing in the tensioner pulley was worn to the point of noise and obvious looseness. Surprisingly, the power steering pump felt fine.

So, what to do?

When you find a bad tensioner pulley, you have several choices. You can replace only the pulley, or you can buy a new tensioner with a new pulley attached, or you can buy a kit with a new belt, tensioner/pulley, and idler pulley if there is one, and do it all. The Armada’s belt looked absolutely fine with no cracks or dry rot, and the idler pulley was quiet. I usually choose the money-saving route, but because there was a break in the weather where I could do the repair, and Amazon could get me a Gates belt-tensioner-idler kit next day for $115 (whereas the a la carte options had longer shipping times), I opted for that.

The only power steering pump I could get next-day was an unbranded Chinese-made one of questionable quality, so even though it made sense to pull the belt off and do the two repairs together, I separated them and ordered a well-priced, low-mileage OEM Hitachi PS pump from a New England recycler, knowing it would take two days to get here.

I’d already figured out how to de-tension the belt to do the component test, so removing it was easy. I first downloaded an image of how the belt routed around all the pulleys, then verified that it was correct for my vehicle. I realized that the Armada is a little unusual in that the mechanical cooling fan (and its viscous clutch) doesn’t ride on the front of the water pump but on its own pulley, essentially creating a second idler pulley, so it wasn’t my imagination that the belt path appeared particularly convoluted. Fortunately, the engine compartment in the Armada is big enough that everything was accessible without having to do anything like removing the fan shroud, so replacing the tensioner assembly and the idler pulley was easy.

What was far more challenging than I expected was getting the new belt on. I foolishly thought that, to thread it onto the pulleys, all I needed to do was pass the belt between the fan and the shroud and pull it over the fan. It took me over an hour to fully understand that the only pulley that’s “inside the fan” is the fan pulley itself, and that the fan pulley was smooth, so it needed to run against the back of the belt, not the grooved part. After several attempts, I learned that the trick to putting the belt on was to take a loop of it oriented with the grooves facing outward, pass it over the fan, then put the flat back of the belt on the fan pulley. Everything else could then be placed on its pulley.

Except, of course, the tensioner. New serpentine belts are typically much tighter than old stretched belts, requiring the tensioner to be rotated much further back than was needed to release the old belt. While I was able to release the old belt using a ratchet placed from the top of the engine compartment, getting enough clearance to put an 18-inch pipe on the end of the ratchet handle required me to do it from beneath the car. I also employed the trick of using strong clothespin-style clamps to hold the belt onto pulleys that it kept sliding off during belt routing.

Getting the belt on was enough work that I didn’t look forward to having to do it again when the replacement power steering pump arrived. Although I was certain that I needed to replace it, I gave the pump a look while I was under the car. I noticed that one of the bolts on the pump bracket was loose, so I tightened it. And, although the whole issue of fluid leaks was a separate task, there was an obvious and non-trivial leak of power steering fluid from where one of the rubber PS hoses mated to a metal line. The Armada uses spring-style, constant-tension clamps for all the coolant and power steering connections. While I understand the theory behind their use, I hate these clamps, as in situations like this, there’s no way to tighten them. I used pliers to loosen the clamp, moved it backward on the hose, took a conventional worm-screw-style clamp, opened it up, slid it over the hose, closed it, and tightened it down.

I then started the Armada. Not only was the ringy rattle from the belt tensioner pulley gone, so was the noise from the power steering pump.

No way!

I thought it was a fluke, so I waited until the following 32°-morning and tried it again.

Quiet as a church mouse.

I’m not certain whether the power steering noise I was hearing through the stethoscope was just a rattle from the bolt loose on the bracket, and whether the groaning on cold turning was due to pressure loss from a little fluid leakage, but for now there’s nothing wrong with it. I need to decide whether to spend the shipping to return the $80 used power steering pump, or put it on the shelf in the garage for when the thing really does fail.

So. Armada exhaust? Done, at least for now. Belt-and-related-accessory noise? Done, at least until the power steering pump rears its head. Next week: fluid leaks.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The Twisted Task of Replacing Serpentine Belts and Tensioners appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Just having some time alone in the garage is a luxury for most of us, so building our dream shop with all the bells and whistles often stays a dream as we focus on simply enjoying what we have. Just because we can’t have 2000 square feet, a mill, a lathe, and a lift does not mean we should ignore little touches of luxury that make our projects more enjoyable—or, at least, more tolerable.

A luxury does not have to be a big-ticket item, merely something that makes you look forward to your time in the garage or that makes your projects run a little smoother. With that goal in mind, here are five affordable upgrades for just about any space.

Affordable Luxury #1: Good Lights

Lighting technology has come a long way in recent history. Compact and efficient LED work lights are easy to hang, run tens of thousands of hours with little maintenance, and sometimes can even be put on a dimmer. That last feature may seem a little absurd, but I don’t particularly enjoy how surgical my garage can feel when I want to just hang out with friends.

Hardwired, battery-operated, or plug-in, lights are great options that can fit anyone’s needs at almost every price range. Consider lighting an investment. It might feel like a decent chunk of change now, but most lights will last years, and they will make working on just about anything more enjoyable.

Affordable Luxury #2: A Decent Stereo

The jury has been split 50/50 here whenever I bring up having a television in the garage, but it’s pretty much universally agreed that a good stereo is a must-have. While the Panasonic boombox purchased with Pepsi points in 1996 might still be cranking out the tunes, if you care about sound quality at all, a good set of speakers and a decent amplifier are very affordable, and they allow you to advantage of any music format you might prefer.

Obviously, no one would want to keep records where they use an angle grinder, but not every garage is focused on fabrication. After I splurged for in-ceiling speakers and a tidy wall-mounted amplifier, it became so much easier to listen to music, and the sound doesn’t change much no matter where I am in the space—and my setup cost about $200. Do what works for you, and make it sound good.

Affordable Luxury #3: Sturdy Shelves

Even the most minimal workspace must include storage. The prices of sturdy, strong, and decent-looking shelving are budget-level when you consider that it takes a lot to wear out shelves. Similar to the lighting above, good shelving is a buy once, cry once decision. Adjustable shelving can be had for just a couple hundred dollars, perfectly suited for the projects and parts you store currently. It can even leave you room to grow or change the space in the future. For the same price, you can also buy materials and build custom shelves for your space.

Affordable Luxury #4: Reels

If your garage is bigger than a closet, the addition of extension cords or air hoses is less about convenience and more about necessity: Overhead or wall-mounted, retractable reels make it easy to keep tripping hazards to a minimum. These have gotten budget-friendly as of late—just be sure the wire gauge is appropriate for your use.

Some of the low-end, cheap electrical reels can be 14-gauge or smaller, while most heavy-duty plug-in power tools are best served by 12-gauge. Roll out the length of hose or cord semi-regularly to inspect for imperfections or damage. Cables and hoses that live on the floor pick up debris and, if those bits are rolled into a reel, they become grinding compounds that can damage cords over time.

Affordable Luxury #5: Rugs

Okay, maybe not a rug. We couldn’t imagine a garage with wall-to-wall carpet, but something that people can wipe their feet on, or a standing mat at your workbench are little things that go a long way to make a workspace feel less industrial and more like a place you enjoy being in. Use them to inject a little personality into your space, if you want: Novelty door mats can say just about anything, so we won’t give you any ideas.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 5 Affordable Luxuries for a Hard-Working Garage appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Last week, I wrote about discovering that the exhaust in my just-purchased 182,000-mile 2008 Nissan Armada was leaking in three places—large leaks from a laughably bad weld between the tailpipe and the muffler and from the seam on the top of the muffler, and a small leak at the rear flange of one of the four catalytic converters. I shoveled muffler putty into and around the first two leaks, ignored the third, took it in for inspection, and failed. So now, instead of a useful vehicle, I had a big red “R” sticker on the windshield that could land me a moving violation and add points on my license, and an exhaust whose proper repair was the definition of a slippery slope. Great. Just great.

In addition to the specifics of the vehicle and its exhaust, there’s, well, me. I’ve long said that I have no idea how anyone can afford to own any older high-mileage car, much less a vintage car, if they need to pay someone to fix it. Multiply that by 13 for the number of vehicles I own (shut up), and you can see why none of the cars I own ever gets everything it needs. The day I stop doing all my own work is the day I decide that I need to shed vehicles. Although that day is not today or next week, this is getting more challenging as I get older. I still think of myself as 25 years old, but I turned 65 last summer, have back issues that get triggered by lifting and bending, and have a garage situation where the Armada appeared to be too big to fit without kicking out not one but two of my cars. I do have a mid-rise lift in the garage, but the Armada’s weight is close to the lift’s 6000-pound limit, it’s so wide that I don’t think the swing arms will even reach the jack points on the sills, and the geometry of the truck and the lift make it challenging to get the jack pads somewhere more inboard, like the under frame. For these reasons, any under-truck work likely needs to be done on the garage floor, and even then, figuring out how to get the truck in there so I could close the door and turn the heat on and not freeze my old bones was challenging.

My 38-year-owned ’73 BMW 3.0CSi, 1999 M Coupe, and 49,000-mile ’73 2002 are here in the garage over the winter, with four other vintage BMWs and the Lotus in warehouse storage. The CSi is the definition of a pampered car. With its Karmann-built body, it is never going to sit outside (to repeat the best automotive joke in the world: Karmann invented rust, then licensed the process to the Italians). In contrast, the M Coupe is a modern car that can sit in the driveway for weeks if necessary. The low-mileage 2002 is somewhere between the two. I don’t necessarily think it’s an act of violence to move it outside for a few days, but if the weather turns and it sits in rain or snow while I’ve taken the Armada “down” and rendered it immobile while waiting for parts, I will have made the wrong call.

My garage is 31-feet long, so it easily fits two small cars nose-to-tail. After I bought the mid-rise lift, I discovered that an unintended benefit is that I can put a car on it, lift it, and be able to tuck the nose of another car under it. I didn’t think that would work with the Armada, as its nose is tall enough that I’d need to raise the 2002 so high that I was concerned I’d dent the roof against the ceiling. Plus, a while back I found that one of the lift’s hydraulic cylinders leaks when raising it to the upper position.

I went for it anyway. The cylinder shot out a stream of red fluid, but it got to where I could lower it into the lock-stopped upper position. Hopefully come spring I’ll be able to get the 2002 back down.

So, I had the truck inside the heated garage. I could lift the back end if I needed to, but I had no room to lift the nose. This meant that I could get to the tailpipe, maybe the muffler, but I wouldn’t be able to access the slightly-leaky flange behind the right-hand secondary cat.

I looked on RockAuto and found that there were three aftermarket cat-back exhausts, each less than $200 delivered. One was an ANSA that had an OEM-style muffler with long inlet tubes, one of which bolted directly to the leaky flange.

The other two exhausts—AP (which apparently now owns ANSA) and Walker—both had a muffler with short inlets that are meant to be clamped or welded to intermediate pipes. The Walker was appealing because it’s stainless, but reviews on Amazon reported that it uses 2-inch pipes rather than the stock 2.25-inch, requiring adapters if you want to try to splice a new muffler into the existing pipes. The AP exhaust appeared to have 2.25-inch muffler inlets, however.

I began to formulate an approach—order an AP muffler and tailpipe, cut the old muffler off with a Sawzall, and splice the new one to the existing pipes with butt-joint-style band clamps. If it worked (meaning if it sealed well enough to pass inspection), done (at least for now), but if it didn’t, I could still order the other pieces of the AP exhaust kit and replace everything behind the cats, and a cost comparison showed that there wasn’t a big discount buying the whole exhaust kit as opposed to ordering the pieces a la carte anyway. If the paper-thin leaky cat flange self-destructed when I tried to take it apart, then I’d need to replace the cat, which was another $125. Hopefully the joint between the primary and secondary cats would cooperate.

Before I ordered parts, I wanted to see if this repair could be accomplished with the Armada shoehorned in the garage the way it was. I took my Sawzall, shimmied under the back of the truck, tried to get to the front of the muffler where I’d need to cut the pipes, and found that there wasn’t enough clearance to do it. I’d need to raise the front of the Armada, and there was no way to do that with it stuffed under the tail of the 2002 on the lift. I’d either have to take the 2002 down and give the Armada the entire right side of the garage, or do the repair with the Armada’s butt hanging out of the garage, leaving the place open to the elements.

I checked the weather. There was a Nor’easter predicted to drop about 10 inches of snow two days hence.

Dukes.

I thought about it carefully, and realized that I hadn’t tried to find the exact reason why the exhaust had failed inspection. I clamped a rubber glove back over the tailpipe, started the truck, and did my best to feel along the exhaust for leaks. To my surprise, my patch along the upper seam of the muffler appeared to be holding. The leak from the cat flange was minor. The motherlode was coming from my unsuccessful attempt to seal up the booged weld attaching the tailpipe to the muffler. I was unable to fix it with the soup-can-and-hose-clamps method because the weld (and my putty) created a gall like a walnut inside a garden hose, around which a clamped can had zero hope of sealing.

I thought “What if I cut the lump out with a Sawzall? Couldn’t I then just mate the two sections with a butt-joint band clamp like I was planning on doing to the muffler?”

Hmmmmn.

I crawled under the rear of the car again with the Sawzall. But this time I found that, unlike the front of the muffler, there was ample space to get the Sawzall positioned on the tailpipe, as it was located up in the recess where the spare tire is.

I used my vernier calipers to take some careful measurements of the pipes so I could order the correct band clamp and laughed out loud when I found that the outlet pipe of the muffler was 2.25 inches, but the tailpipe was 2.5. No wonder the thing didn’t seal.

So what I needed wasn’t a butt-joint clamp. I needed a 2.5-to-2.25-inch reducer adapter.

Mindful of the impending Nor’easter and really wanting to get the repair completed before a foot of snow stranded the Armada inside the garage, I drove to five local auto parts stores, but none of them had a 2.5-to-2.25-inch reducer. I looked on Amazon, found one that appeared to fit the bill (2.5-inch inner diameter to 2.25-inch outer diameter) with next-day delivery, clicked, and waited. In the interim, I cut the “walnut” out of the exhaust pipe. It was laughable how misaligned the two different-sized pieces were.

The reducer arrived at about 7 p.m. the night before the snowstorm was predicted to hit. I’d already wire-brushed and sanded the cut ends of the muffler and tailpipe, so I thought all I needed to do was goop up the reducer with muffler cement, slide it on, and clamp it down, but I found that while the 2.5-inch end fit the tailpipe perfectly, the 2.25-inch end was not an inner-diameter fit to the back of the muffler—it was exactly the same size as the back of the muffler. I hightailed it to the O’Reilly Auto Parts a few miles from me before closing time and grabbed a 2.25-to-2.25 adapter and another clamp.

I emptied a good portion of a tube of J-B Weld muffler cement into the three slip-in joints, clamped everything down, backed the truck out of the garage, and drove the M Coupe back in. I had beaten the impending snowstorm, but when I’d be able to get the truck inspected remained to be seen. I also was well aware that between the adapters, the clamps, and the muffler cement, I’d just dropped 50 bucks on a very, um, hacky solution when $200 would’ve bought me something permanent.

In the morning, I was surprised to find that the big Nor’Easter had fizzled. Overnight the meteorologists had massively rolled back the snow prediction. I looked out the window and saw only rain. I started the truck, put a gloved hand over the tailpipe, the exhaust felt tight to me, so I beat it on down to get it re-inspected. As this was a re-test for a failure due to an exhaust leak, I heard them rev it up and down several times as they checked, but it passed.

I have little doubt that I’ll probably need to do a more proper stem-to-stern exhaust replacement sooner rather than later, but damn it’s awfully satisfying to dig the ice axe and the crampons in and say, “Slippery slope? Not today.”

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The Exhaust Problem (Part 2) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Ron writes:

Hi Sajeev, I talked to you via email a year ago about my 1954 Oldsmobile Rocket 88. I too had a piston slap noise when I started the motor. You advised me to put diesel oil in place of my regular oil. I did it a few months back and it made a big difference. The engine is much smoother now and the piston noise is to a minimum when I start it. There is a little noise when cold but it dissipates after less than a minute when the engine is getting warmed up.

Thank you again for helping me. I have owned my car since 1983 when I bought it from a gentleman in Van Nuys, California.

Sajeev answers:

I am so glad my advice worked out for you! Bear with me for a second, as there might be a lesson to be learned for all classic vehicle owners.

Too often we get caught up in problems with our cars, and cannot see the forest for the trees. This is one of my (numerous problems) with Project Valentino, and I’ve been forced to listen to my internal project manager and his need to implement a “change management” plan. (Gotta listen to him because he’s got an MBA so he like totally knows what he’s talking about.)

It’s a slippery slope to introduce business concepts in places they don’t belong. But change management has validity in our complex world of automobiles. Otherwise, you’re just banging your head against a wall. The practice requires the user to recognize a problem, note any issue(s) surrounding it, gauge possible solutions, and approve/implement a solution. If your solution doesn’t work, you repeat the process. Simple as that.

In the case of Ron’s Oldsmobile, an engine rattle only has a few logical solutions: increase oil pressure via a change in oil type, tear apart the motor to fix an issue with the oil pump and piston rings, or a full rebuild before more engine damage occurs. The simplest, most logical solution for an armchair quarterback (like yours truly!) is to change the oil first, and diesel oil is generally the best for pre-1975 vehicles.

Luckily for me, the first step in my change management strategy worked for Ron. So if you think I can help YOU, read the next paragraph to make that happen. I could always use more questions to enlighten and possibly even entertain the Hagerty Community.

Have a question you’d like answered on Piston Slap? Send your queries to pistonslap@hagerty.com—give us as much detail as possible so we can help! Keep in mind this is a weekly column, so if you need an expedited answer, please tell me in your email.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Piston Slap: Help For The Rough Rocket? (Take 2) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There are many staples of a DIY shop or garage, but the workbench stands above the rest. Having a work surface that is not the floor can make working on projects safer, more efficient, and more enjoyable. Sadly, just because benches are ubiquitous does not mean each one is good.

Like so many other things in life, a workbench must balance budget, function, appearance, and specialization. While we can’t help you with the last one on that list, we can get you to a great starting point by calling out some of the attributes that every good workbench will have. Whether you are building a new one or checking up on one that you’ve been using for years, here are five characteristics every great workbench needs.

A Flat (ish) Surface

You don’t need to rebuild a carburetor on a certified granite slab, but you do want a surface that can be clean and smooth while not allowing parts to roll away. You’ll often need to level your bench using shims or some other method, because garage floors are not typically very even—occasionally, on purpose.

Dozens of materials can be appropriate for bench tops, so be sure to take a deep look at what kinds of projects you think you’ll tackle and choose a material that can take the amount of weight you need it to and that won’t deform during use. Butcher’s block surfaces have been great to me, though there are a few sections of my bench that have some serious dents from hammer blows or heavy parts.

Height

It might be tempting to plan your workbench around the height of a kitchen countertop (36 inches is standard), but be careful: Most kitchen tasks are less precise than most DIY projects, and food prep and cooking don’t require leverage or a large range of movement, like garage work often does. A lower work surface height is more tolerable in a kitchen, the arrangement of which needs to be somewhat standardized. Your workspace has no such constraints. Set your bench at a comfortable height for you and the work you do. That might even mean two benches at two different heights: parts cleaning is best done at a lower bench, while carburetor rebuilding is best done at a higher one, so that it’s easier to see.

Heft

A flimsy bench makes work difficult in a number of ways. If you’ve got a component plopped on top of your workbench and every time you move it or shift something for access, the whole bench moves, you won’t feel confident in the work you’re doing.

Again, be careful: You can have too much of a good thing. Nice and sturdy does not require using 6×6-inch steel tubing for legs and 1/2-inch plate for the top. There’s a place for a bench like that in a welding shop, but in most home shops, it would be more annoying than helpful.

A Solid Vise

The third hand we always seem to need, a vise is a necessity for any shop for many reasons. It can be a anvil, a press, or an anchor that can help projects big and small in a multitude of ways. Don’t believe me? Try and work without one for a while.

Like the other characteristics listed here, consider your specific needs and choose accordingly. Do we all need Wilton Bullets? No, but most people would be better served with one than with an import vise whose jaws don’t line up evenly and have a ton of slop. If you’re on a budget, consider buying an old vise to restore. It’s a fun project, and we can honestly say that cast metals aren’t what they once used to be.

Sturdiness

When wrenching on something, it’s nice to have a workbench that doesn’t move an inch to the left when trying to loosen something and an inch to the right when tightening something. Especially if you are not planning to bolt the bench to a wall or other structure in your garage, consider using an under-bench shelf for storage: It will add a nice, low weight and improve stability.

Bonus: Wheels

I’ve said it before and will say it again: The ability to bring your tools and workspace to your project is a superpower. Buy a good set of double-locking casters, put them on your bench, and suddendly it is a tool that goes places with you. The other side of the shop? Easy. The driveway? No problem. Putting multiple benches together to create super bench? Also an option! Use this power wisely.

No matter what, having a workbench is better than not having one. If you are looking to maximize your workspace and haven’t assessed whether your workbench is working for or against you, now is the time.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 5 Things Every Great Workbench Has appeared first on Hagerty Media.

As I wrote last week, I bought a 2008 Nissan Armada to have as a keep-it-in-the-driveway-until-you-need-it tow vehicle/stuff-hauler/snowmageddon chariot. At $3250, it was cheap, but a few problems were baked into that price, one of which was a leaky exhaust that wasn’t loud enough for me to hear but was apparent when I held my gloved hand over the tailpipe.

A tight exhaust should pretty much push your gloved hand off, but one with substantial leaks one won’t offer any resistance at all. So I bought it knowing it needed exhaust work. The question was, how much? The tried-and-true triage method is to visually examine the entire length of the exhaust as well as block off the tailpipe with a cut-off inner tube and a hose clamp and carefully run your hands close to all exhaust surfaces to feel for leaks, but I was unable to do either of those things on the seller’s muddy dirt-and-gravel driveway.

Let’s put on our rose-colored glasses for a moment. Back in the golden pre-emission-control days, most exhaust systems consisted of a cast-iron exhaust manifold that likely lasted the life of the car, and four normal-wear-and-tear components—the headpipe that bolted to the manifold, the center resonator, the muffler, and possibly a separate tailpipe. These components were interconnected by flanges sealed by either gaskets or crush rings, and held together with simple nuts and bolts. Replacing isolated sections was usually easy. If the exhaust got loud, you crawled under the car, figured out which section was rotted out, bought another one, installed it—boom, done. Yeah, OK, some exhaust sections were fitted by sliding one tube inside another and U-clamping them together, and over time, rust would fuse the sections making replacement difficult, but if you were careful you could usually manage it.

As vintage cars age, though, it’s common for them reach the point where, if one component is rusted through, the smart thing is to “just do it all” and replace the entire exhaust, meaning everything except the manifold. The reason is twofold. First, if one exhaust component is rusty enough to be ventilated, odds are that the others aren’t far behind. Second, it’s often challenging to get new components to seal against old ones. Some of this is unevenness on the sealing surface of the old component, some is that the flange size on a non-original replacement component is subtly different from that which it needs to mate with in the car. If it’s a car you’re keeping for the long term, buying and installing a new exhaust—be it original (if it’s still available), aftermarket, performance, stainless steel, or whatever—is often a good box to check off for a rejuvenation.

The other option is to go to a custom exhaust shop where they measure, bend, and install a system specifically for your car. I’m generally not a fan of this approach, as custom exhausts often have welded joints that make it difficult or impossible to drop the exhaust to, for example, remove a transmission. I had it done a few years ago in my little Winnebago Rialta RV because there was no other option.

Things became more complicated when catalytic converters crept in in the mid-1970s, as the cat was an expensive additional component that could rust out and get loud, and it had an extra set of flanges that needed to seal to make the exhaust tight. V-configuration engines typically have a separate cat for each bank of cylinders. And many cars, including the Armada, are equipped with primary and secondary cats on each bank, for a total of four. This creates six flange joints where the cats can leak (manifold to primary, primary to secondary, secondary to the rest of the exhaust, on each side).

You can see why “just do it all” is not ever my go-to strategy on a modern car. It’s simply too expensive. If an exhaust and one or more cats needs to be replaced in a high-mileage 15-year-old car, the dealer estimate for the repair can easily exceed the car’s value, and the price from an aftermarket or custom shop can easily top a thousand dollars.

So, with that backdrop, let’s look at the Armada. The exhaust was porous enough that a rubber glove clamped over the tailpipe was enough to redirect all the flow through the holes, making them easier to find.

The Armada doesn’t have the ground clearance that my Silverado 3500HD did (which enabled its catalytic converter to get stolen, but also allowed me to replace it without lifting the truck), but the rear section of the exhaust is pretty accessible. I skooched under the back and quickly found a major leak where the tailpipe was attached to the muffler with the world’s worst weld. I bought a decent mig welder about five years ago but have never walked up the learning curve to use it properly, and I’m certain that if I attempted to re-weld the joint, it would look no better. I’ve certainly done my share of soup-can-and-hose-clamp exhaust repairs and tested one here with aluminum flashing, but the big bulge from the misaligned pipes and the weld didn’t give it a hope of sealing.

I’ve occasionally used a local exhaust shop to patch isolated leaks like this, so I took the Armada to them for a quote on fixing the tailpipe, thinking that maybe all it needed was a hundred-dollar splice-and-weld. Unfortunately—and not surprisingly—when they had it on the lift and inspected it, they found that the tailpipe was only one of three leaks. There was also a good-sized leak from the seam on the top of the muffler, and a small leak at the output flange of the right rear (secondary) catalytic converter. Unfortunately, the studs and nuts on that flange were decimated by rust, and the flange itself looked paper-thin. The shop’s recommendation was to cut off the flange and weld a new pipe from the back of the cat to a new muffler and tailpipe. The $1200 estimate wasn’t unreasonable, but it was more than I wanted to spend.

I thought about my options, all of which were limited by winter weather and my workspace. The Armada is big enough that, to fit it in my garage, I’d need to kick not one car outside, but two. That’s fine when the weather’s good, but I’m not going to let my 49,000-mile 1973 BMW 2002 sit outside in rain or snow, and due to the configuration of my narrow suburban driveway, which is hemmed in by my house and my neighbor’s high fence, when we get a lot of snow, there’s nowhere to blow it, so the garage can get snowed in for weeks.

So I tried the easiest path first—muffler paste. This stuff comes in a couple of forms. There’s muffler cement that’s intended to fill gaps and seal joints, and there’s muffler putty that’s intended to be more structural. I had a can of the latter in the garage, so I gave both the tailpipe and the top of the muffler a wire-brushing, then with a nitrile glove on my hand, shoveled the putty into and around the tailpipe weld and into the seam on the top of the muffler.

At this point, I need to explain a few things about Massachusetts’ draconian annual automotive inspection. I love my home state, but not this part of it. You’re required to have a vehicle inspected within seven days of purchase. It doesn’t matter if it already has a valid inspection sticker on the windshield. That’s not your sticker—it’s the previous owner’s. The sticker has the car’s plate number and VIN printed on it in small type, and a bar code that a police officer can scan and call up the registration. So if you’re driving on the old sticker, and you’re stopped for some reason and the officer checks the sticker, you’ll be cited for driving an uninspected vehicle, which is a moving violation that adds points to your license. There are rare reports of people even being ticketed for this when the car is parked. Plus, there is the safety part of the inspection and the emissions part. If you fail the emission part, you get a black “R” sticker with a 60-day grace period for you to get the car repaired, but if you fail for a safety reason, you get a red “R” sticker with no grace period—you can be pulled over any time and ticketed—and an exhaust leak is regarded as a safety issue. I’m uncertain exactly how they check for exhaust leaks, whether they do the hand-over-the-tailpipe test on every single car or only on cars that have loud-sounding exhausts.

So. I’d bought the Armada with a leaky but largely asymptomatic exhaust. The inspection sticker on the car was good through August, but it wasn’t my sticker. Legally I was required to get the beast inspected, but … should I? The risk was that it would fail and I’d lose the valid-looking sticker, be given a big red rejection sticker that’s far more visible (moving violation-wise), and have to spend real money replacing the exhaust.

I thought it over. The exhaust didn’t sound loud to me to begin with, and I’d patched the two big leaks, so it had to be quieter and better-sealed than before. Do it. Get it inspected. Cross it off the list. Be legal about it, as I am with most things these days. I brought it in.

Bad idea. It failed. I’d rolled the dice and lost. The car I’d bought to have around in case I needed to drop everything and buy something big now had a large red “R” on the windshield that could land me an expensive ticket.

To make matters worse, a winter nor’easter was forecast to move in and dump 8–12 inches of snow, effectively cutting off access to my garage. And the logistics of major exhaust surgery on the Armada were daunting, as the vehicle’s weight is uncomfortably close to the 6000-pound limit of my mid-rise lift. I’d likely need to do the whole thing on the garage floor, which, at age 65 with back issues, didn’t sound like a lot of fun.

I still do essentially all my own work, but I realize that there are times when you need to, as they say, just pay the man (or woman). Was this one of those times? I wasn’t sure. It drives me crazy when I’m put in a situation where I need to pay someone 10 times what it would cost for me to do something myself.

I looked on RockAuto (you gotta love RockAuto) and found that there are several well-priced aftermarket cat-back exhausts available for the Armada, two of which are less than $200 shipped to my house. The question was the slippery slope of that secondary catalytic converter’s paper-thin rear-facing flange. Since I don’t weld, if that flange broke or wouldn’t seal, I’d need to replace that cat. I wanted to know what the cat’s front flange looked like (where it mates with the primary cat), but I couldn’t get under the car, so I stuffed my phone under and shot some pics. What I saw was concerning. The idea of a minor exhaust repair potentially cascading into replacing two catalytic converters made me want to consider my next steps very carefully.

What’s a Hack Mechanic to do? Tune in next week in find out.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The Exhaust Problem (Part 1) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Read all the books you want. Watch all the TV shows and YouTube mechanic videos that have ever been filmed. Sit and have a conversation with everyone who has turned a wrench. You still won’t be a mechanic, because practice and experience cannot be taught.

When younger enthusiasts recount certain adventures (or misadventures) to those with a few more years in the hobby, the seasoned folks will nod along. A mechanic’s rites of passage often need no explaining; by definition, these experiences have become universally accepted as ones that you must encounter and conquer to become proficient.

Which of these 11 rites of passage have you experienced, and which do you think changed you the most?

Rite of Passage #1: Roadside repair with makeshift parts

Whether on the road or in the shop, there comes a time when what you have is all you’ve got, and what you have just needs to work. Gaskets cut out of beer packaging, throttle cables made of shoestrings, or bailing wire on a part or piece that should be properly connected, but isn’t … If you understand a system well enough to engineer a functional fix on the fly, you truly understand how that system works.

Rite of Passage #2: Busted knuckles

You know the bolt is about to break free, so you give it a little extra oomph—and slam your hand into something. Usually, that something is heavy, rusty, or sharp … possibly, all three. Keep a record of your last tetanus shot handy, and know that we’ve all been there. Pulling towards yourself is often safer, except when it comes to cutting tools or other sharp implements.

Rite of Passage #3: Trapped tools

The order of operations during disassembly and assembly is important—but you’ve got to pay attention to your tools, too. We’ve all been in situations when the excitement of a bolt coming loose makes us forget the limited space we’re working with, and suddenly our wrench is trapped between a bolt and a hard place.

Rite of Passage #4: Broken hardware

When a bolt chooses to Marie Antoinette itself, or threads stretch past the plasticity point and become unusable, progress can get tough. The fact of the matter is that rookies are more likely to break hardware, but there is a bit of a bell curve: As you tackle more and more projects, the quality of your work often rises; and then, as you gain confidence to handle the problems you now expect to encounter, the quality of your work tends to dip. Learning new methods for dealing with broken and stuck hardware is a never-ending quest for any wrench, green or seasoned.

Rite of Passage #5: Buying the shop manual

Just about everyone went through a phase when they felt as though they knew everything. Most advance out of such a state to understand that, even with everything they know, the shop manual knows more. Learning just how important and helpful a shop manual can be is often a freeing experience: Buying one is the first step to being self-sufficient because it allows you to solve problems without calling in experts or endlessly searching the web.

Rite of Passage #6: Disappearing parts

How else are you going to learn to organize your shop if you never experience the mildly panicked search for something you sat down right there? Everyone who ever gave you advice about doing DIY work probably told you to bag and tag parts and hardware, but most of us had to learn the benefits of organization the hard way to truly understand them.

Rite of Passage #7: Endless parts search

You saw that cool hunk of metal on the side of the road and just had to have it. Now you got it home and are excited to get to work and … Wait, there are no parts available for this? Sometimes the coolest models are the ones with the most problems and buying one that needs everything without realizing none of the parts exists is the gearhead’s version of falling in love with a crazy person: You often can’t give them what they need, and if you try, you’re going to be doing a lot of work (and probably spending a lot of money).

Rite of Passage #8: First rebuilt engine start-up

The thrum of a well-tuned engine is magnificent, but the stutter and cough of one chugging to life for the first time is even more enthralling. Was everything assembled correctly? Was anything forgotten? How is the combination of parts you chose going to work together? It all becomes clear with the first touch of the key. Weathering that storm of nerves is an experience unlike any other.

Rite of Passage #9: Ruined clothes

It was supposed to be a quick, clean job. Now that pair of jeans that used to be nice is stained with oil. (The situation is even worse if you’ve just ruined a pair of pants that your significant other specifically told you not to wear in the garage.) Typically when doing DIY work you dress to protect, not to impress. Hubris may protest, calling that an obvious truth, but the drawer of “work clothes” indicates we occasionally need a reminder.

Rite of Passage #10: Inclement weather moving in

Having a garage is a luxury that some of us take for granted. Most of us started by working on whatever we had wherever we could: Laying on our backs in gravel driveways, sitting cross-legged on the dirt of the back yard, or even leaning over core supports on the side of the street. If the sun was shining when you started work, your lack of protection from the elements becomes obvious as the clouds gather and the wind picks up. Being soaking wet, cold, and/or dirty while trying to assemble or diagnose your car is not fun, but we all must experience this misery to truly appreciate mild weather and good shelter.

Rite of Passage #11: Fixing what is not broken

The excitement to work on a project is sometimes so great that it must be satiated—even when there is work that needs to be done. I personally recall my father giving me the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” speech while in my early teens; I had just made a mess of the garage floor taking apart something that had worked when I started and, more than likely, would never work correctly again. Poor thing.

Do you have to go through all of these to be a decent mechanic? Of course not, but many of us have experienced most, if not all, of these and more. Think we missed a rite of passage that changed you? Let us know about it in the comments below.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 11 Rites of Passage for Every DIY Mechanic appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Today’s automobiles don’t require regular tune-ups like the cars of yore once needed. The electronic sensors and computers that regulate spark, timing, and fuel mixture are not maintenance items, although they do have to be replaced if they fail. And in today’s engines, spark plugs operate well for 100,000 miles or more. There are still filters to be replaced and components to be checked, but modern maintenance procedures are far different than what we old-timers remember.

Older cars need more attention on a more frequent basis. A typical owner’s manual for a 1950s car calls for a 10,000-mile that includes swapping out spark plugs, replacing points and condenser, and checking the carburetor idle mixture and ignition timing. In addition, recommended maintenance calls for oil changes every 2000 miles and regular lubrication of numerous components in the engine and chassis. With an older classic or an ancient beater, regular maintenance of ignition parts and filters is critical to smooth running and adequate power. Let’s walk through the process together.

Step 1: Swap out the spark plugs

To replace the spark plugs, carefully remove the plug wires and their insulating boots from each plug. If you think you’re not going to be able to tell which wire belongs to which plug, tag the wires. Inspect them: If you see deterioration of the insulating boots, or severe burns or cracking of the cables, replace them. Likewise, if the cables’ contacts are corroded to the point where they can’t be cleaned, replace the wires.

To remove the spark plugs, you’ll need a 3/8-inch drive ratchet and a spark plug socket. In most cases, a short extension allows better access. A ratchet with a flex head that can rotate to different angles can be helpful. A 5/8-inch or 16-mm hex socket will fit many plugs. Some Fords use plugs with a 9/16th-inch hex. A few European and Asian vehicles use 14mm plugs, and there are a few applications that use plugs with a 7/8-inch, 3/4-inch, or 18-mm hex. Most older American cars are fitted with plugs that have a 13/16-inch hex.

Some BMWs are equipped with plugs that require a thin-wall, 12-point, 14-mm socket for removal. Check the specs for your car before purchasing a tool.

Once the spark plug is fully loosened, extract the magnet or a rubber sleeve inside that grips the plug (most cars have one or the other). On many cars, that combination of ratchet, socket, and short extension is all you’ll need, but on some models, it may not allow you to access all the plugs. My ’55 Chevy V-8 is equipped with a combination generator/power steering pump, and some left-bank plugs are best serviced from under the car with a 13/16-inch open-end wrench.

Before installing the new plugs, inspect them for damaged insulators or bent electrodes, then set the gap between the inner and outer electrodes. For most older vehicles with coil ignition, a gap of 0.025 inches is generally recommended. For even older vehicles with magneto ignition, the gap should be set to 0.020 inches. You can use a conventional feeler gauge to set the gap, but a round wire gauge is better. I have a tool that consists of a calibrated ramp of gradually increasing thickness. By sliding the plug along the ramp, the gap is easily measured. Your auto parts counterman may stock gapping tools as giveaway items. At the very least, they are inexpensive.

If you have to change the gap, carefully bend the outer electrode with needle-nose pliers or with the slot on the gapping tool. Don’t bang the electrode against a hard surface: You might crack the insulator, which can cause a short.

Some plugs come with the metal gasket installed. On others, you have to work it on over the threaded end. Place a small amount of dielectric grease on the plug threads and install them. Tighten moderately. If space permits the use of a torque wrench, torque them to 25 pounds. If you can’t use a torque wrench, screw the plugs in by hand until they seat, then tighten another half-turn with your wrench. It’s always best to start them by hand; there’s nothing like a cross-threaded spark plug to ruin your day.

Step 2: Service the distributor

The replacement and adjustment of distributor parts is fairly easy on many cars, as the distributor is mounted at either the side or at the front of the engine. Except on my ’55 Bel Air, in which the distributor at the rear of the engine and snug up against the firewall. One must either have really long arms or lie atop the engine to reach it.

On some cars, the distributor cap can be removed with the spark plug wires attached. On my old Chevy that’s near impossible, as the wires are routed behind the engine, and there’s not much room for maneuvering. In any case, you’ll want to remove the wires from the cap at some point to check for corrosion or other damage. I mark the position of the number one cylinder’s wire in the cap, then pull all the wires out of the cap, wiggling each a bit as I tug on them so as not to damage the wire terminals. Armed with the firing order (1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2 for my Chevy) and the rotation (clockwise), it is easy to reinstall them correctly. But because the wires disappear behind the engine and under the exhaust manifolds before they arrive at the spark plugs, I number them as well, wrapping a short piece of masking tape with the cylinder number written on it around each wire.

After removing the distributor cap, have a look inside. There you’ll see contacts that distribute voltage to the spark plugs for each of the cylinders. For example, the cap for an eight-cylinder engine has eight contacts evenly spaced within the circumference of the cap. If the contacts are badly corroded or if the cap is damaged, they should be replaced. The contacts will likely be mildly corroded. In that case, clean them with a small, sharp knife or similar tool.

Remove the rotor from the top of the distributor shaft. Check for corrosion on the conductor at the rotor’s outer edge. Mild corrosion can be removed with an emory cloth or small file. Severe corrosion that has caused pitting or loss of material is grounds for replacement.

Within the distributor, you’ll find the breaker points and condenser attached to the breaker plate with screws. While old-time service manuals suggest that points can be cleaned and readjusted if they are in fairly good condition, I replace them if I’ve already dug in this deep. Many distributor parts for older cars are still available from standard aftermarket sources, even for cars that are 70 or more years old. And they’re generally not very expensive: Breaker points for my ’55 Chevy, as listed in the East Coast Chevy parts catalog, sell for $15.00. Other distributor parts are equally inexpensive.

Ignition parts for less common cars may be harder to find. But suppliers who specialize in servicing classics and exotics should have them. Of course, you may pay considerably more. Ignition points for a Ferrari 250 GTO are $53.50 from awitalian.com.

The breaker points are attached to the distributor breaker plate with one or two screws. You might also find an eccentric adjusting screw that can close or open the point gap when it’s turned with the locking screw loosened. Be careful removing the screws, as they’re small and it’s easy to drop them.

On most systems, the condenser is wired to the breaker points via a screw terminal and is held in a bracket that is attached to the breaker plate with one screw. The points and condenser can usually be removed together.

Before installing new points and condenser, apply a very small amount of dielectric grease to the distributor shaft cam. Install the points and condenser. Some points are adjusted with a slotted screw hole in the breaker point assembly that enables adjustment of the installation position. The points on most 1957 to 1974 GM cars are adjusted using an 1/8-inch Allen socket adjustment screw that can be accessed with the distributor cap removed, or through a sliding metal window in the cap. Thus, on these models, final adjustment of the points can be completed with a dwell meter after reassembly. But whichever type of breaker point adjustment you’re dealing with, it’s important to set the air gap before buttoning things up, even if you intend to fine-tune the adjustment with a dwell meter after starting the car.

The breaker points are fitted with a cam follower that rides on the distributor cam. To adjust the air gap, crank the engine until the cam follower is on a peak of the cam. Then adjust the gap to 0.015 inches by moving the breaker point assembly in or out before tightening the screw or screws that lock it in place. On those GM cars with the Allen adjustment, just turn the Allen screw until the correct air gap is achieved.

Install the rotor, cap, and plug wires. Then, if you have a dwell meter, attach its black lead to ground and its green lead to the negative terminal on the coil or as directed by the instructions for your meter. Dwell is the number of degrees of rotation that the points remain closed. Start the engine. You should see a reading of about 30 degrees dwell for V-8 engines. A degree or two in either direction is okay. A six- or four-cylinder engine will be happiest with a couple of degrees more dwell.

If dwell is not correct, you will have to readjust the points. If you are working on a ’57 to ’74 GM car, you can adjust the dwell while the engine is running by turning the 1/8-inch Allen screw, accessed through the metal shutter in the distributor cap. For most other cars, remove the distributor cap and readjust the air gap, moving the breaker point assembly closer to the cam for less dwell and further away from the cam for more dwell. If dwell bounces around more than a degree or two, the distributor shaft bearings are probably worn, and the distributor should be replaced.

Step 3: Check ignition timing

After installing new points, a check of ignition timing is necessary. Attach your timing light inductive lead to the number one spark-plug wire, and attach its black and red power leads to positive and negative contacts. Disconnect the vacuum advance and plug the vacuum line. On most cars, there will be a line on the harmonic balancer that indicates top dead center (TDC) for the number one cylinder. Behind the harmonic balancer, on the engine, there will be a degree scale. With timing light attached and engine running, aim that line at the degree scale. The flashing light will indicate how many degrees before top dead center the plug is firing. The spec for my Chevy is 8 degrees before top dead center (BTDC), which is indicated by four lines on the scale. With today’s higher octane fuels, I set it to 10 degrees BTDC.

Step 4: Replace filters

At minimum, your car probably has filters for air, oil, and fuel. Of course you should change your oil filter every time you change your oil. And for a classic car that is driven infrequently, oil change intervals should be 2000 miles or every two years.

Fuel filter intervals vary widely by filter type, and many classic owners who don’t put many miles on their car may never have to change it. But a good rule of thumb calls for replacing the fuel filter after 20,000 miles of driving.

Air filters made of paper or synthetic material should last at least 20,000 miles. Oil bath filters, like that on my ’55 Chevy, should be cleaned and refilled with oil at tune-up time. But the filter housing oil level should be checked every 1000 miles or so. I clean the wire mesh element of the oil bath in a solvent bucket and then blow it out gently with the air gun. I then douse the element with SAE 50 engine oil and fill the reservoir to the full indicator mark with the same oil. If temperatures are expected to remain below freezing for an extended time, I use SAE 20 oil. When servicing the oil bath air cleaner, I cover the areas of the engine around the carburetor with plastic drop cloths, because drips are inevitable.

Step 5: Adjust idle mixture

Before 1980 or so, carburetor idle mixture adjustment was an important part of a tuneup. Begin by setting the idle rpm using the adjustment screw on the carburetor throttle linkage. For my old ’55, GM recommends setting the rpm to 450 rpm. If you have a dwell meter, it probably doubles as a tachometer. A vacuum gauge will also be necessary to pinpoint the idle mixture setting.

With the vacuum gauge attached to a manifold vacuum port, turn the idle mix screw gradually in clockwise and/or counterclockwise direction until you find the spot where rpm peaks and the vacuum reading is highest. If that increases the idle rpm above the spec for your car (or what you’re comfortable with in terms of vehicle creep and smooth idle), reset the idle speed via the idle speed screw on the throttle linkage, and then recheck the mixture adjustment. If you’re unable to detect any difference in engine performance as a result of this procedure, you may have a vacuum leak or a bad carburetor.

If you don’t have a tachometer or vacuum gauge, you can probably get a good approximate idle mixture setting just by adjusting for what your ears tell you is the maximum engine speed. A lot of old timers set idle mix strictly by ear, made possible through lots of experience.

In every case, lots of experience is a mechanic’s best friend.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 5 Steps to Tune-Up Your Classic Car appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Whodunits are fun. About a quarter of the top-ranking global podcasts are true-crime-themed. Working to understand every twist and turn to solve the mystery gives people a rush. That’s the feeling gearheads chase when something isn’t working and they want to track down the cause. The engines under our hoods are comprised of myriad parts and systems that, when all operating as designed, create a harmonious symphony of power, heat, and exhaust. When something is wrong, it can be a frustrating experience learning just how much more intricate an engine can be than simple “does it have fuel, air, and spark?”

The latest diagnostics tale I’ve been following is that of high-performance engine builder Steve Morris and the small-block Chevrolet V-8 that got bolted up to his dynamometer. The engine is in its second life now; it first served as an NHRA Pro Stock Truck powerplant when the NHRA had such a class nearly 30 years ago. It wears heavily modified Chevrolet casting, which is unique compared with many high-horsepower applications these days that utilize aftermarket and improved castings or, simply, blank-slate billet engine blocks and cylinder heads.

That NHRA class, full of Chevrolet S10- and Ford Ranger-bodied vehicles, is long faded from it’s short-lived popularity. But that didn’t mean this engine was relegated to a shelf or scrap metal pile. Instead, it now lives inside a mini-mod pulling tractor that is designed to move a weighted sled as far and as fast as possible on dirt. It’s a very different use case for the engine, and that created problems. As we learn in Morris’ YouTube video, the first issue was recently solved, but another popped up and it’s a stumper. On the bright side, it’s an interesting reason to learn something.

The initial problem: The engine would destroy the thrust bearing on the crankshaft after only a few runs down the dirt track. Turns out, the amount of clutch usage and pressure plate force over the duration of a tractor pull run is significantly different compared with the rapid-fire hits of shifting down a drag strip. The solution was a roller-style thrust bearing, and to be sure the fix was going to work, Morris hung the engine on the dyno to give it final checks.

After the first loaded pull, the engine exhibited a slightly higher idle than before. After the second pull, the idle reset again to another couple hundred rpm higher. Even after the team dialed in the idle air screws and reset the idle on the carbs, the engine continued to high-idle after a dyno pull. It even coughed a bit of smoke on startup after sitting between pulls. No vacuum leaks could be found.

Later in the video, Morris seems to have some ideas as to the cause of the high idle, but he doesn’t let on much. Can we at-home players suss out the problem?

My personal theory is that the problem is related to ignition timing. The short clip of a dyno pull at the start of the video shows that this engine is using the front-mounted distributor for arcing the plugs. While it’s extremely unlikely to be running a points plate, there could be some form of mechanical advance inside that is hanging up as the engine slows down after a dyno pull. Or the pick-up and sensor are moving due to vibration thus causing a slight timing change.

I am also totally aware that my theories could be 100 percent wrong. Is the fact that Morris has the valve cover off in the video a tell or a well-placed red herring?

Morris closes the video with a promise that he will post a video within a couple of days, revealing the answer. These kinds of diagnostic discussions are just plain fun for some gearheads. If you have a solid guess, leave a comment below. I promise not to edit the story when you prove how wrong I am!

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Can You Diagnose this Struggling Pro-Stock Chevy Small-Block? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

At 32 by 24 feet, my garage is not huge, but it is certainly big enough to work on fun toys and stash away projects. The line between workshop and storage facility can be a tough one to walk, and lately the hoarding portion of my brain has been winning the battle between making progress on projects and accumulating stuff.

After successfully balancing storage and workspace for three years, I found myself at a breaking point. I went out to the garage on a Saturday morning, hot coffee in hand, ready to work on something. I was greeted by the reality that, no matter what project I wanted to work on, I needed to rearrange some pile of stuff in order to get started on it. All three work surfaces—48 square feet of space—were covered.

Having to shuffle junk to get work done was such a buzzkill that I did little more than pick up something, fiddle with it for a minute, and go back inside the house. The proverbial parking lot was full, the fire lane was occupied, and somehow there was even stuff parked on top. There was no more space to store things, which meant there was no more space to work on things.

This situation demanded that I purge all of my spare motorcycle parts. The stacks of metal and plastic had no real organization. Each bin was labeled “parts.” Just about every Honda XR that has crossed the threshold into this space has been partially, if not fully, disassembled. Some got put back together. For a long time any XR bit that I deemed “usable” I put on a shelf. After three years in this shop, it was time to re-evaluate my definition of what should be saved.

Everything that I had so carefully stacked on a shelf I pulled out and laid on the floor, where each part was inspected, wiped down, and finally sorted before going back onto the shelf—or into the discard pile. The sad reality of the task was learning just how much straight-up junk I was keeping. Why did I need three sets of bent-up foot pegs? Or two frayed clutch cables? Multiple sets of bent handlebars?

My system of storing parts was all wrong. A parts stash should not be a repository of anything that can be useful; it needs to be full of things that are worth storing. With great care I had assembled the perfect place to work on projects and then used it to store scrap metal.

It was a game of keeping the best and culling the rest. I have a few rare pieces and a few valuable ones, and even a couple that are both. I am oddly chuffed about my collection of cylinder heads, so I stored those carefully under the workbench. While most of the bent-up footpeg pile went into the scrap bin for recycling, I kept the best pair because I expect to do a restoration one day and I’m gambling that OEM pegs might be hard to find by then. (Only need one pair, though.) Anything I knew to be OEM-correct and of restoration quality I retained. Dozens of cables became a few good spares that could be used for test fitment or to allow a project to limp along until a new cable arrived in the mail—they are only $8 and still in mass production. The used countershaft sprockets felt so good to expunge that I can’t believe I ever held onto them at all.

Now that I’ve confronted my excess junk, all my projects will progress. The feeling is sublime: A clean workspace primed and ready to take advantage of any spare time I can find. Without the need to clean a spot before being productive, 30 minutes of work is actually 30 minutes of work, not 15 minutes of shuffling and 15 minutes of work. All that time adds up, but if you had told me I could find more time to work on projects by taking out the trash, I’d have called you crazy. Now I know it was me that was crazy. What was my plan for those worn-out rear sprockets, anyway?

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Purging My Spare Parts Made Me Love My Garage Again appeared first on Hagerty Media.

“A good friend of mine had a Corvair, and I’ve always wanted one,” explained Bill Anstine as he sat by his dark gray 1963 model. Driving it, however, is difficult. Anstine’s Corvair has a manual transmission; he uses a prosthetic since his leg was amputated below the knee. “I drove it before with the four-speed and it didn’t work out too well for me.”

On an overcast summer morning, a group of six volunteers from the Detroit Area Corvair Club (DACC) gathered in Anstine’s expansive home garage in suburban Livonia, Michigan. The goal: Swap his Corvair’s four-speed manual for a Powerglide automatic.

A transmission conversion can seem like a daunting task, even to the Corvair initiated. There are a number of part differences between automatic and manual Corvairs (the transmission bellhousing, flexplate, and subframe, just to name a few). And, uh, you need to take the old transmission out and put the new one back in.

Luckily for Anstine, the volunteers in attendance, who call themselves the Garage Squad, have many years of experience and tomes of Corvair knowledge at the ready. Longtime club member Pete Koehler has been coordinating the group. “I’m retired and watch too much TV, and one of the shows I was watching was called Garage Squad. They went to people’s houses and they fixed cars up, and I thought, ‘Hey, that’s a cool idea.'” Kohler doesn’t remember exactly when the Garage Squad started, but the club’s Facebook page first mentioned it in 2017. Since then, the Squad has helped dozens of Detroit-area Corvair owners repair their cars.

The engine in the back of Koehler’s pickup truck looked like it was home to a mouse nest for the better part of five decades. He had purchased the heap for cheap, hoping it could either be nursed back to life or salvaged for parts. Attached to the crusty, air-cooled flat-six was the flexplate (a metal disc that connects the engine to an automatic’s torque converter) needed to swap the transmission. It was quickly determined that the engine was not worth saving; even with the help of penetrating oil in the cylinders and a big breaker bar, the mill would not turn over.

“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”—Abraham Maslow

Because the engine was seized, only one of the bolts attaching the flexplate to the torque converter could be reached through the access port on the transmission bellhousing. And, annoyingly, the bellhousing couldn’t be removed until the converter and flexplate were out. Club member Ian Smith seemed to take glee in breaking the brittle aluminum bellhousing, bashing it with a hammer. Elegant, no. Effective, yes.

As work commenced, so flowed the jokes and war stories from previous Garage Squad events. The club’s ethos reflects its values—perfectly correct grease marks and bolt coatings don’t matter compared with keeping Corvairs on the road and getting more people interested in the hobby. Koehler chalks this attitude up to the accessibility and variety of Chevy’s rear-engined nameplate. In period, the model lineup ranged from convertibles to pickups, and 1.8 million Corvairs were produced during its ten-year run between 1960 and 1969—most coming from the Willow Run Assembly Plant in nearby Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Despite Ralph Nader’s infamous takedown of the model, Corvair enthusiasts (like our own Kyle Smith) have a deep and long-running affection for the car. The Detroit Area Corvair Club was established in 1974 by autocross junkies and GM employees, and there are several vendors with piles of parts to help keep these cars running and driving. The largest such outfit is in Massachusetts, known as Clark’s Corvair Parts. The place has been in business for 50 years.

“As the hobby grays, you’ve got to bring in some fresh people, some younger folks that want to participate, and that’s what Facebook has done for us,” said Koehler. Indeed, with the introduction of the DACC Facebook page (1000 followers) and Garage Squad events, more local young people have taken an interest in Chevy’s rear-engined vehicles. For example, Kassie, Anstine’s 18-year-old granddaughter, stopped by in her matte-black Corvair named Venom. With the help of the Garage Squad, Kassie has rebuilt Venom’s motor and swapped the transmission.

Over on Anstine’s Corvair, things were going well. There were no stuck or especially rusty fasteners, and the team’s experience removing drivelines certainly helped. Anstine’s son (and club president) Mike Anstine, Kerry Borgne, and Bob Wittmann were able to drop the engine and transmission in about the same time it took to free the flexplate from the crusty engine.

Lunch had arrived, putting a pause on work. (The one stipulation of receiving the Garage Squad’s help is that you pay for lunch. Donations to the Ypsilanti Automotive Heritage Museum as a form of payment are also encouraged.)  “In the years we’ve been doing this, we’ve donated well over $10,000 to the museum to our efforts. And that’s helping to keep the doors open over there in Ypsilanti, especially during the COVID,” said Koehler.

After lunch, the team bolted up the automatic transmission and related parts to the engine, proceeding to then lift up the whole assembly up and into the car. The swap would have been finished that day (not bad for about six hours of work), but the parts needed to convert the Powerglide to a floor-shift mechanism rather than the factory column shift were not on hand.

Based on what we saw, the Garage Squad will be right back at it again once the weather warms up this spring. All in the name of helping fellow Corvair owners, wrenchers, and friends.

The post Garage Squad: Detroit-Area Corvair Faithful Offer Helping Hands appeared first on Hagerty Media.

One of the topics I get asked about and over is the “My car won’t start” question. At this point in my life, I have my family pretty well programmed to not say “it won’t start” and to instead give the much more descriptive “it won’t crank” or “it cranks but it won’t start,” as such information is absolutely key to a diagnosis, particularly a remote one. I thought that, on this cold New England winter day, I’d lay out the basic car-won’t-start troubleshooting procedure.

A car needs three things to start: The battery needs to spin the starter motor, the fuel/air mixture must get sucked into the engine, and the spark plugs need to fire. Yes, the engine also needs compression and the ignition has to be timed at least in the ball park, but if the car was starting yesterday and it’s not today, the odds are it’s not due to those last two.

Let’s begin with the battery and the starter motor. The starter has two components—the starter motor itself, and the solenoid, which is an electrical relay that allows you to crank the engine without sending hundreds of amps through the steering column and ignition switch. The solenoid also has a little plunger inside it with a gear at the end that connects the starter to the gear on the outer edge of the flywheel, causing the engine to spin. For electrical connections, the solenoid has a long fat cable that’s directly connected to the positive battery terminal, and a short braided cable connected to the starter motor. The starter/solenoid are grounded by the fact that they’re mounted directly to the grounded engine, either directly to the negative battery terminal or indirectly via chassis ground. When the solenoid receives 12V from the ignition switch, it closes its internal contacts, allowing current to flow through the short braided cable to the starter motor and spin the engine. So if turning the key doesn’t spin the engine, the fault is either in the battery, the starter, the solenoid, the ignition switch, or the wiring between the switch and the solenoid.

By far the most common cause for the starter not spinning the engine, or spinning it too slowly for it to start, is a weak or dead battery. If you turn the key and hear CLICK but there’s little or no engine cranking, that means the battery has enough charge to energize the solenoid, close its internal contacts, and move the plunger/gear moving forward, but not enough for the starter to spin the engine.

The first thing to do is check the battery voltage. Take a multimeter set to measure voltage (and if you don’t own a multimeter, just go buy one; auto-ranging meters can be had for $20 on Amazon), put the red and black leads across the positive and negative battery terminals and see if it reads the 12.6 volts that a fully-charged battery should have. As a rough rule of thumb, for every 0.2 volts the battery drops, the charge is down 25 percent, so by the time it’s under 12 volts, it’s essentially discharged, at least as far as the ability to spin the engine quickly. And if it’s down into the single volts, it’s deeply discharged. Now, it is possible for a just-recharged battery to read 12.6 volts and not be able to deliver sufficient cranking amps to spin the engine, but the best way to think about checking battery voltage is that if you find it’s low, you’ve found the source of the car-won’t-start problem.

If the battery voltage is fine but you turn the key and hear absolutely nothing, or hear one click and then nothing, and if none of the electrical systems in the car are working at all or are barely working (if, for example, the dome light is dim), the problem could be that the battery posts and the clamps at the ends of the battery cables are corroded enough to prevent good contact from being made. So before you pony up the $150+ it takes these days to buy a new battery, clean the posts and clamps with a battery post cleaner and try again. Also be certain to check the ground connections from the negative battery terminal to both the engine block and chassis. If one of these ground connections fails, electricity is forced to take the path through the other one, which can cause a no-crank condition.

If the posts are clean and the ground paths are good but even once the battery is recharged it still won’t crank the car, or only does so for a short amount of time, you can use a battery analyzer that use resistance as a measure of battery health. I’ve found they work pretty well. But really the gold-standard test is to remove the old battery, clean the clamps, and install a new or a known-good battery. If the car then cranks and starts, the battery was the problem. Note that, particularly in winter, due to low temperatures sapping battery strength and corrosion on the battery terminals causing high resistance in the contact with the jaws on the jumper cables, the failure of a car to crank with a jump-start can be highly misleading. Time after time I’ve experienced no-crank conditions that vanished immediately when a good battery was dropped directly into the car.

If the battery is dead, it’s crucially important that you figure out why it’s dead. If it’s winter, the battery is five years old, and the terminals are a corroded mess, then odds are that the battery has simply reached the end of its useful life. But if the battery is recent and it keeps running down to the point where it won’t crank the engine, something is making that happen. The cause can be that the car’s charging system (the alternator and voltage regulator and the wiring connecting them to the battery) isn’t working. As I say over and over, the resting voltage of a car battery is 12.6V, but with the engine running, it should increase by about 1–1.5V to between about 13.5–14.2V. So if you start the car, check the battery voltage, and still see 12.6V, the battery isn’t being recharged while you drive, so it will die on you again.

Other things causing a battery to drain can be that you’re leaving something on without knowing it, such as a trunk light or a power antenna. Or it can be a so-called parasitic drain where something subtle in the car is sucking power. Parasitic drains can be maddening. If the problem rears its head when the car hasn’t been driven for a week, sometimes the easiest thing is simply to install a battery disconnect switch, flip it off when you park the car in your driveway, and flip it on when you need to use the car.

If you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the battery and its connections are good and you hear no CLICK when you turn the key, odds are that the solenoid isn’t receiving voltage from the ignition switch. You can trouble-shoot this in two ways. You can use a multimeter to check for voltage on the quick-connect tab of the solenoid when the key is turned to the crank position. If there’s not voltage there, the ignition switch, or the wiring between it and the solenoid, is suspect. If the car has an automatic transmission, there may be a problem in the lock-out switch that allows the engine to be cranked only if the selector is in the park position.

The other way to check the solenoid is to make a jumper wire with a quick-connect connector on one end, slide it onto the tab on the solenoid, and—after you set the handbrake and make sure the car isn’t in gear—touch the other end to battery positive. If that doesn’t cause the solenoid to click, then either the solenoid is bad or there’s not a ground path between the solenoid and the battery. If the solenoid clicks but the starter doesn’t spin, then either the starter is bad or the positive and negative current paths are corroded. Note that bypassing the ignition like this and feeding 12V directly to the solenoid is exactly what you’re doing when you use one of those trigger-style remote starter switches. Note also that there’s an old-school technique where, instead of using a jumper wire, you take a long screwdriver, touch the tip to the starter’s heavy-duty positive post, and lean it against the solenoid terminal to fire it. I strongly advise not doing this, as it’s way too easy for the screwdriver to slip and short to ground. A jumper wire accomplishes the same thing and is much safer.

If you’re certain that the battery and the current paths are good, and the starter won’t spin or sounds labored, and it’s hot to the touch, odds are that the starter has reached the end of the line. Once you have the starter out of the car, you can test it just to be certain by using jumper cables to connect the fat positive post and any convenient point on the case to a battery, and touching the post on the solenoid to battery positive. Make sure, though, to stand on it, as when it starts to spin, it’ll jump around.

Now that you have the engine cranking, if the car still doesn’t start, you have to deal with fuel and spark. While it’s possible for an engine to have both fuel and spark and still not start, odds are strong that a crank-but-no-start condition is caused by one of them. Let’s deal with spark first.

On an old-school vintage car with a single ignition coil feeding a distributor and plug wires going to the spark plugs at each cylinder, it’s a simple matter to pull the center wire out of the distributor cap, hold it ¼-inch from ground with insulated pliers, and have someone crank the engine while you check for spark. If you see it, then the coil is firing and high voltage is going to the distributor. Do the same test with a plug wire. If there’s spark going into the distributor but none reaching the spark plugs, the problem is in the cap or the rotor. If there’s no spark at all from the coil, odds are that the points have closed up, the condenser isn’t grounded, or one of the wires has come off the coil. There’s really not much to vintage ignition systems, and no-spark problems can always be solved via replacement of components with known-good ones. Suspect the points and the connections first, then the condenser, and the coil last.

On modern cars, it’s much more difficult to directly check for spark. Instead of having a single ignition coil feeding a distributor with exposed plug wires, most cars since the mid-1990s have had a coil-on-plug design (also called “stick coils”) where individual coils sit directly on top of the spark plugs in a recess in the head, so there’s no easy way to directly verify spark. While any number of things can cause a no-spark condition, a likely suspect is the crankshaft position sensor, as without that fiducial, the car’s ECU doesn’t know when to fire the plugs. If it goes bad, hopefully it’ll throw a code that can be read with a scan tool.

If you have spark but the car still won’t start, odds are it’s a fuel delivery issue. A quick and easy test is to take a can of starting fluid and give a blast down the throat of the carb with the throttles open, or in a fuel-injected car, into the throttle body. If the car starts, runs for a few seconds, then dies, you’ve nailed it as a fuel-delivery problem. The time-tested method is, with a fire extinguisher at the ready, to disconnect the fuel line heading into the carburetor and put the end into a clear bottle while cranking the engine. Sometimes you find a bad fuel pump, sometimes you find that a porous gas line is causing air to get sucked instead of fuel, and sometimes you find that the gas tank is full of rust and is clogging up the filter. You need to step through it, back to front, and find the problem.

On a fuel-injected car, care must be taken because the fuel pressures are much higher, but depending on the age of the car, you may still be able to disconnect the fuel line from the fuel rail, energize the fuel pump by cranking the engine, and verify that fuel is squirting out. At some point, though, most fuel-injected cars switched over from simple rubber hoses and hose clamps to dedicated fittings with crimp-on connectors, and instead of putting the hose end in a bottle, it may be necessary to use a fuel pressure gauge with the proper fitting to screw into the test port on the fuel rail. If there’s no pressure, then the fuel pump isn’t running. The problem could be in the pump or the relay that controls it. An enthusiast forum will usually have information on the location of the relay, enabling you to jumper over it (connect pin 30 to pin 87). If that doesn’t bring things to life, the fuel pump itself probably needs to be replaced or at least troubleshot to see if an in-tank hose has fallen off it.

If temperatures are cold and the engine cranks and has both gas and spark but it still won’t start, it’s likely an issue in the cold-start circuit. On a carburetor, this is the choke. The choke plates should rotate closed over the top of the carb, and the carb linkage should settle on the fast-idle cam so the throttle plates are partially open. On a primitive electronically fuel-injected car, there’s usually a cold-start injector in the throttle body that opens up to squirt fuel while the engine is cranking and for some short amount of time afterward. For troubleshooting reasons, it’s fairly common practice to either wire these to a little push-button switch or to connect them directly to the starter solenoid so you know they’re receiving voltage during cranking.

There, that’s most of it.

But don’t message me saying “HELP! My car won’t start!” I hate that. If I can train my wife and kids, I can train you.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Troubleshooting a Car That Won’t Start appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Most of us treasure the time we spend working on projects. The mental flow state that comes with forcing our minds to mellow out and focus on solely the task at hand can be therapeutic—in the right situation. Every bright light casts a shadow, and every garage holds some tools we hope never to use.

These are the devices that mean our time in the garage is not going well. The steel canaries in the horsepower mine. Projects go sideways just as many times as they go flawlessly, and many of us have various gadgets that serve no purpose until all else has failed.

Here are a few tools that we love to have but hate to reach for.

Tool #1: Tap set

More often than not, forming—or re-forming—threads in a part or piece follows the destruction of those spiraling channels. You’ve probably broken a piece of hardware—or, worst of all, an easy-out. Toss in the fact that taps are very hard, and thus brittle, and you have a very volatile evening of work ahead of you.

When used properly and carefully, a tap set can be a reset button on the life of a part. Even drilling up one size and tapping so that a fastener can have appropriate holding power may be better than replacing the fastener. Sometimes it’s all about perspective.

Tool #2: Spring compressors

The sudden release of potential energy describes a lot of scenarios: The explosion of a firecracker, the expansion of an airbag, and the release of a compressed spring. Each of those can have serious long-term health effects if it happens too close to your person. There are two groups of people who work on automotive suspension: those who are uncomfortable, and those who ignore the forces at play.

Springs and suspension still need to be serviced, though. Carefully inspect and service spring compressors before using them to ensure there is no damage or problems that might pop up. Sometimes just that bit of added confidence is enough to soften the fear factor.

Tool #3: Camshaft locker

It’s not that this tool is so bad; it’s that the consequences of human error when using it are high enough to make us uneasy. Variable camshaft timing has unlocked horsepower that comes with minimal compromises in fuel economy and also drivability. Unfortunately, the technology also makes for more complicated service; replacing a timing chain or belt often requires careful alignment of multiple points while also holding tensioners and gears in proper orientation. The job can be fairly painless, but that doesn’t mean it’s fun.

Tool #4: Air hammer

Percussive force breaks the bonds of rust, and it hammers eardrums just as thoroughly. The compromise can often be easily overcome with a good set of earplugs or over-the-ear muffs, but using an air hammer still isn’t a pleasurable experience. Compared to using the torch, and the chance of lighting everything on fire, it is the lesser of two evils. We don’t love you, air hammer, but, after all these years, we haven’t let you leave the toolbox.

Tool #5: Impact driver

Stripped hardware is the bane of any DIYer’s existence. Even with the proper tools and experience to handle stripped screws and bolts, we don’t want to spend the limited time we have in the garage dealing with them. The combination of driving and turning force delivered by an impact screwdriver can take quickly solve the problem of a partially stripped screw. It can also result in hitting your wrist with a hammer, or create an even bigger problem by snapping a bolt off where you can’t grab it. Often, our opinion of an impact screwdriver is based on how well it worked the last time we used it.

Tool #6: The Big Hammer

You know the one. The handle is slightly stained, and the face features a few chips from that one time you got a little carried away on that ball joint. You probably started addressing the problem at hand with a couple of smaller hammers and, when you realized that things were not going your way, and that you were tired of talking nice, opened the drawer to grab The Big Hammer.

This list is all a matter of opinion and personal experience, so we may have missed one or two here. If you’ve got a tool you avoid reaching for but might not be able to put a finger on why, leave a comment. Consider it an unofficial survey.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 6 Tools We Hate to Reach For appeared first on Hagerty Media.

By my count, I’ve owned over 70 BMWs since I got bit by the bug back in 1982. Add in the Vanagons, the Suburbans, the onesies and twosies like the 911SC, Alfa Spider,  Lotus Europa, Winnebago Rialta, and (of course) the family vehicles, and it’s over 100 cars. That’s fewer than a pro or a diehard collector, but it’s a pretty good number. I’ve written previously about the best and worst vehicles that stand out, but I thought I’d concentrate for a moment on the purchases and sales, or near-purchases and near-sales, themselves. Some were classic time-wasters, but others were beautiful bits of humanity.

1973 BMW 2002

This was my second 2002, purchased in Austin, Texas, in 1983. I’d just gotten my first one sorted out and repainted, but then I found this one and sold the other one. It had been sitting for years, the Malaga (burgundy) paint was faded, but it was rust-free and had air conditioning. I tried jump-starting it, even putting the battery from my car directly in it, and it clicked once but wouldn’t crank, indicating a dead starter. The seller lived on a hill with an unpaved driveway. I convinced him that the car would likely start if we rolled it down the hill and I popped the clutch to spin the engine. I did, and it didn’t. Now he had a dead car at the bottom of the hill. He was not pleased. I bought it anyway. With a new starter and fresh plugs, it fired right up. I hadn’t fully sorted it out yet when Maire Anne and I left for a scheduled hiking vacation in Colorado in her VW camper. Unfortunately the camper began running badly and we limped it back home. “Can we take the new 2002?” she asked. “That’s risky,” I said. “It burns oil, there’s no spare tire, and a hundred other things.” But with vacation at risk, I threw a case of oil and a can of Fix-o-flat in the truck, and we made the 2000-mile round trip without incident.

1978 BMW 323i

This was a “gray market” model (a car sold in Germany but not in America) that BMW enthusiasts craved because it had the small six-cylinder engine eight years before it was available in an American-issue car. Buying it was straightforward, but when I tried to sell it, it appeared to be cursed. To begin with, the car’s hot-rod nature attracted a callous testosterone-enhanced element. One guy test-drove it weaving dangerously through Boston traffic and cutting people off. “Ever hear of the Skip Barber driver’s school at Lime Rock? I went there,” he said, as if that justified his homicidal behavior. “Then you should know to confine these antics to the track,” I deadpanned. Another guy liked it and said he wanted to buy it, but when he came back with cash, it was less than we’d agreed on and he brought four of his friends to intimidate me. By utter coincidence, while this was playing out, my wife opened the third-floor window and called out “Someone else is calling about the car. Is it still available?” “Yes,” I told her, and went inside, leaving the guy and his muscle at the curb. (To the guy’s credit, 35 years later he found me online and apologized for his sophomoric behavior.)

The fellow who eventually bought it wanted it for his pregnant wife. I thought it was a terrible fit for that role, but he kept increasing his offer price and I relented. The small-six was BMW’s only engine with a timing belt instead of a chain, and I hadn’t replaced the belt yet, so I told the guy to make sure to get it done ASAP. He didn’t, the belt broke, the valves got bent, his mechanic rebuilt the head but couldn’t get the car running, and the guy came back to me threatening legal action. I could’ve told him to pound sand, but I figured that I was buying back a car with a rebuilt head. Turned out the only reason it wouldn’t run was that the distributor cap and plug wires are specific to this Euro model, and a new set of plug wires didn’t make electrical contact with the cap.

1985 Alfa Spider

In 1991, I had my first wave of roadster cravings and bought an ’85 Alfa Spider. Due to needing a head gasket and the nose being dented due to a pickup track backing into it, it was cheap. I fixed it and drove it around for one glorious summer until my wife and I began house shopping and I had to shed some cars. I sold it to a guy about my age who seemed to be a good buyer as, like me, he owned a BMW 2002, but the sale soon went south. First he complained that it was leaking differential fluid out the solid rear axle’s wheel seals, something I was unaware of. To smooth things over, I kicked him back some money to help with the repair. But a month later I received a certified letter containing allegations of odometer tampering and threat of lawsuit if I didn’t refund his money. A lawyer friend advised that, if the allegations were true (and I had no idea if they were or not), I could be hit with treble damages. It worked out OK, as I had the car for the summer at our new home, then sold it to someone who was moving to California.

1987 BMW 325ic

I missed the Alfa, so a few years later I bought a BMW E30 3 Series convertible. I didn’t really have room for it, so the deal with myself was that it had to be my daily driver, even in the winter. Of course this was a stupid idea, so the following summer I put it up for sale. A gentleman who lived on the north shore of Boston called me and made me a very fair offer, but I explained that I don’t really put much stock in sight-unseen offers because when people come and see the car, they usually try to bargain down further (“Oh, I didn’t know about the cracked tail light, the dings on the trim,” etc). The fellow said that that wasn’t going to happen and there was something in his demeanor that made me believe him. So I agreed. And then he upped the ante—he said that he’d pay me $150 to deliver the car to him that weekend. This had all the hallmarks of a fool’s errand, but he said without flash or bravado that he was simply a really busy guy living in a nice beach community and wanted to begin enjoying the car. So that weekend my wife and I drove up there in two cars, he handed me the money, I handed him the title and keys, boom, done. Every sale should go like this.

1991 VW Vanagon Carat

I had six Vanagons back in the day. They were wonderful vehicles when my wife and I had our band, as they swallowed more equipment than any other minivan. However, the air-cooled four-cylinder engines were anemic like the VW busses of yore, and the later water-boxer engines suffered from coolant leakage at the cylinder-to-head interface. I became entranced by the idea of installing a 230-horsepower engine from a Subaru SVX. I found a desirable ’91 Vanagon Carat with the slightly lowered suspension, the front air dam, the Weekender package (the fold-out bed but not the stove or pop-top), and a blown engine for a good price down in Rhode Island. I spoke on the phone with the seller, said I’d be down in an hour with cash, and joked, “Please don’t sell it out from under me before I get there,” never thinking that that would actually happen.

I arrived in the parking lot, found the Vanagon, but the seller was nowhere. I called the number I had for him, and there was no answer. I noticed that the “for sale” sign on the car had a different phone number on it. I called it, and the seller answered. I said, “Hey, this is Rob, I’m here in the parking lot next to the Vanagon.” To my stunned surprise, he said, “I sold it.” I was dumbfounded. The guy was going to ghost me. “I just spoke with you an hour ago.” “Sorry, man” was the best he could muster. Looking at seller reviews on Facebook Marketplace, I see that this happens all the time. As a seller, I would never do that to someone.

1973 VW Bus

This is the humorous companion to the Vanagon story. I really hadn’t been looking for another old-school VW bus, as they’re rust-prone vehicles that must be garaged, but a nice-looking bus showed up on Craigslist about 12 years ago up in New Hampshire for a surprisingly low price. I called the guy and asked if I could come right now. “Yes,” he said, “but someone else is on the way, so it might be sold by the time you get here.” “Warned and understood,” I said, “I’ll risk it,” and drove the 90 miles up to NH. As the GPS had me turning onto the seller’s street, my cell rang. The seller said to me “I just sold it.” Incredibly, just as he told me the news, I arrived at his house and saw him talking on his cell (to me) as the buyer was handing him cash. I swung a continuous-motion 180-degree turn across the top of the driveway, made eye contact with both the seller and the buyer, exchanged waves, laughed, and headed home.

1973 BMW Bavaria

During the winter 10 years ago I answered a Craigslist ad in southern Maine for a Bavaria that the seller claimed was rust-free. “Don’t kid a kidder,” I said when I spoke with him. “There is no such thing as a rust-free Bavaria.” He said that it was a former California car that the previous owner only drove to summer events. “The car is in my warehouse on a lift while I’m doing the brakes,” he said. “You can walk under it and see for yourself.” I had nowhere to store the car, and my engineering job was starting to become unstable, so a car purchase was risky, but you never know unless you look, so I drove up there.

The guy handed me a droplight, and sure enough, there was only the most minor surface oxidation on the floor pans. “I know who you are,” the seller said, “and I’d love the car to go to you.” He named a price well under the one in the ad. I said that I was quite interested, but explained about my precarious professional and space issues. “Tell you what,” he said. “Give me a hundred bucks and I’ll hold it for you here ’til spring.” How are you not supposed to take someone up on that? Come spring, however, my job situation became even worse, and I thought that I should do the right thing and bail out of the car. Then I decided that, no, I should go see it again. When I drove back up, the car was down off the lift, outside in the sun, running, and drivable. One spin around the parking lot and I thought, “Yeah, I’m totally buying this car.” I still own it.

2000 Toyota Tacoma

In 2014, my middle son Kyle graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts, got his first job in South Carolina, and needed a vehicle. He was interested in a small pickup. My wife, my mother, and I went in together on a graduation present. After having a 2004 Tacoma pickup at a used car lot fall through, I found a 2000 two-door RWD Tacoma as a private Craigslist sale. I told the seller I’d meet his asking price if he helped my son register and insure it, as neither of us had a clue what the procedure was in South Carolina. The gentleman was true to his word—the sale, registration, and insurance went off without a hitch. Kyle’s now a metalworker in Santa Fe, New Mexico, still owns the truck, hauls all manner of sculptures and metal stock in it, and frequently finds notes on the windshield that say  “Call me if you ever want to sell this.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post My Best and Worst Car Transactions appeared first on Hagerty Media.

When it comes to a project car, it’s best to dive into one that truly lights a flame inside you. A project car is almost always mentally, physically, and financially draining at some point in your relationship with it. If you don’t care to stick it out through such hurdles, frustration might block you from ever returning to the project again.

So, where to begin? The list of needy cars for sale from the world’s garages, carports, driveways, and open fields can seem overwhelming. It can be easy to dream big. Of course, hell-on-wheels traps exist; certain cars are difficult to source parts for, offer minimal community and owner support, or are just plain prone to breaking.

Some cars, on the flip side, offer a stronger foundation for novices. Today we’ll be donning the role of Car Matchmaker. Whether you’re new to the hobby or a veteran, smoother-sailing and joy-to-own DIY classics are out there— here are five vehicles we think might be right for you:

Little British Cars

A cheap British sports car can offer plenty of, uh, opportunities to bond with the mechanically inclined owner. The nice thing is that there were tens of millions of Austin-Healeys, Triumphs, and MGs produced during the 1960s and ’70s that share much in terms of maintenance parts and techniques. The cars are relatively affordable, and thus, so are the parts. The biggest boon: support and knowledge provided by other enthusiasts. British car clubs are often large and helpful—perfect for a newbie to the genre.

Volkswagen Beetle

The Beetle dethroned the Model T for the outright model sales record, eventually going on to account for over 21 million sales. There is safety in numbers, which often correlates with good parts support and pricing. The aftermarket support for Bugs is downright impressive, even compared with other mainstream vintage cars like Mustangs or Chevelles. Beetle owners will get familiar with regular maintenance like oil changes and valve adjustments, but the fundamental build and design are sturdy; if you do the job right the first time, you likely won’t have to do it again unexpectedly.

Ford Model A or T

You want to learn the basics? Then buy one of the most basic cars you can drive. Just stare at a Model T for more than a few minutes, and you’ll notice that none of the critical parts are hiding. Everything is pretty out in the open. Best of all, components were overbuilt by a factor or two in most areas. Model Ts—and As, for that matter—don’t require many power tools, which means they’re accessible and enjoyable to work on whether you’re a tool rookie or an experienced wrench. Fun to learn on and fun to drive? That’s a good project car.

Trucks of the 1970s and ’80

As simple as the aforementioned Fords are, their age comes with real-world usage limitations. If a utility is an aspect you value in a finished project car, vintage pickups from the 1970s and ’80s are a great place to look. These are rugged, tough hunks of metal that enjoy fairly high tolerance for deferred maintenance. If you are willing to buck up and take on the challenge of catching up on all the stuff the last owner neglected, the juice can be worth the squeeze. Fruits of your labor will include functional overdrive transmissions, disc brakes, and decent power, all baked into solid packages with relatively simple powertrains and chassis. Being trucks, they also have beds for work—or pleasure hauling. For those without a utility-focused daily driver, that’s a nice bonus when trying to justify how a collector car fits into your lifestyle.

Anything you don’t expect to daily drive

In reality, just about anything that makes you look forward to dirty hands and busted knuckles is the right project car. Expectations, however, are important; old, semi-working cars tend to behave like old, semi-working cars—they can break down and sit out of commission for extended periods. Take it from me: Spending Sunday evening underneath your car is a lot more relaxing when you don’t need the thing to get to work the next morning.

*

The whole project car process, even if it requires a long timeline, can be as rewarding as the end result. The thrill of parts finding is sometimes more thrilling than installing or even using said parts; whether buying something that requires lots of networking and parts hunting might be perfect for you, as long as you go down that road with both eyes open. Tougher endeavors in that vein hone project-car skills, but the learning curve is often steep and time-consuming. Patience is essential, so if you want more immediate gratification, relative oddball stuff like Wankel-powered NSUs or Nash Metropolitans may not be the ideal place to get your feet wet.

Find a car you think you’ll love, and the learning, fixing, and driving it all become part of the adventure. Get some experiencce under your belt and before you know it, you’ll have more than one project in the pipeline—don’t say we didn’t warn you!

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post 5 Fantastic First Project Cars appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The Corvair has been precariously perched atop jack stands in my garage for a month or two—I’ve lost track, to be honest. The engine and transaxle sit divorced on the floor, angled away from one another, conveying a slight contempt for each other that shouldn’t be possible for inanimate objects.

After weeks of trying to “find the time” to make the next big step in getting the car back together, I finally carved out just enough time to make some progress. Luckily for me and my tight schedule, I knew how to make some self-tightening bolts.

The rift in the relationship between engine and transmission was my doing, of course. My investigation of an oil leak revealed that the crankshaft seal, which I expected to have failed, was innocent; the real culprit was a damaged gasket between the bell housing and engine block, which was found guilty for its part in leaving oil stains all over town for five years. This unplanned crankcase vent was allowing oil mist to blow out and coat the underside of the car with enough anti-rust I could probably have driven it last winter. The leak became an un-ignorable problem last fall, and this winter was the perfect time to deal with it.

Over the past few months, however, other combustion-based projects entering and leaving my garage have made progress slow—slow enough that suddenly a planned spring road trip was starting to look shaky. It took a good hour to for me get back in the “working on a car” groove. It sounds dumb to say, but there is a radical difference in touch and technique between working on the motorcycles and the cars. The literal weight of everything. More systems. More finicky bits. More patience.

About the time I was hitting my stride, I turned my attention to the powerpack that was resting on the bright red steel cradle that bolts to my aluminum floor jack. To split the differential and engine requires removing seven bolts, two of which hold on the starter motor. Those starter bolts are the only ones you can easily access, though. The five other 9/16”–headed bolts go in from the bellhousing side, tucked in nicely cast aluminum ribs for strength. The arrangement totally makes sense, just like the countless other times assembly time won out over service time. The insufferably slow process of threading a bolt in 10-degree rotations is something that just gnaws at me—I needed some self-tightening bolts.

The process is simple, really. I’ve been working at learning machining on the lathe and wanted to test my single-point thread cutting technique, so I started with a super secret alloy sourced from an old tool and die guy in North Carolina …

Yeah, not really. Self-tightening bolts don’t exist. You knew that. But we don’t have to settle through these infuriating little catch-22 situations created by someone else. Back when this engine was last out, I cut slots in the tips of the bolts. The holes that receive them are drilled and threaded clear through the cast-iron housing of the differential. With a nice narrow screwdriver, I can reach down the center bore of each hole and turn the screwdriver counterclockwise to thread the bolt in snugly. A couple touches with a wrench, and it’s time to move on. Even describing the process on video took less than a minute. Cut those slots once, and a job like this is easier, should you ever come back.

Rarely is anything about project cars or motorcycles easy. There are no self-tightening bolts, just like there is no shortage of time-saving tips that create scenic trips rather than shortcuts. We have to do the work in some way, shape, or form. The result of doing the work is what gives us the otherwise-mythical powers to make things easier for ourselves. We learn these tips and tricks over months, years, and decades spent thinking about the materials and processes that we use and abuse during our love affair with an inanimate object. Because I learned and implemented that little trick of slotting the end of five bolts, this sizable job is not so bad—enjoyable, even. At the very least, it’s more fun than watching the car assemble itself.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post How To Make Self-Tightening Bolts appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Several years ago, I wrote a series of detailed pieces on relays (you can find them here: part 1, 2, 3, and 4). I explained how a relay is nothing more than a remote-controlled switch that turns something on and off without having to have a large amount of current running into the passenger compartment. The common example is the little square headlight or fan relay that turns on the high beams or the A/C condenser fan by pulling the current through a thick wire connected directly to the battery instead of through the thin wires from the toggle switch that turns it on.

To summarize: All relays have a low-current side and a high-current side. The low-current side turns on and off a small electromagnet. The high-current side has the actual switch contacts. As I described in my original pieces, by far the most common type of relay is the single-pole-single-throw (SPST) relay with four terminals. One terminal of the electromagnet is fed 12 volts, the other is grounded. When current flows through the electromagnet, the magnetic field pulls the contacts in the switch together, connecting the two high-current terminals to each other.

There is a numerical shorthand applied to the terminals on a relay. It’s originally a German “DIN” standard notation, but it eventually was adopted by nearly all manufacturers. The DIN standard numbering for a common four-terminal SPST is:

High-current side (the device you want to turn on)

Terminal 30  |  12V from battery (fused)

Terminal 87  |  12V to device

Low-current side (the electromagnet)

Terminal 86  |  12V from switched power

Terminal 85  |  Ground

So, use beefy, high-gauge wires to connect terminal 30 to battery power and terminal 87 to the thing you want to turn on (the electric fan, the fog lights, whatever). Then use thin, low-gauge wires to connect the input of a toggle switch to power and the output to terminal 86. Connect terminal 85 to ground. Flip the toggle switch, and low current will flow through the electromagnet to ground, energizing it. That will pull the connections 30 and 87 together, causing high current to flow to your fan or fog lights. Neat, huh?

What I didn’t include in those articles years back was the neat method to figure out which terminal on the relay is which if the labels are illegible due to age.

It’s very simple. Basically, you determine by trial-and-error which pair of terminals belong to the electromagnet. The other pair are therefore the terminals on the high-current side. Within the low and high-current sides, the terminals are actually interchangeable—that is, it really doesn’t matter if 86 is connected to 12V and 85 goes to ground or vice-versa, and the same is true for 30 and 87.

There are two ways to determine which terminals belong to the electromagnet. In both, you use the fact that if you mentally label the four terminals as 1, 2, 3, and 4, you’ll see that there are a total of six combinations to try (1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 2-3, 2-4, 3-4).

Way 1: Use a multimeter

Take a multimeter, set it to measure resistance, and use the two probes to find the pair of terminals that have continuity between them. That is, if you’re measuring the resistance across anything other than 86 and 85, there should be no internal connection, so there will be zero continuity, so the multimeter will read “0L” for “over limit,” but when measuring across 86 and 85, it’ll measure the resistance of the windings of the electromagnet, which is usually in the 50-to-100-ohm range.

Once you’ve found 86 and 85, the other two terminals are 30 and 87. Note that if you happen to find a pair of terminals whose resistance is very low, like about one ohm, you’ve found the high-current pair, and they’re either stuck in the closed position, or the relay is a “normally closed” type instead of “normally open.”

Way 2: Hear the electromagnet click

If you don’t have a multimeter, take a pair of wires, each with a female quick-connect connector (commonly but mistakenly referred to as a “spade” connector) on one end and exposed wire at the other end. Connect them to any two of the relay’s terminals. Then touch the end of one wire to battery positive, the other to battery negative. It doesn’t matter which goes where, as either polarity will energize the electromagnet. Go through all six combinations. When you find the pair for 86 and 85, you’ll hear the contacts inside the relay click as the little electromagnet pulls them closed and click again when you release the wires.

Testing that you’ve gotten it right: Now that you’ve found the electromagnet contacts 86 and 85, and thus know that the two remaining ones are 30 and 87, you can actually test the relay as follows. You put a multimeter set to measure resistance across 30 and 87, verify that there’s no continuity (that it reads “0L” for “over limit”), touch the wires from 86 and 85 to battery positive and negative to pull the contacts together close the relay’s internal switch, and verify that the resistance between 30 and 87 has dropped to about one ohm.

Note that, as with 86 and 85, in practice, with a simple relay, it really doesn’t matter which one is 30 and which is 87, as it’s just a simple contact switch. If, however, the relay is in a modern computer-controlled fuel-injected car, it may have one or more diodes in it for noise suppression, in which case polarity is important. In this case, though, the relay is unlikely to be 50 years old, and the labels on it are likely to be readable.

The beauty of this technique is that even if the relay is a five-terminal single-pole double-throw relay that toggles between two devices, it still works. There’s still absolutely no internal connection between the low-current and high-current circuits, and there’s still only one internal electromagnet. Once you determine which pair of terminals is 86 and 85, the remaining terminals are for the high-current side, and by checking their resistance in pairs, you can determine which pair is normally open and which is normally closed.

So, if, like me, you have a collection of old relays in a box in the garage and want to install one in your vintage car to turn on a set of new old stock Marchal driving lights—and still have the engine compartment look like it’s free of components purchased from Pep Boys—but you can’t read the numbers, in just a few minutes you can figure it out.

But don’t touch my stuff.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Decoding a Relay with No Numbers appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I keep a few of my cars outside under covers. As winter approaches, this invites critters, as we say in the South, to find shelter in the relatively warm confines of various nooks and crannies throughout the undercarriages and interiors of these cars. I’m not alone, of course. Hobbyists who store cars, including in unheated buildings, have an annual battle with mice and certain reptiles as the weather turns cold.

My own campaign of death and deterrence for mice has come down to baits, traps, and sticky paper (my least favorite—some things you can’t unsee). Mice seem to get used to my strategies, and recently I even noticed mouse excrement on top of my slappy trap—the critter had literally pooped on my idea of a viable lethal bait system for him. So now I use baits placed strategically around the trunk, the interior, and the engine bay, plus a spring trap in the interior, plus a sticky trap for good measure. I am adding odds in my favor in lieu of truly knowing my enemy.

One night in early December, I realized that it had been a month since I’d exercised one of my air-cooled Porsches, so I went out after dinner to take a short drive. The routine is simple: Pull off the car cover, reconnect the battery, check the slappy-slap mousetrap on the passenger floor for a dead tenant, then proceed with starting the car and the subsequent driving fun. This one particular evening, the mouse trap was empty so all went as planned on my getting off to a good start. Being a visual guy, I did not really want to drive while seeing a mouse trap on the floorboard, but it was dark outside and my dash lights are 1970s dim. As the saying goes, out of sight, out of mind. So I left the trap where it lay.

The engine started relatively willingly, I backed out of the driveway through the usual cloud of heavy fumes and oil vapors, and I was off. Everything was warming up nicely on this cold December evening, and soon I had heat wafting from the floor vents (“wafting” is the maximum setting on vintage Porsche heaters). I was falling in love again with this special vintage machine, just a simple engine and four wheels, with minimum gadgets and doodads to distract from a pure driving experience.

About three miles into the drive, however, things started to go a bit wrong. I smelled a distinct burning odor, definitely organic, not oil- or gasoline-based (or plastic-based, as wiring harnesses give off when thermally excited). I surmised that a varmint had started a nest in one of the car’s exhaust heat exchangers and that the fumes were coming into the cabin. Here is where I made a critical but unknown error.

The air vent and heating controls on early Porsches are purposely confusing, a means to humble owners who have not memorized their user manuals. On this model, there are three unlabeled levers that have a particularly satisfying feel as you slide them from left to right, even if their purpose is impossible to remember. The top lever does something related to the fan speed, the bottom lever has some temperature-related function, and the middle lever’s purpose is unclear, but I always associate it with fresh air.

My error, unbeknownst to me, was to move the top lever over to the right position to let some cool outside air into my stinky cockpit, rather than the correct middle lever. I will blame the darkness for me using the wrong lever. It turns out that a mouse had indeed already been in the car, and had started a nest in the blower motor located in the front trunk, which served to jam the fan’s blower wheel into a fixed position. Engaging the “high” setting on the top lever fan switch sent the desired 14 volts or so to the motor, which promptly became an amperage dead end, the motor being unable to rotate due to the various newspaper and paper towel tatters carefully placed there by said mouse. This soon overloaded the circuit leading to the blower motor, and concurrently, began to overheat the fuse for this shared circuit.

In a normal vehicle, this would simply result in a blown fuse. What I was driving is not a normal vehicle but a 50-year-old German car that has, what was at the time, a well-engineered electrical system. That system was pumping its little heart out trying to carry the extra amps to the motor in an attempt to make it turn. If this had been 1972 (the year this car was made) all would be well, and the circuit might even handle the extra load without failure. Enter the modern world, however, and we have to consider the weak link that had been introduced to this circuit when I, the owner, lazily Amazon-ed some off-shore, off-brand fuses for the car. The original German fuses were wonderfully simple assemblies consisting of a ceramic carrier wrapped with the appropriate-gauge metal fusing element. Each color of fuse matches its particular rating, and you can visibly see thicker mid-sections on the higher-rated fuses. So elegant, so simple.

The modern off-shore copies of these robust German designs, however, do not use heat-resistant ceramic cores but rather plastic material which looks and fits just the same, but has a much lower heat capacity. This is not generally a problem, until you try to pass a lot of amperage through the fusing element and the high current slowly starts to heat up the fuse, approaching the melting temperature of the plastic in question. As the cheap plastic core softens, it loses its dimensional integrity. The clever Porsche/Bosch clips in the fuse box compress the fuse core into a banana shape, and the clips can no longer hold the fuse in place.

The first warning that all was not well just a few minutes after I’d slid the fan lever to “high” was that the alternator warning light came on. This alerted the DEFCON 1 status in my automotive lizard brain because a) my battery was no longer being charged; and b) it was pitch-dark outside and I had to keep my headlights on to get home; and c) I was 10 miles from home, and my battery is a four-year-old Mazda unit that I got from Mazda racing guru Glenn Long when he was making Spec Racers out of ND Miatas, so it had questionable depth due to its age.

In someone else’s world, all of this might have not been a catastrophic situation. An overheated and melting off-shore fuse, even without blowing, might just shorten/relax its length enough to lose contact with the terminals, and the circuit would simply go dead in a moment of self-diagnosing failure. However, as clever as Porsche’s German engineers were, one error might have been installing the fuse box directly above the driver’s feet. If an owner were, say, to use a cheap fuse with a plastic core, and if that fuse were to melt and fall out, and if the previous owner had removed the fuse box cover and lost it years ago, there just might be a direct trajectory from the melting fuse to the driver’s ankle. Welcome to my world, December 7, 2023 at 9:16 p.m. Good thing this was not the 1980s and I was no longer wearing cuffed pants.

The human brain is a wonderful storage device, and while I didn’t anticipate the burning sensation in my left ankle, I did immediately recognize it for what it was—jetsam from my electrical failure giving me empirical evidence of the burned-out fuse. I grew up on British cars, so this was not the first time this has happened.

I saw a neighborhood entrance 30 feet ahead so jammed everything I had on the brake pedal (this car has early ABS: “About to Brake Sometime”) and pulled a hard righthand turn into it. This 0.8 g maneuver, inelegantly executed, served up a new problem as the accompanying centripetal forces launched the armed-and-ready mouse trap in the direction of my right ankle, which it proceeded to impact with great enthusiasm, triggering its release mechanism.

For this I had no such past memory data point to pull up. What I did have is the recollection of once being on a drive in this very car and finding a medium-sized black snake below the brake pedal as I was cruising down a country road. My mind connected the long-past snake incident with the biting sensation in my exposed right ankle. My actual lizard brain then took over and I essentially leapt from my seat into the roof of the car, an involuntary convulsion of self-preservation all while rolling into the neighborhood at about 30 mph.

A 60-some-odd human brain takes a bit longer to recover from trauma than a younger one does, and it took me a good 50 yards of coasting past this neighborhood’s Christmas lights to regain at least a portion of my senses. Regrouping, I pulled to the side of the road, yanked out my phone and turned on the flashlight feature. Looking down I saw, not an enraged snake, but only an empty floorboard. Then I noticed the sprung mouse trap hanging from my pants leg. It was at that moment that my folly came into full focus. I left the trap in place, dangling as a badge of shame and stupidity, and quickly jumped back in to start home. I chose not to install a new fuse, since they all were of the same poor quality as the one that had tattooed my left ankle. And so, my electrical death march started. At the one stoplight of my route, I cut the headlights off, cringing when I turned them back on, anticipating the engine to stutter and stall from a lack of juice to the ignition coil.

As I drove I did some quick mental math and worked backward on my amperage budget:

• A used spark plug will fire (in a compressed-air environment) with as little as 5000 volts.
• My Bosch ignition coil on this car has about a 100:1 lift ratio as an inductive transformer, amplifying the alternator’s 14 volts into 100 primary field volts when the circuit voltage is cut (thanks to the magic of a magnetic field collapsing), and then inducing 100 times that voltage in the secondary field coil (the one that zaps you—always the best cure for hiccups in my family).
• So, I’m probably okay until I get down to 5 volts in the battery.
• My headlights and taillights combined pull around 20 amps and the ignition coil pulls about 5 amps.
• My old battery probably has a 15 amp-hour capacity left in it.
• I maybe have a safe half-hour of driving before life goes dark.

This is why engineers are generally optimists: We make up pedantic equations, often on the fly, to make ourselves feel better.

Fuzzy logic aside, I sweated the last eight miles to my house. I am happy to say that we both made it, the voltage in the battery inversely proportional to my adrenaline as every quarter-mile passed beneath me.

They say your brain permanently records strong emotions, maybe as a survival mechanism to prevent future trauma. In the classic-car world, events such as those I had experienced are chalked up as “character building” and are, in some crazy way, considered to be the charm of these old machines. Hmm.

In any case, thanks, old Porsche, for a memorable ride.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post Of Mice and Machines: Porsche Fuses, Death Traps, and Imagination Gone Awry appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Progress on long-term projects is very nebulous. A written-out list of to-dos or a pile of parts carefully organized on the bench both indicate that a project is underway, but it is often weeks, months, or even years before progress is visible. The indicators are often so minute that, even after we do all the work to clean and carefully prepare a part, it will look nearly the same as it did before we started … and that’s before friends and loved ones stop by week after week and begin to question if we are insane. In an effort to see measurable progress toward my dream of reviving a dead Honda XR600R, I took a big step—one that, at first blush, seems like it was in the wrong direction.

I bought a basketcase engine from a thousand miles away.

Of all the absurd ways to move forward on a project, buying yet another one is an interesting decision to justify. The reason boils down to discovering exactly what it is about this hobby that is most enjoyable and exciting.

Shopping for a core crankshaft–one that is undamaged but needs rebuilt–led me to an ad for this 3D puzzle. I did a mental tally of the parts included and weighed the ease of starting right in on cleaning and assembly versus the time required to tear down my question mark of an engine, which was likely hiding even more bad news. Suddenly, it made sense to buy a complete engine and demote my broken one to spares or a potential future hot rod project.

It would be possible to tear down the already broken XR600R sitting on the lift, take inventory, and then source and repair the needed parts and pieces before putting it all back together. I had even done some light disassembly and inspection, estimated a rough list of parts it would need, and totaled up the cost. I had then spent a few moments daydreaming about spending modern KTM money on a 36-year-old Honda and taken a walk around the neighborhood—in the blizzard that was then hammering the Midwest—to shock myself back to reality.

I chose the known over the unknown, and bought this basketcase full of goodies. The list of parts was very close to what I was originally planning to buy for a rebuild, anyway. The crankshaft was rebuilt how I would have had it done, and the cylinder head had received the same treatment, and a welded and reground camshaft with a conservative lift and duration increase was included as well. The previous owner had even sourced a few new transmission gears—a common swap on these bikes to get wider ratios across each of the five speeds in the gearbox. The only change I’ll likely make is swapping the 9:1 compression piston with a 10.5:1 unit: I really like how these Honda XR engines respond to the bump in compression, and the new piston will pair nicely with the camshaft to make great power off pump gas.

This exercise in project planning and budgeting is rare for me and forced me to realize what I actually enjoy most about these projects: The puzzle aspect. Buying carefully cut cardboard from Amazon or basketcases from motorcycle forums is essentially the same thing at some point: Acknowledging that you have a little too much time and want a challenge to fill it. That said, you rarely need to spend more money on a cardboard cat picture to make sure the whole thing goes together correctly.

Buying this engine is also a vote of confidence that I can and will finish this puzzle. I’m essentially betting $1500 against myself that I will create something worth that much from the parts I unwrapped. Of course, there are multiple ways to pull that value out: Selling it all piece by piece; assembling it quick and dirty, and selling it to the first person who makes an offer; or carefully building it into the powerplant it deserves to be.

The cleaning and processing has already started, and I’m taking inventory of everything, including condition, to ensure that this will be an engine to be proud of. Basketcase engines can be nightmares, but sometimes nightmares are just dreams with a twisted perspective. A pile of parts on the bench is what makes me happy, so this basketcase carried me to cloud nine and I expect the process of finishing the job to keep me there.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post My Honda XR600R Project Is Going to Hell in a Handbasket appeared first on Hagerty Media.

As I’m not wrenching much this winter (a situation caused by not really having a proper winter project, as well as using that as an opportunity to give my nagging back injury a chance to heal), I thought I’d write about the spectrum of wounds, cautionary tactics, near misses, and emergency room visits that the decades of wrenching have produced. Considering the amount of wrenching I’ve done over the past 45 years, I’ve had surprisingly few serious injuries—no ambulances have visited my house. But there has been blood and one near catastrophe.

Cautionary Tactics

Racers talk about losing their judgement when the red mist (adrenaline) flows and they begin doing things they know they shouldn’t do. When you’re removing some stuck bolt or recalcitrant component, it’s easy to get influenced by “mechanic’s red mist” and go all Cole Trickle on it (“This part is goin’ DOWN!”). Because of both impaired judgement and the larger forces at play when you’re pushing or pulling hard, this is when you’re likely to hurt yourself. For example, when gripping on a wrench or a ratchet handle and pushing it to loosen a bolt, if the ratchet slips or the bolt breaks, it’s the back of your hand that’s likely to smack against something sharp or pointy. The tendons back there are very close to the surface; you can plainly see them whenever you flex your fingers. Pushing a wrench or ratchet with the open palm of your hand instead of the closed fist can make the difference between a few stitches versus surgery and months of physical therapy.

Helicoptering up a bit, it’s good to be in the habit of approaching any repair with a degree of situational awareness. What are the hazards in the area you’re about to stick your hands into? Are there jagged edges? Hot hoses? Frayed wires or ends of cables that can cause a painful puncture that gets infected? Are there rotating parts you need to be aware of? Is the thing that you’re removing going to drop down and pin your hand? Simply taking a moment and scoping this stuff out is time well spent.

The phrase “gas and spark” is often used to describe the necessary precursors for an internal combustion engine to run, but it’s also a cautionary phrase, as you really don’t want these things combined outside of the engine’s combustion chamber. Spilled or leaking gas can easily be ignited by a stray spark from either an electrical connection being made or broken, or cutting something with a spinning wheel. So don’t, for example, use a Dremel tool to cut a metal clamp off a fuel hose.

But that’s all small stuff. In my opinion, the most serious vector for automotive injuries is jacking up a car and working under it. I believe I’ve told the story on these pages about how my physics professor for my sophomore mechanics class (and part of mechanics is statics—the study of the forces on things that aren’t moving) was killed when his car fell on him, forever imprinting on me that intelligence and common sense don’t necessarily go hand in hand. To be fair, I don’t know the details of what went wrong, but ever since that event, I’ve “double-jacked” cars. That is, if you’re going to crawl under a car, be sure to put it on a hard level surface (concrete, not asphalt, and definitely not hot asphalt), jack it up, position the jack stands, let it down onto the stands, and then leave the floor jack in place as a backup.

Near-Misses

There are five that stand out.

The lift incident: By far the scariest thing that ever happened to me while fixing cars was the time my mid-rise lift nearly killed me. A chain of three unlikely events—the design of the lift that makes it possible to defeat the safety latch (the thing that supports the weight of the car mechanically instead of relying on the hydraulic pressure in the cylinders), my having flipped that latch and not flipped it back into the auto-lock position, and, while I was under the car, my legs having accidentally kicked one of the car’s removed wheels, by pure chance sending it rolling into the lift’s pressure release lever—caused the hydraulics to depressurize and the lift to slowly drop while I was under it. Fortunately, I was under the back of the car, and due to it coming to a stop on its brake drums, there was enough space that my chest cavity didn’t get crushed. (You can read the details in the link above.)

At the time, I was stoic about it and simply finished the repair, but with hindsight, I could’ve been killed, and I’d be lying if I said that that didn’t rattle me. Obviously I no longer move the latch from its auto-lock position, and I’m assiduously careful to make certain that, when a car is on the lift, the lift is resting on one of the stops and not on hydraulic pressure.

The jack incident: While not nearly as serious as the lift incident, the jack incident viscerally demonstrated the importance of jack safety. On a hot late-summer day, I drove down to Cape Cod to have a look at a BMW 5 Series wagon. I met the seller in a CVS parking lot. I noticed that the lot was asphalt and had a very slight grade but didn’t think too much of it. I’d brought a medium-sized aluminum floor jack to check for front-end play, so I slid it under the nose of the car, found the jack point under the subframe, and gave it a few pumps to get the front wheels high enough to wiggle. As I was checking the first wheel, the seller said, “Look out, look out, LOOK OUT!” The combination of the jack sinking into the hot, malleable asphalt and the slight grade caused the car to topple off the jack and toward me. I was never in real danger—I was wiggling the wheel with no part of me under the car—but it alarmed both of us. Whenever I think about swapping a wheel with a car supported by only a jack, I remember this incident, and reconsider.

The wiper linkage that pinned my wrist: Decades ago, I was troubleshooting the non-functional windshield wipers on my BMW 3.0CSi. Doing so required me to pull the multi-prong plug off the wiper motor, turn the key to the accessories setting, switch on the wipers, and check for voltage and ground at the connector using a multimeter. When I was done, I pushed the connector back onto the wiper motor, which rewarded my efforts by suddenly springing to life. When it spun, it rotated the wiper linkage, which pinned my wrist against the piece of metal that the wiper motor mounts to. I’ve recreated the event in the photo below, which was instructive because the way I remembered it, it was the act of reaching in and plugging the connector back in that put my wrist in a position where it could’ve gotten pinned, but now I see that that’s highly unlikely. Regardless of exactly how it happened, my wrist was pinned, and the motor was still on.

The incident occurred in the late 1980s when my wife and I were still living at my mother’s house in Brighton. I stood there, watching my hand turn white as the unrelenting torque of the wiper motor cut off the blood flow and stood a good chance at slicing open my wrist, but because the garage was on street level and the house was a flight up from the sidewalk and my wife’s and my apartment was up on the third floor, my calls for help went unanswered. Fortunately, while looking around the engine compartment, I saw a wrench within reach, and I was able to use it to undo the negative battery cable, which killed the power to the wiper motor. Even with the power cut, though, it took quite a bit of wiggling to extricate my hand, and when I did, the crease on my wrist looked like a dull guillotine blade had bounced off it.

The vise that attacked my foot: I was installing a new exhaust in my car, replacing every piece except the catalytic converter. Unfortunately, one of the bolts holding the cat to the resonator was frozen in the flange and needed to be drilled out. At the time I didn’t own a drill press, so I put the cat in my car, changed into summer clothes, drove into work, and used the drill press there. I clamped the flange into a vise that sat on the flat surface of the drill-press table. The vise wasn’t secured to the table, though; it was free to move, allowing you to line up the drill bit with its target.

Drilling out a bolt is slow work, I got impatient, the mechanic’s red mist got the best of me, and I leaned a little harder on the drill press lever. I saw a little whisp of smoke, heard a little chirp from the bit, and then the bit grabbed the flange, causing both the catalytic converter and the vise to rotate and throw themselves on the floor. They landed about six inches from my left foot. As I looked down, I saw that I was wearing sandals. IDIOT!

Emergency Room Visits

It’s the two head wounds that rise above the background of hand stitches and metal filings and rust removed from my eye. Head wounds, of course, generate a lot of blood, making them very dramatic. And these two incidents were just so stupid.

Chevy Suburban rear hatch: The gas struts on the rear hatch of my 2000 Suburban were getting weak, resulting in the hatch slowly closing after you raised it. I replaced one of them, smiled to see that the hatch was now holding itself up, reached inside the truck to get the second strut, didn’t expect the hatch to begin sagging during those few seconds, turned around, and the corner of the lowered hatch caught me right across the scalp line. I grabbed a handful of paper towels, mashed it against the wound, and staggered toward the house. A few minutes later my wife and kids arrived home to find me sitting on the front stoop with blood dripping from my face. “Father down!” I said. “Father needs assistance!” My wife looked at it and said, “Hospital, now.” (photo above)

The vicious driveshaft: I don’t work on other people’s cars for money, but I do favors for friends. The problem is that the more often you do this, the more you open up the possibility of something going wrong. In this case, prior to a road trip, one of my traveling companions asked if I could revive the A/C system in his BMW 2002. A pressure test revealed a single bad o-ring, so with a pump-down and a recharge, he had a cold car. But when we test-drove it, I noticed a very large amount of play in the shift lever. Tightening it up is usually a quick repair, so I put the car up on the lift and crawled under it while he moved the shift lever around. There are two metal-and-rubber bushings holding the shift platform to the back of the transmission, and the Allen-head bolt holding one of them had backed its way out. This was the left-hand bolt, which is usually the one that you’re able to get an Allen-key socket onto by using a wobble extension, but there was something about the five-speed installation in this particular car that made accessing that bolt difficult. Plus I could see that the hex hole was stripped. So to get at the bolt and replace it, the front of the driveshaft needed to be dropped.

It was the end of a long day of wrenching, and I was on automatic pilot. I undid the bolts securing the driveshaft’s center support bearing, and the three holding the giubo (the rubber flex disc) to the flange on the back of the transmission. I began lowering the driveshaft but immediately found that it hit the exhaust. Fortunately, the bolts holding the resonator to the exhaust headpipe weren’t seized. Unfortunately, as soon as the resonator was lowered, the center of the driveshaft dropped with it, which freed the front of the driveshaft to swing down and clonk me right in the face, just above my left eye.

Garage wounds fall into three categories (emphasis on the gory): 1. Press on regardless, 2. Non-urgent car ride to urgent care clinic or emergency room, or 3. Ambulance. I asked my wife to triage me. “It’s not awful,” she said, “but it’ll need stitches.” I asked her to call and find out the hours and the co-pay of the nearest urgent care facility and to put a gauze pad and tape over the wound so I could finish the repair, which only took about 15 minutes. My friend graciously paid the quoted $35 co-pay, and we joked about whether a medical facility had a standardized insurance code for “hit in the face by a driveshaft.” (A doctor-friend later told me that the code is likely W20.8xxA, “struck by thrown, projected, or falling object,” along with Y92.015, “private garage of single-family house as the place of occurrence of the external cause.” He then joked, “For completeness sake, I would probably add Z74.3: Need for continuous supervision.”)

That’s most of it. Except for the time I ran over my own foot, but I think I’ll stay mum on the details. I mean a guy has to have some secrets.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post When Cars Attack: Cautionary Tales from The Hack Mechanic appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The first night I tucked my new-to-me 1967 Porsche 912 into my garage (read part one of Lyn’s story here), two things happened. First, I pinched myself. It had always seemed that the odds of my getting a car like this settled on the “outlook not so good” answer from a Magic 8-Ball. Second, a wave of anxiety washed over me. This is my first project car, and I had no clue where to start—I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

I took a breath, recalling the joys found in my dad’s 356 Speedster. If I was going to make some fresh memories of my own, there was nothing to do but get cracking.

This effort should have been kicked off with a trip to California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, but that doesn’t exactly inspire the romance of classic car ownership—it’s more like a grade school visit to the principal’s office, especially given the implications of my 912’s non-operational status. I knew it’d be a while before the 912 would be on the road, so I did what any self-respecting scaredy-cat would do: I procrastinated.

In my defense, the first step in my delay-the-inevitable strategy was critical to the process: I sought out reference material.

I was desperate to know more about my car’s story. The person I’d purchased the 912 from had meant to get it running but never did, and ultimately never put the title in his name. So, I tracked down the guy whose name was on the title. As I left a message on his machine, he picked up. He—I’ll call him Sam—was thrilled to talk with me about the car. He’d bought it from a corrections officer in Santa Rosa who’d started the restoration—that’s where the brand-new floor pan and dashboard, among other things, made their way onto the car, but the project was eventually abandoned. Sam bought the car and a mountain of parts from the officer, but soon realized he wanted something further along in the restoration process. He sold the car and all the parts to a dealer, who then sold just the car to the owner before me. Then, the car languished.

This was a car that everyone, and then no one, wanted. As a result, it had been sitting outside for the better part of five years before making its way to me. It was as if all these previous owners were shepherding it along until I was ready. Serendipity, baby.

Now that I had a bit of my 912’s history, I set about understanding what resources there were within the 912 community. For the first time ever, I joined a discussion forum and even posted. For someone who traditionally doesn’t like asking questions for fear of looking stupid, I put myself out there. I was happy to embarrass myself and admit I had no clue what I was doing and would likely get lots of things wrong, but was excited to learn. I received a lovely welcoming response and even got some great advice about transmission rod boots among the encouragement.

I also picked up a couple of books to have with me in the garage. The 911 & 912 Porsche: A Restorer’s Guide to Authenticity by Dr. B. Johnson came highly recommended, as did the Porsche 912 Workshop Manual and Owner’s Manual. The latter includes some helpful mechanical advice but also imparts the wisdom of taking your car to a well-trained mechanic for detailed jobs.

With literature in hand, I started taking stock of the 912 and what it needed. The more I looked things over, the more I grew confident in my purchase, but there was still plenty of work ahead of me. With each turn of the page, I could see what was correct on my car and what wasn’t.

Somewhere along the line, a previous owner removed the correct 1967 sealed, glass H4 headlights that Ralph Nader deemed unsafe and replaced them with “sugar scoop” units from 1968. I prefer the original look, so I bought a refinished set off eBay before I’d even turned the 912’s key. Even a newbie like me knows that cosmetic fixes aren’t top priority, but I rationalized straightforward projects as a means of getting comfortable with wielding tools and bringing my 912 back to life.

Though it had a new dashboard, the rest of the interior was rough. Fortunately, I’d gotten the car around Thanksgiving and online Black Friday sales were in high gear. I went on a spree, purchasing an entire new interior, including carpets, an upholstery kit, and dash trim plate at a massive discount. I’m a sucker for oxblood, and it’s going to look great with the current patinated exterior, not to mention my future paint plans.

Was I getting ahead of myself? Maybe a little, but I wasn’t ignoring the steps to get this little 912 running. I knew the engine turned over manually, but before checking to see if it could run on its own, I needed to do something about the incredibly rusty gas tank. I ordered a new one as well as the requisite plugs, fitments, and sleeves that go with it. The old sending unit was virtually falling apart so I decided to replace that, too.

The new battery went in next, and to my delight every light except for one of the turn signals worked. Even the clock ran properly! No classic car I’ve ever owned had a clock that was accurate more than twice a day. This was the biggest win yet—the prospect of electrical work was not something I was looking forward to.

As my bank balance shrank, I knew I needed to tap the brakes on the purchases, but I’d do that after I bought new rotors (the pads were actually in good shape). And shocks. Okay, now I was done. Almost. There was a spot up front on the driver’s side directly under the battery that was notorious for rusting out. Mine was no different. I’d need a new front suspension pan and someone to do the welding work before it was safe to drive. If indeed the car actually started.

Once again, I took a breath.

I considered the progress I’d made in mere weeks. There’s now a mile-long to-do list, but having that list and crossing things off it meant I was headed in the right direction. Emboldened, I decided it was time to sort the title.

I headed to the Auto Association of America, which in California can perform some DMV functions, including vehicle registration. Good fortune rained down. It turns out that Sam, the previous-titled owner, was wise enough to register it as non-operational, too—so there’d be no inspections or convoluted processes to worry about. The lovely woman asked for my $292, and there, without fuss or friction, I’d taken care of the legal paperwork. I was in and out in 15 minutes.

The momentum was building. My priority was to get this thing on the road. I had debated prepping the car for paint work, but a couple things stopped me. Almost every other 912 owner I’d come across suggested I just get out there and enjoy the car as-is. Closer to home, my friend and co-conspirator, Hagerty Driver’s Club editor-at-large Aaron Robinson, recently penned an argument for embracing imperfection in our cars, and that sealed it for me. I decided to press on with the mechanical improvements and enjoy the patina. I’d complete the interior because I wanted the cockpit to be a pleasant experience, but for now, it was time to focus on what was under all the sun-damaged sheet metal.

Not long after, with the new gas tank in and fresh gas coursing through its veins, the moment of truth for my 912 came. Robinson, ever helpful, stood by the engine with his can of starter fluid at the ready as I turned the key.

“More gas…More. Again. It’s starving—more,” he said between cranks. I pumped the throttle and the engine coughed. The exhaust blew out a cartoonish cloud of soot.

“More gas. Again.” Robinson sprayed starter fluid into the carbs and it shuddered to life. That simple four-cylinder settled into rhythm, making the same high-humming and happy sound of my father’s long-gone-but-not-forgotten 356 Speedster.

Let the adventures continue.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Buying My First Porsche and Everything After—Part II appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There are several strikes against my 1996 Winnebago Rialta (a Volkswagen Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body). The primary one is that early ones like this have the 105-horsepower, five-cylinder Audi engine, making them as snail-slow as the VW Westfalia campers of old. Another is that this particular one is a bit, well, ratty. The white paint and the decals on the metal and fiberglass surfaces are in shabby shape, and it’s missing the spare tire cover and the rear bumper corner pieces.

However, part of its charm is its interior color scheme. Our Rialta is outfitted with a fabric that Winnebago called “Bauhaus,” which I believe was only available in these early five-cylinder rigs. You can argue whether the artistic term Bauhaus, which refers to a rational functional design aesthetic and is best known from architect Walter Gropius’ minimalist houses, really applies to this fabric or whether it has more of a Picasso-Kandinsky-Miro vibe, but it’s certainly unique.

Part of the history of my buying the Rialta is that I wanted a small, inexpensive, fuel-efficient RV, but looking at the cheap end of the market means seeing a lot of ads for rigs with dark paneled interiors that look like a meth lab or a porn studio. When I learned about the Rialta, with its lighter-colored European-feeling interior, then found this Rialta and its Bauhaus fabric in my price range, I loved it, as did my wife Maire Anne.

Unfortunately, the RV’s front seats were torn from road wear. Maire Anne is an avid quilter and seamstress, and she looked for replacement fabric, but it appears to be long out of production, so we put seat covers on them.

Plus, the slipcovers on our twin rear mattresses were missing. So what remains intact of the original Bauhaus interior is the seat at the fold-out table, and the accent pieces on the walls and near the ceiling. Still, it’s very cool.

Fast-forward six years. A week before this past Christmas, Maire Anne saw a Facebook post on the “Newton Free Stuff” page. It said “Well-used loveseat sleep sofa (full-size mattress). Must be out on Thursday.” She showed it to me, and we both gasped, as the sofa was unmistakably covered in Bauhaus fabric. We both had the same thought—it’d be great if we could cherry-pick the back cushions, as we could use them to lean against when watching TV in bed in the RV. Maire Anne messaged the owner “I hope this sofa-bed finds a home, but if no one else wants it, and you’re going to discard it, I would love the two large back pillows. The fabric is identical to something I own. Thanks.”

Two days before Christmas, the owner replied to Maire Anne: “The sofa with pillows is on the curb outside my house. Help yourself!” Out the door I ran.

If I was going to grab the back pillows, it made sense to also grab the bottom cushions as well, even if we weren’t sure what to use them for. I wasn’t sure how big they all were, so I almost drove the Rialta itself, as it’s currently the only large vehicle I own, but it had already become landlocked at the end of the driveway for the winter. So I took my wife’s little Honda Fit, whose rear hatch and fold-down rear seats can swallow a lot.

I drove about 10 minutes to another part of Newton, crested a hill, and there was the sofa, looking like a beached Bauhaus whale by the curb. I wish I’d taken a photo of its unmolested puffy Bauhaus curbside splendor, but I had other Christmas errands to run. The cushions from the loveseat-sized sofa were smaller than I expected and fit easily in the back of the little Honda. I stashed and dashed.

When I got home, I transferred the cushions into the Rialta, and marveled at the absolutely perfect match of the fabric. There wasn’t even a noticeable difference from sun exposure.

I showed this to Maire Anne, and we were both oddly giddy. While there clearly wasn’t enough fabric to make slipcovers for the mattresses (and even if there was, it wasn’t obvious whether we should cover the original mattresses themselves or the deliciously comfortable Tempur-Pedic toppers we had over them), we began thinking about reupholstering the front seats.

And then, like an old married couple who thinks the same thoughts and completes each other’s sentences, we both wondered if maybe we should go and strip more fabric off the sofa before the truck comes to take it to the big dump in the sky. We should at least pull the big piece off the back.

Now, you have to appreciate that this was two days before Christmas, my wife had cardiac surgery this summer, and while she’s doing great, she rations her energy and chooses her activities appropriately. But there was something about this idea that instantly clicked with both car-guy-me and fabric-girl-her. The owner’s “Help yourself” message could’ve been construed as a green light to strip the sofa (the fact that it was out on the curb meant that it was already scheduled for disposal), but in the tony suburb of Newton, you don’t want to be wrong about this. After all, I’d hate to repay an act of generosity by having someone mad at me for leaving a shredded sofa carcass on the sidewalk with its stuffing blowing in the breeze.

So I messaged the owner and confirmed that we could strip the fabric. Maire Anne grabbed her fabric shears (though not “the good ones”), I took a single-edged razor blade and my Swiss army knife, we jumped into the Fit, and shot back over to the curbside couch.

Initially I tried to pry the fabric-upholstered panel off the back, but the density of staples that held it on was formidable. So we both began cutting. It didn’t take long to remove the back piece.

At this point, the owners came out of their house. We explained how the fabric was the same as the “Bauhaus” design of our little Volkswagen Eurovan-based RV. They found this interesting, as the wife’s brother was into vintage VW busses. Rather than being annoyed at someone ripping up their old sofa by the side of the curb, they were gratified by the thought that the fabric would live on.

Although we’d ostensibly come just for the big fabric piece on the back of the sofa, the weather was good and the sun was still up, so we kept going, systematically denuding the couch of the other big pieces.

The odd thing was that, a few weeks prior, I’d watched the Ken Burns two-part series The American Buffalo about the horrific near-extinction of the bison. Images of slaughtered buffalo stripped of their hides and left to rot on the plains were still fresh in my mind as I reached into the couch’s crevices to cut the inner side pieces. Fortunately, this was the closest I’d ever come to skinning something that’s the last of its kind.

It’s still likely not enough fabric to make slipcovers for the mattresses, but it’s enough to recover several sets of seats. That’s important because I posted a photo of the curb-find Bauhaus sofa on a Rialta forum, so I’m now not the only one who has interest in the unobtanium fabric.

Someone on the Rialta forum commented, “What are the odds?” It’s true. Having a) someone local own a Bauhaus-pattern sofa, b) offer it for free, c) Maire Anne see the ad and recognize the fabric, d) her request to take only the pillows acceded to, and e) the owners not balk at our request to strip the fabric off was an astonishingly narrow series of needles to thread.

Of course, looked at another way, absent the Rialta’s connection to the fabric, the odds that owners would tire of a sofa like this, that there would be no takers even for free, and that it would need to be disposed of were pretty high.

But of all the things I’ve parted out, this was the cleanest, the lightest, and the most colorful.

And the only one where my wife was excited to help.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The Parts Couch: Stripping a sofa to save an RV’s seats appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The evolution of the automobile has been non-stop from the moment Karl Benz first threw the flywheel ’round on his Patent Motorwagen. The technology, process, and tools needed to keep cars running have evolved from the adjustable spanners and flat head screwdrivers to complex, hyper-specific specialized tools that spend more time laying in toolbox drawers than being used. Some old tools have stood the test of time while others have faded from common use.

We are tool hoarders ourselves, and objects designed for utility that are still functional will always have a place in our box but it is interesting to look into the corners of the toolbox and see what tools are getting less and less use over the years. Whether due to an improved design usurping the use of an older tool, or the task a specialty tool was design for becoming less popular due to car construction and use changing, tools evolve as quickly—if not more—than the car itself. Here are seven examples of tools that are no longer the toolbox staples they once were—for better or worse.

Bumper jacks

In a world of bumper covers, the thought of attaching a lifting mechanism to the exterior of your car and using it to lift the vehicle is some type of strange fever dream. It wasn’t always that way though. Flat tires have been around longer than the automobile and the need to pick up the car followed right along. Bumper jacks are good in concept but the lack of any safety catch or stabilization to keep from tipping over makes them treacherous to use. They still have utility in off-road situations but that can also make use even more dangerous.

Verdict: Keep as a reminder of how far we’ve come.

Brake pliers

Somehow in the history of cars, there have been just two types of brakes commonly found behind the wheels: Drum or disc. Drum brakes can provide all the stopping power needed while also wearing like iron thanks to the enclosed and thus relatively debris-free nature of the design. That same design also has a handful of tension springs stretched carefully over small studs that can be serviced with groove-joint pliers and a screwdriver, but there are also brake pliers that rose and slipped from popularity right alongside drum brakes.

With modern materials and the relatively limited use of drum-brake cars, servicing drums has gotten less common to the point that while special tools can make the job easier it is only marginal and certainly not required.

Verdict: Keep them if you’ve got them but can likely pass if building your toolkit.

Growler

We aren’t talking about that curmudgeon of a mechanic who seems to only communicate in grunts and growls as the ratchet clicks to remove parts. No, the growler here is used to test the windings of a motor or generator. The armature is placed on a bed that flows alternating current into the windings. Using a ferrous rod to locate the magnetic field that will be created by a short makes for easy diagnostics. The price drop that came with the mass production and parts sharing between various models relegated these to hobby benches or the back room of specialist shops. Since rebuilding motors or alternators has become rare, these are practically a novelty.

Verdict: Keep if you’ve got the space, but often these find problems that are difficult to source parts to fix.

Vernier caliper

The increase in affordable precision has been quiet but amazing for at-home DIY projects. Good precision measuring devices used to be limited to the hands of skilled technicians and specialists in machine and fabrication shops. It took skill and training to properly use and read items like the vernier scale on calipers used in fabrication and precision machine work. Then digital calipers entered the market and the prices dropped year after year to the point that now a set of calipers accurate enough for most home use can be had for under $50.

Verdict: Use what you like and what works best for you. Regardless of what that is, be sure to keep any and all precision tools stored carefully to prevent damage.

Timing light

When we first wrote about tools that were fading from popularity last year, the comments section lit up with the suggestion that timing lights were left out. It’s been decades since a car rolling off the assembly line featured a tunable distributor, as the ignition is often now controlled by a computer working off data provided by a crankshaft or camshaft position sensor (or both) to control the firing of individual coils for each spark plug and cylinder. Adjusting the timing of the spark in the cylinder is changed with a laptop rather than a wrench and strobe light. Timing lights have been relegated to specialist shops and DIY garages.

Verdict: Keep it if it works, but consider a modern digital light if building a vintage-focused toolset as the features and capability have come a long way since the strobes of old.

Point file

Another from the ignition side of things. Even before computerized ignition was the advent of electronic or non-points-based discharge. Long gone are the days of having to swap a set of points on the side of the road or scratch off the char of the small faces to allow the coil to charge. A points file was handy for if or when a condenser would fail or the points would otherwise get crummy enough to not allow enough current through.

Verdict: If one is already in your glovebox, keep it for nostalgia’s sake and just in case. You never know who it might help.

Brake lathe or shoe arcing machine

Drum brakes often have more swept area compared to disc brakes, but that additional friction material is useless if it is not in contact with the brake surface. The heat retention characteristics of drums can sometimes lead to warping that would previously be cleaned up by “turning” the drums to create a nice concentric surface around the shoes. While drums can still be found on modern cars the drums are often cast so thin that turning them is no longer an option and instead we must skip straight to replacement.

Shoe arcing machines do the same thing as brake lathes but set the radius of the friction material to match that of the drum. It’s critical for good brake performance on some vintage cars but has faded from popularity significantly due to the health concerns of grinding friction materials—especially asbestos.

Verdict: Save if you’ve got the space, or sell to a vintage shop if you don’t. We likely won’t see new versions of these tools made and they so help keep our cars safely going down the road. 

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 7 more old tools almost no one uses anymore appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Just like I did twelve months ago, and virtually every week in between, I spent last Sunday night piddling about, cleaning up my home shop. It was the perfect time to both reflect and look forward. Thinking like that in late December leads neatly to a polarizing word: Resolutions.

I’m not great with resolutions. That doesn’t keep me from continuing to make them, even if the activity feels increasingly absurd. Somehow my lack of seriousness about resolutions allowed me to discover their core purpose: To force a small bit of evolution into a better version of Kyle Smith. Resolutions to “stop this” or “start that” have fallen flat year after year, and it’s finally become all too clear that subtle changes go a hell of a lot further than attempting to revolutionize or reinvent myself.

So this year will continue the trend of measurable but attainable goals that are also soft pitches. I thought last year’s were beer-league-softball stuff, quite honestly, yet when the season ended, I was batting below .200, stone sober. I swung and missed at making all my cars run. Saved myself from striking out by buying a couple of investment-grade tools. Watched a lazy one come right across the plate, then whiffed and bought a non-running project bike—which I swore I wouldn’t—at the last second.

I’m only making two resolutions for 2024. First, stop using sports metaphors. Second, break something.

Let me explain with a brief trip down memory lane. The 1965 Corvair I love so dearly has always had a few problems that I simply tolerate. One is an oil leak from the rear crankshaft seal, a leak that has been there since day one of my ownership. After a year of driving, the oil soaked the clutch so thoroughly that it flung off all its friction material and clogged the starter bendix. I took the whole powerpack out and put it back together with new seals, flywheel, clutch, and pressure plate. Three days after reinstall, I drove the Corvair 1000 miles to a car show.

The crankshaft still leaked. But it wasn’t bad enough to worry about yet, so I embraced the trope that “they always leak” and decided to enjoy the car in spite of its territorial behavior.

I’m currently staring at the tail end of the crankshaft of the Corvair. The leak got worse this fall, and this winter seemed as good a time as any to buy $50 in gaskets and seals and knock the job out before the leak ruined another clutch disc. Three hours into disassembly, I arrived at the last step, the bellhousing bolts. They’re loose. Did these 9/16″ coarse-thread bolts back themselves out or did I fail to tighten them in my thrash to get the car back on the road?

At some point, the reason doesn’t matter. I only sit here with greasy fingers dancing over a keyboard because I realized this might be the first time I can recall that something I did (or didn’t do) caused a machine to need repair.

I have sought out all of the broken stuff I own, often paying to bring it home. We chronic mechanics all agree such behavior is normal, though, so I’ll set that aside. That crankshaft seal sticks in my brain because points to a lack of use.

In my garage, the restored and rebuilt seem to sit on stands more than anything, engines and machines doted over a kid picking dandelions in the outfield of the T-ball field, their helicopter mom holding triple antibiotic and bandaid on the sidelines. I’m so ready to fix things that I am doing preventative maintenance on preventative maintenance.

This year’s resolution is to put down the tools and use one of the motorcycles, cars, or other motorized objects until something breaks. My true goal is to wear something out. Could be the 520 non O-ring chain on the trailbike, or the tires on the Corvair—something that demands service due to use, not decay.

I choose vehicles for their durable nature, so the ones in my garage are not the ideal group to choose from, but if I fail to break anything while taking Corvair on a good road trip and hit the single track multiple times on the Honda XR250R, was the time really wasted?

The tools are clean and in their boxes now, the top of the workbench wiped down as if I’m closing a bar. Really, I’m cleaning enough space to lay out a map and do some thinking about where I’d like to drive this year. Suggestions welcome, especially if you offer to help out when I break something on the road. Might be my arm …

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post A New Year’s resolution worth breaking appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Having written about the purchase of the 2008 Silverado 3500HD duallie Duramax diesel, the de-mousing of the truck, the eventual sale of the truck, and missing the truck once it was gone, you wouldn’t think I could get another column out of it. And you’d be wrong. It’s like the truck equivalent of the Hanukkah menorah—it burned for not one article, but eight.

One last time for those in the cheap seats: I bought the 29,000-mile truck from my former employer when they largely abandoned it with a building closure. Mice had gotten into it and their excretory excesses in the truck’s headliner made for very dramatic photographs of its deteriorated condition. Since it was my former geophysics work vehicle, I knew bloody well what it was, but no one else left in my division of the company did—it was just a line on an inventory sheet for which they balked at paying monthly storage fees. So I made them an insanely low offer. They accepted it, I brought the truck home, largely de-moused it, and had the biggest, baddest tow-vehicle-stuff-mover on the planet.

But I never really used the truck the way I imagined. I towed a few of my own cars back and forth to storage with it but never used it to drop everything and run off, buy, and drag home a barn-find prize before someone else got it. It began to feel ridiculous owning a super-duty vehicle like this when most of its use was running cardboard boxes down to the local recycling depo, and its awful turning radius and low visibility from the wonderful-when-you-use-it-but-in-the-way-when-you-don’t utility body made it feel like using an assault rifle to hunt squirrels. Plus, the combination of the remnant rodent smell, the poor gas mileage, and the high cost of diesel meant that we never used it as a “family vehicle”—it only left the driveway if I needed to move something, which wasn’t often.

So I sold it. All in (purchase, taxes, tires, replacement of the stolen catalytic converter, and lift pump), I had maybe six grand in it, and I sold it for $30K. It is the only time in my life I’ve ever made windfall money on a vehicle. I don’t regret the decision one iota (my bank account thanked me profusely), but almost as soon as the truck was gone, I felt its absence, both in terms of hypothetical towing as well as not being able to do trivial things like run out and pick up a free Tempur-Pedic bed.

The surprising thing is the degree to which I’ve waffled on replacing it. I’m usually very surgical about this sort of thing. I analyze a need, make a decision, and act quickly on it, which generally translates into picking up the cheapest version of what’s available (hey, all this content doesn’t just generate itself). Initially I gravitated toward looking at Honda Ridgelines in the $4000 range, but then the whole thing ran into molasses.

It’s taken me a while to grok why I’ve been so slow on the uptake. I think I’ve got it figured out. And hence you get one more piece on my curious thought process.

Here’s the story. I’ve long joked that a car person needs seven cars. They are: Your daily driver, your spouse’s daily (which is also probably the family hauler), the pampered classic, the tow monster/beach truck, the track go-cart, the ragtop roadster for sunny Sundays, and whatever the current project car happens to be. Makes sense, right?

In truth, that slot for the tow monster/beach truck began as 100 percent beach truck. For almost 30 years, I took my family on a big beach vacation on Nantucket. You need a four-wheel-drive vehicle to reach the fishing spots on the peninsulas of Great Point and Smith Point, so I got into the habit of buying a beat-up Suburban in late spring (nothing comes close to the people-and-cargo-carrying capability of a seventh-generation ’Burb, though I did eventually roll into eighth- and ninth-gen vehicles), doing whatever maintenance was needed, taking it on vacation, selling it when it was over, and repeating the process the following year. Why not hold onto the truck year-round? Well, insurance costs money, driveway space was at a premium in those days, and selling one of our other cars was out of the question because neither my wife nor I wanted to daily-drive something that big. The realization that I could also use the Suburbans to tow came when my garage finally got built in 2006—I suddenly had both garage space and driveway space for more cars, and their numbers began their steady climb.

Not long after that, my old engineering job bought the Silverado 3500HD work truck, so if I was between Suburbans and needed to tow something, it was available for occasional loan. In later years, I did begin keeping a ‘Burb registered year-round and began to appreciate how useful it was if we needed to, say, go down to The Sears Outlet and buy a scratch-and-dent refrigerator, and obviously for smaller stuff-moving like buying Recaro seats or sets of wheels and tires.

The point is that I was never towing a travel trailer, nor was I a track junkie who had a dedicated need to tow a race car every weekend. The Suburbans could haul the U-Haul auto transporters with small to mid-size BMWs on them, and that was fine. I never evaluated my towing needs and went out and researched and purchased a dedicated tow vehicle—it was always either the works-fine Suburban beach vehicle or the borrowed massive-overkill work truck.

So, with that history, what is it that I want NOW? Is it another truck like the one I just sold—something specifically for towing cars and moving stuff and with mileage so low that it’s likely to be reliable for years? Having bought and then sold the Silverado, the odds that I’m going to find another duallie diesel tow monster—with less than 30K miles and a utility body that would hold three refrigerators—for $6000 are less than zero.

No, it isn’t that. If I wanted that, I wouldn’t have sold the truck.

Is it another Suburban, something that i can use to take eight people out onto soft sand and still have room for suitcases and coolers behind the third row seats? No, it isn’t that either. The big family beach vacations are long over. I have no need to haul that many people and cargo on sand or asphalt.

Or is it something more Swiss-army-knife-like, something I can use as a daily driver but also tow with? Maybe, but I tried that before—with the triple-unicorn 2004 BMW X5 six-speed with both the sport package and the tow package that I bought shortly before the pandemic, and I was glad when I sold it and went back to daily-driving my 2003 E39 530i sedan.

Although the X5 experiment failed, it was instructive to look back on what I wrote about buying it. I’d forgotten that one of the things that kicked off the purchase was this comment from my wife: “I miss having a Suburban. The stuff we used to be able to pick up in those things was great.” However, the last Suburban I owned had brake-line rot issues that plague late-1990s through mid-2000s Chevy trucks, and most of the cheap ’Burbs I looked at had the same problem. I briefly looked at inexpensive high-mileage Toyota Sequoia and Nissan Armada SUVs, but I found that they have the same frame and trailing arm rust issues as their Tacoma and Titan truck brethren.

It was that combination of events that sent me to looking at BMW X5s. The V-8s 4.4-liter vehicles are better tow vehicles than the straight six 3.0s, but the sixes were available with a stick, though they’re rare. It was the lightning-strike event of finding a six-speed car that also had both the tow package and the sport package; its interior looked uncannily similar to my 530i. The car had 270,000 miles on it, but fact that it had lived most of its life in North Carolina and Florida, was about 10 miles from me, had had a ton of recent maintenance, and had a $4000 asking price got me to go see it. In person, it looked practically new inside and out, and I snagged it for $3300. In other words, the whole exercise was more “How can I pass up this cool vehicle at this price?” than it was a well-considered solution to a towing problem. Plus, at that point I still could borrow the work truck if I needed it.

If you look above, you’ll notice that what I considered, looked at, and bought were all SUVs. No pickups. That’s not accidental. I’m really not a truck guy. I don’t need a truck. I don’t have repeating needs to move dirt or bricks or gravel or construction debris or 4×8-foot sheets of plywood or drywall. The original vector into towing wasn’t a need to move stuff—it was a need to move people.

Once I understood why my focus on what could replace the Silverado 3500HD was cloudy, I began to think of it another way. My daily is the 530i, which is a rear-wheel drive vehicle. My wife’s is a front-wheel 2013 Honda Fit. Both cars are shod with snows on all four corners in the winter, and thus are fine, as we live in suburban Boston, not northern Vermont. If there’s an honest-to-goodness Biblical snow event (as opposed to the local weather report’s OH GOD RUN FROM THE KILLER SNOWSTORM hype), we wait to go out until our son has shoveled the driveway and the streets have been plowed. It’s not hardship. So on paper it’s a forced fit to say we should own a big tow-capable 4WD SUV so that we’d have something “safe” to drive in winter weather, much less gas one up year-round as a daily driver.

However, maybe the X5 experiment wasn’t a failure after all. I work from home, and my wife is retired, so we don’t have the commuting needs that might tip us toward a more all-weather-capable vehicle. However, my wife is a passionate quilter, and attends regular quilting and sewing events, including winter retreats up in New Hampshire. If a storm moves in, I would feel better with her driving something with 4WD (and yes, something larger than the little Honda Fit). If I bought a truck, she’d be unlikely to drive it, but a mid-size SUV? Maybe that’s the tack to take. Find something like a facelifted first-gen Toyota Sequoia. That’s small enough that she’d feel comfortable driving it, big enough to put stuff in without being Suburban-sized (let’s face it—I’m not muscling any more Sears scratch-and-dent refrigerators into and out of vehicles), and tow-capable without being a tow monster. Maybe I can thread the needle and find one without the frame rust, without crazy mileage on it, and in the same price bracket that the X5 was (I often joke that I do my best work around $4000).

I’m a man with a plan. We’ll see how it plays out.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post One more (last?) column about the long-gone diesel truck appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A few weeks ago I wrote about lessons learned when I stepped outside my usual risk-averse “I generally don’t buy cars I’m not familiar with, and I almost never buy cars I can’t personally inspect” wheelhouse.

I can’t believe that I forgot The Lama.

In 2014, I bought a very nice, very original, nearly rust-free E30 3-Series BMW 325is. I kept it for a few years, did some light sorting on it, and when I lost my job in 2017, I sold it and took a profit. In retrospect, it was too early. E30 prices were really on the upswing. Had I waited, I could’ve taken a really nice profit. I tried to get into another E30 to flip and augment my unemployment, but by that time the word was out.

However, E28 5-Series BMWs were also on the rise and didn’t have quite the same premium as the E30 3-Series cars. So in the summer of 2018, I bought a 1987 BMW E28 535i sight-unseen in Tampa. The ad said, “Unmolested rare 1987 BMW 535i 5 speed transmission, has only 133,000 miles. Rare find, especially with a manual gearbox, Lama interior. This car does run and drive but needs tune up and front brakes. Does have minor surface rust and driver’s seat needs repair, car is all power and everything works. 100% original, no modifications were done to this E28 except for new fuel tank, fuel pump & filter, new sensors were also changed out. Great candidate for full restoration, great bones. No accident history. $2250 obo.” (And yes, BMW spells the interior color “Lama” with one L.)

The cell phone pics in the Craigslist ad were poor, but the car appeared to be intact, other than a few isolated rust bubbles at the bottom of one door and around the sunroof. The seller and I chatted on the phone. He said the car had belonged to a gentleman who passed away. The car then sat in the family’s garage for five years. The seller bought it and began sorting it out (hence the fuel system work) but then found another project. He sent me the VIN, I ran a CarFax, and it came up clean, showing that the car had lived in Florida its entire life.

I told the seller that I’d consider flying down and road-tripping the car home (after all, I’d recently completed the Ran When Parked adventure of buying a dead 2002tii, reviving it, and driving it back). He said that the car was sitting on its original dry-rotted TRX tires, and at a minimum that would need to be addressed. Plus, he said that the car was running rough, that the brake pedal sometimes sank to the floor, and that since he posted the ad, he noticed that the car was leaking a little antifreeze. Still, running and driving beats dead every day and twice on Sunday. I did some reconnaissance—I found that round-trip flights on Spirit were $110 (meaning that I could fly down, look at the car, and fly home if I didn’t like what I saw), and I spoke with an old colleague of mine, who lived in Tampa, about the possibility of camping out there for a few days while I gave the car what it needed.

After a few more calls with the seller (in which I remotely diagnosed the coolant leak as something trivial and joked that I was undercutting my bargaining position) it was clear he just needed the car gone. We put together a deal—I paid him $1400, which included him having the car towed to my friend Al’s house. Al isn’t a car guy, but he was certainly capable of driving the car and telling me what he found. He said that the brake pedal did initially go to the floor, but firmed up with repeated pumping, which sounded like either air in the brake lines or a bad master cylinder. However, he also reported that there was a loud rattling noise.

The gears began turning in my head. It sounded like a mini-Ran-When-Parked was in order. Have a master cylinder, spark plugs, belts, and a just-in-case water pump drop-shipped to Al’s house, buy a round-trip ticket with a three-day return, fly down, go out to dinner a few nights and talk about old times, change the master in his driveway, and drive home if I could or bail and fly home and arrange to ship the car if it got too hairy.

The dry-rotted TRX tires, though, were a problem. TRX was Michelin’s odd metric-sized low-profile tire used during the 1980s on a variety of European cars. They’re mounted on specific TRX metric-sized wheels. So if the car has TRX wheels and needs TRX tires, there are no inexpensive off-brand options. You either pay Coker Tire the $350 per tire for reproductions, or you ditch the whole TRX thing and find a normal set of wheels from a later model. So I combed Craigslist in Tampa, Ocala, and Jacksonville for a set of four used wheels and good tires that I could slap on, but nothing materialized.

Then I did what I do and crunched the numbers for the projected expenses for driving the Lama back. I figured that, at a bare minimum, between the airfare, gas, two nights in a cheap model, and food, it came to $650, excluding the cost of wheels and tires. And that was if nothing went wrong on the 1400-mile drive. When I received a shipping quote from a broker who a friend recommended (and who I’ve used ever since) and the cost came in at $700, I realized I’d be an idiot not to pull the trigger on it.

So I had The Lama shipped home. My friend Al met the transport at his house. Unfortunately, the photo he sent me of the car being loaded showed it engulfed in oil smoke, which was the first I’d heard of this particular problem.

The smoke show was repeated when the car arrived and was dropped off a few streets from my house (my street is too small for multi-level transporters). Once off the transport, the car died in the middle of the street. I got it started, but it ran horribly, smoked like five chimneys, and rattled like a chainsaw. I pumped up the brake pedal and beat it around the block and into my driveway. It was then that I noticed the gas dripping from the back. I put the car up on my mid-rise lift and was glad to find that the gas leak was just a loose clamp on the output hose from the fuel pump, and the chainsaw noise was just a loose exhaust shield. Both issues were fixed in minutes. Was that all? Did I just get lucky?

While the car was up, I bled the brakes, and found that fluid only came out from one caliper, likely due to swelled flexible brake hoses. I put them on order and took the car for a short test drive. This time the car easily started but still ran poorly, still generating clouds of oil smoke. If I was lucky, the smoke was due to stuck rings from the car’s five-year-long sit, and they’d unstick with use, but there’s no knowing which way luck goes until it plays out.

With the chainsaw noise gone, I could hear the engine, and the valve train sounded loud. I did a compression test and found 155 in five cylinders and 135 in cylinder #4. Concerning but not awful. I followed up with a leak-down test and didn’t see any open valves.

But when the engine cooled and I pulled the valve cover to adjust the valves, I was horrified to find a broken intake rocker arm on #4 cylinder. Most of the pieces had collected in the depression on the exhaust side, but looking carefully, I could see where one piece had chipped one of the cam lobes.

So much for luck.

What did I just buy?

The six-cylinder M30 engines in the big BMWs sold in the United States from 1968 through 1991 are, like the four-cylinder M10 engine in the 2002, incredibly stout as long as they’re not overheated, and broken rocker arms are uncommon as long as the engine isn’t raced and over-revved. But the rocker arms run on shafts that are banged into the head. To replace a rocker arm, the rocker shaft passing through it has to be banged out. And to do that, the head has to come off. I was perfectly capable of doing all that (I’ve done it many times), but the problem is that you invariably go from simply yanking the head and replacing the one broken part to sliding down the slippery slope and completely dismantling the head and bringing it to a machine shop to have it resurfaced and have the valves done.

My reaction was to re-evaluate the project before moving further. I put the car back up on the lift, examined it carefully, and found a bit more rust than I’d expected; the inside corner of one of the doors completely rotted out.

Taken together, I sighed and thought, “That’s what I get for buying a car sight-unseen.” I decided to get out of the car. I photographed it, described the condition accurately and honestly (my wife would say TOO honestly), and advertised it locally for what I had in it, but there were no takers. As Thanksgiving rolled into December and the car was still here, I somewhat reluctantly accepted The Lama and its broken rocker arm as a winter project.

So, as the Queen of Hearts said in Alice in Wonderland, off with its head. There was the immediate whiff of a smoking gun when I looked into cylinder #4 and saw a little nick in the piston crown where the intake valve had kissed it. At least I knew why the rocker had broken.

With the head on a fold-up work table, I wondered if I could do the arthroscopic version of the procedure and simply drop in another rocker arm without disturbing anything else. To my surprise, I did succeed in separating the two intake rocker shafts just enough to pull the broken rocker arm out. I thought that, boy, I could pull a used arm out of my parts stash, drop it in, bang the shafts back together, drop the head back on with a new gasket, and be done with it.

Then I decided that, having gotten this far, I should at least lap the valves. So I banged the shafts out, pulled the cam, and did the twisty thing with the wooden valve lapping stick with the suction cup and the end, attached to the valve, its edges coated with grinding compound.

I did this on all 12 valves, but using both solvent and compressed air to check the seals, I was never quite sure that I did a good enough job. So I took it all in to the machine shop, which checked the head for straightness. Of course it was slightly warped; they all are at this age. And the machinist surprised me by saying that not just one intake valve was bent—four of them were. (I told him that that the leak-down test didn’t reveal anything obvious. The seen-it-all machinist deadpanned, “They were obviously bent when I spun them. They must’ve been sealing on carbon.”)

I picked up the minty-fresh head from the machine shop and began reassembling it. To hold costs down, I bought one new rocker arm to replace the broken one, but reused the rest of the original rockers and the shafts. I nearly re-used the cam, as I convinced myself that the broken edge of the lobe wasn’t actually on the rocker’s running surface, but when I carefully inspected the cam, I found that there was a good-sized gouge right in the middle of another lobe. I sourced a good used cam and threw things back together.

With the head reassembled, the valve clatter was gone, but the car still ran horribly. I checked the fuel pressure and it read over a hundred psi. At first I thought that this was due to a bad fuel pressure regulator, but it turned out that the metal part of the fuel return line was clogged, spiking fuel pressure and making the system run incredibly rich. I reamed it out, fuel pressure returned to normal, and the car finally ran decently but not perfectly. Replacing the fuel injectors with a rebuilt set made it cross the line to well-running.

Whew!

Despite having ample opportunity to look for wheels and tires to replace the TRXs while the car was laid up, I never found the cheap set of good wheels and tires I imagined would be thick as snowplows in the Northeast. I did, however, find a nice set of $200 BBS basketweave wheels from an E32 BMW 7-series, and ponied up for new rubber.

I did the full required brake job, knocked a few other items off the punch list—such as the voltage regulator and the blower motor—and then decided to list the car again. This time it had traction. A couple in Alabama who’d heard me speak at a BMW event down there contacted me. I offered to fix a few more things, and we settled on $4250, which was about what I had in it. So if the aim was to make money, I failed miserably.

Of course, the aim in most of my automotive endeavors isn’t really to make money. It’s to buy cars I like, have a relationship with them for the time they sojourn with me, keep them for however long it feels right, and move them on to the next owner when it’s time. Nevertheless, there were three big lessons from the Lama.

The first was the one I already knew—unless you or another knowledgeable car person you trust lays eyeballs and hands on the car, there’s a lot of risk. People can lie three ways: They can lie through their teeth, they can lie by omission, and they can lie passively because they assume but don’t know for sure. It’s unclear which was the case here; I don’t know whether or not the seller knew about the broken rocker shaft. But had I or a knowledgeable friend looked at the car, the combination of the oil burning, the rough running, and the valve train noise might have warned me off.

The second was that I’ve long said that dead cars pose a lot of risk as well as a lot of potential reward. If you can revive a car easily, you can either have a nice driver for yourself or a potential moneymaker, but if you can’t drive it, anything can be wrong and you won’t know. Even if it’s not a remote purchase—hell, even if a car is local and free—there’s no way to drive risk down to zero. These older BMW engines tend to be very robust and seem to like being revived, so I thought the risk of the car acutely needing engine work was low, and even after having done a compression and a leak-down test, I didn’t expect a broken rocker arm. I thought that the Lama’s $1400 purchase price was low enough that it had the risk baked into it, but I was wrong.

The third was that there’s a huge distinction between a car like, say, a vintage Porsche 911 or a split-windowed ‘Vette that’s worth gobs of money in any condition, and a car like a BMW E28 5-Series sedan that’s worth moderate money if it’s in great shape and less than you’d think if it’s not. So if you’re actually trying to make a little coin, it’s better to pick a car whose value isn’t so condition-dependent.

Live and learn. Well, at least live.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post The Lama teaches me three big lessons appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Within the grease-under-the-nails populace is a subculture of very interesting humans: The people who can justify anything. While my New Year’s resolution to not purchase another motorcycle failed before the snow melted, it is kind of implied in the self-negotiations of such resolutions that you will try to stick to the resolution even after you slip up and load a Honda CRF50 into your van.

Things were going well. My meager parts fund was less stretched, and projects had progressed in the absence of another new (old), shiny (rusty) thing (distraction).

So when a friend sent me a Marketplace ad on Saturday afternoon of a 1988 Honda XR600R for sale—locally, and under $1000—he knew exactly what he was doing. The Baja 1000 champ? The model that competed for over a decade in both desert and hare-scramble racing, with the likes of five-time Grand National Cross Country champion Scott Summers and 11-time Baja 1000 champion Johnny Campbell holding onto its handlebars? Maybe you’ve seen that iconic photo of Summers holding his 290-pound XR600R as if it were his baby—he feels as though the bike picked him. There is just something about these machines.

An XR600R is powered by a large, 591cc air-oil-cooled single-cylinder that is about as big, dumb, and simple as they come. Think of it as the Chevrolet 427 big-block of motorcycle engines. It has a shorter stroke than the XR650L, but some subtle changes give it more punch than its bigger siblings. There are some cool details, but in the end, the XR600R is an example of the “no replacement for displacement” solution. And it kinda works.

Though I have owned and ridden a fair number of Honda singles over the years, the 600R has always eluded me. The bike into which the XR600 evolved for 2000, the XR650R, was one I was lucky enough to enjoy when they were cheap 15 years ago. The XR650L is the slightly younger and sleepier brother, and you can still find it in Honda powersports dealers today. The 600R has long been on my wish list, but opportunities just haven’t come up to buy the right bike. Or, at least, I never had a good reason.

I am a big believer in the separation of excuses and reasons. The distinction might have come from Mr. Lebo, my high school homeroom teacher, who would make us sit and wait every Friday at the final bell for him to give a small speech that always ended with: “And remember, bad things happen to good kids when they make bad decisions.” I would often show up late to class “because of” my temperamental 1964 Corvair: car troubles were low-hanging fruit, and a pretty believable excuse. One day, Mr. Lebo called me out: I had better have a reason I was late, he said, not an excuse. It hit me hard then and has stayed with me since.

Even on the drive to go pick it up, I knew this XR600R was probably a bad purchase and that I was making excuses to even go look at it. The fact was underscored when I returned home and spotted a crack on the clutch side cover. Opening the right side of the engine, I found that a gorilla with a breaker bar had assembled the timing pointer onto the crankshaft. The splines critical for timing the ignition were mangled, along with the threads meant to hold the drive gear for the oil pump in place. The first step of building an XR engine is the crankshaft. The last step of disassembly is removing the crank. To fix this problem properly, there are no shortcuts.

The mutilated crankshaft has put a big wet blanket over the excitement of having an XR600R join my garage. Now comes the time to sit at the workbench and stare at the project, trying to find a reason to own it. Should I cut my losses and chase a better starting point, or throw good money after bad to rescue this bike? Working on any XR600R could satiate my desires. Why put myself through the annoyance of cleaning up someone else’s mess? It sure feels like god doesn’t know and the devil isn’t talking. Instead, I sit there and daydream of the artful process of kick-starting a big-bore and riding the sands of Baja.

There are concrete, justifiable reasons to not have this thing. Yet each pass through the garage requires me to pause, stand, and picture the 600R I could build. Where it could take me. What it could show me. I don’t really need a reason to keep it, but I can’t turn these dreams into goals yet, and all these excuses feel flimsier and more nebulous than ever. For now, I walk back into the house and shut the door to the garage, leaving the bike on the lift.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Reasons, excuses, and the big, dumb bike of my dreams appeared first on Hagerty Media.

One of the dynamics in the Hack Mechanic household is that the number of guitars rivals the number of cars. Fortunately, the guitars are considerably less greasy and a lot smaller, all fitting in one room. While I haven’t bought any new cars recently, I have bought two more guitars. I didn’t need either, but sometimes, like with cars, circumstances present themselves—an instrument speaks to you, you bond with it, and you act. (Which is, of course, a heartfelt and carefully-crafted description of an utter lack of self-control.)

To free up funds and make it seem like it’s a zero-sum game, I sold a few rare BMW parts. I had a pair of new-in-the-bags European-style flush turn signals for a BMW 2002. They’re no longer available and highly sought-after. I priced them slightly under the last available retail price, and they were snatched up immediately, which was the intent. Ditto with a pair of original chrome BMW 1600 front grills.

The last item intended to help fill the two-guitar-shaped hole in the bank account is a lovely wood-grained four-pod instrument cluster from a BMW 2800CS E9 coupe that I parted out over 35 years ago. It had been sitting in clean dry storage in my basement ever since. As with the other parts, I photographed it and researched the asking prices on eBay and enthusiast forums.

However, an instrument cluster is different from trim. It has electronics and moving parts. The descriptions I read for clusters with higher asking prices said that they’re tested and functional. My knee-jerk reaction was “I have no way to do that.” Unlike on a BMW 2002, where swapping out the cluster takes maybe 10 minutes, it is very difficult to get the cluster out of an E9 coupe.

And then a series of epiphanies occurred to me that enabled me to test the whole thing. The biggest one involves my steadfast belief that most of the time, you don’t need a wiring diagram, but we’ll get to that.

The speedometer

If the speedometer in the cluster is an old-school mechanically-driven unit, and you have a spare cable, odds are it can be easily tested by connecting the cable to back, gently clamping the transmission end into the chuck of an electric drill, and spinning it. Be certain to first check on an enthusiast forum for which direction to spin the drill, as you can damage the speedo if you spin it the wrong way. On a vintage BMW, you spin the drill in reverse. The whole thing took just a few minutes.

My rant about wiring diagrams

As I’ve said before, my experience is that the need for wiring diagrams on vintage cars is overblown. Sure, there are times when you do need to know what the green-and-red-striped wire in the multi-pin connector goes to, but most of the time you’re working from a PDF of a scan of a 55-year-old piece of paper in a shop manual, and it’s very difficult to read. On German cars, the wiring diagrams generally label the wire colors and the so-called “DIN” standard numbering of the terminals, but the components, much less the common-sense functions of the individual connectors, may not even be labeled, and if they are, they’re likely in German. If you need to know—oh, let’s just pick some example at random—the individual connections on the back of a gauge cluster, it’s often easier to look on an enthusiast forum and find a photo where some kind soul has labeled them with their actual useful names. Below, I’ll explain why not even that was necessary for me to test the gauges.

The tachometer

Tachs on vintage cars generally have three wires—power, ground, and a signal from the negative side of the coil (the side connected to the distributor, often stamped “1” or “-”). I could tell which of the three connections on the back of the E9’s tach were which because the power and ground connections were labeled as “+” and “-“ and were shared with other gauges, and the wires on the ground connection were the standard German brown, which left the third unshared unlabeled connection as signal.

For this test, I opened up the hood of my E9 coupe in the garage, laid the spare cluster on a pad, took the red and black test wires I carry with me on every road trip that have small battery clamps at one end and female spade connectors at the other, connected them to the car’s battery, and connected the ends to the power and ground male spades on the back of the tachometer. Then I took another wire with female spades and both ends, connected one end to the negative side of the coil, and the other to the signal input spade on the tach, and started the car. The tach sprang to life.

Fuel and temperature gauges

As is the case on many cars, the fuel and temperature gauges on the E9 are part of a gauge pod with other functions such as the high beam, brake, oil pressure, and battery warning lights. Initially, when you look at the back of the gauge, you think “How do I tell which connection is which, much less test things?”

But it’s actually not that hard. The trick is to simply look at the front of the gauge, note which function is where, flip the gauge around, and match things up. In the composite photo below, you can see that the gas gauge is on the left, so when you turn the cluster around, it’s actually very clear where the wires and connectors on the right for the gas gauge are. It’s obvious that the big circular one is the bulb. The multiple wires on the spade connector above it are the shared power (there’s also a little “+” above it). That means that the single wire on the spade connector below the bulb is the signal for the gas gauge. The same is true for the temperature gauge on the left, but its terminals are obscured by the bend of the wires in the harness.

The ground is a bit harder to see in the photo. The metal cases themselves are ground for each of the gauges. There are two male spade connectors that stand upright from the back of the case. The one at the upper left has chassis ground passed to it through the wiring harness. The one at lower center is unused, making it a convenient attachment point.

The last trick you need to know for this benchtop test is that temperature and fuel gauges and senders typically work by having the gauge interpret a variable resistance between it and ground. If there’s infinite resistance—no connection to the sender—then the needle doesn’t move, so the fuel gauge reads empty, the temperature gauge stays at the bottom. But if there’s low resistance connection between the gauge and ground, then the needle pegs (full fuel tank, temperature high in the red). The lowest resistance is continuity—grounding the signal connection. So to check functionality of these gauges, all you need to do is apply power and ground and make sure the needles are sitting at the bottom, then ground the signal connector. In the photo below, the bundle of green and white wires have been pulled off their male spade post, replaced by a thick red wire connected to battery positive. A Y-adapter has been connected to the spade for the case ground. The thick black wire is connected to battery negative. A white jumper wire connects the fuel gauge’s signal input to ground.

And … ta-DA!

I repeated all this to test the temperature gauge, with the same results.

With the gauges all tested, the only task remaining was to turn the cluster lights on. This was less to test them than it was to get the pic of the glowing instrument cluster because a) it would carry visual impact that the cluster was tested and worked, and b) it would be cool. For this, since the bulbs are all tied together, the easiest way to do it was to look at the wire color they used (gray and blue), find the pin on the harness connector using that color, feed it 12V, and use a shared ground for the instrument cases.

So, I now have a tested E9 gauge cluster. It hasn’t sold yet, so no more guitars (or cars) for this guy. Unless I find one that, you know, really speaks to me.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post Bench-testing an instrument cluster appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Sometimes I find myself needing to ride the adrenaline wave. And while some get that raw hormone boost from extreme sports, I get it from adding awful cars to my motley fleet of misfits. While on that high, I like to get as much as possible done before getting distracted by something else. As regular readers will remember, I recently schlepped a decade-dormant Renault GTA from Connecticut to North Carolina. I didn’t need another project, so I’m trying to get it on the road as quickly as possible before momentum wanes. Surf’s up, I guess!

Admittedly, I engaged in a bit of intentional ignorance with this GTA. Since there was no obvious rust, every other mechanical or electronic surprise would be an energizing opportunity, so I did as little investigating as possible before hauling it off.

Now I’ve been, uh, enlightened following a bit of rudimentary research. I’ll let you in on a little secret that only past and present Renault Alliance owners know: Every Alliance, Encore, and GTA that came out of the weeds needs the exact same stuff. Unfortunately, none of it is readily available.

Window regulators, timing belts, and gas tanks are the three-part Achilles heel that grounded all of the GTAs that didn’t rust in half. Not one to do things half-way, I’m going to need to replace each one on my fresh catch. So rather than mope and kick rocks, let’s crack into it, shall we?

First step: sanitization. Though I found the symbiotic relationship between the car’s fungi and algae colonies charming, my experience as a Saturn of Raleigh detailer in high school forced me to evict these organisms. With my mouth shut this time, I proceeded to blast off the entire ecosystem into oblivion.

A mild glow-up was the next item on my punch list. Under all of the plant matter was the dull sheen of heavily oxidized single-stage Sebring Red paint. If the car looked good, I reasoned, I’d have more motivation to persevere when things inevitably got less glamorous. A gift today for the delirious-on-gas-fumes Matt of tomorrow. I tested my buffing pad and trusty marine compound on a vertical surface. After a rinse from a hose, the resulting pink goo created a mural on the side of my barn. But the gleaming paint underneath made an irrefutable case to keep at it, for hours. I do have some swirl marks to contend with, but I have no regrets.

Duly jazzed, I moved on to mechanical concerns. The most relevant concern with the Renault R9 and R11 family of cars is that the timing belt tensioner lurks in the shadows, constantly threatening to grenade your investment. Most U.S.-market Renaults met their death by means of a valve-to-cylinder meet-and-greet, held mere miles after a missed timing belt service interval. Sadly, the taller deck of the GTA-only 2.0-liter means that no ordinary timing belt tensioner endemic to the 1.4- or 1.7-liter engine works. Remember, this unique assembly was made for a run of just 3500 cars! Luckily, a nice fellow in Missouri named Lloyd produces a kit so he can sell them to suckers like me. Once I had the parts in hand, an hour’s work was all it took to swap into the GTA. That should avoid certain death (by timing belt, anyway) for another 40,000 miles.

Via attrition and forecasted rain, my failed window regulator ascended to top priority.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “pushing a rope” then you’ve unknowingly been briefed on the operating principle of the Renault Alliance window regulator. When brand new, they function with supreme adequacy. With aged grease and brittle plastic components, the whining and growling hand crank functions solely as a raccoon call. French electronics from the 1980s barely work when they’re dry, so it was safe to assume that a half-inch of rain in the floorboards would render them kaput. I fished the regulator out of the door, copied the return address off of my timing belt package, and sent it out to friendly, industrious Lloyd in Missouri for a rebuild.

As I means of holding myself accountable to my promise that I not joyride until the timing belt was fixed, I electively decided to not test the fuel and electrical systems beforehand. Now that I was in the clear, I proceeded with that evaluation. Good thing I was careful, or so the sparks that shot out of the fuel pump test port indicated. Sigh. I ordered a pump and mentally prepared myself for a week of soured hydrocarbon stench infiltrating my hands, arms, and sweatshirt sleeves. The tank was out in about fifteen minutes with minimal spillage. As for turning the tank back into a functional car part? I looked back at the shiny paint, held my breath, and dove in.

Removing the fuel strainer assembly and peering into the tank showed iron oxide stalagmites, along with someone’s half-hearted attempt at applying a liner with the fuel pump in situ. (A word of advice: don’t ever do that.) My wife was out running errands, which meant the disgusting tank actually had to go in my GR86. I carefully shoehorned the tank into the trunk, resisted the temptation to drive my local roundabout in the usual high-g anger, and hauled it as responsibly as possible to Statesville Radiator. There, my fuel vessel was treated to a four-day spa day in a boiling green cauldron. Upon picking it up, the holes were brazed and it stunk a lot less.

Now on to the strainer assembly. With all the electrical connections snapped off, a return line filled with tank epoxy, and rust holes throughout, this would be a test of commitment. Given that all possible donor cars were no better off, I spent several evenings repeatedly scrubbing the CLR-soaked assembly with a toothbrush. Eventually, it was inert enough to tickle with the welder on the lowest possible amperage and solder all of the missing gauge connections. With a freshly POR-15’d tank, permanently stained fingertips, and a full-on downpour arriving in a matter of minutes, I placed the whole assembly back into the car as quickly as possible.

In the middle of the thunderstorm, I hastily grabbed a battery from the local auto parts store plus four gallons of the freshest gas. With a couple spritzes of ether and some coaxing, the car finally roared to life through its perforated exhaust. A quick test drive around the field taught me a bit more: non-functional wipers, nothing backlit but the tach, and an oddly recumbent seating position. But who cares! The hard stuff was all done inside of two weeks, with reserve motivation for the DMV. Voila!

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Against All Oddities: All about making that GTA… run appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If you’ve been reading this space for some time, you probably have gleaned that my unhinged Hack Mechanic persona is not the only thing bubbling inside my cranium. Underneath I’m actually a very rational, deliberative guy who really tries to think things through, not make decisions or take on risks he’s going to regret, and if he does, at least learn the lesson so it’s less likely to happen again. I thought that this week I’d highlight five vehicles where I leaped and wound up in trouble, and disclose what the lessons learned were.

1999 BMW 528iT Sport Wagon

We like what we like. I like rear wheel-drive cars. Having front wheels that steer and deliver power never feels quite right to me, even with cars where the long-standing torque steer problem has been solved. Rear wheel-drive BMWs have been my daily-driver jam for 40 years. About 10 years ago, it made sense to me to move to an E39-body 5 Series wagon. I found one locally with about 150,000 miles on it. It was black with a black interior, and it had the rare combination of the five-speed manual box and the sport package that slightly hunkered-down the car. Initially I loved it, but it turned out to be one of these cars whose purchase puts you on the repair-of-the-week plan without your knowing it. And on this car, it wasn’t just the usual parade of cooling system, fuel delivery, and charging problems. Nor was it having to rebuild the cool-but-troublesome self-leveling rear suspension, as it’s a known trouble spot. In addition to all that, weird things broke. In frigid weather, the oil separator froze and nearly hydro-locked the engine. A front coil spring broke and punctured the tire. Simply getting the rear hatch to work reliably was a battle. As Rosanne Rosannadanna said on Saturday Night Live, it was always something. I was relieved when I sold it.

Lessons learned: The car’s constant neediness made me realize that it was actually an enthusiast car when I needed it to be something more pedestrian. It was from this I learned not to confuse your daily driver and your project cars.

1972 BMW 2002tii

In 2016, when my long-time engineering career ended, I became obsessed with the idea of buying a dead car in some far-flung corner of the country, swooping in, getting it running, and road-tripping it home. It needed to be a car that I knew well, so a BMW 2002 made the most sense. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this romantic image of casting all caution to the wind and pitting man against machine and road wasn’t practical. I mean, how exactly are you going to do it? Show up at the seller’s house with a toolbox, a tent, and a sleeping bag and say, “I’m going to camp out here until I get this running and oh, can I use your shower for a week?” At a minimum, the car either needs to be capable of driving off the seller’s property, or you need to tow it a friend or relative’s house where you can do at least the first level of repair and sorting. I did the latter, buying the decade-dead 2002tii sight unseen and accepting an invitation from a guy I’d met once for 10 minutes at a BMW event to stay with him and his wife and wrench on the car in his pole barn. In addition, this fellow scoped out the car for me and gave me a heads-up on what some of its needs were, enabling me to go down there in a rented SUV with parts and tools. (If you’re curious, I wrote about the whole adventure in my book Ran When Parked.)

Lessons learned: You can do this kind of thing, but you really need to have eyes on the car first, come prepared, and then be absolutely merciless in your delineation of what’s truly required to get the car home versus what can wait until you’re in the comfort of your own garage. Otherwise you’ll be on the road for a month.

1976 BMW 2002

A close friend let me know of a mutual acquaintance one town over from me (in Massachusetts) who was selling his ran-when-parked BMW 2002 due to an impending home renovation project. I contacted the fellow, went over and had a look, was surprised and impressed at the car’s nearly rust-free condition. I got it running with a jump start and starting fluid, made a low cash-on-the-table offer, and bought it. I was positively giddy at my being at the right place at the right time. However, when I drove it home a few days later, the car exhibited an alarming amount of engine noise above around 2500 rpm. Poking around with a mechanic’s stethoscope revealed the noise coming from the oil pan. When I dropped the pan, sure enough, the rod bearings were shot.

Lessons learned: Replacing the rod bearings wasn’t difficult or expensive, and I did fine in the resurrection and re-sale of the car. But while it is well-known that if you can’t test-drive a car, anything can be wrong with it and you won’t know, it was a reminder that hearing an engine run isn’t the same thing as a test drive.

1974 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special

I’ve written quite a bit about the Lotus in this space. When I was in junior high school, I worked for a guy who owned one—it was the first exotic, impossibly low, and angular car that I saw in person, and it hit me right in that special adolescent automotive place. I bought this one sight unseen in 2013 in Chicago; it had 23K on the odometer, but it had been dead since 1979, with an engine that had seized from sitting. I’d revived many dead BMWs but knew nothing about old Lotuses, and this odd, 1600-pound British thing with an engine that had a Ford block and a boutique Lotus head was way more troublesome to resurrect than I’d ever imagined. Even once I got the engine rebuilt, installed, and running, the steps from there to get the car moving, then driving around the block, then driving on the highway, then behaving well enough that I felt I could explore its Lotus-ness, were all waaaaay bigger than in the vintage BMW world I was familiar with. Still, the amount of pleasure I get out of this crazy little thing seems barely legal. (See The Lotus Chronicles for more detail.)

Lessons learned: Oh, many. First, stepping outside your zone of expertise is exciting, but very time consuming. Second, if the goal is to make a Lotus handle like a Lotus is supposed to, that’s a far tougher goal than simply limping it a few miles to a Cars and Coffee. It’s going to cost whatever it’s going to cost, and once you’re in pursuit of that goal, it’s really difficult to shut off the spending tap. Third, even though everyone tells you not to, I did add up the costs, and I’ve got over 20 grand in the car, which is well in excess of what it’s worth. I’m usually not one to do the “underwater” calculation, but it’s important knowing that if I find another basket-case Lotus, it’d cost me similar to get it to the point where it performs like a Lotus should.

1996 Winnebago Rialta

My wife and I used to take the family on beach vacations every summer, for which I’d typically buy a beat-up Suburban and use it as a beach assault vehicle. When the kids fledged and that ended, I floated the idea of buying a small RV, something just slightly larger than the VW campers we had when we were younger. Our middle son lives in Santa Fe, and the idea of road-tripping out there and taking in some national parks on the way was appealing. I wanted something small, parkable, and fuel-efficient, and the used Sprinter-based RVs were all way too expensive. I learned about the Winnebago Rialta—the Volkswagen Eurovan conversion that’s sort of a Westfalia camper on steroids, with a bathroom and a real bed. Even as 25-year-old vehicles, the Rialtas with the VR6 engine are pricey, but the 1995 and ’96 vehicles with the 110-horsepower, five-cylinder Audi engine are more affordable, and when I found a needy one for crapcan Celica money, I jumped on it. Unfortunately, with a 110-hp engine in a 7000-pound vehicle, they’re as slow as the VW campers of yore. For this reason, we’ve never taken it on a big road trip, as I’m sure that on the big western hill climbs we’d be doing 35 mph in the right lane. Instead, we use it for weekends on Cape Cod, where state campgrounds are about $40 a night. There’s been a steady cavalcade of plumbing and electrical issues, but even the beach use notwithstanding, as we’re both now in our 60s, owning a vehicle with a bathroom in it is awesome.

Lessons learned: Bargain RVs have all of the problems of a car and a house, and if you’re traveling with your spouse, it becomes not just your tolerance for imperfection, but theirs as well. Fortunately my wife rolls with it. Due to the Rialta being both too under-powered and a bit too small, I doubt we’ll ever do a real road trip in it, but I don’t think I could’ve learned that lesson without owning it. In that way, it’s been a great starter RV.

As Mark Twain said, “Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.” I don’t really think any of these decisions were bad, but I really do try to learn from them nonetheless. I don’t believe that Bob Dylan is a car guy, but I think of his line “And here I sit so patiently / waiting to find out what price / you have to pay to get out of / going through all these things twice” and think he’d be right at home with us.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post Important lessons from a car guy who can’t afford to take risks appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I first saw this MG in The Washington Post classifieds, for $750. My parents took me to meet the owner at a Howard Johnson’s in Arlington, Virginia, and I (or, more precisely, my mom) ended up driving it home.

Through two years of high school and then to college, this was my regular car. I would drive it home and back to Clemson—about 12 hours round trip—for the holidays. When I graduated, though, I started not to use it as much. Career. Life. Eventually, the car was placed in a storage unit in southern Delaware. It sat there for close to 20 years.

I got married nine years ago, and our house had a three-car garage. My wife encouraged me to bring the MG back to New Jersey to get it on the road again. I rented a trailer and got the MG. I had this desire to bring it back to life again; I felt guilty that I had pushed it away.

I started slow—small jobs like restoring the steering wheel—but particularly during the early days of the pandemic, I dived deeper. Over time, I replaced everything in the car except the block, the head, and the suspension. After almost two years, the car drove down the street, but the instruments didn’t work. We discovered rain had come through the windscreen seal and had rusted the gauges. A previous owner had chopped up the wiring harness, so now I needed a new electrical harness. I removed the seats to get better access under the dash. I knew I was in trouble when the first fastener I pulled out was a machine screw. I rolled back the carpet, and, lo and behold, I could see the garage floor.

Then, last year, I got Covid. It caused me to suffer a stroke. I was very fortunate to make it through, knowing that so many people had suffered worse than me during the pandemic. Fortunately, finishing the car became part of my therapy—literally. I would video myself moving nuts and bolts, grinding the floor joints, then I’d show it to my physical therapist. She would say, “Get on your knees,” or “Straighten your back.”

Since I’d gone so far as to redo the floor, I figured I might as well upholster it in style. I was obsessed with green carpet—found in early Jaguars. I found a little shop in England that made green wool carpet for MGBs. When the exchange rate hit $1.08 per pound sterling last year in August, I pulled the trigger.

Obviously, this project had snowballed. My idea at first had been simply to get it running. That morphed into redoing the wiring, then replacing the interior. So… why not paint, too? We started with just a few rattle cans for the front clip, which had a ton of rock chips. That looked so good that, well, we decided to do the whole car. Forty-four cans later (20 base coat and 24 clear coat), it turned out amazing. (Check out the end of the article for more detail on the process.)

It might sound as if I did this whole thing myself, but it’s not like that at all. I never could have gotten this far without the car community. First and foremost is Nick O’Donohoe. I had purchased a few parts from him at an MG show, unaware that he is the son of a British Leyland parts director. Lucky for me, he passed down all of his knowledge to Nick! Nick became interested in the fact that I wanted to do the work myself and helped me with some tougher bits, like welding. He also has a wholesale account with Moss Motors, to serve his business, British Car Company of Wayne, New Jersey.

Most important, though, he held me accountable. “Did you get that done? Can I come tomorrow?” He was like a teacher whom I didn’t want to let down. After I got Covid, when I really needed in my own head to see progress on the car, Nick would bring over three or four members of the Eastern New York MGA Club and spend a Saturday on the car. This gentleman spent countless hours helping me—and he refuses to take money.

There were others. Tim McNair, of GP Concours, the preparation specialist, told me exactly how to polish my paint. Sandra McPhillips at the upholstery shop in the U.K., PJM Motors, where I ordered my carpets, was super nice and helpful. And of course, my wife, Karen, who supported the project from start to finish and who works in automotive PR. After I had my stroke, she put the word out through the local Motor Press Guild to stop by our home and help me work on my car. And then there are the people I’ve never actually met but who were indispensable nonetheless: commenters on the MG Experience online forum and YouTubers.

So now the car is just about done, although it does still need a new front suspension, and the rear shocks are probably kind of on their last legs.

There’s always something else, right?

***

I really painted the whole car with rattle cans

The process is dead simple: prime, paint, and clear. The devil is in the details. For the base coat, don’t just grab a color off the shelf, especially if you’re planning to paint only a section (as I originally planned to). Instead, go to a paint-and-body supply shop and have them custom-mix an exact match to your car. They’ll also have the clear coat you need, the kind with hardener (aka 2K clear). It’ll give you a glassy finish. (Note the hardener produces some nasty vapors, so wear a mask.)

To make it shine like a “real” paint job—and remove debris that falls onto the surface as the paint dries—you’re in for a lot of wet sanding, with progressively finer grit: 3000, 4000, 5000. (I used an inexpensive dual-action sander from Harbor Freight.) Think you’re ready for polish? Nope. Sand more. A paint-thickness gauge can keep you from sanding through. Allow the finish to cure in the sun before polishing out the final swirls.

I learned the hard way not to cheap out on primer—it had a reaction with the base coat. Spraying even strokes takes practice. And the final result, admittedly, isn’t concours-ready. If you want that, pay a pro. But for a car painted outside with rattle cans? You won’t believe how good it can look.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post I breathed life anew into my 1970 MGB thanks to hard work—and rattle cans appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It’s been a big year for Right to Repair. Starting with John Deere signing a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in January that allows farmers and independent repair shops to perform maintenance on their own tractors, 2023 has provided multiple victories on behalf of consumers. Some of those wins are directly related to the automotive industry.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 33 states and Puerto Rico considered Right to Repair legislation during the 2023 legislative session. Maine became the fifth state in 11 months to approve Right to Repair legislation, when 84 percent of voters said yes to the question, “Should auto manufacturers enable owners and their preferred mechanics to access their car’s diagnostics systems?” Other states to pass similar laws in 2023 are:

• Colorado, which now “requires agricultural equipment manufacturers to provide resources for individuals to repair their own agricultural equipment”;
• California, which “requires manufacturers [of electronic or appliance products, with some exclusions*] to provide the means to diagnose, maintain, or repair for seven years for products with a price point more than $100 and three years for products under $100”;
• New York, which “requires manufacturers [excluding makers of cars and farm equipment, among others**] to provide consumers with parts or tools for electronic equipment manufactured for the first time and sold or used in New York after July 1, 2023”; and
• Minnesota, which enacted the Digital Fair Repair Act, which requires “manufacturers of certain electronic products to make documentation, parts, and tools for diagnosis, maintenance, or repair available to independent repair providers and product owners on fair and reasonable terms.”

In a nutshell, the Right to Repair fight comes down to this: Consumers want the right to work on their own cars, farm machinery, and electronics. Manufacturers, of course, would rather keep the required computer codes and specialized tools to themselves, citing trademark issues and trade secrets.

Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of The Repair Association, says that not allowing consumers the right or resources to repair their own electronics seems illogical.

“When people hear about the right to repair, they say, ‘Oh my God, my dishwasher was broken and I couldn’t get it fixed. My cell phone was broken and it cost me an arm and a leg,’” Gay Gordon-Byrne says. “And it’s very popular from that standpoint because everybody needs to get their stuff fixed.”

However, the idea that “I own it, therefore I should be able to fix it” isn’t popular among manufacturers—and some in the media—who are concerned that sharing proprietary information could affect safety, efficiency, and incentive to innovate. Regardless, Right to Repair advocates remain steadfast.

“It’s pretty incredible the array of people coming out to support (Right to Repair) …” says Allison Conwell, an advocate for Colorado Public Interest Research Group (CoPIRG). “But it’s pretty clear that this is going to take a big effort when you look at who’s across the table.”

Specific to automobiles, the first of many attempts to establish the right to repair arrived in 2001, when the Motor Vehicle Owners’ Right to Repair Act was introduced in the United States Congress. However, the bill went nowhere. Eleven years later, in 2012, Massachusetts voters approved a Right to Repair proposal that “required vehicle owners and independent repair facilities in Massachusetts to have access to the same vehicle diagnostic and repair information made available to the manufacturers’ Massachusetts dealers and authorized repair facilities.” The law was then used as a starting draft to create similar legislation in other states.

Three years ago, in November 2020, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved a measure that expanded the rights of do-it-yourselfers and independent mechanics, allowing them access not only to mechanical information but also to wirelessly transmitted information such as telematics, driving, and diagnostics data. Automakers almost immediately filed suit to stop the measure, claiming the law was “unenforceable because it is unconstitutional.” While the case is still working its way through the courts, in August 2023 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) instructed Massachusetts authorities to begin enforcing the Right to Repair law—just months after the same agency told automakers to ignore it.

Of the 74 Right to Repair legislation proposals introduced in 2023, most either failed or remain pending. Of those that specifically mention “motor vehicles,” two failed (in Maryland and Montana), and two are pending (in Hawaii and New York).

While Right to Repair advocates applaud victories in Massachusetts, Colorado, California, New York, Minnesota, and Maine in the last three years, they also admit they have a long way to go. For now, those six states will provide a litmus test that will be closely watched by legislators in the other 44. Stay tuned.

* Agricultural, forestry, industrial, or construction industry equipment; video game consoles; and alarm systems, like fire alarms are all excluded from California’s 2023 Right to Repair legislation. 

** As reported by the New York National Law Review, home appliances that have a “digital electronic product embedded within,” medical devices, motor vehicle manufacturers, and farm and utility tractors and off-road equipment are all excluded from New York’s Right to Repair law. 

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Right to Repair made strides in ’23, but the movement has far to go appeared first on Hagerty Media.

David S. writes:

Do you have any thoughts/rules of thumb when it comes to replacing things before they break? I’m thinking about replacing the original, trouble-free radiator in my 1990 Mazda Miata as preventive maintenance. Am I being proactive or just wasting money?

Rob Siegel answers:

I used to be big on prophylactic replacement of parts in the “Big Seven” systems most likely to fail (if you’re new to reading this column, those are: cooling, fuel delivery, ignition, charging, belts, clutch hydraulics, and ball joints). The problem is that these days, there’s the very real possibility that you’ll remove an old, high-quality original part and replace it with something that’s new but of lower quality. When cars are under warranty, manufacturers work with the vendors who supplied the Original Equipment (OE) or “genuine” parts that were originally in the car. The dealership charges top dollar for these parts precisely because they pass quality control standards intended to help avoid repeat failures. As the cars age out of warranty, there’s little incentive for the manufacturer to police the quality standards of these OE parts. They may still be supplied by the same manufacturer, but production may be shifted to a different country, or the part may be made out of cheaper materials. Thus, the part you still pay top dollar for at the dealership may no longer be identical to what was originally in the car. It’s even worse when you move from “genuine” parts to aftermarket parts (the advertising phrase “OEM quality” is not an actual standard).

Obviously, cracked belts and rattling idler pulleys should be replaced before they full-on fail, but whether to replace an “it ain’t broke” part, and what to replace it with, has become a fuzzy calculation based on the perceived likelihood of failure, the difficulty of the repair, the cost, and whether you’ll feel like more of an idiot if the original part breaks and strands you or the replacement does. The best you can do is read up on candidate parts on enthusiast forums and make an informed decision.

I recently faced your specific problem. Although there was nothing wrong with the cooling system in my 200,000-mile 2003 BMW, I replaced most of it for exactly the reason you list—the aging plastic is known to crack. However, within a month, the brand-new water pump began to weep coolant (the vendor exchanged it). On a 200K daily driver, I’d make the same call again.

Nelson W. writes:

We all know that rust and accident damage are things to avoid when buying a classic car. But is there any mechanical telltale that will make you run for the hills, regardless of asking price? (Not an idle question: I’m considering buying a rust-free 1988 Camaro that clearly has some cooling problems. Owner admits he’s topping off the radiator constantly, and the heater core has been bypassed.)

Rob Siegel answers:

Mechanical? Not really. The more mechanical issues a car has, the better. If it’s dead and being sold at a third of its market value because of it, I welcome dead. Dead I can fix. Rust I can’t. But be aware of just how bad the worst-case scenario can be. For instance, the coolant loss in your candidate Camaro could be rotting hoses—or it could be a cracked head or block. If you feel that that possibility has been baked into the asking price, that you have the time to deal with it, and that you love the car in other ways (e.g., color, condition), fine, but be brutally honest with yourself about the downside.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Is “preventive maintenance” a fool’s errand? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Walk the aisles of your local pick-a-part, or scroll the seemingly endless pages of projects listed for sale on the internet, and you’ll find plenty of cars just waiting for a new home. Decades of market forces have shaped the roster of cars that have survived this long. There’s a certain safety in going with the grain—relatively generous parts supply, aftermarket options, a knowledgable and engaged community—but going the other direction with a particularly rare or unloved model has its own rewards. Here are five reasons to adopt a car from an orphan brand:

Forces you to better understand your car

Parts availability often trends with popularity and production numbers. That means that while those who love Chevrolet Chevelles are spoiled by the ability to procure just about any part or piece they might need to keep their car on the road. Someone with an AMC Javelin is often left to sort out how new and old parts might play nice together.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Mainstream bolt-on kits often make meaningful compromises, and the simplicity of a one-stop shop means the installer doesn’t need to be terribly scrutinizing. In absence of such easy solutions, we might more clearly think through what we are trying to build and not get distracted by low-hanging fruit.

You’ll become a member of the community by necessity

Lived experience is a powerful thing. Usually, the most valuable resource for someone working on a given car is to talk with the people who have been doing it for much longer. Our knowledge and understanding of how our cars work changes over time, as well as changing with the technologies at hand, so not everything should be taken as gospel (look no further than a lot of performance modification books from decades ago) but there is incredible experience to mine from those who have tread the path before us. It’s probably possible to restore a first-generation Mustang without engaging with anyone else, but doing the same with a basket-case Nash? A lot tougher, and a few savvy Nash friends will make your journey a lot richer.

It’s impossible to hide

It’s fun to be known for something, especially if you can pick what it is. “Steve? The guy really into rotary NSUs?” Or “Alex? The Studebaker nut?” Just about any old car will stand out in modern traffic, but an orphan of years gone by is likely to draw even more attention. People just don’t know what they are. The rarer it is on the road, the more likely it is to draw comments and conversation at every fuel-up or parking lot. Not everyone wants to become the center of attention wherever they go, but it can be to have your work in keeping history on the road foster human connections.

Event eligibility

If you like driving your car and attending tours and events, an off-beat or otherwise unusual car can be your ticket into exclusive gatherings that run-of-the-mill cars will not be allowed access. Driving tours and large shows typically have to cap entry, often favoring interesting or unique cars so as to avoid a parade of too-similar vehicles. One example: The Colorado Grand “is open to racing cars and sports cars of distinction built in 1960 or before.” That means Peerless GTs are as welcome as Mercedes-Benz  SL Gullwings or Shelby Cobras. One of those is available on a blue-collar budget, while the other two are, well, not.

The barrier to entry is typically lower

Speaking of prices, take a scroll through your favorite classifieds site. It doesn’t take long to suss out that defunct brands generally trade at lower value than those from, say, the Big Three. Your dollar often goes further if your are agnostic as to the grille badge. For the price of an entry-level but popular car, you can sometimes nab the top trim of a more obscure car. While others may spend time and money up-badging or even up-restoring (think of all the Chevrolet 150s that became Bel Airs over the years) it can be satisfying to have piece of history that requires no asterisk. Not to mention the fatter parts budget.

Are there downside that come with choosing the path less traveled? Of course. It’s harder, for one, but the upsides should not be ignored. An oddball car might send you on an adventure that benefits not only you but helps preserve a small part of car culture that would have otherwise faded away.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have motorcycles to haul and a space in my driveway for a Studebaker pickup to do the grunt work. It’s out there somewhere.

The post 5 reasons to adopt orphan project cars appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Welcome to Homegrown—a limited series about homebuilt cars and the ingenuity of their visionary creators. Know a car and builder that might fit the bill? Send us an email to tips@hagerty.com with the subject line HOMEGROWN. Read about more Homegrown creations here. —Ed.

The concoctions we cover in our Homegrown feature series are usually the products of simmering adulthood creativity, constructed by individuals with superfluous time and money on their hands. But, as the cliché goes, for every rule there is an exception: The “car” depicted here began as 14-year-old Deacon Fancher’s sketches. It subsequently took shape over five years of effort between Fancher and his grandpa, Bill Spadafora, aka Popops.

Deacon, now 19, is a sophomore at Oakland University in Auburn Hills, Michigan, enrolled in journalism and film studies. He not only dreams about constructing cars, he hopes to someday write about them. (Please don’t hold that against him.) His other fantasy is to add bodywork, lighting, and the equipment that will make his car eligible for plates and street driving.

The term that best fits Deacon’s vehicle is cyclecar, reflecting that it is a motorcycle/car tweener with open wheels. The cyclecar’s brief moment of glory occurred in the 1910s and early ‘20s before the versatile Ford Model T booted them in automotive history’s ditch.

Deacon explains, “To get my project rolling, I bolted an 8.5-horsepower Honda single-cylinder engine and CVT from a snowmobile in the back of a steel-tubing spaceframe bent and welded by Popops in his garage. Grandpa is retired from an engineering career at GM, Bosch, Dana, and BAE in the Detroit area so he brings the expertise I lack to this project.

“Our wheelbase is 86 inches, track widths are 49 inches, overall length is about 11 feet. While the original idea was seating for two, there’s not going to be room for a passenger once I add a shifter and the necessary control pedals.

“Various chassis parts including the rack-and-pinion steering gear, brakes, and wheel hubs came from a Yamaha Rhino 700 side-by-side utility vehicle. Our control arm suspension system is homemade from steel tubing. Here, grandpa used Suspension Analyzer on screen to refine the geometry. The Factory Spec spring-shock units were purchased new via Amazon.

“I admire pre-war cars so we selected Ford Model A wire wheels fitted with Universal 19-inch bias-ply tires. Popops machined the adapters necessary to bolt these wheels to our Yamaha hubs. So far, our investment is about $2800 just for parts. My car runs, drives, and draws smiles wherever we take it. I belong to Oakland U’s Golden Grizzlies Formula SAE racing team so there is ample advice concerning what to do next.

“A 95-horsepower 1100-cc four-cylinder engine and five-speed transmission from a Yamaha Maxim XJ motorcycle are already in hand to add speed. My car’s curb weight is below 1000 pounds so excellent acceleration and decent cornering are assured.

“We’re just starting to think about bodywork. Naturally my SAE team members suggest using molded carbon-fiber panels which would require lots of learning on my part. More realistic options are fiberglass, aluminum, and canvas.

“The current John Deere bucket seat will definitely be replaced by something with a lower hip position to drop the top of my head well below the current 4-foot-tall upper frame loop.

“I feel very lucky on two counts—my family totally supports this fantasy and working elbow-to-elbow with Popops has been amazing fun. Every break I get from school gives us the chance to advance our project another step.”

While it hasn’t been Hagerty’s habit to cover Homegrown builds in progress, with installment reports, that’s precisely what we’re up to here. We’re not only anxious to see Deacon’s car finished, we’re hoping to be near the head of the line for a test drive.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters. 

The post Homegrown: Teenager’s snowmobile-powered cyclecar appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Earlier this year, I declared I would not buy any more motorcycles. Now I’m stuck in a deep debate over how many parts can be purchased for a project before they qualify as the purchase of a project. It’s not going well.

New Year’s resolutions are hard. I bet my failure rate is right around the national average of 91 percent. (And yes, I actually looked that up.)

My lust to store one more motorcycle in an already hardworking shop grew so strong that I began to creatively interpret my own rulebook. My desire to build a flat-track racer trumped my resolution to focus on the projects I already have. The compromise is going to be how the project gets done and where I source the pieces. Two simple rules: It’s gotta be cheap and it’s gotta be available.

Each fall I try to go through my storage shelf and mentally catalog exactly what junk is holding my floor to the ground. I don’t have enough storage space to keep everything, and sorting through keeps me from stashing things that truly have zero value.

Several Honda XR250Rs of the late 1980s have come through my garage in the last few years. Three were parts bikes that got broken down and boxed to serve as spares during my first year of racing. Somewhere in there, I accumulated enough spares to build a second race bike. Another dredge through the shelf brought forth a bounty that persuaded me to build a flat-track race bike rather than to sell some of the parts. This type of logic never fails to entertain, does it?

After talking to a few dirt-track racers and looking through spec sheets for aftermarket frames, I realized that the 1986 model year XR250R frame sitting outside next to my scrap pile actually had good enough geometry to be fun to ride and to be competitive in the right venues and classes. The swingarm was under one workbench, along with the triple trees. Forks were leaning in the corner under the coat rack. Rear shock, in a bin on the shelf. That was the bones. Now I just needed … everything else.

The deck could be stacked, though, and for me that meant doing a lot of the mental work up front. Much of it I had already done, because the idea of building a flat-track bike, disc-brake conversion and all, has been rattling around in my head for years. I have drawings and scribbled lists dating back a decade.

Building what I wanted started with defining what I wanted: A racer that fit into a vintage class, had decent parts support, and also allowed me to get creative when building it. A CRF250 or 450 is what I should own, on paper. All the parts I need are a credit-card swipe away. However, my credit card has had a water-cooled kinda last three months, and if building parts and doing things creatively is my goal, then why start with a bolt-together project? No fun in that.

Of course, I started with one of my XR250R frames. Sadly, I only have two on hand and they are both chassis with drum rear brakes. While the drum-brake path is familiar, it’s not ideal for this project. So I am planning a disc-brake conversion, and will use a modern rear wheel for cheaper gearing and rotor options. I can also use take-off calipers and master cylinders, as the pure-bred race stuff is overkill for my skills. I’m not about to say I’m building this bike on a budget, because things will get out of hand at some point, but I’m taking budget into heavy consideration.

The first big sticking point was wheels. For the race tires that I should be running, 19-inch rims are all but necessary. Buying hoops and spokes and lacing my own wheels is not out of the question, but a fellow racer mentioned that building spacers for a modern motocross bike wheel is almost easier than building up a stock hub. Even better, that option would give me a strong wheel with non-custom spokes, as a fair number of modern bikes ship from the factory with 19-inch rear wheels.

I nabbed a CRF450 wheel from eBay for $125. It needs a few spokes and a good cleaning, but it was still hundreds cheaper than the alternative. The front was even cheaper: Adventures with the 1983 Goldwing that haunted my driveway for a few years reminded me that the cast front wheels—known as Comstars—are fairly light and use a 17mm axle diameter, the same as a stock XR250 front axle. I don’t even need to source special bearings, just spend some time on the lathe.

The prospects are exciting, mainly because there are so many parts of this project and plan that I have never tackled before. It is a path that will require me to learn new things. For instance, more complex lathe projects. I know enough to be dangerous, but only enough, so when I realized a lathe project was the first step to getting an idea of how much I would need to lower the suspension, I was a little intimidated. The swing arm pivot is two needle roller bearings pressed in on each side. This put me in the middle of a catch-22. It really makes no sense to install a set of new bearings just to have to pull them out to blast and finish the swing arm, but blasting and finishing the swing arm now is a fool’s errand as fabrication needs to be done on and around the swing arm that would likely ruin the finish anyway. What to do?

Chuck up some aluminum in the lathe, that’s what. Getting the newer rear wheel and older front wheel to fit requires new spacers to properly center the wheels and also adapt the larger 22mm rear wheel bearings to fit the 17mm axle. To learn the process I would need for the wheel spacers, I chose to turn down some spacers that will take the place of the needle bearings in the swing arm. I don’t need smoothly pivoting suspension right now, I just need a bike in roughly one piece. That compromise allowed me to do my first solo project on the lathe, which taught me the basic process and primed me for the next step: building the precision wheel spacers.

Each step of this coming build is a problem I am excited to solve, and that alone all but guarantees my success, because my goal is not to have a fast race bike but to know how to build things. Experience is far more valuable to me than another motorcycle in the garage. That’s how I know this project will get done. Didn’t even need a resolution to know that.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post How to succeed in your next project without trying appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Although I have a demonstrated track record of undertaking and completing lengthy challenging projects—swapping the drivetrain and installing fuel injection in the 3.0CSi, retrofitting air conditioning into multiple cars, taking six years to rebuild the engine in the Lotus Europa—I have a particular fondness for simple “quick hit and run” repairs.

I’ve long said that in a world of intractable problems, few things are as satisfying as diagnosing a problem in a car, then fixing it. Clear beginning, clear metric for success, clear end—it really doesn’t get better than that. Routine maintenance like changing the oil doesn’t really qualify for this merit badge of satisfaction, but doing something like replacing the windshield washer pump—taking something that was driving you nuts because it wasn’t working and make it work—certainly does. Sometimes, the more trivial the thing you fix and the less time it takes to do it, the more you enjoy the end product, as that maximizes the effort-to-reward ratio.

So, with that in mind, I’d been saving an easy repair for the right moment. For the entirety of the nearly eight years I’ve owned my daily-driver 2003 BMW E39 530i stick sport, the trunk lock actuator hasn’t worked. This meant that in order to open the truck, I had to use the key; I could use neither the pop-the-trunk button above my left knee, nor trip the microswitch behind the soft rubber panel on the trunk lid itself. The trunk release on the key? Fugetaboudit. I was reminded of this every time I needed to pick up or drop off someone at the airport—I had to shut the car off, pull the keys out of the ignition, get out of the car, and walk around to the trunk to unlock it so they could get their luggage out. Actually, I was reminded of it every time I started the car, as the failure generated an incorrect “truck open” message on my dashboard.

I’ve replaced several door and trunk lock actuators over the years. The ones for the trunk are generally easier, as you don’t need to remove a door panel. Pop off an electrical connector, remove a few screws, disconnect a rod, installation is the reverse of disassembly, yadda, yadda, yadda … maybe 10 minutes, done. And the part is usually reasonably priced—for the E39, an OEM actuator costs $42, with no-brand aftermarket parts under $20. With the calendar rapidly ticking off the fall days, I decided to reward myself by eating this bit of candy. I ordered the $42 VDO actuator.

On a 60-degree day in late October, I opened up the trunk and removed the three clips holding on the access panel. On this car, the trunk latch mechanism had to come out before you could unscrew the actuator from it, but that was just three Torx-head fasteners. It took perhaps 20 minutes, not 10, for me to install the new actuator, but hey, I didn’t need to crawl under a car to do it. I was positively giddy in anticipation of the utterly trivial act of remote trunk unlocking.

Ready to savor my easy triumph, I closed the trunk and reached for the rubber-padded microswitch on the underside of the lid.

Nothing.

I went inside the car and pushed the trunk release button under the dash.

Crickets.

Hmmmmn.

I thought that perhaps a fuse had blown. I looked at the fuse card and didn’t see one specifically for the actuator, but I saw three for the central locking system. All were fine. I did some reading and verified that the car doesn’t have a “valet mode” that disables the trunk actuator.

As I poked around inside the trunk with the lid up, the light bulb went on—that is, the one in my head. In a remarkable instance of symmetry, it was triggered by the fact that the light bulb in the trunk did not go on. My mind suddenly shot to the “trunk open” message I’ve seen on the dashboard for eight years. I realized that the actuator not working wasn’t the only issue. The problem was systemic, involving all things on the bendy little wiring harness connecting the trunk lid to the body.

Oh crap. So much for the joy-enabling quick-hit-and-run repair.

To appreciate how badly I’d gotten this wrong, I need to rewind the tape to a few months ago when I was giving a talk about automotive electrical systems at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Massachusetts, and discussed the five types of circuit failures. In the talk, I said that while it’s possible for wires to break in the middle, it’s far more likely for an open circuit to be caused by a connector pulling off a component, or by a wire pulling out of the back of a connector. However, in the talk I noted that the exception is in wiring harnesses that experience a lot of flex such as those connecting doors, trunk lids, and hatches. I’d never experienced broken trunk lid wires before, but I dealt with broken wires in the hatch harness in both my BMW E39 and E46 wagons. And now that I realized that the actuator and the trunk light and the latch warning indicator all weren’t working, when I pulled back the rubber boot on the sheath leading to the trunk lid, I wasn’t surprised what I found.

Using a small pair of scissors, I carefully slit open the rubber sheath, revealing the extent of the problem. Five wires were broken up near the top.

But wait! There’s more! To be certain I had fully scoped things out, I looked at the bottom end of the rubber sheath and found one more broken wire and three more whose insulation was cracked 360 degrees around.

When wires are broken at a connector, you simply strip the ends and crimp on new connectors. But when they’re broken in the middle like this, they need to be spliced. That can be done by using crimp-on butt-splice connectors, by using heat-shrink solder-splice connectors, or by soldering the wires manually. I wrote about this in detail in the electrical book I wrote when I worked at Bentley Publishers, but here’s the short version.

The quickest way to repair a broken wire is by crimping a butt-splice connector between the pieces. Strip both ends, insert them into the connector, crimp, done. The advantages are speed, no soldering, and the fact that it preserves the length of the wire since you don’t need to overlap the ends. The disadvantages are the physical size of the connector, their rigidness, and lack of weatherproofing.

Heat-shrink solder-splice connectors (a piece of transparent heat-shrink tubing with an internal solder ring that melts when heat is applied) also work well. Strip both ends of the wire, insert them into the connector with both ends inside the ring of solder, and heat it with a heat gun until the solder melts. The integrated heat-shrink tubing makes the connection weathertight, as well as making it smaller in diameter than a traditional crimp-on butt-splice connector. A disadvantage is that needing to overlap the ends of the wire inside the solder ring shortens the wire slightly.

In a case like mine, where multiple wires in a harness are broken, butt-splice connectors like the one pictured above aren’t a great solution due to their physical size and rigidness. At a minimum, they’d need to be spaced out from each other and surrounded with heat-shrink tubing to keep water out. Heat-shrink solder-splice connectors can work, but because they shorten the length of the wire, you’re likely to need to splice in a few extra inches of wire, meaning that you’re making not one but two splice connections on each wire.

When I’ve encountered this situation, I tend to splice in a few extra inches of wire, manually solder each end, and cover the solder joints with heat-shrink tubing. Despite writing an electrical systems book, I don’t do this kind of work often, so you’re welcome to laugh at my soldering skills, but here’s how I do it.

• If you’re splicing in extra wire, identify the gauge (thickness) of the wires you’re repairing, and make sure to use wire of at least the same gauge. In my case, I found that two of the ground wires were actually of a thicker gauge than the rest.
• Cut the requisite number of splice wires all to the same length and strip their ends. It’s up to you whether you use different colors of wire or not.
• Strip one end of the wire being repaired and slide a piece of heat-shrink tubing over it and several inches past it.
• Bend a right-angle hook in the ends of the broken wire and the splice wire, put them together, fold over both hooks, and smooth it down to as small a diameter as possible.

• Heat the little bundle of wire with a soldering iron and touch the solder to the wire until it flows into the strands. As with any soldering, you don’t want to “cold-solder” it so the solder sits on top instead of flowing in.
  • Note that, in the case of old wiring with a coating of oxidation or corrosion on it, it may be necessary to use flux on the wires in order to get the solder to melt and flow.
  • Note that some people like to “tin” the ends of the wire first with solder, then twist them together, then flow solder into them.

• Once the splice has been soldered and has cooled, slide the heat-shrink tubing down over it, and use a heat gun to shrink it in place.

• Repeat for the other end of the wire, then for any other broken wires.

***

I don’t do work like this often, so I proceeded slowly and broke the work into two sessions. I also ignored advice on BMW forums to cut and splice all the wires (meaning including the ones that aren’t broken) to keep them all the same length. The solder melted easily on the new spliced-in sections, but not on the 20-year-old stripped-off wire ends that I was trying to reattach. Using flux and having it carry the solder into the joints was essential to making good soldered connections.

With the wire splicing complete, I gently closed the trunk and curled my hand under the lid to trigger the rubber-padded release button.

Pop!

I then did the same from inside the car.

Pop!

And yes, the trunk light went on.

Lastly, I stuffed the wires back inside the now-slit rubber sheath, wrapped it in the stick-to-itself cloth tape that wraps old BMW wiring harnesses, and fit the sheath back in place. I still need to seal up the still-slit rubber boot with some adhesive or tape.

The next time I drove the car, I got the cherry on the sundae of the repair—when I started the car, for the first time in the eight years I’ve owned it, the “trunk open” message didn’t appear.

So it wasn’t the “quick hit-and-run” repair I’d envisioned, but it was still extremely satisfying. The wiring repair cost me two additional repair sessions, but no money.

And yes, I’m as curious as you are if that actuator I replaced was, um, actually bad. Hey, 42 bucks is 42 bucks.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The easy repair that got hard: Fixing broken wires inside a harness appeared first on Hagerty Media.

As I wrote last month, I sold the 2008 Chevy 3500 Duramax diesel truck with the utility body on it. This was the truck that my old engineering job bought new in 2008, that had been our work vehicle during the years when my field geophysics career wound down, and that I purchased from the company for a song after the build had closed. By then the truck was largely forgotten about, and it became a rodent-infested mess.

Before I bought it, I had employee-favor-level use of the truck for years. I borrowed it to move my kids in and out of college, and towed cars with it multiple times. So my ownership of it, while extremely useful, wasn’t really that much more than a karmic extension of the access I already had anyway, but it became my financial responsibility to repair and maintain it—in other words, paying for what I’d previously been getting for free. But, yes, it was very convenient having the truck in my driveway instead of needing to drive 20 miles to where it was stored, and that was a godsend when my sister and I were emptying our mother’s house prior to sale and a seemingly endless stream of items needed to be delivered to other relatives or donated.

But let’s talk about towing cars. For many years, I was a serial user of beat-up high-mileage Suburbans. Their main utility was to take the family on the big annual Nantucket beach vacation and be able to drive on sand to the prime fishing spots at Smith Point and Great Point. The realization that I could also use the ’Burbs to tow cars home dawned on me slowly, but it was life-changing when it came. So, for a time, towing cars with the still-owned-by-work-truck was only when I was between Suburbans.

The utility of being prepared to tow a car you’re interested in buying isn’t just the original Bring a Trailer paradigm, where the car is a dead, needy, well-priced project, nor is it the more recent Bring a Trailer paradigm where the car is ungodly expensive and too mint and low-mileage to do something so banal as actually driving it home. No, the big advantage of having a tow setup is twofold. First, you can strike quickly and show unmistakable intent, purpose, and confidence—nothing says “I am here to do business and can end your Craigslist / Facebook Marketplace nightmare of deadbeats and no-shows right freaking now” than rolling into the driveway with a truck and a trailer. But second, it makes it so you don’t need to rely on anyone but yourself, another arrow in the quiver of the whole car-buyer-as-lone-wolf thing. My wonderful wife certainly has driven me to dozens of car pick-ups over the decades and would continue to do so if asked, but there’s an ineffable sense of independence that comes from doing it all by yourself. To paraphrase Carson McCullers, the truck and trailer owner is a lonely hunter.

Plus, there’s the distance part of the calculation. As I said a few weeks ago, if a car is an hour away, it’s easy enough to just drive there, check it out, decide if you want to buy it, and if you do, come back with either a second driver or a truck and a trailer. If a car is hundreds of miles away, however,  it really makes sense to go there prepared to do it all in one trip and not have to rope your spouse into giving up a Saturday to drive you back there to pick it up. Plus, loading the car onto a trailer removes the often legally gray issue of driving it home without registration and insurance (in Massachusetts, the legality of temporarily slapping another plate on the car requires a set of circumstances so thin as to be nearly impossible outside of trading a car in at a dealership). Unfortunately, I’ve never owned a trailer and thus needed to go to U-Haul and rent and return an auto transporter, so whether it was with the Suburban or the borrowed Silverado or the owned Silverado, the idea that I could drop everything and simply walk out to the driveway and drive off and bag dead cheap desirable cars never really materialized into reality.

But just because I didn’t wind up using the truck that way didn’t obviate the constant feeling that I might, or that I should. During the two-and-a-half years I owned the truck, the amount of time I spent online looking at cars was obsessive, compulsive, and unhealthy—a step change from previous years where it was merely excessive. Granted, the fact that I’m self-employed, work from home, and nearly all my income comes from writing tends to plant me in front of the computer in a quasi-professional mode for much of the day, and there’s a thin line between banging out content for my paying gigs versus time spent on social media, where I’m less verbose but perhaps even more entertaining. The point is that buying the truck and having it in the driveway seemed to kick what was already a high-OCD car-searching habit into overdrive, injecting methamphetamine straight into my automotive brain, but it was justifiable because the acts of searching online—for reference material for something I was writing, finding ridiculous cars I could make fun of on my Facebook page, and endlessly pounding the interwebs looking for that elusive rust-free Series 2 Fiat 124 Sport Coupe (or whatever I was infatuated with at the time)—all blended into one another.

When I wrote that I sold the truck but kept the little Winnebago Rialta RV (the VW Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body on it), a number of folks asked me why I didn’t instead sell the Rialta, keep the truck, and buy a travel trailer and a car-towing trailer if that’s what I kept saying I needed? It’s a reasonable question. Some of it was driveway space (I simply don’t have the room here in Newton, Massachusetts, for trailers), but the larger part is that my wife and I like the little 21-foot Rialta. We like the fact that it’s closer to an old-school VW camper than to a real RV, and we appreciate the ability to drive and park it nearly anywhere. We’ve used it mainly to do a few days at a time at the beach. We’ve never done any real long-haul RVing in it. So thinking of using the truck to tow a well-appointed travel trailer was like opening up a blade on a Swiss Army knife that you never really have any intention of using.

Going back to the Suburban for a bit, you’d think that owning both the truck and the Rialta, I’d have covered all the bases of what the ’Burb did in a single vehicle, but that’s not accurate. I owned the Suburbans because I could fit nine people, coolers, a Coleman grill, chairs, plus boogie boards, fishing rods, a surfboard, and a windsurfer strapped to the roof and drive it all onto soft sand. ’Burbs did this astonishingly well. The RV certainly can’t do this, and it’s a forced fit for the truck. I had one geophysical survey in 2011 looking for unexploded ordnance on Martha’s Vineyard’s Cape Pogue where I had to put the truck on sand, requiring me to deflate the duallie rear tires, and it was not exactly convenient. And as a people-mover, the truck’s extended cab could fit five, but that was all. The RV appears cavernous inside, but it only has seat belts for three (the two front seats and a single seat in the coach).

Looking at it cargo-wise, obviously nothing came close to the truck with its 8-foot bed and utility body. But once my mother’s house was sold, the window of its use largely passed. Still, I kept thinking that, if I sold it, how would I snag a Honda tracked snow blower being sold way below market value in August? But then summer passed. And besides, there was no way to get a snowblower into the back without ramps, and I didn’t own them. Then I realized that if I was going to need to rent a little trailer to move a snowblower, I could use the Rialta, as that’s just about all its trailer hitch can handle.

I laughed when, two days after I sold the truck, my oldest son asked me about driving 80 miles each way to Springfield to buy a mattress, bed frame, drawers, and a nightstand. Although the Rialta has a full-time queen-sized bed inside, all that space has to be accessed through the small side door (that big rear window isn’t on a hatch and doesn’t open up). The Rialta did swallow the bed, but it had to be forced down its throat.

Of course, towing-wise, while the Suburbans were capable of hauling home a car on a U-Haul trailer, the Silverado with its Duramax diesel could’ve easily towed a ramp truck with five Suburbans on it across the country, and the fact that it was such massive overkill for the pedestrian tasks I subjected it to was one of the reasons I let it go. The final time I used the truck was when my wife said that a friend of hers was getting rid of all of her tomato grow boxes and related supplies. Maire Anne grows tomatoes on the garage roof and, like me when I see a well-priced car or guitar, wanted to pounce before someone else grabbed the goods. She wasn’t sure if she could squeeze it all into her little Honda Fit hatchback, so we took the truck. Hauling tomato boxes was one final example of what massive overkill this vehicle—which my old job had bought to tow a 32-foot trailer cross country—was for this kind of leafy-suburb errand-running.

But with all that rationalization of why I should let it go, immediately after I sold the truck I felt viscerally hobbled. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I found a cool must-buy vehicle, I was at a significant disadvantage, as I couldn’t show up in the hunt-and-kill position of power. Never mind the fact that I had the opportunity in August to do exactly that with a well-priced TVR 2500M on Long Island and bailed on the trip, a decision I now regret (in my defense, my wife’s recent cardiac surgery and the impending sale of my mother’s house were significant pre-occupying factors).

For a few weeks after the sale, I put a lot of effort into looking for a replacement truck. Rather than another Suburban, I gravitated toward Honda Ridgelines, as the fact that they’re unibody vehicles (the same platform as the Odyssey minivan and the Pilot SUV, and front-wheel drive until they need four-wheel-drive traction) with a significantly more car-like ride was appealing to someone who has infrequent towing needs. Used Ridgelines are as thick as flies on poo, and 200K examples show up as low as $3500, but as with any vehicle, finding one that’s at the knee of the curve of cost and mileage, and appears to be in decent condition, and is nearby (since, of course, I no longer have a truck to use to tow home a truck), made it a narrow needle to thread. At some point I had the epiphany that I was spending obsessive time looking for a truck I didn’t really want or need since I sold the last truck because I didn’t really need it. I put the whole matter on the back burner, at least for now.

So, I’m truck-less, in some sense for the first time since 2008. And I’m OK with that.

But if I see an ad that says “1963 Jaguar E-Type ran when parked five years ago no rust stored indoors sold house must go $5300 to the first one who shows up with truck and trailer,” hooo boy, am I going to be pissed.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Living without the truck appeared first on Hagerty Media.

My arrest-me-Signal-Red 1973 BMW E9 3.0CSi coupe is the unmistakable jewel in the crown of my not-a-collection. I never keep it in my rented more-humid-than-I’d-like storage—it’s always safe and sound in the garage at my house. In addition, I regard it as the best-sorted of any of my vintage cars. So when I needed to take it to BMW CCA Oktoberfest in Warwick, Rhode Island, a scant 70 miles south of my Boston-area home, I didn’t think twice about just checking the oil and the tires, reconnecting the battery, twisting the key, and driving it.

And when I did, the car lurched backwards. I’m lucky it didn’t crash into the back wall of the garage and incur tens of thousands of dollars of sheet metal damage.

I was so jarred by the event that it took me a moment to put the mechanics of it together. The shift lever was in reverse—I’d obviously left it there when I’d backed the car in—but I was certain that I’d stepped on the clutch. Or not? Regardless, the first thing I needed to do was shift it into neutral and try it again.

I couldn’t. The shift lever wouldn’t budge.

Hmmmmn.

The lever was so stuck in reverse that I began to think it might be a linkage issue, but I realized that, when coupled with the fact that the car lurched backward when I was sure I had my foot on the clutch, it was more likely that the clutch was the culprit. By applying an amount of brute force on the shift lever sufficient for me to worry about bending it or the linkage, I eventually popped it out of reverse and into neutral (in retrospect, I should’ve jacked up the back of the car to relieve the twist on the transmission likely being transmitted through the drivetrain). But when I tried rowing it engine-off-clutch-down through the gears, it took far more effort than usual.

I triple-checked that the gearbox was in neutral and I had the clutch pedal depressed (and the brake pedal too as insurance) and again started the car. As expected, it started without trying to take off anywhere, but with the engine running and the clutch depressed, I could not get it into any gear.

Clearly the clutch wasn’t working. But that can mean two very different things. It can mean that there’s a hydraulic or a mechanical failure. Or it can mean that the clutch disc is frozen between the flywheel and the clutch plate. And it’s surprisingly challenging to tell which it is.

Let’s back up (smoothly; no lurching) and enroll in Hack Mechanic Clutch 101 for a moment. The clutches in most manual-transmission cars work in pretty much the same way. The clutch itself has two pieces—the clutch plate and the clutch disc. The disc has a two-sided sacrificial surface made from material that’s not unlike a brake pad or shoe. In the center it has a splined hole through which the transmission input shaft passes. The disc is held against the flywheel by the clutch plate, which like the flywheel has a machined metal surface. The clutch plate assembly is bolted to the flywheel, but when the sprung “fingers” on the back of the clutch are pressed inward, the machined plate surface retracts backward, freeing the disc (I know, it’s counterintuitive).

Separate from but intimately related to the clutch itself is the clutch release mechanism, which consists of the release lever, the sleeve, and the throwout bearing. The throwout bearing is what actually presses against the clutch plate’s fingers. It slides up and down on a cylindrical sleeve inside the transmission bell housing. It’s called a release “bearing” because since the clutch plate is bolted to the flywheel, it and its fingers are always spinning, so in order for something to depress those rotating fingers, it needs to touch them and then spin with them. The throwout bearing is moved fore and aft by the release lever, which may use a see-saw design or a simple forward-throw configuration.

Lastly is the linkage connecting the clutch pedal to the release lever. Although some old cars have purely mechanical clutch linkages, and others—like vintage Volkswagens, Porsches, and my Lotus Europa—have a cable-actuated clutch, most cars have a hydraulic clutch linkage, where a clutch master cylinder behind the pedal is connected to a clutch slave cylinder on or in the bell housing.

Now that we’ve identified the actors, we can start the play. When your foot is off the clutch pedal, the sprung pressure in the clutch plate causes the clutch disc to be sandwiched between the plate and the flywheel, making them essentially a single unit. So as the flywheel turns, the disc turns. The splined fit between the disc and the transmission input shaft causes the shaft to rotate, which in turn sends power to the wheels via whatever gear the transmission is in, or idles in neutral.

When you depress the clutch pedal, that moves a piston in the clutch master cylinder. Fluid under pressure is sent to the clutch slave cylinder, which causes a piston inside it to move, which moves a rod sticking out the end. This pushes the release lever, which in turn slides the throwout bearing along the sleeve. The throwout bearing contacts the fingers on the back of the spinning clutch plate. It presses against them, retracting the machined surface of the plate. This frees the clutch disc. With the disc no longer sandwiched against the flywheel, the spinning engine is no longer coupled to the transmission, allowing the gears to be shifted.

Got it? This concludes Clutch 101. But there will be homework.

A number of things can go wrong with all this. As I’ve written, failed clutch hydraulics are one of the “Big Seven” things that frequently strand a vintage car. A bad clutch slave or clutch master cylinder usually manifests itself as a pedal that goes all the way to the floor, usually accompanied by visible fluid leakage. However, sometimes there’s no leakage and the pedal stills feels fine, but there’s a problem building hydraulic pressure. Other non-hydraulic issues are that the throwout bearing can go bad, sounding like a little lathe inside the bell housing. Or the release mechanism itself can fail, either jamming the pedal or making it floppy, as were the respective cases on two separate occasions with my 1970 Triumph GT6+ 45 years ago—once when the sleeve broke and again when the pivot broke through the release lever (ah, the joy of cars built from recycled WWII metal). And, of course, eventually the clutch disc wears down, resulting in the clutch slipping when power is applied. The clutch can also chatter if it’s contaminated with oil from a leaking rear main engine seal.

But the other thing that can happen on a car that’s been sitting is that the clutch can stick. Just like brake pads and shoes will stick to the rotors and drums if a car isn’t driven, the clutch disc can stick to the flywheel and/or the clutch plate. The standard methods of freeing it are letting the engine run for a while to warm things up, then cranking the starter with the transmission in gear and your foot on the clutch and brake pedals. Or jacking up the back of the car, starting it in gear, revving it up, then having someone drop the jack. Or spraying brake cleaner into the timing inspection hole (at least on BMWs) to try to break the bond of corrosion. I read one very clever solution in an Alfa forum from a guy who had a spare transmission and clutch assembly and figured out exactly where to drill a quarter-inch hole to reach in with a thin screwdriver and tap the surfaces apart, but most of us can’t do that.

I had the “frozen clutch or bad hydraulics” thing happen when my 1972 BMW 2002tii “Louie” was part of an exhibit in the BMW CCA Foundation museum. As the exhibit was ending and I was planning to fly down to pick up the car, the museum staff told me that the car would no longer go into gear when running. As part of sorting out the car just a year prior, I’d replaced both the clutch master and slave cylinders, so my brain automatically checked the “well, it can’t be that” box and I thus assumed the problem must be a frozen clutch, but nonetheless I went down with spare hydraulics just in case. When I got there, the clutch pedal felt fine to me and I saw no evidence of fluid leaking, further reinforcing the diagnosis that the clutch must be stuck. I did everything you’re supposed to do to free it, but it remained stuck. Finally I jacked up the car, put it on stands, crawled under it, had someone depress the clutch pedal, and watched the action of the slave cylinder and the clutch release lever—which is possible because, as per the photo above, on a stock BMW 2002 four-speed gearbox, the release lever protrudes through the side of the bellhousing.

To my surprise, I found that, although the pedal felt just fine, the release lever moved a little, then retreated back, indicating a hydraulic pressure-loss issue. The video of this can be seen here. Was the clutch slave cylinder bad, or was it the master? I didn’t know, so I replaced the year-old slave cylinder first because that was easier. Unfortunately, that didn’t fix it, but replacing the year-old master cylinder did. The correct release lever action can be seen here.

Unfortunately, the transmission in my 3.0CSi is different from that on the 2002—the release lever is wholly contained inside the bellhousing, so you can’t watch it in action. The real lesson from Louie was that if you can’t actually see what the hydraulics are doing, there’s not really a way to tell bad hydraulics from a frozen clutch. You need to try and rule one out as best as you can, and then go down the road of the other and hope that you’re not wrong.

I’ve only had stuck clutches twice before. One was on my Z3 after it sat outside all winter. It freed up fairly easily after I started the car in gear with my feet on the brake and clutch pedals. The other was a long-dead 2002 I’d hauled home. For that one, I had to use the blast-brake-cleaner-down-the-timing-inspection-hole trick to let it seep between the clutch plate, disc, and flywheel and soften the bond of corrosion that had formed. And then start it in gear.

Now, my pampered 3.0CSi certainly hadn’t been sitting out in the elements all winter—it was in my garage and had last been driven just three or four months ago. But it had been a rainy summer, and my garage certainly isn’t a humidity-controlled environment. So I tried cranking the starter with my foot on the clutch and the brake pedal pinned but had no success. I was about to try spraying brake cleaner down the timing inspection hole, but to my amazement, I couldn’t find any in the garage (inconceivable!).

So I had a look at the hydraulics. I jacked up the car, set it on stands, crawled beneath it, and inspected things closely. I saw no sign of fluid leakage. Although there was no way to directly visualize the motion of the release lever, I unbolted the clutch slave from the side of the gearbox, roped one of my kids into service, and had him gently depress the clutch pedal while I pressed the slave cylinder’s rod against the side of the gearbox to simulate the push-back from the clutch’s sprung fingers. I couldn’t find a spec for exactly how far the rod should extend, but it moved about an inch and stayed out as long as the clutch was depressed. Hack Mechanic verdict: There was nothing obviously wrong with the clutch hydraulics.

In the morning, I reattached the slave and set the car back down on the ground. I was about to run out for brake cleaner but thought I’d give another try at cranking the starter. This time I did it with the car in third gear, foot on the clutch, and the brake pedal mashed so hard I thought I might break the back of the Recaro. Mercifully, the clutch broke free. So it was a stuck clutch.

But even though the problem was solved, I couldn’t let go of the idea that there must be some way of telling a frozen clutch from bad hydraulics. I asked the question of two friends of mine, both professional wrenches on vintage European cars. Both offered the same “if it quacks like a duck” diagnostic approaches I’d already followed.

So I thought about it quite a bit. I wondered if there’s a difference between the disc being frozen to the flywheel versus to the clutch plate versus to both. I don’t think there is. The clutch plate is bolted to the flywheel, so the two always rotate together. The disc is always coupled directly to the transmission input shaft via the splines. So whether it’s stuck to one machined surface or the other or both, I think the effect is the same.

Then I wondered if you should be able to feel a stuck clutch as lack of motion in the pedal. Intuitively you’d think you could, as we’re trained to make sure that, during installation, the clutch disc slides smoothly on the transmission input shaft’s splines. Hell, you even put a dab of special lube on the splines to make sure it does. So if the clutch is seized, shouldn’t you feel the disc not sliding?

Surprisingly, no. Once you’ve bench-pressed the transmission upward, positioned the input shaft in the hole in the clutch disc, aligned the two with the precision of lenses on an optical bench, rotated the flange on the back of the transmission to get the splines to mesh, uttered a foul streak of blue language that no matter what you do it’s not going in, prayed to whatever god you believe in, then finally slid the transmission forward and heard that reassuring THOCK that indicates it’s in place, the disc really doesn’t move much on the shaft other than floating slightly away from the flywheel when the clutch is depressed in the same way that brake pads move slightly off a rotor. It should also move slightly closer to the flywheel as the disc wears down. But more to the point, what you feel when you depress the clutch pedal isn’t the disc sliding on the splines—it’s the throwout bearing pushing the clutch fingers and moving the plate backward.

On a closely related note, I’ve heard of a malady where the clutch disc sticks not to the flywheel but to the splines on the transmission shaft. This causes the disc to drag against the flywheel, creating hard shifting until things warm up.

So, no, I don’t think there’s an easy definitive frozen-clutch-versus-hydraulics test. If it happens to you, I’d say do what I did and try to rule out the hydraulics. See if the clutch pedal feels normal. Check if the clutch reservoir has lost any fluid and if the hydraulics are leaking. If the release lever is visible, watch it while someone depresses the clutch pedal. If it’s not, pull out the slave and put the rod under pressure while someone pushes fluid into it. If it passes all those tests, it’s probably a seized clutch. So try to free it. If you can’t despite doing everything, you’re faced with either pulling the transmission to get direct evidence that it’s seized, or replacing the hydraulics even though there’s nothing obviously wrong. Which one do you want to try first? I thought so.

But if anyone knows of a secret test, I’d love to hear it.

And yes, from now on, I won’t simply mash the clutch pedal when I start a car—I’ll shift it to neutral and then mash the clutch pedal.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Frozen clutch or bad hydraulics? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Look at the car in your garage. Now look at a Ford Model T. You’re likely seeing two cars that look nothing alike. Well, at least on the macro level. Get down to eyeballing individual pieces and parts, however, and it won’t take long to spot a few bits that actually look pretty close to the same. Are there really car parts that haven’t changed in over a century of production? No, not really, but there are at some that look like they haven’t. Let’s take a peek at five such pieces.

Tires

Treaded, rubber, and round. Simple right? Not so fast. Tires have advanced in so many ways, but just the highlights are compound and construction. The chemical makeup of the tires we buy today is a complex and artfully crafted mix designed to balance wear, grip, noise, and comfort. Tires 100 years ago were still tube-type and were good—if they stayed round and rolling for an extended period of time. Tire construction went from bias ply, where the bands of reinforcing material under the tread are laid at 45 degrees to each other—on a bias—rather than the modern method of radial construction, which puts the reinforcement into the tire both around the circumference and also from bead to bead. This modern design allows for additional tire flex, which can be tuned to fit various situations.

Windshields

It’s clear and keeps the junk flying up from the road from hitting you and your passengers in the face. Well, at least that is what it did back then. Now, windshields are stronger than ever, clearer than ever, and more advanced than ever. Safety glass of today is something many take for granted, and it is likely because many drivers have never seen what happens to plate glass windows in the event of a crash. Early safety glass was even worse.

Now windshields are embedded with sensors and antennae, along with defroster coils and tint. Yes, it’s still a curved piece of glass, but the similarities end there.

Body panels

The idea of body panels took a while to evolve, as the automobile was a novelty for years prior becoming a near necessity. As cars became more reliable, their styling and larger function gained importance and thus body panels became critical. The flat steel panels were structured with wood beneath them, but now the panels themselves are bent and folded in such ways that they often brace themselves. They are also designed to behave with certain manners in the event of a crash, rather than being built as if they were going to be statically installed on a house.

The skin of a car is still the skin of a car, but now exotic materials are more popular than ever. Early cars had all kinds of crazy stuff for body panels, and to be honest, we are happy that carbon fiber, aluminum, and plastics won out over patent leather and wood.

Drum brakes

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is something many people have learned through experience. The same can be said for OEM carmakers. Drum brakes are not sexy and have their drawbacks but in the grand scheme of things are simple, dependable, cheap to produce, and easy to maintain. Look at vintage cars and you’ll likely see some version of a drum brake. Model A Fords only have three springs per brake backing plate, and the shoes are actuated by a wedge pushing the shoes out in unison.

Modern drum brakes have varying designs that require differing solutions for the one brake shoe over the other, and they are hydraulically actuated with a whole host of springs and levers to incorporate various functions. Are they still drum brakes that function the same? Yes, but once you pull the drum you’d be hard pressed to say they are the same as they have always been.

Shocks

The automobile was born from wagons, and even back when the horsepower came from real horses we knew that solid suspension was a bad idea. Roads were even worse than they are today, and undamped springs can make for a wild ride. The idea of shocks was not something new for cars, but cars really advanced the technology. From lever shocks to the modern tubular design, their function centers around the idea of pushing a fluid through a metered orifice in an effort to slow the motion of the spring or sprung part. What used to be a simple hole has advanced to highly-tunable shim stacks and even electronically adjustable designs that adapt automatically on the fly without the driver even realizing it.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 5 car parts that look the same despite changing dramatically appeared first on Hagerty Media.

My garage is attached to the back corner of my house, as that was the only way to build it and respect the town’s requirement of a four-foot setback from the property line. Its 31- x 17-foot size was the maximum allowable under a different building code that puts a limit on the ratio of the home’s square footage to that of the property. The garage’s low ceiling, which precludes having a real walk-under post lift, is due to the fact that a high ceiling would’ve obstructed the view out the dining room window.

In other words, the garage is a compromise solution that navigated a number of obstacles on its way to fruition. It is a triumph of the good over the perfect. From the suburban streets of Newton, Massachusetts, you don’t see the garage at all. From the backyard, it sticks out like an ovipositor on the butt of a wasp.

Although I love my garage and am blessed to have it, there are a number of issues with it. All access is through a single roll-up door at the front. There’s a double-width roll-up door on the rear side, intended to allow a big hooked J-turn into the garage and put one car cross-wise in the back, but I’ve never used it that way. Instead, even though we didn’t design it for this, I discovered early on that, since most of my vintage cars are short (a BMW 2002 is a little under 14 feet), I can fit two of them straight-in nose-to-tail, obviating the need for the awkward car-crosswise-in-the-rear thing. I back a third car in, do a dog-leg turn, and put it in the left rear of the garage. This fits three cars and leaves an empty space on the front left.

I can and have squeezed a fourth car in there by sliding it sideways on wheel dollies, but \for several reasons I haven’t done so in a few years. It takes a bit of work to pull off the maneuver. The floor slopes slightly toward the back for drainage, which means that a car on roller dollies will tend to drift rearward. To stop it, I have a wooden runner screwed into the floor, but the wheels of the roller dollies jam up against it. And with four cars sardined in there, it becomes difficult to get any serious mechanical work done over the winter, as there’s very little room to move. I know I constantly complain about my warehouse storage in Monson, but since it’s expandable, it’s just easier to cap the number of cars in my garage at three.

What’s clearly missing in the garage is a workbench to act as both a general-purpose table as well as to hold the bench vise, the table-top grinder, the Scotch-Brite wheel, the band saw, and the drill press that all instead sit on my basement floor. Since I don’t have one, when I’ve needed a work surface, I’ve used a fold-up card table that can barely support the cylinder head I’m working on, much less host a bench vise. Because there’s no broad horizontal work surface, the fourth open space on the garage floor becomes a magnet for, well, everything—tools, new parts I’ve bought that are waiting to be installed, things I’m in the middle of rebuilding, etc. And in order to drive the car that’s in the third space, I need to move all of it.

A separate but overlapping issue is the problem of boxes. For a while, the boxes littering the floor were predominantly full of parts I’ve been gifted from people who’d sold their (or their departed family member’s) BMW 2002, but recently also came to include stuff from selling my mother’s house (I mean, how am I supposed to leave boxes of new light bulbs and painting supplies behind?) and selling my truck (I mean, how am I supposed to leave behind all those tools that were in the truck’s utility body from when it was my geophysics field vehicle?). All of this winds up on the floor in the fourth space along with the welder I never use and the floor jacks.

The fundamental problem is that the garage is just a little too small for the way I try to use it (of course, the fact that I’m a tornado of chaos contributes immensely). I’m thrilled that the garage’s dimensions make it possible to fit three cars and squeeze in four, but it’s challenging to put a workbench inside. There’s zero room along the right wall. There’s barely room along the back part of the left wall. I do have a small parts washer there, but the car in the third space comes within 18 inches of it; I doubt I could put a workbench and a chair there. There’s a door to an under-deck storage closet along the front left wall that I don’t want to block. It’s possible that a bench could go in the left rear, behind the third space, but the floor of that area is still full of stuff.

Now, I’ve tried several times before to do a better job of organizing the garage, but I always lose momentum and fall back to doing the bare minimum that’s necessary to do whatever it was that I really needed to do, which is usually clearing the floor so I can simply get the third car out of the back space and drive it. I decided to take another run at it, this time with the realistic goal of doing enough organization and configuration to keep the fourth space clear so I can pull the car in the third space in and out without making it a floor-clearing project each time, as well as enabling the possibility of a workbench in the back.

If I haven’t made it clear, stuff on the floor is death to efficient use of space not only because it takes up the space on the floor, not only because you can’t drive over it, but because it essentially occupies all the space above it as well—unless it’s stackable crates, little else can be put on top of it. The obvious solution is shelving. Over the decades, I’ve shelved most of the available wall space in both the basement and the garage. Most of this is wire shelving on wall-mounted brackets and standards, but a few years ago I bought two rolling wire shelving units. There’s a sliding door on the left wall that opens up under the back porch where I have big items like the engine hoist stored. By having rolling shelves instead of wall-mounted ones, it allows the possibility (the slim possibility, but the possibility nevertheless) of rolling the shelves out of the way in case I need access to these items. I ordered two more of these rolling shelf units on Amazon and tackled the boxes of junk that were in the way of where I wanted to put them.

Getting boxes out of the way of where you want to put shelving is definitely a case of things getting much worse before they get better. One by one, I disgorged the contents of boxes (many of which had rotted bottoms) directly onto the garage floor, threw things out, tossed other things in the scrap metal pile, combined like with like, put them in new boxes, and put them up on the shelves.

But boy, it’s easy to get sidetracked. I accumulated all the BMW 2002 shift platforms and related transmission and clutch parts left over from when I’d performed five-speed conversions in several cars. I had four shift platforms. Did I need to keep all of them? No. The platform itself is not a rare part that wears out; only the detachable rubber bushings do, and they’re readily available. Still, someone might one to shorten it for a five-speed conversion. Should I give them away? I’ve done a lot of this in the past, and it takes time. I fought my tendency for analysis/paralysis and instead kept two of the good ones and threw the two grimy ones in the scrap metal heap.

Then I went through the same thing with old cooling system parts. I had seven 2002 thermostats. Granted, there’s some value in saving these things when a) thermostats go bad far less often than we’ve been led to believe, and b) the old ones may be of higher quality than the new ones, but seven? I picked two OE-manufacturer thermostats with low opening temperatures and recycled the rest.

Another issue has been my tendency to keep donated parts together in their original boxes. I’ve been the beneficiary of a number of BMW 2002 parts hoards over the years, several donated by the spouses of their deceased husbands. One fellow was fastidious in his accumulation and bagging of small interior parts. Another had a fine assortment of barely-used under-hood ignition parts that were replaced with higher-performance versions. I’ve kept these collections intact for years, but the time had come to organize by functionality rather than by donor.

If I may continue for a moment longer on the issue of boxes, if the floor is death, boxes are death, too. The problem with boxes is that while they’re necessary for organization and storage, their very presence legitimizes their contents. Just because a box is clearly labeled “Old BMW 2002 ignition parts” doesn’t mean that it isn’t all just junk. A time comes when it’s necessary to dump the contents on the floor, give everything a good hard look, separate the wheat from the chaff, pitch the junk, and redistribute the good stuff. I was particularly merciless with the box of parts from the rebuild of the Lotus Europa’s engine. I mean, used rings, bearings, valves, and timing chain? Out it all went. The edge of silliness of this curve was encountered when I found a box that contained the cleaned-out contents of a car before I sold it. It wasn’t even my car—this was a favor I did for a friend six years ago. So this wasn’t even my stuff. I shredded the old registration and threw the rest away.

In addition to shelving, I have an endless need for drawers and find the plastic multi-drawer storage units very handy. The tall seven-drawer units were a little more expensive on Amazon than I expected, but I found someone on Facebook Marketplace who has a side hustle selling used furniture and delivered one to my house for $45. A few hours and a bunch of plastic take-out containers later, and I had a decently-organized set of drawers with metal and plastic trim clips, small interior screws, zip ties, gaskets, rubber seals and grommets, BMW 2002tii fuel injection parts, and the like.

One of the toughest things to deal with has been the tools, as I’ve accumulated redundant sets of them from different sources. The most recent motherlode came from the work truck I just sold—full SAE and metric toolboxes, as well as several ratchet sets in small fold-open plastic cases, were left in it when the truck was largely abandoned when the company I worked for closed the building where it was based. At some point I need to do the full-on anal-retentive organization of, for example, grouping all the ½-inch tall metric sockets together on a socket rail, repeating for all the different socket sizes and types, making one high-quality master tool box, one house tool box, and two road tool boxes, and then taking whatever’s left over down to my local used tool store to sell for pennies on the dollar. But in the meantime, I simply needed this stuff off the floor. My brain and my search patterns were in wire-shelving-mode, so what I found on Amazon was a three-tier wire shelf cart for $80. It does the job. But much of online purchases hinges on using the correct search terms, and in retrospect, looking at “tool carts” would’ve yielded a better solution. Still, several tool boxes and big stuff like sledgehammers and crowbars are now off the ground and roll-able.

As the garage got way more organized and the fourth space was cleared, the need for a table or workbench made itself known in a funny way. There’s a tall wastebasket in the garage that I’d filled with trash but hadn’t emptied yet. At one point, while dealing with empty boxes I’d slated for recycling, a shallow cardboard tray that originally held a case of carbonated water wound up sitting on top of the wastebasket. Before I knew what had happened, it filled up with stuff—hats, flashlights, T-shirts, a metal box filled with old keys—that I wasn’t sure what to do with. In other words, I began using the first available horizontal surface as a table. “No!” I said to myself. I recycled the box and found longer-term homes for these things or threw them out. As I continued dealing with smaller groupings of stuff—a few electrical components, some molding clips—they naturally found their way onto … other horizonal surfaces, like the tops of toolboxes. The point is that whether you have a table or a workbench or not, one is going to invent itself because the need is never going to go away.

So, no, I don’t have a workbench in the garage yet, but I do now have everything off the floor in the fourth space. I won’t be storing another car in it, but that wasn’t the goal—the goal was making it so I can easily drive the car into space #3. I’m there. Regarding the workbench, I can see light at the end of the tunnel. Once I clean out the stuff behind space #3, I can put a workbench back there.

The only problem is … I sold the truck that I would’ve used to drag home an inexpensive, used work bench.

Damn. Why don’t I ever think these things through?

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post My garage needs a workbench, but where? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Halloween is right around the corner, and any number of scary ghouls and goblins will soon be at your door asking for sweet treats. The holiday got us thinking about DIY experiences that don’t leave our minds so easily. A few projects still keep us up at night, and the thought of repeating certain procedures can provoke a cold sweat. We aren’t saying cars are cursed or possessed—we’ll leave that to the movies—but we all know at least a few vehicles for which it was hard to prove otherwise.

From losing tools to stripping threads, here are the scariest scenarios we’ve encountered in the garage.

Using a spring compressor

The McPherson-strut front suspension design has a lot going for it, like easy installation and cost-effectiveness. Sadly, changing springs or dampers in McPherson struts can be a terror. A spring this powerful is essentially a pipe bomb, and cheap or home-fabricated spring compressors that underestimate the spring’s stored tension are legitimately dangerous. Just the thought of hearing a creak from the spring compressor and seeing a spring shoot off at full force gives us nightmares that would make most horror flicks look tame.

Discovering rust under a paint bubble

You would never pick at a scab, but sometimes you can’t help but give a light poke at that discolored spot on the quarter panel of your classic. Next thing you know, your finger has promoted inner fender to the prestigious status of outer fender. The damage only gets worse from that moment: Iron oxide takes over, a pestilence that no spooky campfire story could ever conjure. Rust is a threat that hangs over everything in your garage. You’ll start seeing the brown-ish red everywhere, until even your mixed drink seems to include red rum. It can drive a man insane, that rust.

Losing a bolt

We all know what it’s like when the bolt or tool that you just had in your hand is—poof—gone. A portal to the fifth dimension opened, swallowing that one small but critical piece of your project. The thought of where that piece of hardware went will haunt you. I’m not scared of Casper, but I am terrified of where that piston pin circlip might have gone.

Stripping a bolt

At last, final assembly. Your workbench is covered in perfectly clean, ready-to-assemble parts. You painstakingly kept all the threads of all your fasteners clean, but somehow a hard-to-reach bolt that only requires 35 foot-pounds of torque just … won’t … tighten. All of a sudden, “righty-tighty, left-loosey” becomes “righty loosey, lefty also loosey.” The split second your wrench meets no resistance, the horrors of dealing with the consequences come into sharp focus.

Burning through paint

The paint on a vehicle can get really shiny if you remove enough of it to eliminate scratches, scrapes, and other imperfections. However, the mere thought of burning through the paint of their beloved classics has kept thousands of owners from so much as looking at an electric polisher. Thanks to modern compounds, this automotive horror story no longer needs to strike fear in your heart. Random-orbit polishers and diminishing-grit compounds allow you to be gentler with paint than ever before, even if the process requires a certain touch and understanding, and the fear of burn-through lingers in the room like a ghost.

What would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments below.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 5 scary scenarios DIYers face appeared first on Hagerty Media.

One of the best parts of any project is the investigation into who did what to the hulk that has found its way into your garage. Some folks obsess over and pay a premium for service records that lay out a perfectly airtight timeline of what parts were tickled and when, but I’m not one of them, and I cannot pass up a sub-$1000 running motorcycle. Case in point: a 1998 Honda XR200 that I picked up during a short detour on a long trip.

The bike is for a friend, but he wanted me to go through it before he took possession. That meant tearing the poor thing down pretty far—not to bare frame, but awful close. What we knew: A ticking noise was emanating from the engine. It was also down on compression. Finally, and most disturbingly, at least two different types of silicone sealant were squeezing out from underneath the camshaft cover.

Thus began the investigation.

The cam cover of a ’98 XR200 can only be removed once the engine is out of the frame. I learned this by a failed attempt to remove the cover followed by a (ever-humbling) check of the shop manual. The engine-out service explained the loose chassis hardware we had noticed when we picked up the bike. Interestingly, none of the bolts were stripped: The person who last worked on this bike had a decent understanding of what was going on and access to decent tools. Both good signs.

With the motor out of the frame, it was time to dig deeper. The camshaft and rocker arms were in great shape. No signs of valve or valve spring issues. Once the cylinder came off, the bad news came into focus. The cylinder and piston had experienced a type of torrid love affair that left both pieces scarred. The piston was marred, and the cylinder’s cross-section was more of an oval than a circle. That piston knocking around was likely the source of the tick, but I had yet to discover what the last person did or why they gave up. No signs of new gaskets or parts. Did the previous owner open this engine up and decide it wasn’t worth their time? That scenario would be ideal, but unlikely.

While discussing the workings of a rocker system over a cold one with fellow editor Nate Petroelje, a glimmer of shiny metal caught my eye. The automatic decompression shaft looked funny. Close inspection revealed that someone had used a grinder to remove the nub that acts on the rocker arm for the exhaust valve, the part that opens the exhaust valve slightly to make the engine easier to kickstart. The actions of the previous owner became clear: They had removed the engine, pulled the cam cover, ground off that nub thinking it was causing the tick, and reassembled everything only to find the tick was still there. Naturally, they then listed the bike on Marketplace.

The previous owner was sort of correct to suspect the decompression shaft, but the frequency of the noise had thrown them off-scent of the real problem. Having heard the bike run, even if only for 6 or 8 seconds, I knew the tick occurred at crankshaft speed, not camshaft speed. The cam spins at half speed relative to the crank, a difference that makes the process of diagnosing a noise a little easier if you can hone in on its tempo. The agricultural nature of these XR engines means they idle at just 800 rpm or so, which sounds very different than 400 rpm. In the case of this sad bike, that was the difference between 13 knocks a second and six knocks a second. Trouble here was that the piston seemed to be knocking around only during the power stroke, so the tick sounded like it was happening at half-engine speed—the same frequency as a noise in the valvetrain.

The previous owner went after the first thing they saw: the automatic decompression shaft. Was their decision due to lack of understanding, lack of care, or just laziness? We may never know, but what we do know is that this engine will get fixed correctly and will likely live a long and happy existence.

With any project, the goal of an investigation is not only to find out what is wrong with the machine, but also to understand what someone in the past has done to try and fix the problem—or to make it worse. Piecing together the history of what has failed and which parts aided in their own destruction will give you a better understanding of a system and of the life that particular machine lived prior to your ownership. Without knowing the full extent of the previous mechanic’s hackery, installing any new or refurbished parts is just rolling the dice.

The local damage to this Honda is bad, but generally my friend has a solid start on a project bike. We are two parts orders and a handful of evenings from a trail-ready machine. Well, we will also need a new-to-us cylinder and take a trip to the machine shop, but that is all relatively small potatoes for the sort of projects that come across my bench.

Repair and restoration can be as complicated or simple as you want, but if you want trustworthy results that you can be proud of, you must often be decidedly critical of just about every component you come in contact with. Asking questions like, “How did that get damaged?” and “What else would get hurt if that failed?” will soak up time and money, but you will also gain more knowledge and, in the end, success. Plus, who doesn’t love solving a good mystery?

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post When combustion crimes call for internal investigation appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If there are two things we all agree on, they are the following: We can always save one more project vehicle, and we need one more tool. I had been telling myself I was going to stop purchasing shop equipment for a bit, but when strolling an estate sale with the missus, I spotted a chance to upgrade my shop’s DIY capabilities for pennies on the dollar. I’d be crazy to not jump on the opportunity, right?

Glad we agree.

It was a grungy portable bandsaw, sitting on the floor in the back room of a house. Initially, it didn’t grab me. The price tag said $100 and there are enough projects already sitting on my workbench that could use that cash. I walked out to see what must-have items my wife had found (a 100-foot garden hose, for the record), a green sign by the cash box caught my eye: today, everything was 25% off. Tomorrow, a deeper discount. A tiny tinge of fear—I could be missing out—poked at that soft part of my brain. I walked back to the portaband saw.

On the surface, a bandsaw is not hugely useful when you work primarily on classic cars and vintage motorcycles. You’re more likely to need one if you travel to job sites that require you to frequently cut pipe or large cable. A bandsaw is not particularly precise, and this model’s handheld nature requires that the workpiece be properly sized, even before cutting, so both of your hands are free to control the saw, rather than hold the piece to be cut. I rarely do large-scale work, but I’m not the only person who has limited space and more dreams than he knows what to do with.

Enter the portable bandsaw table. Swag Offroad makes the model I chose: a few chunks of hefty metal plate bent into the right shapes to bolt to each other and to my workbench. This table makes a portable bandsaw quite un-portable, but raises its utility by an extreme amount.

Of course, I had to rebuild the saw before mounting it to the table, because this tool had clearly worked hard for a few years before I rescued it from the concrete floor. Fresh guides, a couple blades, and cleaning of the armature and brushes–the latter of which were in surprisingly good shape—along with a double-checking of the wiring, and this tool was ready to go to work.

The table bolted together easily, though my saw is an older model than Swag Offroad had in mind when they made this table, and thus I had to use a little bit of fabrication and vision to mount mine properly. Finally, it was time to solve the most important problem: Making the saw run with no hand operation. A zip-tie around the trigger switch proved the concept worked, but it meant that the saw was running long before and after I made a cut. I wasn’t willing to use plug and un-plug as an on/off control, either.

Luckily there are a bunch of cable-operated pedals that use the factory trigger switch. A foot pedal allowed me to leave the saw plugged in and ready and, when I am ready to cut, I just press the foot switch. For safety, I store the switch on the side of the workbench where it can’t accidentally be tripped over. I also still unplug the saw.

For a tool I didn’t think I really needed, this bandsaw sure has been useful. It helped cut all the metal angle to build the table on which it now lives, along with some small feet for a couple engines. The saw is cleaner and quicker than an angle grinder, and the results are better, too. All-in, I have around $300 into this new tool—including some spare blades—and I know this investment will open doors in the future. The only drawback is the throat depth: The saw can only handle material that is less than 4 and 3/4 inches deep. Still plenty big to handle exhaust tubing for any of my projects, or the tubing for a new subframe or frame repair on my motorcycles.

This once-portable bandsaw was a fun project that brought a ton of function into my shop. Did I need more tools? Apparently so. Or maybe my conviction was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post How one tool went from estate-sale find to shop-bench staple appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I recently sold my 29,000-mile 2008 Chevy Silverado 3500HD dually Duramax diesel (a.k.a., the sort-of formerly mouse-infested truck). Like most automotive moves. I thought it through very carefully. It was not an easy decision.

I had a long and curious history with the truck. It was my former work vehicle when I used to do field geophysics (detection of unexploded shells on old military training ranges). The company I worked for bought it new in 2008 and spec’d it to tow a 32-foot trailer containing a geophysical survey system (a small Gator-like UTV that towed what looked like a carbon fiber boat trailer loaded of metal detectors and high-resolution GPS). We ordered the truck with a utility body on it to house tools and parts and provide a work space if need be. As I was the one who designed the geophysical equipment and kept it running, I needed to be in the field with it. Initially we had a guy with a commercial driver’s license (CDL) who drove the truck for us, but I eventually took the helm. I was never able to do the block-traffic-and-back-up-to-the-loading-dock-in-one-try thing, but then again I never needed to. Nearly all the driving was interstates and very rural areas.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the geophysical work went away by 2013, leaving the truck with only 22,000 miles on it. The company closed the big building I worked in and relocated my group to much smaller industrial space. We parked the truck and trailer in the parking lot, but it turned out the landlord didn’t have permits needed from the city for overnight parking of commercial vehicles. This kicked off a repeating annual cycle of my needing to find new digs for the truck and trailer, then getting kicked out of it when the landlord needed the lot space. Around that time, the company I worked for split in two, its paperwork was never transferred to the half of the company the truck actually belonged to, and I was the only one who paid attention to its annual insurance, registration, and inspection needs.

In the meantime, my work load at my old engineering job spiraled down to near nothing. I left in 2015 and became a full-time automotive writer but remained a consulting employee and had an unofficial quid pro quo with them regarding the truck. I kept it legal for them by taking it in for its annual Massachusetts inspections and renewing its registration. In return, they let me use it for occasional errand-running, such as moving my kids into and out of college and hauling cars, as these uses also helped keep the truck exercised. I sometimes emptied the 32-foot trailer of geophysical equipment and strapped a car inside, but it was way more trailer than I wanted to be towing, and I usually opted for renting a U-Haul auto transporter (open trailer) instead.

When there was only one employee left in the small industrial space, the company closed it and liquidated the equipment inside. Since the truck and trailer were parked elsewhere, they were spared the liquidation axe. The truck, incredibly, had only 28,000 miles on it. However, it had been sitting at the edge of a parking lot that backed onto a wooded area, and by that time, mice had gotten into it and done a lot of damage, infesting the headliner and the heater box.

Knowing the large amount of work necessary to abate the gag-inducing smell, I sent the company photographs of the rodent damage and made them an insultingly-low offer for the truck. The combination of the fact that I appeared to be the only one left who knew exactly what the truck was, the old paperwork snafu over which part of the company owned it, and the 100-percent-accurate photos of the mouse damage worked to my favor. It took a few months, but eventually I was the owner of a running, driving, rust-free, dent-free, 28,000-mile 2008 Silverado 3500HD dually Duramax diesel with a utility body for a practically-stole-it price. Except, of course, for the fact that it smelled like that episode of Mythbusters where they put a dead pig in a Corvette and left it in a cargo trailer for six months to see if anyone would still buy it.

I wrote several pieces about the abatement of the mouse damage. Serious trigger warning: I don’t recommend that you click on any of the following links unless you have a strong stomach. The first piece was on the purchase of the truck and the overview of the rodent problem. The second dealt specifically with replacing the headliner (I found a used headliner at a junkyard in Woonsocket Rhode Island, about 45 minutes south of me for $150,  drove there in my little Winnebago Rialta RV, and picked it up).

The third piece detailed my efforts at cleaning out the contaminated heater box without taking the quoted 20 hours needed to pull the dash to get at it. Instead, I bought another heater box to use as a test mule, figured out where to drill inspection and cleaning holes, snaked in an inspection camera, and located and removed the nest and mouse carcass. This was never going to be as complete a decontamination as would be achieved with the box removed and disassembled, but with repeated flushing with enzyme-based cleaner, occasional running of an ozone generator, and lots of fresh air and sun, the smell abated to the point where my wife—she of the exquisitely sensitive nose—would ride with me with the windows up and the A/C on. The heat was a big more fragrant, but it was easily tolerable.

With the bouquet of the abattoir largely gone, and with the truck’s original dry-rotted tires replaced with a not-inexpensive set of Michelin LTX Defenders, I was a man with a big bad and presumably highly-reliable truck. Naturally I assumed that I’d become a towing madman, dragging home any number of sweet, new, hunted-and-killed automotive prizes. At a minimum, I knew that my long-time storage of five cars in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, was ending, and that I’d need to move them to a new home, possibly in winter.

Make no mistake, it was incredibly handy owning a truck like this. Some friends dissed the utility body, but when it was pouring rain and I needed to move my niece into her new apartment, it was fabulous. During the period when my sister and I were cleaning out our mother’s house prior to its sale, the truck was in near-constant use. My sister would say, “Ariana wants the sofa and chairs, and Elena wants the swing set,” and my sons and I and the truck would make it happen. Plus, the body’s shelves and cabinets swallowed multitudes of car parts given to me by estates of deceased motorheads.

But with regard to the truck being an enabler to me buying and dragging home every stupid car that caught my eye, it just didn’t turn out like I expected. There were a few reasons why.

Understand that, in addition to having access to the Silverado before I bought it, I’ve owned six Suburbans, so I’m familiar with both the flexibility and limitations of owning a vehicle you can tow a car with. I’ve generally followed the framework that, on the short-haul end, buying a long-dead car with flat tires and seized wheels 10 miles away is usually worth throwing a hundred bucks to someone on Craigslist moonlighting with their employer’s roll-back flatbed, and on the long-haul end, it’s hard to make the economics of towing a car a thousand miles work, but for a running vehicle a few hours from home, sure, rent the U-Haul auto transporter for 60 bucks, show up, drive the car onto it, and drag it back. But the problem is that a) U-Haul is sometimes sold out of auto transporters the weekend you need one, and b) the logistics of going to U-Haul, waiting in line, hooking the thing up, then having to off-load the car and return the trailer by the end of the day adds a surprising number of hours to the exercise, enough that one begins to think that, unless they can own a truck and a trailer (for which I simply don’t have the room), the car-towing utility of the truck alone is less than you’d think.

In the two-and-a-half years since I bought the truck, I’ve used it exactly three times to tow cars. And none of those were new purchases. Two were moving my own cars between storage areas. The other was taking delivery of a widow’s car that I was helping her sell.

But even if I did suddenly increase my use of the truck to buy cars, the dually Duramax would still be massive overkill. This is the kind of truck you use to tow a ramp trailer with six cars on it. I have no need for a tow monster like this. I could do occasional short-run towing with just about anything.

A few other things factored into my thought process. One was that, despite my history with the truck, I didn’t really enjoy driving it. I often say that part of the joy of owning a vintage car is simply using it to run errands—it turns the mundane into an event. The truck was the opposite. If I needed to run out on a Sunday morning to buy milk and the truck was at the top of the driveway and I took it, I’d think, “This is a completely ridiculous vehicle to be driving.” Between its length, its horrible turning radius, and the extra width and poor visibility imparted by the utility body, it certainly wasn’t the vehicle of choice for parallel parking or tight parking lots.

Another was that, although its oodles of ground clearance provided ample access when I needed to replace its stolen catalytic converter, in general the truck’s size and weight was daunting to this guy whose soft spot is 1500- to 3000-pound 1970s European cars. I didn’t own a floor jack that I felt safe using to lift it, and even if I did, thinking about dealing with the torque on the lug nuts and the size and the weight of the wheels felt like stretching what my 65-year-old body could comfortably do. I realized that, when the time came for pads and rotors or front-end work, I’d probably need to pay someone else. I’d be happy to do that if there was a good reason for me to own the vehicle, but the more I thought about it, there wasn’t.

Lastly, despite the truck’s low mileage potentially buying me trouble-free towing, there was the specter that if and when it needed work on the injection pump or the injectors replaced, I’d cry.

So I thought about it carefully. With the sale of my mother’s house, the truck’s window of usefulness had passed. If my wife and I resurrected our desire to find a car-centric property out in the country, the truck would again be a godsend. Was that more likely or less likely to happen within the next year? The answer seemed to be the latter.

As far as value, when I bought the 28,000-mile 2008 Diesel Emission Fluid (DEF)-free Silverado with the utility body during the pandemic, I had folks telling me that supply chain issues made it so you couldn’t buy a new truck like this if you wanted to, so if I could make the mouse smell livable, it was worth crazy money. I’d only put a thousand miles on it, and between the purchase price, Massachusetts taxes and fees, the new Michelins, the lift pump, and some other odds and ends, I only had seven grand in it.

So I cleaned it, shot it, wrote up a highly-detailed ad documenting the low mileage and fully disclosing the rodent history, and put the truck on eBay with a $25,000 opening price, a $37,500 Buy It Now price, and a $32,500 reserve. I linked to the eBay ad on both Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist. I had no bids and only a handful of interested messages. I began to think that if I had to sell it for less than $25K, I’d just keep it until it needed work.

But then I was contacted by a local guy up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who owns a concrete and gravel company and has two other Duramax diesel work trucks. He was the kind of buyer you just wanted to hug—messaged in complete sentences, showed up exactly when he said he would, followed through on every part of the process with great communication. When he test-drove it, we rolled up the windows and turned on the A/C, then the heat. I nervously awaited the odor verdict. He shrugged and said, “Smells like every other work truck I’ve ever owned.” A few days later he offered me 30 grand for it. I realized I’d be out of my tree not to take it. The deal is done.

The truck is still in my driveway, but money and papers have been exchanged. The buyer is coming this weekend to drive it off to a life of real labor. Maybe it’ll love that. Or maybe it’ll think, “Remember that guy who rescued us and de-moused us and then just left us alone in his driveway most of the time? That was awesome.”

We’ll see whether or not I buy something better suited to my habits. For now, the little Winnebago Rialta RV has enough interior room to move things, provided they’ll fit through the narrow side door, but it has zero towing capability.

I’ll miss the truck, but what I’ll miss more is the idea that I could use it whenever I needed it. I think I may have liked that part even more before I actually owned it.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post My Silverado 3500HD has found a new home, hopefully one that’s mouse-free appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It’s that time of year, and I don’t mean decorative gourd season. No, it’s the time when the DIY devout start casting hooks into the depths of the project car pond hoping to reel in the right winter undertaking. While every project is unique, a few universal truths span them all, regardless of how the vehicle appears in those crunchy, dimly lit photos you’re seeing in a Marketplace ad. To that end, these are the top five things your own project will need, regardless of what it is or what shape it’s in. You can’t say we didn’t warn you.

Patience

Someone else’s project—or worse, abandoned project—is going to require a massive amount of mental gymnastics to figure out what they were thinking when taking it apart, storing pieces, or putting it back together. Occasionally that isn’t difficult, but even then it takes a lot of patience to sort through what someone else has done and try to decide if their process is acceptable to you. Do you trust the previous person based on what you see? Do you think they cleaned and assembled things to the same standard you would? Are you willing to risk it? Taking the time to wrestle with that question will be crucial to how you proceed.

Cleaning

Whether it’s a venture someone else started or one that was never gotten to, project cars rarely get tender loving care when stored. Dust, dirt, and moisture combine to create some of the grungiest substances known to man. Just getting a project car home can leave pounds of dirt and debris on a trailer, and that’s before any real cleaning has started. We often get caught up in the excitement of the big tasks involved with bringing a project car back to life, but the reality is less glamorous, and a lot of time—more than you think—is going to be spent scrubbing and just generally making things un-grimy.

Tires

We don’t know what it is about project cars, but they seem always to be sitting on the worst rubber we’ve seen since the last project car that rolled into the shop. Tires are expensive, so they’re often the last thing a project car will get. This means that when you buy a project, there’s a good chance its tires aren’t even round anymore, let alone safe to drive on. Even just sitting on dry-rotted rubber can be dangerous, as blowouts can occur. Check the date code just to be sure, but in general every project car will need fresh rubber before it ever reaches the driving stage of the process.

Fluids

Another item that isn’t worth gambling on is anything that flows. Fuel, brake fluid, coolant, transmission fluid, and even differential oil are all items you should change by default. Sure, there’s a chance that what’s in there is serviceable, but more than likely your project car has questionable service records—if any at all. Mentally reset the clock on all the regular changes by knocking them out all at once. This also forces you to look at a couple intimate areas of a car, which more than likely will tell you a lot about what else you might need to do.

“Un-screwing”

No, I’m not talking about backing out threaded fasteners here. I’m talking about winding back previous repairs. Project cars often live at the bottom of their value curve before appreciation picks up and owners begin to see the potential. That means repairs done while the car was worth little may be incomplete, or, well, crude. Un-screwing them could be as simple as cleaning up shoddy wiring, or as in depth as rust repair from sitting neglected in a field. If you are buying the cheapest example of anything, it likely has been screwed with by someone who didn’t know or didn’t care. You will have to deal with that.

Project cars are incredibly rewarding to see through. We know a lot of you readers have worked on a project or twelve over the years and these five things are likely not the only universal truths. What have you found to be true? Leave a comment below.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 5 things every project car purchase will need appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If you’re tooling around close to home in a vintage car, breakdowns aren’t really that big of a deal. Your Hagerty or AAA coverage will probably tow the car home for free or close enough, and you can fix it there. But if you’re road-tripping a car, breakdowns are a much bigger deal. Even if the cause is something you think you can fix, you really don’t want to be in a situation where you need to be under a car when trucks are whipping past only 10 feet away. Anything you know is wrong with a car that is likely to put it in the breakdown lane really should be fixed before a trip.

That having been said, breakdowns happen, and when the cause is obvious and easily addressable, roadside repairs get made. To be clear, whenever possible, don’t literally repair it roadside—if you’re on the highway, limp the car to an exit and find a parking lot instead. Cooling system and oil pressure issues, however, carry a special urgency, as failure to act immediately can result in a cracked head or a lunched engine.

When a roadside repair is ingenious or difficult, it turns into the stuff of legend. I’ve heard stories about broken fan belts in Volkswagens being addressed (or undressed) by convincing a female companion to surrender her panty hose and fashioning a belt out of it (likely a relationship-cementing or a relationship-ending event). One South African friend told me a story about engine failure in a remote area and a weeks-long process of walking miles and hitchhiking while carrying a cylinder head to and from a machine shop. And I witnessed two good friends of mine replace a BMW 2002’s blown head gasket in a hotel parking lot in under an hour and a half.

Now, nothing I’ve done approaches these feats. But after 47 years of wrenching, these are the roadside repairs that stand out above the usual wiring-up of hanging exhausts, reseated distributor caps, “your alternator won’t charge without excitation current from the battery warning light” fixes, and getting a car to start by tapping on the positive battery clamp, the starter, or the electric fuel pump, then going “Ayyyy” like Fonzie.

1. Water pump failure in the Triumph GT6+

In high school, I had been a bicycle guy—riding bikes, fixing bikes, pulling bikes out of the trash and rejuvenating them with parts from other bikes. The summer before college, I was planning on cycling cross-country, which scared the bejesus out of my mother. She blatantly bribed me by offering to buy me a car. I took the bribe and bought the then-six-year-old 1970 Triumph GT6+, easily the worst car I’ve ever owned.

The first of many failures occurred when the car overheated in the hill country north of Amherst, Massachusetts. I limped it to that night’s destination, a friend’s father’s house. I didn’t know much about cars, but knowing bikes, to me the car was just another mechanical system. I could see that the part where water was streaming out had a pulley and a belt on it, and deduced that it was the water pump. I made a few phone calls, found a shop in nearby Hadley that had one, hitchhiked there, and bought it … and the gasket … and the sealant … and the antifreeze.

My friend’s father had enough tools for me to do the job. I had my first taste of the joy of getting myself out of trouble. There were other more devastating mechanical failures to come, and of course the requisite Lucas electrical system problems, but if anything is ground zero for me becoming The Hack Mechanic, it was this.

2. Points closing up in the VW Bus

In early January 1982, my then-girlfriend and now-wife Maire Anne and I moved from Boston down to Austin, Texas, in her rotted 1971 VW Bus with no heat. After surviving an ice storm in Pennsylvania, we finally made it to warmer climes, but somewhere in Arkansas, the bus lost power and sputtered into the breakdown lane. As the de-facto mechanic of my girlfriend’s car, I’d read John Muir’s classic How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step-By-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot cover-to-cover. This was my first “it’s almost always the points” experience—due to pitting on the point faces and wear in the little nylon block that runs on the distributor shaft, the point gap had closed up until it no longer triggered the coil. I pulled the points, filed them, did the trick of gapping them with a matchbook cover (which is about the 0.016-inch needed), and voila. I think this is why Maire Anne later married me.

3. Fixing the 2800CS in the middle of a busy intersection

In 1988, I looked at two BMW 2800CS E9 coupes from a salvage yard north of Boston. One was a wrecked picked-over parts car, but the other surprised me by being rusty but whole, and starting and running. I bought them and decided to drive the good one home, use it as a winter beater, and part it out the following spring (I had two other E9 coupes). A few days later, Maire Anne drove me over to the junkyard in our 1983 Volvo 245GLT wagon. I slapped a plate from my daily driver on the 2800CS, jump-started its doornail-dead battery with the Volvo (incredibly foolish—I should’ve brought a fully-charged battery from another car instead), verified that no fluid was gushing out from under the engine compartment, and off we went. Through traffic. At rush hour. Ah, youth. When I was trying to get through the very busy intersection of Rt. 28 and Memorial Drive, I didn’t feed enough gas coming off the clutch, and the car stalled. Since the battery was dead, there was no re-starting it.

So, there I am in the middle of a city intersection at rush hour in a dead, rusty, uninsured, unregistered old car that looked like Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill II when she escaped from being buried alive. With it nearly impossible to position the Volvo nose-to-nose to the 2800CS to jump it, I motioned Maire Anne to drive the Volvo to the curb. I ran over, popped open the Volvo’s hood, yanked out its battery (also foolish, as doing so on a running car risks blowing the diodes in the alternator, but necessary), wrapped the positive battery cable in a glove so it wouldn’t short to ground, said to Maire Anne, “Whatever you do, don’t stall,” ran into the intersection with the Volvo’s battery, threw it in the 2800, started it, and drove home. Certainly not one of my smarter moves, but a good story.

4. Reconnecting the half-axle on the Vanagon

Before I began my serial relationship with Suburbans, I had Vanagons. They were weird cars but cavernous inside. I think I went through half a dozen of them before we finally bought the Toyota Previa, which also was weird but was more reliable. When I bought the first Vanagon, the clutch was slipping badly. I dropped the engine (very similar to the old VW busses—support it on blocks, unbolt the bumper, unbolt the engine, roll the bus forward) and replaced the clutch. A few days later, my sister needed to borrow the Vanagon to pick up a piece of furniture. That afternoon, I got a call from her from a payphone (this was pre-cell-phone days) saying that the Vanagon began making a loud rumble, then very loud whacking sounds came from the back.

She and the car were a few miles away. I shot over there with my tools and found that one end of one of the half-axles was flopping in the breeze. Apparently I hadn’t torqued down the ring of Allen-head bolts holding it to the flange on the transaxle. I crawled under the car, tightened things up, and sent my sister on her way. Some 35 years later, she will still sometimes needle me, “Remember when the axle fell off the Vanagon you leant me?” I, of course, will correct her and say, “It wasn’t ‘the axle.’ It was one of the half-axles. And it didn’t fall off—one end just got loose. And I came immediately and tightened it back up, didn’t I?” The funny thing is that, looking back on it, I can’t remember why I had to detach the half-axles at all. Maybe there was some reason why I needed to pull the engine and transaxle together.

5. Unadjustable fan belt on a 635CSi

I had a 1985 BMW 635CSi that had been gifted to me by my son’s girlfriend’s father. He was mainly a Mercedes guy, and his Mercedes mechanic couldn’t figure out why the 635 wouldn’t start. It turned out to simply be a bad distributor cap. That, an air flow meter, and new injectors got the car running well, but it was by no means well-sorted, and the young man who bought it from me surprised by saying that he wanted to join my convoy on the 2000-mile round trip to The Vintage in Asheville. I warned him that this was risky. He said that he understood that I wasn’t his traveling mechanic, but I couldn’t help but feel a sense of responsibility for both him and the car. Sure enough, on the drive down, the car’s temperature began creeping up and eventually headed for the red zone.

We took the next exit. I found that the belt was slipping even though there was no audible squealing, and the slippage resulted in the water pump not continuously spinning. I tried to adjust the belt, but the bolt in the adjuster track was at the end of the slot, indicating either that the belt was wrong to begin with or had stretched. I was afraid that, if he drove the car hot, he’d crack the head, and I was about to search for the nearest auto parts store when I noticed that next door to the convenience store we’d pulled into was a machine shop where we were able to borrow a round file. I removed the bracket, and Jordan (“the kid”) did the hard work extending the adjustment slot (hey, it was his car). It worked like a charm. We later found a shorter belt, but never needed to install it.

6. Cracked fan on a Euro 635CSi

I was driving my ’79 Euro 635CSi on the return trip from The Vintage—the same trip where I fixed the kid’s unadjustable fan belt. During a rest stop, I opened up the hood to check the oil and was stunned to see that two blades had flown off the belt-driven cooling fan. The 635CSi’s six-cylinder M30 engine was used in BMWs from 1968 through ’95, but it went through three different water pump, fan clutch, and fan configurations, and new parts are no longer available for anything other than the final configuration. I put out the call to friends on Facebook, but unless someone had an old fan, I’d need to replace not just the fan but also update the water pump, the fan clutch, and the pulley.

I removed the fan lest it lose another blade and slice open a coolant hose. This required removing the radiator, which in turn required dumping the coolant. Fortunately I was able to send one of my road trip companions to a nearby Autozone for a catch basin and a few gallons of antifreeze. Driving without a belt-driven cooling fan is usually fine when cruising at highway speeds, but if there’s not enough air flow over the radiator at low speeds or in traffic, it can send temperatures into the red and crack the head. I made a quick wiring mod that allowed me to run the electric pusher fan that’s in front of the A/C condenser without turning on the A/C, and let the car idle in the parking lot to test it. The temperature seemed to top out at about 3/4 of the way up the gauge, so I felt pretty good about making a run for it.

In the meantime, a friend about 150 miles north and on the way home messaged me that he had every part to do the full water pump/clutch/fan/pulley upgrade. We made it to his garage without incident, where I installed the newer-style cooling components. The car’s cooling system was fine until…

7. Leaky heater hose on the same car

A few years later, again on the way to The Vintage and driving the same ’79 Euro 635CSi, I had another cooling system issue. The irony was that, having experienced cooling system issues the last time I road-tripped the car, I wanted to be certain everything was copasetic, so I inspected the cooling system. I found a heater hose that was obviously ballooned and soft. The hose was listed as no longer available from BMW, but I found one as new old stock (NOS) on eBay. I clicked and bought it, but wasn’t certain it would arrive in time, so I hunted around on my parts shelves for a replacement. I found what appeared to be a perfectly good used heater hose. It was clearly better than the ballooned one in the car, so I installed it.

When the NOS hose arrived, I tossed it in the trunk as a spare. On the way to The Vintage, the car’s temp crept up, but did so slowly enough that I thought it was just due to the outside temperature increasing as we headed south, combined with the car rolling up and down the Blue Ridge mountains, but when it tickled the red, I pulled over. I-81 is one of the most heavily trucked routes in the country, so I made it a point to get the car as far off the breakdown lane as I could. Sure enough, the engine was peeing coolant … out the hose I’d just replaced.

Fortunately, I had the NOS hose in the trunk. While I was waiting for the engine to cool down, I sent my travel companions for antifreeze, at which we all had a serious déjà vu, as the same thing happened with the car and the same people three years prior. It was yet another reminder how much easier these things are when you’re not trying to act like a lone wolf.

8. High beam stalk disintegrates on the Merritt Parkway

The Merritt Parkway is a windy two-lane road north of New York City with a lot of elevation changes. When I was younger, I used to love the Merritt for that reason, but in my dotage I find it stressful due to the 85-mph traffic, the sudden squeezing of two lanes down to one due to construction, the lack of illumination at night, and the repeated experience of coming over one of the rises and having to jam on the brakes due to the sudden sea of red lights. As such, I usually avoid it, but sometimes I’ll just do whatever Waze says, and if it takes me via the Merritt, so be it. Such was the case on one of my trips to The Vintage in a 2002tii.

It was night. Traffic was light to moderate, so there was a lot of toggling the stalk between low and high beams. During one such flick, the stalk fell apart in my hand. What’s the big deal, you might say? Did it fail in the low or high beam position? That was the problem. Neither—my headlights went completely out. With the Merritt Parkway’s lack of lighting, I was abruptly plunged into darkness. I slowed down while fumbling with the stalk to see if I could restore lighting. Fortunately I found one fragile position where the lights came back on, but they went out if I deviated in the slightest. I drove very carefully that way—one hand on the wheel, the other on the stalk—until I came to a rest area. On road trips, I always pack a roll of wire, a variety of connectors, and a crimping tool, so I had no question that, if necessary, I would wire the lights directly to the fuse box, but I thought that I’d first try fixing the stalk. I took the upper and lower panels off the steering column to expose the stalks and found that the potted metal tabs holding the Bakelite back of the stalk in place had broken off.

I carefully put the stalk back together, held it together with zip ties, re-attached it, and tested it. It held. For the rest of the trip, I flicked the stalk very carefully lest it fall apart again, but it’s now eight years later, and those zip ties are still in place.

9. J-B Welding a cracked head

I’d say that I’m saving the best for last, but I already wrote about the time that I J-B Welded a cracked cylinder head in a lot of detail here. It almost doesn’t count as a roadside repair, as it didn’t technically fail on the road, and as it certainly wasn’t fixed roadside—I was in a first-class repair shop with the advice of a seen-it-all mechanic—but it was still enormously satisfying to stop the dripping of oil out a crack at the top of the head onto the exhaust manifold using J-B Weld and be driving home a few hours later.

How about you folks? What was your favorite roadside repair? Wipers pulled back and forth with rope? Throttle controlled with a hand-yanked cable? Tell me what you’ve got.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 9 roadside repairs that tested my DIY limits appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I had hoped to write about the sale of my truck this week, but events have not yet played out. So instead I’m going to give you my odd history with automotive sound systems. Note that in 2017 I wrote a five-part series for Hagerty on the history of obsolete automotive audio (here are links to part 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), but this will be far more personal.

When I was growing up on Long Island in the 1960s, my father had a monophonic hi-fi sound system in the living room with a Heathkit AA13 amp that he’d built (he was an electrical engineer), a Garrard turntable, a Lafayette tuner, and a single AR-4 speaker. While he was alive, it was used mainly to play Broadway soundtracks. The standard ’60s stuff … you know—Fiddler on the Roof, Man of La Mancha, The Fantasticks, Camelot. When I was nine years old, I remember asking him what the bass and the treble knobs did. He explained and twisted them for me to demonstrate, but I couldn’t hear their effect. Of course, the soundtrack of Camelot didn’t exactly have the snap or the frequency range of, say, Paul McCartney’s bass and George Harrison’s sitar on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and I have no recollection of rock and roll like that finding its way via the tuner into the house to educate me. Likewise, if there was a radio in my parents’ 1963 Ford Fairlane, I have no recollection of it pumping scratchy music into the Long Island air. To be clear, it wasn’t as if my father clamped down on music in any way. The lack of happenin’ tunes in the Siegel ancestral household to grab me and make me pay attention to audio was just a generational thing.

After my father passed, my mother bought ’69 Plymouth Satellite. My earliest recollection of listening to music in a car is hearing Cousin Brucie on WABC spin songs on the AM radio in the Satellite. Perhaps it was the fact that the Satellite was the first family car with air conditioning, allowing windows-up driving that didn’t drown out the tunes. Whatever the reason, I have sharp clear memories of my sister and I fighting for control of the radio dial and hearing songs as disparate as Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky,” and Desmond Dekker’s “Israelites.” Toto, I don’t think we’re in Camelot anymore.

After we moved up to Amherst, Massachusetts, I briefly worked in a stereo store when I was in the 8th grade. In addition to being the place I first saw a Lotus Europa, it’s where I developed an understanding of audio. If someone was interested in a pair of big expensive speakers, the store’s owner would crank Emerson Lake and Palmer’s “Lucky Man.” The combination of the jangly twin acoustic guitars, the crisp snare crack, the woofy electric bass, and the thunderous 36.71 Hz low D synthesizer note at the end of the song literally moved product.

A few years later, when I was in high school, I learned to drive in the Satellite, but when the car’s repair bills mounted, and when the Arab oil embargo hit in 1974 causing gas prices to spike, my mother went shopping for a small car. I, who had been bitten by the BMW 2002 bug as a 13-year-old when a 2002-owning college student lived with us for the summer, begged her to buy one, but they were too pricey, so she bought a brand-new ’74 Fiat 128 two-door instead. It was a stripped car with no radio and no A/C, but it had a four-speed standard transmission. My mother taught me how to drive a stick, and as soon as I got my license, I had fairly free run of the Fiat. In return, I pretended it was a 2002 and beat on it mercilessly.

Having a driver’s license and a car with four-on-the-floor was awesome, but one thing was missing—tunes. I begged my mother to let me install a sound system in the Fiat. I think she gave me a $20 budget. Presaging the Hack Mechanic that I would become, I bought a used monophonic FM radio, hung it from the underside of the dash with furniture brackets and drywall screws, and laid the no-longer-used AR-4 speaker from my father’s sound system on the back seat. The car had no tach, but there was so much ignition interference on the radio that you could estimate engine rpm from the whine. I didn’t care. I was driving a stick with tunes. I was in absolute heaven.

I bought the 1970 Triumph GT6+ the summer of ’76 after I graduated high school. The previous owner had stuffed both an 8-track player and a cassette player into that tiny interior (the cassette in the console, the 8-track hanging down from the left under-dash). When I bought it, the car came with two 8-track tapes. In the glove box was Eagles Greatest Hits, which I think was a legislatively mandated requirement for any car in 1976, along with ridiculously large bumpers and crushing levels of hastily-integrated emission controls. But the album that was already queued up in the 8-track player was Gary Wright’s Dream Weaver. When I drove the car home after the purchase, the song “Love is Alive” began cranking over the car’s decent aftermarket sound system. I’m not sure that any other piece of music roots me so completely to an automotive-specific time and place. When Gary Wright passed away in early September, I went back and listened to “Love is Alive,” and confirmed that a) it’s still a killer song, and b) it still puts my 18-year-old butt right back into the GT6’s seat. The summer of 1978, a few months before I sold the Triumph, The Cars’ debut album broke on the radio, and like Gary Wright, I can’t hear “Just What I Needed” (or anything else off that album) without imagining myself in the car.

Fast-forward to winter 1981. When my then-girlfriend Maire Anne and I were preparing to move down to Austin, Texas (her job running an animal lab at Harvard had been transferred there), outfitting her 1971 VW Bus with tunes for the four-day drive was a necessity. My ex-boss—the guy who’d had the 2002 when I was in junior high school—gifted us a Fosgate Punch 100-watt power amp he’d pulled out of a car before selling it. I, who had no job waiting for me in Austin, spent most of my remaining cash on a Craig “Road-Rated” cassette deck with a pair of RCA output jacks to feed the Punch power amp. For speakers, I continued the fine tradition I’d begun with placing my father’s AR-4 on the Fiat’s back seat and used my two massive ESS AMT9s home stereo speakers. I installed them in the back of the bus (hey, we had to move them anyway, right?) and put a plywood board and a mattress on top of them so one of us could sleep while the other one was driving. When I showed this system to friends, the uniform response was “You’ve got to be kidding me,” only they didn’t say “kidding.” You could’ve faced the speakers backward and used the music as propulsion.

Once we were settled in Austin and I bought my first project BMW 2002, I mounted in it the Craig tape deck, the Fosgate power amp, and a pair of ADS 200s (speakers in little Kleenex-box-sized metal die-cast boxes) that I’d bought at a pawn shop. When I first drove the revived car with its freshly-rebuilt transmission, brand-new Pirelli P3 tires, and killer stereo through the Texas hill country—winding it up, shifting the no-longer-crunching transmission through the gears, cornering on the new rubber, and listening to The Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” jumping off a fresh Maxell UDXLII tape—I was the happiest guy on the planet. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever felt that my needs in life were so completely satisfied.

The ADS 200s had two versions—standard home bookshelf speakers and versions that had threaded holes for brackets meant to be mounted on a car’s back deck. These were the bookshelf versions, so there was no obvious mounting method. I found that they wedged nicely on the back deck under the rear windshield and didn’t move around while driving, but they were also highly visible and thus likely to be stolen, so I took a couple of ¼-inch guitar-style plugs and jacks, installed a jack panel on the back deck, wired it to the power amp, and made the speakers un-pluggable so they could be removed and put in the trunk. It was my first of several steps toward non-permanent stereo installations. Of course, as BMW informally stood for “Break My Window” because of both stereo theft as well as theft of the entire car, that’s the way the industry was moving anyway.

When we moved back to Boston, one of the 2002 parts cars I bought had a high-dollar sound system with an Alpine deck, an ADS power amp, and a pair of ADS 300i flush-mount speakers. This system found its way into several cars, including my ’73 E9 3.0CSi, with the Alpine in a slide-mount-removable “Benzi Box.” Although I didn’t mutilate the door panels by cutting holes for speakers, I did cut rectangular holes in the back deck for the 300i speakers and cut a second set of holes in the rear seat’s kick panel for a pair of subwoofers, decisions that are now commonly regarded as an act of cruelty against a vintage car.

As part of replacing the console when I retrofitted air conditioning into the E9 in 2000, I swapped out the Alpine cassette deck for a Pioneer CD player. Although I specifically tried to find a deck with a very simple design (that is, no Star Trek The Motion Picture graphics), it still clearly looked like it teleported in from the wrong millennium. Surprisingly but perhaps mercifully, I can’t find a single photo of the system in the car, a cosmic indictment of the fact that it wasn’t supposed to be there. I didn’t really use it that much, as there was something about the placement of the ADS 300i speakers in the back deck that set up an unpleasant resonance. It probably could’ve been tuned out with proper equalization, but I wound up removing the 300is and installing them into another car.

As the number of cars multiplied, I moved away from direct installations in favor of portable systems that I could throw in a car before a road trip. Initially I used a Cambridge Soundworks PC Works system with two small satellite speakers and a small, powered subwoofer. As the name implies, it was meant for use with a desktop computer, but its advantages were that a) you could plug in an aux cable from your iPod (and later your phone), b) it sounded surprisingly good, c) the powered subwoofer had a 12-volt jack that you could power directly off the car’s cigarette lighter socket, and d) for the $30 a used system cost you, if it got stolen from the car, who cared?

Once I went down the Cambridge Soundworks rabbit hole, I found the then-way-cool but now-laughably-clunky Cambridge Soundworks Model 12 that had a small, old-school stereo amplifier and two removable satellite speakers inside a little road case that also held an integral subwoofer. Like the PC Works system, the Model 12 runs off a cigarette lighter, but it sounds much better. When I found one of these locally for $150, I jumped at it. I used it for a few road trips, jamming the case with the sub behind the driver’s seat, sticking the satellites to the back deck with Velcro and balancing the little amp on the transmission hump. It sounded great, but it wasn’t really a very good solution, as it was a bit too valuable for the “go ahead and steal me” approach of its PC Works brother, and the pack-up and re-deploy time to pull it in and out of the car was non-trivial.

Because the Pioneer CD player in the E9 was too old to have an aux port, for a while when I was annually road-tripping the E9 coupe to The Vintage in Asheville, North Carolina, I resurrected the ADS Power Plate amp that’s still mounted in the trunk, fed it music directly from my phone via an aux-to-RCA adapter, and tried the old Fiat / VW Bus / BMW 2002 approach of pumping the sound into stereo speakers like the ADS 200s. However, over the years I found the high-volume levels needed to overcome the wind noise in the vintage cars fatiguing and began the road-trip in thought-provoking silence instead. The exception is my 2003 E39 530i— compared with the vintage cars, it’s very quiet, and its bone-stock sound system is astonishingly good.

Of course, with vintage cars, what the market values is the original in-dash radio. I’m responsible for the violence committed against my E9 in the name of tunes, but in my defense, two of my BMW 2002s have never had their interiors cut up for a sound system and are still wearing their original functional Blaupunkt mono FM units, and those things will only change over my dead body. I’ll sometimes twiddle the tuner knob just for the novelty of it if I’m at a traffic light running an errand on a Sunday morning. I’m well aware that I could send these units out and have them retrofitted for Bluetooth, but I don’t see the point. It’s doubtful it would make me listen to them more. I have a period-correct mono Blaupunkt for the E9 too. I’ll install it the next time I need to pull apart the console.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that, at age 65, I’m now officially a get-off-my-lawn senior citizen, but my days of in-car audio seem to have naturally ended. These days, when a car with a big woofing sound system rolls by pumping out oodles of Lucky Man-ending bass, I have a reaction where I feel physically ill.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that if, during one of the short periods I have the monophonic Blaupunkt turned on in one of the 2002s, something from Camelot came on, I’d probably enjoy it. My father would be so pleased.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Moving in mono: Cruising to music by any means necessary appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The tools of the automotive trade have remained fairly basic for more do-it-yourself types. Wrenches, hammers, saws, screwdrivers, and a few offshoot variations thereof. How those tools are used and what they are used on has certainly evolved, but for the most part, modern technology has mainly focused on specializing those core tool designs rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

But every so often, there’s a leap in technology that grows to redefine what we garage dwellers are capable of. Not only have prices of tools reached what feels like an all-time low, but some new materials and processes have also come forth and given us the ability to do work better, faster, or safer than ever—all without needing to be a professional with a full shop.

Induction heater

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Heat is a superpower for DIY folks. The more methods at your disposal to add heat to parts and pieces, the better chance you have of never dealing with broken or mangled hardware. The only option used to be heat guns or open flames, but then induction heaters came onto the scene.

The heart of the system is a small controller and a coil of wire. The controller sends a current through the coil and that current creates an electromagnetic field that has the power to heat ferrous metals to red-hot temperatures very quickly and with great precision. No open flame, no heat outside the coil, and safe to touch shortly after heating. It makes for the perfect tight-space solution to heat corroded hardware. The price is still a bit of an investment for most, but this is very much a buy once, cry once tool, as there are no tanks to refill like an oxy-acetylene or propane torch. Just keep in mind that this magical apparatus won’t work on aluminum (or any other non-magnetic) hardware.

Electric Impact wrenches

Impact wrenches have been around for decades, but the compact and powerful modern electric versions are a downright luxury compared to the air hog anchors of years past. No more compressor, air line, or lack of adjustability. These days we have the ability to pick whichever tool brand we prefer and buy a kit with an impact wrench and driver that covers the vast majority of DIY needs.

A 1/2″ impact is lightweight and packable, and some can hit harder than the air impacts of just 10 years ago. Ensuring a battery is charged pales in comparison to the upkeep of a compressor and air lines in a shop, and that’s before you talk cost. Electric impacts make disassembly a breeze and are all but a staple of any home shop these days.

Ultrasonic cleaners

While not required to keep vintage cars and trucks running, effectively cleaning parts is critical to restoration efforts. Ultrasonic cleaners have dropped in price to the point where it finally makes sense for home shops to dedicate space on the workbench for one. I am a recent convert to the ultrasonic world and while there is a learning curve, it is fairly mellow and the tools enable passive cleaning which gives me time to do the tasks in the garage I actually enjoy rather than running copper wire through another carburetor passageway.

This is because ultrasonic cleaners are great for cleaning impossible-to-reach passageways thanks to the way the ultrasonic waves cause bubbles to form and burst on the surface of parts and pieces inside the tub. It creates a light scrubbing action that breaks up deposits and junk. Combined with the right cleaning solution, it is possible to pull nearly ready-to-reassemble parts right from your ultrasonic cleaner.

Insert machine tooling

While most of us lust after having the fabrication superpowers of a knee mill or a lathe in our shop, the footprint and power demands often leave us wanting. Beyond just having the big tool is the need for the skills and tooling to actually complete the processes and create the ideas we have in our heads. That used to mean having the skills and tools to grind your own cutters and tooling, but thanks to affordable insert tooling, it has never been easier to run a mill or lathe in a home shop. Yes, carbide insert tooling really doesn’t show its benefits until it is being run at production speeds and feeds, but it makes for easier setup and roughly the same finished product for most home machinists. This has opened a door for a safer and easier gateway into machining.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 4 modern tools that changed the DIY game appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If you watch too many automotive cable shows and read too many articles on collecting, the mantra that gets beaten into your brain is to buy the best car in the best possible condition, as that’s what’s likely to appreciate the most. Another way this sometimes gets phrased is, “You can’t spend too much—you can only buy too soon.”

That’s all well and fine if you have the disposable income to spring for the best of the best. However, many of us don’t.

One way out of this trap of a surplus of passion and a deficit of funds is to buy a car that doesn’t even attempt to be a shiny lust object and instead is one that proudly wears its age and experience out in the open.

I’m talking about patina.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably aware that patina can be desirable. Battered-looking goods have their own appeal, even apart from the monetary value that untouched originality occasionally brings. That’s why home furnishing stores are full of new cabinets that have that distressed French farmhouse look and why Fender sells a “Time Machine” line—new electric guitars pre-distressed at the factory to simulate decades of stage wear. This “relic-ing” has spread into the car world as well. Some of it may have been kick-started by the rat-rod movement that began in the hot-rod world 30 years ago, where a backlash against the cost of shiny customs resulted in home-built cars with oxidized body panels, no chrome, and steel wheels. Ironically, the term “rat rod” has now morphed into a moniker for any car with an outrageously distressed finish, even if it’s sitting atop expensive oversize alloys.

Yet one of the biggest selling points of patina—the “real” kind, at least—comes down to dollars and sense: Worn cars are usually significantly less expensive than those in excellent condition and a bargain compared with those where every inch of the car has been brought up to like-new standards. This makes it possible for someone of modest means to buy their dream.

I’ll caution, though, that if you go this route, you need to be absolutely honest with yourself and aware of the fact that if you’ll never be happy unless you own a car in condition A, you should buy a car in condition A and not buy one in condition C and try to put it into condition A. Aside from the financial havoc that will likely cause, there’s a very real risk of mucking up the car.

Here’s the deal: A car’s appearance is a synergistic thing where the condition of the paint, the brightwork (the exterior chrome), and the interior all hang together and project a certain image. If you have a well-patinaed car that you want to “restore” (and I use that word in quotes because it means so many different things), you slide down an expensive slippery slope because you need to address all of the items that project that image. If you just paint the car, all the old chrome looks like hell. Replace the bumpers and trim with new, and all the rubber and glass look old. Complete the exterior refurbishment, and the interior shows its age.

It’s much easier—and less expensive—to live with a car where both exterior and interior already have a certain amount of wear on them. Since the car is nowhere near perfect, you’re not constantly chasing perfection because you’re not under the illusion that you’re going to reach it. And, since you’re less worried about dings from driving and parking, you’re more likely to use the car.

For these reasons, I’m a big believer in cars with patina. My 1973 BMW 3.0CSi is the only car I’ve ever had an outer-body restoration done on. All my other vintage cars have some degree of patina. My ’73 2002 and my Bavaria are lightly dinged survivors wearing original paint. The previous owner of my ’72 2002tii sanded off the rust spots and touched them up with doesn’t-quite-match, rattle-can Rust-Oleum. My ’75 2002—known as “Bertha”—has rust spots the size of dinner plates on the hood. My ’74 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special was stored under a tarp in a storage container for over 30 years, which carved some interesting patterns into the dried-out, fragile paint.

Personally, I love the look of surface rust blooms against light-colored paint. It looks so organic—like flaming but done by nature. Of course, there’s a line between patina and just plain beat up, but most of us know that line when we see it. When it’s at its best, patina has the natural sensibility of Monet’s Water Lilies or the inherent rhythm of a Jackson Pollock abstract.

One misnomer about patina is that, since the car is already imperfect, you can drive it in any kind of weather. Any vintage car is inherently rust-prone, and a car that already has exposed patches of surface rust is even more so, so storing it outside, driving it in the rain, or—God forbid—in the snow and salt is likely to cause the rust to explode.

But this does raise the reasonable question of how to protect the surface rust that’s already there and prevent it from spreading or deepening. There are four basic approaches. Be aware that only the last won’t alter the patina’s original, baked-in-the-Arizona-sun look.

The first is to sand down any scaly rust that will fester, then spray clear coat. Make no mistake—this is painting, and as such, the quality is proportional to the amount of preparation. If the surface isn’t clean, the clear coat won’t adhere well and will eventually start to peel (hey, maybe you want peeling clear coat as part of the patina). And presumably you’re clear-coating the entire car, not only the surface-rusty area you want to preserve. If there’s flaking paint in addition to the rust, you can’t just clear-coat over it and trap it like a fly in amber; you’re going to need to sand it. Personally, I’m not a big fan of clear-coating patina, as it seems to me that if you’re going to prep a car and then shoot a hard coat of anything, you might as well go all in and paint it. Plus, “shiny patina” seems like an oxymoron.

The second and widely popular approach is to wipe on an oil-based product such as boiled linseed oil (mainly a wood preservation product) cut with mineral spirits, or Penetrol (an additive for oil-based paints to help lessen brush and roller marks). Both work as rust inhibitors by providing a layer of oily protection and helping the surface to shed water. After treatment, the surface looks wetter, shinier, and darker, which can make both the paint and the rust colors pop more, though all these effects will fade within months, depending on the level of exposure.

Be aware, though, that this approach has downsides. The creeping nature of oil is good for getting into rust pores and inhibiting corrosion, but if in the future you want to have the car painted, it can be difficult to get the surface oil-free. Linseed oil and Penetrol will eventually harden, but until they do, they can be gooey, so don’t wipe them on when the pollen count is high. Even after hardening, they can get tacky on a hot day.

The third approach is to do what you’d do on a car whose paint was simply faded—compound it and wax it. The idea is that the compounding will bring out the shine on the remaining paint, and the wax offers rusted areas some of the same moisture protection and water-shedding as the oil-based products while not penetrating as deeply into the metal and thus not being potentially troublesome if you later wish to paint the car.

After reading the above approaches, you can appreciate that, when you see a heavily patinaed car that’s shiny and whose colors pop like an exotic bird’s plumage, that’s not how it rolled out of the junkyard—work has been done on it to give it that look.

The fourth method is the one I prefer: Don’t touch it. I’d no sooner change the worn look of any of my cars than get plastic surgery on my own scarred and craggy face.

Find an imperfect car and then resist the urge to “fix” it. You’ll smile like an idiot when you drive it on a Sunday instead of bemoaning the fact that you always wanted one but couldn’t afford it.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Can you live with patina? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There’s a lot of automotive information bombarding us from a car’s dashboard, and to some folks, it’s not clear which warnings require immediate attention. A rising temperature gauge should be treated very seriously, as driving “in the red” can easily result in a cracked head. The alternator warning light is a bit less pressing, as depending on the complexity of the car’s electrical system, you can get dozens or hundreds of miles down the road before the battery drains. Lower in priority are things like brake lining, ABS, and traction control warning lights—yes you should fix the underlying problems, but you don’t need to do so in the next five miles. At the bottom of the list are the “check engine light” issues which, on a post-1996 car, are usually caused by minor emission-control-related codes.

With all this information, it’s easy to miss the most important indicator of all—the oil pressure light. Ignore it, and it can very quickly lead to a very expensive BANG! And when, after the tow, you get an estimate for the cost of replacing the lunched engine, you’ll cry.

Because oil is the engine’s lifeblood, nearly every post-Model-A car has an oil pressure warning system of some sort. On a vintage car, it’s usually just a light that’s prominently displayed on the dashboard in or near the other instruments. Part of the ritual of driving an old car is to crack the key to ignition, be certain that the oil pressure light and the alternator light are both illuminated, then start the engine and verify that, in a few seconds, both lights go out. On newer cars, these lights may have receded into a distraction of other warnings, or—gak!—been subsumed into a diagnostic screen.

Note that the oil pressure warning light is not the same as an oil level warning light. Nearly all cars have the former. Some cars have the latter, which typically uses a gas-tank-style float and illuminates when you’re a quart or two low, which is the rough equivalent of the oil level being at the bottom of the dipstick. If your car has an oil level warning light, by all means pay attention to it, and if it comes on, check the oil level as soon as it’s safe to do so and top it up as necessary. But driving a few miles to the next exit when you’re a quart or two low is highly unlikely to kill the engine.

But your oil pressure light is different. It’s more important than any of these other indicators. If it comes on, and if the sensor is doing its job, it’s because oil is no longer flowing inside the engine, which is really, really bad. No oil flow means no lubrication, and metal parts which should be happily slip-sliding against each other will instead begin catastrophically scraping. If the oil pressure light comes on while you’re driving, stop. Now! Right freaking now. Don’t wait for the first exit. OK, yeah, find somewhere safe, but while you’re cherry-picking yourself a spot in the shade, imagine a $15,000 engine replacement bill. Rotate the key off the ignition setting but not so far back that the steering locks, and coast the car safely into the breakdown lane. Seriously. That’s how important it is.

Let’s visualize for a moment how oil flows through an engine so we can pick apart the various reasons the oil pressure light can come on. Every automotive engine has a reservoir of oil, and nearly every one built in the last 90 years has a pump that sucks the oil out and sends it coursing through the engine. That reservoir is usually the oil pan (the “wet sump”) at the bottom of the engine. Some high-performance cars instead have a “dry sump,” but let’s just deal with conventional wet-sump engines.

Oil pumps are usually driven mechanically off the crankshaft or camshaft, either via direct gear-to-gear engagement or a chain drive. (At some point in the 2000s, some manufacturers began using a “wet belt” or “Belt In Oil” / BOI system where a belt inside the oil pan spins the oil pump, but this is a family publication, so I won’t speak of those abominations.) A pick-up tube reaches from the pump to the bottom of the oil pan. As the engine turns, gears inside the pump create suction, drawing oil out of the pan and up into the pump. Oil is sent first to the oil filter. From there it flows under pressure via oil passageways in the block and head that then feed holes in the crank, cam, and connecting rods to lubricate the main bearings, rod bearings, cylinder walls, and valve train components.

The rule of thumb is that oil pumps deliver oil at a little more than 10 psi per thousand engine rpm, so at idle it should be about 10-20 psi, and at 4000 rpm about 40 to 50 psi. Note that oil pressure is affected by oil viscosity (thickness), which in turn is affected by engine temperature—as oil warms up, it thins, which results in lower oil pressure. In addition, on a car with a tired engine, badly-worn crankshaft and rod bearings can allow oil to escape around the bearings instead of just oozing the oil into place. Thus, just as a leak in a garden hose will reduce the pressure of the water flowing out the nozzle, worn bearings can reduce the oil pressure to the rest of the engine, including the pressure sensor. The combination of these two things can create a situation where, when the engine is cold, the oil warning light takes longer to go out, and when the engine reaches operating temperature, the light flickers on and off at idle, or worse, stays on. As long as the light goes out when you rev the engine, this isn’t an acute problem, but it is an indication that the lower-end bearings are badly worn and should be checked.

Then again, a flickering light at idle could simply be an incorrect oil filter. I once bought an inexpensive 1985 BMW 635CSi with 230K miles on it and a flickering oil pressure light at idle. I was resigned that it was engine wear until I changed the oil and found this clearly incompatible too-large filter that had been crushed-to-fit inside the housing. I replaced it with the correct filter, the problem went away, and I shuddered to imagine the mechanism by which the wrong filter had lowered the oil pressure.

If the oil warning light comes on while you’re driving, and you’ve stopped the car somewhere safe, here’s what you do. While full-on failure of the oil pump is pretty rare, it is possible that you really do have no oil pressure.

The light has come on for one of four reasons:

1. There’s no oil pressure because there’s NO OIL!
2. The light is grounding somewhere other than through the sensor.
3. The sensor is bad.
4. There really is a catastrophic loss of oil pressure.

Like everyone whose car died and who insisted it didn’t run out of gas only to find that, yeah, it ran out of gas, the engine being out or extremely low on oil can happen, so first, check the oil level on the dipstick. You’d have to have run the sump nearly dry in order for this to be the cause of the light coming on at even throttle on a level road, but stranger things have happened. I’ve engaged in enthusiastic cornering on exit ramps, had the light come on briefly, and found that I was negligently low on oil. It’s certainly possible that the oil drain plug loosened up and fell out, or you hit a rock and cracked your oil pan, or a return line for an oil cooler ruptured. If any of these is the cause of low oil pressure, I’d expect the dipstick to come up dry. Maybe you can fix the problem roadside, maybe it’s a tow, but at least you’ve found your problem.

If the pan is full of oil, then the light is coming on for one of the following three reasons. For #2 and #3, you get to plumb the design of the oil pressure warning system, so gloriously simple and effective that many cars still use it nearly a hundred years after it debuted. On a vintage car, one terminal of the warning light is fed 12 volts. The other terminal is connected to a terminal of an oil pressure sensor screwed into an oil channel in the engine. The sensor is just a make-or-break switch for the warning light’s ground path. When the engine isn’t spinning and oil isn’t pressing against the sensor, a pair of contacts inside the sensor—one connected to the terminal, the other to the body of the sensor—touch each other, completing the ground path and causing the light to illuminate. But when the engine is running and oil is pumping through the channels, the pressure of the oil forces the contacts apart, breaking the circuit and causing the light to go out. Simple. Functional. Perfect.

So go find your engine’s oil pressure sensor. It usually looks like a big nut with a domed plastic central housing and a single wire connected to it. It may be on the front or the back of the head, or screwed into the block. Inspect it. It’s common for the plastic housing to crack and leak oil, in which case the contacts inside may be compromised.

Now that you’ve found it and know how it works, you can probably figure out how to test it. Pull the wire off, and turn the key to ignition. The oil pressure light should have no path to ground, so the light should be off. If it’s on, then the light is grounding somewhere else—the insulation could’ve rubbed off the wire and it’s grounding against the body of the car.

If the light does go off, then do the other test—ground the wire to the engine or the chassis. The light should come on. If it doesn’t, either the bulb is burned out or there’s a wiring issue.

If the light goes on and off correctly, then you’re down to either #3 or #4—bad sensor or a real oil pressure problem. You have two choices—replace the sensor, or perform a direct measurement of oil pressure with a screw-in gauge. You don’t have a gauge? Don’t feel inadequate. It’s pretty rare that you actually need one. And oil pressure sensors have a variety of threads, so compatibility is an issue (though these days, a $30 kit on Amazon has 10 different adapters).

By all means, procure another sensor (they’re usually cheap) and try it, but if the oil pressure light still doesn’t go out, shut the engine off immediately.

If the oil pressure light comes on while you’re on the road and you have neither a gauge nor a spare sensor, there is a seat-of-the-pants test you can do, and I’ve done it more than once, but you perform it and judge the results at your peril, because if you’re wrong, you’ll blow up your engine.

It’s the “thar she blows” test. Clean around the base of the sensor, then take a big wrench (or, if absolutely necessary, pliers), and unscrew it. Then remove the fat wire from the center of the ignition coil so the engine won’t start. Have someone crank the engine while you hold a wad of paper towels on the hole where the sensor was. If the oil pump is doing its thing, a non-trivial amount of oil should hit the paper towels. If the sensor screws into the side of the head or block, you can catch the oil in a container instead, but if it screws into the top of a flat surface, the oil will shoot straight up, and it gets very messy very quickly if you don’t squelch it with a wad of paper towels.

If you still don’t see any oil coming out the hole, or have any doubt whether enough oil is being pumped, reconnect the coil plug wire and start the car and run it for just a few seconds. Given that the rule of thumb is about 10 psi of oil pressure for every thousand engine rpm, oil should absolutely gush out at idle. If it does, you probably just have a bad sensor (though my inner lawyer tells me to advise you not to drive the car anyway). However, if this engine was just running (that is, if it’s not a priming problem), the light came on, and now nothing comes out, you’re kidding yourself if you think you don’t have a major oil pressure issue.

So, if there’s really no oil pressure, what then?

Oil pumps themselves tend to be incredibly robust precisely because they have to be. When the DIY cost of engine rebuild parts plus the machine shop bill for one of my 50-year-old BMWs was $1500 and an oil pump cost $60, you’d throw in a new oil pump whether it needed it or not, but now, many of these parts are no longer available from the dealer, and there’s no aftermarket source. I’m not a professional mechanic, but on the vintage BMWs on which I work, I’ve never seen the gears inside an oil pump so worn that they won’t pump oil. There’s a spec for clearance between the gear faces and the cover, and the cover can be wet-sanded to meet it.

Folks I know who repair vintage cars professionally say that when they’ve seen oil pressure issues, it’s rarely the pump itself and has instead been due to:

• The pressure relief valve inside the pump being stuck open, so it returns most of the oil to the pan instead of circulating it through the engine.
• The screen at the bottom of the pickup tube being so clogged with 50 years of gunk that it barely sucks oil up into the pump.
• An engine being so worn that it leaves clouds of oil smoke at idle or has very noisy rod bearings.

So, if your oil pressure light comes on in an otherwise fine-running vintage car, yes the odds are that it’s just a bad sensor, but you can’t afford to be wrong about it. If you can, you have way more money than I do.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post What to do when your oil pressure light comes on appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Working on our vintage cars is all but required in order to enjoy them safely. Even if you aren’t taking on big DIY jobs, there is always something that needs a little attention or a double check for safety. And in that process of keeping our cars on the road, there are a few aural indicators that, when our ears are tuned in just right, make the experience that much more pleasurable. Here are six examples.

The crack of a bolt breaking free

After visually inspecting the problem and grabbing a few tools, it’s time to actually get started. Put the wrench on that first bolt, give it some tension, and enjoy that wonderful feeling of cracking loose. Not breaking loose, as that opens a whole different can of emotions, but the crisp release of the clamping force the threads were providing. The following intermittent soft clicking of a ratchet as the handle swings back and forth, bringing that piece of hardware closer and closer to freedom, can be as comforting to the right mind as a gentle rain.

The click of a torque wrench

On the other end of things is reassembly, and the defined snap of a click-type torque wrench might as well be applause to a mechanic’s ears. The reward for doing a good and correct job. If you are more of a beam-type or electronic torque wrench kind of person, I guess it might be the slight click of your elbow or wrist as the at final tension is reached. Sadly, mechanic’s elbow is much more difficult to calibrate and varies wildly based on age and, uh, chassis condition.

The squeal of the floor jack lowering

A lever long enough would move mountains. But two pistons connected by a contained fluid will just as easily move the heavy cars in our garage. There’s just something to be said for picking up your project for the last time and sliding out the jack stands with that horrible clatter, before the soft wheeze of the hydraulic fluid passes through the small relief valve opened by twisting the long metal handle. It’s a whizz that fades in pitch like a sigh until the car is back on the ground, as if the jack is happy to do the lifting but the lowering is somehow beneath its pay grade. Regardless of how that inanimate object feels, the noise signals good news to our ears.

The first start-up

This one is really a flurry of sounds that all happen at once to create an automotive orchestra written in 12 volts and and conducted at roughly 700 rpm. As maestro of our cars, we click the key over to the start contacts, which is met with a flourish of clunks, rotational grinds, and, eventually, the steady thrum of a drum line comprised of pistons that holds tempo while the fan and valvetrain fill in under-noise. It all adds up to a concert everyone came to hear.

The soft clunk that comes with shifting into gear

We might all agree that gated shifters sound great, but I have gated shifter dreams on a Saginaw four-speed budget. Therefore, that soft tink–tink of a gated shifter is left for YouTube videos and those rare occasions in the passenger seat of a car that is very much not mine. But even a Corvair has a distinct shifter sound, despite or because of the six-foot-long rod that connects the shifter to the transmission. It’s the light clunk that comes right before going somewhere. The car’s way of saying “alright, let’s get rolling and go have some fun.”

Even drivers of the two-pedal persuasion get a noise to pair with the gentle rock that comes from sliding an automatic transmission into gear. The hit of the hydraulic pressure connecting input and output via the first-gear clutch pack is unique to each and every car out there, and more than likely we could all pick out our car in a blind test.

The soft plink of a car cooling off after a drive

The reward for a job well done is shutting off the ignition, letting the engine wind to a stop, and then reveling in the mild plinks and pings that come from the shrinking and expanding of different hot metals under the hood. The subtle noises are the reminder that your car is both a machine and a living thing, and it communicates with us audibly if only we take the time to listen to its delightful sounds.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 6 of the best sounds to hear in the garage appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There comes a moment in any automotive project where expectations butt up against reality. Sometimes this occurs early on, when the sheer, terrifying scope of what has to be done stretches out in front of you like an endless sea, floating bonfires of cash glinting like beacons of despair in the distance. More often, I find, that reckoning hits hardest just after reaching a major checkpoint in the build process; it might be the initial turn of the key after an engine has been put back together, that first pass down the quarter-mile, or maybe even the reaction of your family when you finally escape the shop and park your reconstructed ride in the driveway at home.

For the past few years, I’ve been chronicling the transformation of my 1987 Jeep Grand Wagoneer here at Hagerty Media. In that time, I have guided from hidden survivor to restomod daily driver. Each step I’ve taken in that build process—from swapping in an LS engine, to replacing the gearing in the front and rear differentials, to overbuilding the cooling system, installing a hydroboost braking system, and even refurbishing the tape deck—has been with one overarching goal in mind: a cool classic SUV that would both ooze old-school charm and start every single time I needed it to.

There was also, I must admit, a practical application: towing my 1978 Datsun 280Z. I was no longer comfortable driving hundreds of miles to and from the track in my Datsun, especially while enduring the merciless summer heat. Hence the need for a tow rig, which meant adding a list of upgrades to the Grand Wagoneer that went above and beyond what might have been “strictly necessary” for a simple LS swap. All so I could hitch up and drive off into the sunset hauling ancient J-tin on a trailer behind me.

When it came time to do exactly that, I found myself face-to-face with a startling, unexpected situation—one that unveiled something about myself more than it did about the vehicle I was driving.

An Inauspicious Start

In the fall of 2022 I attempted towing with my Jeep Grand Wagoneer. I quickly discovered that the Jeep’s ancient, sagging OEM springs had trouble safely handling an unladen U-Haul trailer, let alone one transporting 2500 pounds of Datsun. By the time I had installed a full set of replacement leafs (and load-leveling airbags at the rear), track season was finished for the year, postponing a true test of the new setup until spring’s thaw.

Once April 2023 rolled around, I was raring to go. I’d spent the winter months fantasizing about how much I’d enjoy rolling down I-91, aiming at my first time trial event of the season at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. I could practically hear the Jeep’s 5.3-liter V-8 bellowing out a joyous bass note through the White Mountains, my Z securely locked into place on an affordable rental trailer of dubious quality.

Before I could even hit the highway on-ramp, the whole trip was nearly cut short. At U-Haul, the clerk wouldn’t let me leave the lot with the trailer due to a malfunctioning right-side blinker on the trailer harness. It took about three hours of detective work with the help of nearby AGM Performance (the shop that had installed the LS under the hood of my Jeep), a burned-out signal box, and several return visits to U-Haul for parts. In the end, a new harness installed under the back bumper satisfied U-Haul’s scrupulous safety mavens.

Trailer in place, I was now significantly late to met my father just on the other side of the Quebec/Vermont border, so I hurried home to load up the car. Because I live in the heart of Montreal and don’t have a long driveway, this task had to be completed street-side. Fortunately there is a school zone right out front, which is almost always free of parked cars for the seven or so Jeep-lengths I needed to line up the Z in front of the ramps.

We began to load up. Then came the second insult of the morning: the sound of screeching metal. A curled lip at the very end of the trailer gouged a valley along the Datsun’s decades-old undercoating and left a tidy pile of sadness just behind the back wheel.

A Shaky Foundation

Leaving aside the Z’s unrelated underbody gouge, there are several reasons why an ’80s Jeep Grand Wagoneer makes for a poor towing platform. Although I had taken care of most of them—the lack of power from the original AMC boat anchor engine, the somewhat sketchy nature of its factory brakes, and the tendency for its hindquarters to “wag-sag” under load—there was little I could do about its most limiting characteristic: short wheelbase.

The wheelbase of the original Grand Wagoneer checks in at 110 inches, or three feet less than what you’d find on a current-model-year pickup truck. As a result, it’s particularly sensitive to tongue weight and to the side-to-side sway of a trailer when traveling at highway speeds. Normally I would be able to make use of a load-distributing hitch to help push some of that tongue mass onto the front axles, but U-Haul trailers do not allow for that option due to the design of their surge brake system, which requires that the neck move freely. The trailers also have the propensity to pile on tongue weight via a loading strap system that requires parking the carried vehicle as close to the front of the deck as possible. Finally, there’s the pesky fact that the trailer, Datsun, and assorted gear on board combined to weigh awfully close to the Grand Wagoneer’s 5000-pound tow rating.

As soon as my fiancée and I cleared the city, it became clear to us that the Jeep was highly sensitive to any trailer movements, which might be caused by rough pavement, changes in speed, or even the lateral gravitational pull of ordinary bends in the road. Each steering input and every tap of the brake pedal invited bad behavior from the train I was conducting; I carefully policed my movements so as not to instigate any more wiggle than I could comfortably control with the Grand Wagoneer’s already nautically vague steering setup.

Once across the border, I stopped to fuel up and add air to the rear bags, increasing pressure from 60 psi to 80 psi (but still leaving 20 pounds of leeway below their theoretical maximum rating). This seemed to help somewhat with the rig’s lapsed adherence to tracking straight, and it allowed me to slightly relax the hyper-vigilant state I had assumed. Still, I watched my side mirrors and tuned in to the twist transmitted to my tuchus for any indication of impending trailer chaos.

With that issue settled to my relative satisfaction, a new, more viscous one emerged.

The 4L60E transmission yoked to my Jeep’s LS-series V-8 contains three forward speeds plus overdrive. To safely tow any appreciable load (especially over mountainous roads) it’s necessary to lock-out OD and stick with third gear, thus avoiding heat build-up and possible damage to the transmission.

The consequence of this situation was a near-constant engine drone from 2700 to 3000 rpm, depending on steepness of the road. While I could suffer the extra-loud engine noise, the seals on my motor weren’t quite as willing to. After one particularly cacophonous downshift to second gear to maintain 70 mph up a long and steep grade, the revs briefly rose past 4000 rpm. After that, I began to notice a strange speckling on the rear window. Figuring it was just accumulated dust from the road surface, I ignored it … until it began to blot out my view through the back glass.

It wasn’t until I had pulled into the entrance at the track in New Hampshire I ran a finger over the window. The dot matrix printed across the back glass was, in fact, engine oil.

Not only was the back of the Jeep covered in the stuff, but my gleaming white Datsun had also become a sullied grey-cream, coated by a slick of lubricant that would no doubt impress the officials at tech inspection the following morning.

According to the dipstick, the Jeep’s engine was down a full quart of oil, which for just a two-hour drive is quite considerable. Most of the missing 10w30 was noticeable all along the underside of the Grand Wagoneer. I was, however, unable to pinpoint the exact source; the top of the engine was completely dry, and there were no hoses, seals, or breather valves in obvious distress.

Project-Truck-As-Therapist

I’d like to be able to tell you that the trip back home was better. That once I knew what to expect from the Jeep’s sketchy towing dynamics and frightening thirst for oil, I could better deal with the stress of the entire experience. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Instead, I compounded the tension of the previous day’s difficulties by berating myself for landing in this position in the first place.

I felt stupid. Stupid for having invested so much time, effort, and cash into a project that could not complete a task for which I intended it. Yes, I could deal with the engine oil leak once I had time to put the Jeep on a dyno. No, nothing catastrophic happened. But the Grand Wagoneer’s ultra-sketchy towing behavior with that U-Haul trailer was not something I’d repeat in the future. And without a distributing-hitch-friendly trailer of my own, nor space to store it, this pressed pause on any upcoming Jeep towing adventures.

Worst was the feeling that my poor decisions impacted the people I care for the most. It’s one thing to subject myself to the consequences of my contrarian ambitions (which often pushes me drive something I consider “different” or “interesting,” regardless of the pitfalls or risks). But it was quite another to I could see it in the worry lines on my father’s face when I met him at the border, hours behind schedule. Then, the evening we left to head home, he voiced his concern about whether I’d make it back safely without jackknifing, imploding, or perhaps both. I could hear it my fiancée’s voice as she tried to talk to me over the din of the near-freezing rain on a 20-mile stretch of construction work on the evening of our return. Half the trailer’s wheels were on smooth asphalt, the other half skittered crazily over a latticed surface. I gave short, terse answers to questions, leading to uncomfortable, brooding silences. I did not like surrendering control of the situation to what felt like providence.

Learning To Let Go

After some thought, I realized I’d crossed a line not just in terms of practicality and utility, but also safety and reason. I had built a square peg and tried to fit it into a round hole, only to then insist on rounding off the edges until I could push it through half-assed and sideways, taking my family with me for the ride.

Despite all of my preparations, tasking my Grand Wagoneer to pinch hit as an occasional tow rig is simply outside the scope of what its platform can comfortably handle. Yes, with the proper trailer and a more appropriate hitch, I’d likely have a better overall experience hauling my race car. But at the same time, I’m still asking a short-wheelbase SUV with a fairly low towing capacity to negotiate significant elevation changes and highway speeds that an a full-size truck wouldn’t sweat.

In nearly every other circumstance, I really enjoy the Jeep that I’ve built. It’s a fantastic long-range mile-eater, it brings smiles to the faces of everyone I meet driving it through Montreal’s city streets, it’s quite comfortable, and its generous cargo area makes it remarkably practical. By every non-towing measure, the Grand Wagoneer project has been a rousing success. After all, it looks great and it always starts.

I’m letting go of the tow-rig dream as a yardstick for this project’s success. The true failure here would be for me to ignore this lesson and double-down on trying, squeaking through another towing adventure with little to no margin for error. I didn’t expect a 40-year-old truck to teach me how to be at peace with my personal character flaws, but I’m grateful to have made it out of the experience with a better understanding of myself.

What else do I now understand? That a lightly-used, 21st-century pickup would find in my stable a welcome new home. Stay tuned!

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Square Peg, Round Hole: Grand Wagoneer restomod as unwilling tow rig appeared first on Hagerty Media.

My 29-year-old youngest son, Aaron, owns a silver 2007 Toyota Corolla LE. It’s the poster child for reliability and ease of operation—if ever there was a car whose design goal was to allow any grandmother to rent one and instantly be able to turn on the heat or A/C, it’s this one. It’s the poster child for, well, boredom. The reaction I have whenever I drive the car is that if I had to road-trip it even back and forth to New York, I’d feel like a like a coyote in a trap that would gnaw off its own foot to get free.

That having been said, I have a soft spot for the car, because speaking of grandmothers, that’s where Aaron got it—my mother gifted it to him before she passed in 2019. And, in fact, I was the one who procured the car for her. She had proudly been a “five-speed granny” until her arthritis caught up with her at age 84 and she asked me to find her an automatic. In one of those big circle of life things, Aaron had been living in our old apartment on the third floor of my mother’s house in Boston (where my wife and I lived from 1984–92 before we moved to our current house in Newton), and he would still be living there if my sister—who lived there with my mother for 40 years—hadn’t decided (and reasonably so) that it was time to sell the house and move into something that had fewer stairs and needed less upkeep. So, yeah, my sister and I evicted my son from my mother’s house. He moved back in with us to save money before striking back out on his own.

With all that context, you can probably appreciate that I’m not only happy to have Aaron living with us, but that the sight of the little silver Corolla in front of the house makes me smile. For a moment, I can pretend that my mother drove over here for a visit.

Because she used the car mainly for errands, and Aaron had a short commute to his job two towns over (now one), the car has only 88,000 miles on it. However, New England winters have begun to take their toll, and a large rust spot is forming on the left rear fender lip. At some point this will make the car un-inspectable. But we’re not there yet, and the Corolla soldiers on, receiving little attention and zero preventive maintenance, and it is taking the abuse remarkably well, as it was designed to do.

Aaron was planning to go camping in northern Maine with his two brothers. They had a staggered departure schedule—the other two left the day before in my wife’s Honda Fit, and Aaron was leaving in the Corolla the following morning. But when he got home from work at dusk that evening, he said that the right rear tire began rapidly losing air on his three-mile drive home from work. I looked at it and found what turned out to be a car key stuck in the inside edge of the tread. I could hear the air hissing past it.

This was a problem. The fact that the puncture impinged on the sidewall would almost certainly make any tire shop refuse to patch it. And the car didn’t have a full-sized spare, just a donut—definitely not something you want to put 600 highway miles on. And he had a boat to catch at 2 p.m., necessitating a 10 a.m. departure.

We stepped through the options. I jumped on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace trying to thread the needle looking for a good 195/65R15 tire on a compatible 5×100 45mm offset wheel with a 54.1mm center bore, and found none. (Actually, the Corolla has a set of execrable Pep Boys-type aftermarket alloys, the type with both a 5×100 and a 5×120 bolt circle. Where they came from, I have no idea, as they weren’t on it when I got the car for my mother. In addition, they host four mismatched tires. So I really hoped I could score a whole set of proper wheels and decent tires for Aaron, but sadly it was not to be.)

I called a friend who owns a mobile tire mounting and balancing business and asked if he could bail us out with one tire, but he said he didn’t have that size tire in stock and probably couldn’t get one and get over to the house until mid-morning. Aaron is the only one of my three kids who never learned how to drive a stick (he had a single lesson eight years ago in my Z3, where the combination of a parked car, an aggressive oncoming driver, and pedal confusion spooked him), so despite all the cars in the driveway, the only automatic vehicle I could offer him was the monstrously large Chevy 3500HD dually diesel with the utility body. This wasn’t out of the question, but the fuel cost was daunting.

We checked online and found that a nearby Sullivan Tire opened at 7:30 a.m. I advised that the best thing to do was pull the troublesome wheel and tire off the Corolla and mount the spare. This would let him run the loose wheel over to Sullivan, which might be faster than requiring a service bay to jack up the car. It all took longer than he’d hoped, but by about 10:30 that morning he was back home with a new tire on the wheel. I threw it on the car, and he was on his way. He was late for his boat, but managed to catch another one. It all worked out.

When Aaron got home five days later, I asked if there were any other mishaps with the car. He laughed.

“Well,” he said, “funny story …”

Having nothing to do with the flat tire, the car’s left front caliper was seizing. He knew that was the problem because the same thing had happened to the right front caliper last year. The car was pulling lightly to the side of the stuck caliper while driving, pulling more strongly to the other side while braking. Plus, the brake pad smelled, there was a bit of a chattering sound, and the wheel was hot to the touch. He said it started happening about 50 miles from home, and he thought about bagging it and called for a tow, but instead he stopped, let it cool down, then drove carefully in the right lane.

I don’t include seized brake calipers on my “Big Seven” list of things likely to strand a vintage car on a road trip because it’s not a terribly common occurrence in the vintage BMW world in which I live. I’ve only had it happen once, and oddly, enough, that was on what for me is a relatively new car—my 1999 M Coupe (“the clown shoe”). A seizing rear caliper doesn’t pull the car to one side the way it does when one of the fronts is seized; it’s the smell and the chattering that alerts you while you’re driving. The hot wheel is the confirming symptom. If this happens to you, be aware that the wheel can be so hot that you can easily burn your hand if you blithely press your palm or fingers on it. It’s better to let your palm hover half an inch away, or fold a paper towel over a few times and interpose it.

However, there’s something else that can cause these same symptoms—a clogged or swollen flexible brake line. The brakes on nearly every car use hard metal lines running from the master cylinder to the wheels, but because the wheels (and with them, the calipers, rotors, and pads) move up and down along with the suspension, a flexible section of brake line—usually a rubber hose—is employed to accommodate the motion. The flexible line may connect directly to the caliper, or may sit between two hard metal lines. In either case, if the flexible line is clogged, fluid can’t pass to or return from the caliper, and the symptom can be difficult to distinguish from that of the caliper being seized.

The definitive test is to pull the caliper off the strut and squeeze the piston(s) with a big pair of slip-joint pliers. If the pistons don’t move, then you’ve caught the seized caliper red-handed, but if they’re free, then the caliper isn’t the problem. A less-invasive way to triage whether the problem is due to the caliper or the flexible hose is to open up the bleed valve at the caliper. If fluid doesn’t flow out and the bleed valve itself isn’t plugged, either connect a pressure bleeder to the brake reservoir or have someone gently depress the brake pedal. If there’s still no fluid flow, then it’s likely that the flexible line is clogged or swollen shut. Of course, if the car is one that’s been sitting for decades, you’d automatically replace the flexible brake lines and probably the calipers as well during the rejuvenation process. On a not-as-ancient car, if the flexible lines are rock-hard and cracked, and you’re replacing the calipers anyway, it’s a good while-you’re-in-there task.

I’ve written for Hagerty and also in my first book about what I call “the rhythm of repair.” The issue is that if you bring a car into a dealership for a repair, they likely have every part it needs or can get them in short order, so they lay the car up in a service bay, take the problem area apart, assess the situation, make a list of parts, bring them to the car, then fix the problem. You are a DIY-er, however, not a dealership. So you make an educated guess.

In a perfect world, you know from the symptoms which parts you need to order. When they arrive, you jack up the car, pull the old parts out, install the new parts—boom, done. However, we don’t always live in that world. It’s common to start a repair and find out that you need more than just the parts you ordered. Maybe you have a used set of calipers around as well as a set of enough-meat-on-them-that-you-didn’t-throw-them-out brake pads, but the odds of you having every clip, spring, bolt, and backing plate a brake job might require are close to zero. If you need to order parts twice and wait for delivery, it virtually guarantees that the car will be laid up for a week.

Fortunately, a 2007 Corolla is a far cry from the 1970s BMWs and Lotus Europa that I usually work on. Automotive chains like Autozone are likely to carry many normal wear-and-tear parts. If they don’t, a trip to a dealership is likely to be productive, though more expensive.

I explained to Aaron about how brake work is usually done on both left and right sides, and thus, if this was my car, I’d probably replace both front calipers, and while I was in there would also do the pads and rotors and the flex lines if the rubber was hardened and cracked. I jumped on Rockauto.com and looked up brake parts for the car. The costs of rebuilt versus new Raybestos calipers were both about $60 per side. Two calipers, a set of rotors, and pads came to about $200 shipped. Flexible brake hoses were about an additional $18. However, Aaron said that in addition to the right front caliper having been recently replaced, he’d had the rotors and pads done not long before that. I shined a flashlight through the wheel and gave a cursory examination. The pads looked thick, and there was nothing cringeworthy about the rotors. I reached around the back of the wheel and grabbed the flexible brake line. It felt supple to me. He opted to take the inexpensive route—one caliper, shipped, for $68.44. I can’t say that I protested. My back is still giving me fits, and pulling one fewer wheel, one fewer caliper, and two fewer rotors was fine with me as long as it resulted in a safe car.

The next day, I moved the four cars that were in the way—the ’72 2002tii and the M Coupe that were in the garage, and the Z3 and my daily-driver 530i that were in the driveway—and cleared the most hallowed spot of all, the mid-rise lift, to receive the sh*tbox. As I drove the car into position, I could hear a bit of grinding from the left front. With the car on the lift, I put it in neutral and manually spun both front wheels. The right spun free, but the left was very difficult to turn. It sure felt like a stuck caliper.

I pulled the wheel off and had my first detailed look-see at what I was about to replace. The caliper was the kind of single-piston single-line unit that most modern cars use, with a slider bracket bolted to the MacPherson strut. A long rubber flexible line connected directly to the back of the caliper.

I thought about pulling the caliper off, but a) I really avoid disabling a car until I’m certain I have the correct replacement part in hand, and b) I noticed that the flex line was connected to the caliper with a banjo bolt. Unlike an old-school directly threaded-in brake line, there was no easy way to plug this, so if I disconnected it, it would drip brake fluid until it emptied the reservoir and the master cylinder. No, the thing to do was leave it connected until the new caliper was installed.

A few days later, the replacement caliper arrived, and I had at the repair. No, I didn’t rope Aaron into helping. This was a practical efficient utilitarian task, slotted in while he was at work. He’s a great kid who helps his mother and me in any number of ways. I didn’t need this to be one of them. I was perfectly happy to do it for him.

First, I visually examined the new caliper and verified that it appeared to be the same part currently on the car. I was pleased to find that it came with a new bracket, as some require you to reuse the original one currently on the car.

To minimize brake fluid loss, I left the old caliper connected to the brake line while I transferred the brake pads to the new caliper and installed it on the strut, then undid the banjo bolt and transferred the line over to the new caliper. I assumed I’d need to use my Motive pressure bleeder to get the air out of the caliper, but I realized that I didn’t have the adapter for a Japanese car. I was resigned that I’d need to wait until Aaron got home to press him and his right leg into pedal-pumping service, but then thought I’d try gravity-bleeding the caliper. I’ve rarely had success with this on vintage BMWs with four pistons, two brake lines, and three bleed valves on each caliper, but on this simple modern caliper, it worked perfectly.

A quick test drive revealed absolutely no problems—even braking, no soft pedal, no pull, no chatter.

So, for $68.44 and a few hours of my time, my mother’s car continues to serve my youngest son.

And yes, to avoid a repeat episode of being boxed in like this, Aaron has consented to let me try to again teach him to drive a stick.

Now if only I could do something about those wheels.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Replacing a seized caliper on my son’s crap-can Corolla appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Jim writes:

Regarding classic car engines that have a Pertronix electronic ignition inside the distributor, can they use platinum plugs after removing the points and adding electronic ignition?

Robert writes:

I have a stock 1948 Plymouth six-cylinder and will be using Pertronix ignition in my distributor. Can I use platinum plugs, and what plug would you suggest?

Bill writes:

I have a 1970 Dodge Charger with Pertronix, and I’m trying to figure out if I should use platinum, iridium, or just stick with copper.

Sajeev answers:

Well, this is clearly a question on the minds of many a Hagerty Community member! But first, let’s get on the same page. Pertronix (and others, to be fair) allow classic car owners to retain the external look of their stock distributor, but with solid state internals like the ignition systems ushered into automobiles starting in the mid-1970s. And with it there was no more fussing with points of dubious quality, increased voltage, more reliable performance, and plenty of good vibes going forward.

Spark plugs are a little harder to describe, as their design is most differentiated by their longevity. When placed into a vehicle, a host of variables (ignition coil output, compression ratio, etc., and maybe even heat range) ensure they behave radically different. Most 1996-up vehicles are designed for platinum or even iridium plugs, and their ignition systems are sized up to provide the correct amount of juice to make them happy. I’ve personally seen a modern (modern-ish; it was a 2006 Crown Vic) vehicle absolutely murder a set of copper plugs in less than 30,000 miles. But I doubt the reverse is true, that older cars with a modern Pertronix ignitions must also use platinum or iridium plugs.

The answer, as per usual here at Piston Slap, is that it depends on your unique situation. The Pertronix Ignitor III puts out way, way more voltage than the baseline Ignitor system. And no matter the ignition system, platinum and iridium plugs may fail to perform to their maximum potential on an engine designed for copper plugs. So here’s what I recommend:

1. For Bill: A 1970 Charger may need platinum/iridium plugs, if it has an aggressive ignition system upgrade, a built 426 Hemi with something like a 13:1 compression ratio, or forced induction, etc. If not, stick with copper.
2. For Robert: This Plymouth is stock and likely has a baseline Pertronix Ignitor setup. Given that and the engine’s mild state of configuration, copper plugs are likely best.
3. For Jim: This concern is more generalized, and there’s no better general advice than to stick with whatever the motor came with from the factory.  (Which is usually copper.)

Considering most vehicles this age are not used for primary transportation, and since many have easy-to-reach spark plugs, sticking with copper spark plugs really isn’t a big demand to place on people. Their lower asking price is the textbook definition of an “added perk” too, but Piston Slap isn’t about my thoughts being final conclusions. This is only a means to encourage comments from readers.

So, as a member of the Hagerty Community, what do you think each of these guys should do?

Have a question you’d like answered on Piston Slap? Send your queries to pistonslap@hagerty.com—give us as much detail as possible so we can help! Keep in mind this is a weekly column, so if you need an expedited answer, please tell me in your email.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Piston Slap: Platinum performance with Pertronix persuasion? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Modern repair technology has come a really long way. We as humans have the ability to restore function to so many broken or damaged things. It’s amazing, but we should also understand what cannot be repaired. The one major example that people often forget is the human ear. Our hearing is a delicate thing that once gone is typically gone forever. Luckily it is pretty easy to prevent damage and the old cliche about an ounce of prevention holds true here. For $200 you can have 4 solid options for all-day comfort and safety.

Hearing protection, like most personal safety items in the shop, comes in various levels of protection. Having to use the same piece of equipment for every situation could cause you to use none at all due to the annoyance of stopping to find the right hearing protection. That search can sometimes take longer than the project you need hearing protection for. Short jobs are just as damaging as big jobs though. Tinnitus and hearing loss do not care about your timeline.

There are a couple of terms we need to define before we are able to compare and understand what makes one solution better than another for certain tasks. The first is decibel and how we measure sound. Sounds pressure waves traveling through air bump up against our eardrums which vibrate against three bones—the malleus, incus, and stapes—which comprise our inner ear. Those vibrations are interpreted by our brains. Parts of that system can get damaged by too much or constant pressure that comes from loud noise. Just 70 decibels for an extended period of time can be damaging. For reference that is roughly equivalent to a vacuum cleaner running six feet away.

The second term to know is NRR or Noise Reduction Rating. This is the metric through which the efficacy of hearing protection is judged. The higher the NRR the lower the transfer of sound through the hearing protection to the ear drum. When shopping for hearing protection this number should be easy to find and high is better for most situations but depending on the job you might not need the highest form of protection. In fact, having the four types of hearing protection listed below ought to cover most home garage needs.

Active noise-canceling headphones

Sometimes the noise is not much more than the dull roar of machines running in another room or a modern power tool running at arm’s length. It might add up to a dull roar that can be tolerable but why tolerate what you don’t have to? Active noise cancellation is technically not hearing protection but in the right situation, it sure feels like it.

Active noise cancellation does not insulate our ears from the surrounding noise. Instead, there is a microphone that picks up the surrounding noise and then produces the opposite sound waves via the speakers in the headphones to neutralize the surrounding noise to the wearer’s ears. It’s a fairly complicated system that has dropped significantly in price over the years and now there are sub-$50 options that work fairly well for general wearing. Best suited for steady background noise like an air compressor filling the tank.

Custom molded earplugs

The next step in your hearing protection journey is to go see an audiologist. Just like how you wouldn’t take advice about brushing your teeth from a 30-something writing about cars on the internet, you really shouldn’t take my word as gospel for how to best take care of your hearing. A professional has access to tools and information I don’t.

This is why I will tell you about my favorite thing my audiologist did for me: stuffed my ears full of foam. Well, that might be a little misleading, but mostly accurate. They took a mold of my ears and then used it to create reusable and extremely comfortable in-ear hearing protection specific to my ears. The NRR on most custom-molded ear plugs like these are in the 30-32 range but without interfering with taking a helmet or glasses on and off. They are low profile and comfortable for long-duration wearing like at a racetrack. My personal favorite for working in the pits at a track or fabricating in the shop where I might be doing small amounts of work with an angle grinder or die grinder and don’t want to have to take hearing protection off and on. A middle-ground option before full custom molded ear plugs is reusable triple-flange plugs.

Over-ear muffs

The old standard. Rather than trying to fit the sound blocking inside your ear, muffs create a barrier on the outside. These can be found in various levels of NRR and most importantly can be found in a multitude of sizes including some designs specifically for youth. For a quick job or if having something inside your ear canal for a long duration is uncomfortable, these are the solutions. The easy on and off nature along with durability makes it obvious why these have been the gold standard for a long time.

Like all the other options here, fit is important. ensure that the band over the top is adjusted properly to have the muffs sit over your ears and that the seal around the edge has good contact with your head. Even just the crack in the seal from having sunglass arms can be enough to limit the effectiveness of over-the-ear protection. A bonus is how these also keep your ears clean, which can be nice when doing a lot of grinding or are in a very dusty environment.

Foam “roll and stuff” ear plugs

Interestingly, the disposable option comes last and actually is the most effective. Foam earplugs often have the highest NRR and are the most affordable. That comes with the tradeoff of needing to properly insert them into your ear and also having spares or extras around due to their disposable nature. While foam earplugs can occasionally be reused it does open up the opportunity for ear infections if not careful. A whole bunch of these earplugs often come with a minimal price tag so they are worth having both in the shop and in your car since they are perfect for handing to someone who might be underprepared at an event or wrenching session.

Regardless of which style of hearing protection you favor, using something is better than nothing, and having the right thing on hand makes using proper hearing protection that much easier.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 4 types of hearing protection any shop should have appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Nothing allows you to safely use a tool or material outside of its design parameters quite like understanding how it works and preparing for what could go wrong. The freedom enjoyed by most people who work on cars comes from the ability to understand what they can change about a project—tools, materials, process—and what they cannot. While the tools and space you need to work on a given project are rigid, curiosity is endless and often leads you into interesting adventures.

My latest adventure was self-inflicted: I broke the head off a stuck bolt, a rite of passage for DIY enthusiasts. Some of you are even familiar with the second level of that situation, dealing with the broken “easy-out” screw extractor.

Some people take the easy way out (I will not apologize for that pun) and pay to replace the whole part. At first, it may have made sense to fix the broken bolt; when that little chunk of unobtanium easy-out became embedded in the bolt, the purse strings suddenly got a little looser.

An easy-out is not formed of unobtanium, though, but of high-carbon steel. Badass stuff in the metal world. It is hard, enabling it to bite into and grab a mutilated bolt—a problem we never admit to creating but always boast about fixing. On the Rockwell hardness scale, high-carbon steel falls in the middle of the chart. Even so, the material is very brittle—and not in the delicious way, like the peanut brittle Nana used to make. If you introduce a fraction of a side load while using an extractor, you will snap it off—often flush with your workpiece—leaving you defeated.

At least partially defeated. Now comes the escalation of force, the switch from rigid to flexible. Solving the problem of a broken extractor requires understanding the materials you are dealing with. If you rush ahead, you will end up with a mangled part and a pile of dull drill bits.

The last time I broke an easy-out, I immediately picked up the phone instead of the tools. This time, I couldn’t bring myself to call for more experienced assistance. I needed to deal with this myself.

I have a drill press sitting on my shop floor. It’s not the Bridgeport of my dreams, but it’s decent, and the more I looked at it, the more I realized this drill press had the capability I needed. With a little effort, I could build a good, rigid setup—enough to drill a right-angle hole, at least. If I could figure out how to fix this broken extractor myself, the process would likely bestow upon me the knowledge and experience to avoid this whole song and dance again. The catastrophe you are prepared for rarely strikes, right? Off to McMaster-Carr to buy some carbide.

Carbide is the next step up from high-carbon steel on the Rockwell hardness scale, which means it can pierce high-carbon steel without losing its edge. I selected two sizes of end mills made of carbide. With 90-degree tips designed specifically for plunge cutting, they should be able to remove not only the easy-out but also the bolt—and, likely, a decent amount of the aluminum of my workpiece, a case cover.

That last part was unfortunate but acceptable. Installing new threads or repairing those that remained would be easier than trying to save the delicate M6 threads. Not only were they formed decades ago, but, since they were on the oil-filter cover, they had also suffered hundreds of hamfisted tightenings and overtorques. Thread forms distort with multiple uses, especially when they are made of aluminum, so the thought of new threads in this piece was almost a little comforting. Doing the thread repair with the case cover off the motorcycle and on the bench was an obvious plus.

Carbide in hand, I had to think about setup. Luckily, the table of my drill press has T-slots in it to help the user create a more rigid setup. However, I could only do so much—especially after realizing there was no place locally to source T-nuts. My plan switched to going through my drawer of random hardware until I found the right combination of bolts and nuts. Finally, I had fastened the side cover to the table at three points. I then wound the table as high as I could to keep the quill as high and stiff as possible. The name of the game was rigidity. (This is not to be attempted with a cordless drill.)

With a little cutting oil to keep things cool, I started pecking at the cover with the lever that controlled the quill of the press. The 90-degree tip of the end mill enabled me to carefully locate the actual center—not the poorly drilled hole now filled with easy-out—and begin to remove material. It was a delicate game of managing speeds and feeds by hand: I had to put enough downward pressure on the end mill to prevent chatter—the cutting faces skipping along the surface of the material rather than biting into it—but not so much pressure that I began to generate heat.

Applying cutting oil and taking breaks every few minutes made the whole process feel like it took forever, but it was really maybe 10 minutes of actual work stretched across an hour, me stressing the whole time about breaking the end mill. That would all but require me to call for help, and I would not be real proud to carry this mess into someone else’s workspace.

Of course, the end mill broke. Luckily, there was plenty sticking up, so I grabbed what remained and yanked out the end-mill. With a small punch, I knocked the leftover easy-out onto the bench, which allowed me to step up to the 6.4mm bit to cut the final diameter of the hole. I used a tap to form threads and the repair was complete.

There were a number of ways to go about solving that last piece of the problem, but mine was the most final. The re-formed threads would fail at the same rate as the OE production ones—good enough, considering that the other two bolts for this oil filter cover are original threads.

In the garage, there are some rigid concepts that define the ways we can do things. High-speed steel will not drill out a carbide end mill; that is fact. How you use this knowledge, however, is highly variable. Once you understand the facts that constrain a project, your brain can switch fully to creative thinking and problem-solving. The materials I use demand to be used a certain way; knowing that enables me to choose the right tool for the job or, when doing something off-piste, to stack the deck in my favor. The combination of the flexible and inflexible will set your project free. It is the workbench yin and yang.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post The one thing worse than breaking a bolt—and how to deal with it appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Tires are critically important things. Those four patches of rubber are the only mechanical connection we have to the roads and trails we drive. Maintaining and monitoring those humble, treaded rubber doughnuts is critical to keeping yourself and others safe on the road and vital to preventing premature wear on your vehicle’s steering components. That’s why we all have tire-pressure gauges hanging around. If you don’t, you should.

Not all gauges are created equal. Like any calibrated tool, a tire-pressure gauge has inner workings that can sometimes begin to wear or become damaged. In both scenarios, the accuracy suffers. New tire pressure gauges are pretty cheap, but recently I learned that it was possible to re-calibrate vintage ones. Naturally, this sent me down an eBay rabbit hole.

The journey ended by clicking Buy It Now on a $15 Messer Accu Gauge with a nice worn-in feel. Even better, it has a foot-long hose and a bleeder valve—two of my favorite features on the $90 Intercomp tire pressure gauge I use for track-day and motorcycle tires. I worry about damaging my nice Intercomp gauge, and that fear means that I fail to regularly check the tire pressures on the Corvair. This vintage Accu Gauge would solve that problem well: It has a max of 60psi, which would be perfect for the pressures I run in the modern radial tires.

With anything else of this age that I buy used, the gauge went straight from the shipping packaging to the workbench for cleaning and inspection. This gauge was quite grime-free, with the exception of the polycarbonate face, which had gotten hot and deformed. I’ll make a new one, not a big deal.

Further inside lay the good stuff.

This is what’s called a Bourdon tube gauge. The design gets its name from Eugène Bourdon, a Frenchman who penned the design all the way back in 1849. The copper, C-shaped tubing is formed so that, when pressurized, it deforms. The rate of that deformation is linear, so Bourdon used it to drive a needle, which indicates pressure on a scale drawn on the gauge’s face. The copper tube deforms consistently and reliably, at least until it hardens or cracks. With such small movements day to day, such breakage will take a long time, but a fluctuating environment or heavy use can cause the copper tube to deform in different ways that also produce inaccuracy. In that case, the gauge must be recalibrated.

That is where the linkage comes in. This is the piece that translates the movement of the Bourdon tube to the gearset that moves the needle. That linkage often looks as if it is trying to take the longest path to connect two points; it’s not a straight and simple piece. However, the goofiness of the design allows for fine-tuning and calibration by opening or closing the gap, thus lengthening or shortening the linkage. This changes the ratio between the movement of the Bourdon tube and movement of the needle.

Now comes the fun part. By comparing the reading of the Messer gauge to that of the Intercomp, a modern one I know and trust, I can alter that linkage in small increments and retest until the vintage unit reads correctly and consistently in the range I will use most: For the Corvair, 20 to 32 psi. In a perfect world I would calibrate this gauge with a known quantity of some type, like a manometer or regulated air pressure. I have neither at home, so this method will do. The Corvair doesn’t require pinpoint accuracy. Once reassembled, the old gauge is ready for use.

This Messer gauge looks perfect in the glove box or front seat of my Corvair and also allows me to keep my more delicate, valuable Intercomp at home or in the race toolbox, where it belongs. Practical, vintage flair for $15? Seems like a no-brainer.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post How to calibrate a vintage tire-pressure gauge appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the closing of “The Vermont Loophole”—that too-good-to-be-true situation where you could legally register a 15-year-old car in Vermont without a title or prior registration and without living in Vermont, and do it all by mail. It gave me a flashback to an episode in those pre-Internet days 40 years ago before you could look this stuff up online and where I was over a barrel over a title and not sure what to do about it.

It happened during that short 2½-year window when my then-girlfriend (now-wife) and I were living in Austin, Texas. I bought my first BMW 2002 there in 1982. This triggered a virtual avalanche of 2002s that I fixed and sold, or traded up for a nicer one and sold the one I had. I took to driving around Austin and looking down people’s driveways to find dead cars.

It was then that I saw my first BMW E9 coupe (the 2800CS / 3.0CS / CSi). These two-door, six-cylinder coupes weren’t boxy like the little four-cylinder 2002 sedan; they were lithe and sexy. Unfortunately, they were expensive. You could find solid pretty running 2002s for two or three thousand bucks, but intact E9 coupes were 10 grand even back then.

But in 1983 I saw an ad for a car I didn’t know existed—a 2000CS. It’s the four-cylinder predecessor of the six-cylinder E9 coupe, built 1965–69 as an offshoot of the “Neue Klasse” four-door, four-cylinder sedans that preceded the 2002. The body of the 2000CS is identical to the E9 coupe from the firewall back, but the front is shorter, as it only needs to hold a four-cylinder engine. The slanted-back “shark nose” lacks the pair of horizontally-slatted grilles flanking the center double kidney that became BMW’s signature look. Instead, a pair of unusually narrow kidneys sit alone in the nose’s unbroken sheet metal, and vertical slats in the nose for air flow to the radiator are partially hidden behind the front bumper. The cars had dual headlamps behind glass covers, making them look a bit like a cross between a praying mantis and an electric razor. Like the Neue Klasse sedans, the 2000CS was never imported into the United States through a dealer network, and many examples that were brought in individually through the “gray market” had these replaced with standard round U.S.-spec headlights. There was also a 2000C variant which had a single downdraft Solex carburetor instead of the CS’ twin sidedrafts.

When the first E9 coupe—the six-cylinder 2800CS—was created in 1968, the front was lengthened enough to accommodate the straight-six engine, and the nose, grille, and headlights were restyled, giving the car the timeless look that now makes nice E9s worth six figures. In comparison, the 2000CS’ shorter hood, underdeveloped nose, and narrow wheel track make it look more dated than its elegant E9 big sister.

But in 1983, a 2000CS was the BMW coupe that I could afford. The one in the ad was a 1966 single-carb 2000C, and it was cheap—$2500 (that’s about $8000 today). Although it had a recently-swapped 2002 engine and a rebuilt transmission, the low price reflected three caveats.

The first was that the car turned over and started, but barely ran. This was fine with me. I’d already cut my teeth on half a dozen dead 2002s. The engine, ignition, and fuel delivery systems on the 2000C were the same. If it being dead held the price down, I was all for dead.

The second and more serious issue was that the car had suffered a right front wheel bearing failure catastrophic enough to ruin the front stub axle. Since the car, like all Neue Klasse BMWs, had McPherson struts, where the strut housing and the stub axle were part of the same integral unit, the entire strut housing needed to be replaced. I’d replaced strut cartridges before, so the strut removal and replacement wasn’t an issue. Obtaining a replacement strut housing for this never-commercially-imported car was, however.

The last issue was the one I should’ve been the most concerned about. The seller said that the car was his, but he had no paperwork for it. The story was that he’d taken it in trade for back rent owed by a tenant, was still on good terms with her, and if I bought the car, he’d ask her to get a duplicate title and then sign it over to me.

Bad idea.

You saw that one a mile away, didn’t you? Hey, I was 25 years old. I was smitten. There wasn’t another affordable 2000C/CS or E9 on the horizon. I gleefully paid him the money, had the car towed to my house, and could scarcely believe that I owned a BMW coupe, even if it wasn’t the coupe.

Ah, youth. I wasn’t the least bit concerned about the title. The seller seemed like a nice guy. It was an early example of my being too willing to believe people when they have a motive to lie. No, my worries were about the need for a front strut housing. Since this was a BMW that was never sold in the United States (more than just the model—the entire Neue Klasse platform predated a U.S. BMW dealer presence), the odds of finding the part in a junkyard were essentially zero.

When bought my first 2002 a year and a half earlier, I’d made friends with Terry Sayther who ran the independent BMW shop Phoenix Motor Works in Austin. I pulsed Terry on the problem. He had a parts source in Germany, but keep in mind that this predated the widespread use of email by about 15 years. I had to write the fellow a letter. He responded, quoting me a price. I put a check in the mail. We’re talking three trans-oceanic snail mails.

The car needed a lot of other sorting out, so it’s not like I had nothing to do. I put the nose up on jack stands in the carport of our little rented duplex at 101 West 35th Street, where car friends tell me you can still see the oil stains from my presence 40 years ago. I pulled out the mangled strut and disassembled it with spring compressor. I performed the requisite fluid changes and ignition component replacement and got the car running well.

During this period, I called the seller at regular intervals. He said his former tenant had moved, but he had her contact information and the issue of the title was in process.

Finally, nearly six months later, as the calendar rolled over to 1984, the replacement strut housing arrived. I transferred the strut cartridge, spring, and upper bushing onto it and installed it in the car, along with new wheel bearings on both sides and fresh rotors and pads. By the end of the weekend the car was moving under its own power. I was ecstatic.

Except that I couldn’t register it because I still didn’t have a title.

I called the seller again. I got strident. He got testy. I asked for his “tenant’s” contact information so I could pursue it myself. He hung up on me. I left messages for him at his work place. He blew me off. I began to realize that nothing was “in process.” All I had was a big problem.

As I was a relatively recent transplant to Texas, I didn’t know where to turn. I asked around and was told that the thing to do was request a hearing with the county tax assessor, as their office had the power to grant me clear title. I filled out the necessary forms and made the appointment. I waited nearly a month.

When the time came, I went into the county tax assessor’s office, armed with notes of my correspondence with the seller but hyper-aware that there was a danger that a nervous-talking New York-Massachusetts-Yankee-transplant might not necessarily mesh well with whoever was lord of this particular domain. I pled my case as best as I could. I’m just enough of a nerd that I may have even ended with “Help me, Travis County tax assessor. You’re my only hope.”

When I was done, he squared up my papers, furrowed his brow, and nodded slowly.

“You have this feller’s work phone number?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well,” he smiled, “Why don’t we just ring him up and hear his side of the story?”

I was mortified. I was certain that I was odd man out, that the assessor and the seller would do the secret Texas telephone handshake, and that Yankee BMW boy would be hung out to dry. But there was nothing I could do but bear mute witness to what was about to transpire.

With me sitting right there in the office, the tax assessor dialed the seller up at his job. The assessor summarized the facts as I’d presented them, and asked the seller to respond. The seller claimed that he was helping me, but I was impatient, and if I just trusted him, he’d do what he said he’d do and get the title from the previous owner. The assessor asked exactly what he was doing to contact the previous owner, and the seller said he was working on it. The assessor thanked him for his time, hung up, put his thumb and forefinger on his chin, and thought for a moment. Then he looked at me. My fate hung in the balance. It was probably three seconds, but it felt like an eternity.

“Well,” he said. “That feller’s clearly a lyin’ sack of s**t. By the power vested in me by Travis County, I hereby grant you clear title to your Bee Emm Dubya.” He stamped the paperwork.

Never have I been so happy with someone who had complete control over his little fiefdom. I thanked him profusely and drove directly to the registry and plated the car.

The funny thing was that, when I got home, the guy who rented the other half of the duplex came riding up on a motorcycle. He had a huge Cheshire Cat grin on his face. He said he just picked the bike up for a couple of hundred bucks from a guy who was moving out of town. The catch, he said, was that there was no title.

“You go through a lot of cars,” he asked. “Didn’t you just deal with this with that white car that was in the carport for months?”

I rolled my eyes and laid out the whole story. I told him about the tax assessor and advised that he make an appointment as soon as possible.

“Damn!” he said. “I was hoping to ride it down to Big Bend this weekend.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t think there’s any fast-track way to get it done.”

“I think I’ll go to the registry and try anyway. I’ll play dumb and see what happens.”

The following night, our motorcycle-owning neighbor knocked on my door. He was wearing Cheshire Cat grin #2 and holding a license plate. My jaw hung open. “How the hell did you manage that?” I asked.

“Just lucky I guess.”

The moral of the story is that you can’t always be lucky, but you can always be truthful, respectful, and polite. When someone holds your fate in their hands, you never know what they’re going to do with it. People who you imagine live to rubber-stamp things “DENIED” may surprise you.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally-inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post That time I had to have a title hearing appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Working on cars requires a whole slew of relatively specialized tools. Often times we don’t even realize how unique those tools and practices are until we talk to someone new to the hobby. Or someone who is on the outside looking in. Just one example: How casually we discuss (and practice) the act of lifting our multi-thousand pound vehicles into the air and then supporting them with separate load-bearing apparatuses that allow us to work on, disassemble, or reach under the vehicles. It’s dangerous when done right, and deadly when done wrong.

That sounds scary, and to a point it should be. Being cautious when the risks are this high is not a bad thing. That’s why we created a quick list of tips for using jack stands: good for newbies, but it’s also a refresher for those experienced enough to have lifted up a vehicle many times, in many ways over the years.

Buy once, cry never

There are many factors in selecting jack stands, and price is one that many of us are forced to consider. While tools can and will be shopped based on price point, jack stands should not be one of them. These are critical safety items that should come from reputable and trustworthy sources. The Harbor Freight jack stand debacle of 2020 should be burned in our collective memory for a long time, as being crushed by your car is not the way to go. Cheaping out with jack stands is a fast track to a mere feeling of safety, rather than possessing actual safety.

Jack stands should be sturdy with a good wide base. A secondary method of locking them at the desired height is also a plus. Do not modify jack stands or otherwise compromise safety features in the name of convenience. Doing so is only making it easier to get hurt.

Size appropriately

Jack stands produced after 2015 are rated as a pair. Which means if you find some at the local parts store that say they are “three-ton” jack stands, the ability to support the claimed 6000 pounds requires both stands. In reality, three-ton jack stands should be the smallest used in most home shops, as it gives a good safety margin when working on smaller cars, yet a set of four does have enough capability to hold a medium-sized truck or SUV in a pinch.

Remember that storing jack stands can be a hassle, so having one set that covers anything you’ll work on is the best way to go. That said, a small and large set of them is a nice luxury if you have the space. Inevitably something gets “stranded” on your one set of stands…and you’ll need another set shortly thereafter.

Trace the load path

Jack stand placement is as critical (if not more critical!) than proper sizing. The biggest jack stand in the world is useless if you place it in the wrong spot, letting the car fall down anyway. The service manual is the best place to look for jack points and jack stand placements. Even the owner’s manual in the glove box, a book that’s been shrinking over time and loaded with “please see dealer” language, likely still outlines the jack points for safe lifting. A quick internet search will likely reveal appropriate information too.

But sometimes that doesn’t work, or what you are doing is something the original engineer from decades past could have never imagined. That’s when a little bit of critical thinking goes a long way. Look under the car and locate a place that looks sturdy enough to place a jack stand, then follow what that is connected to. From there, imagine how it would support the load being placed on it. Supporting the rear of a car by placing stands under the rear differential makes sense because the entire weight of the car is normally supported by that part. Using a bumper or frame brace that doesn’t support and wasn’t designed for that load is a bad place to put a stand. If unsure, consult professionals.

Do the shake test

Now that your project is up in the air and supported by jack stands, there is one last step before you roll underneath: You gotta shake it. No, not the latest TikTok dance. Shake the car. Go to one of the corners and give it a good push and pull to make sure the car is stable and the stands are not going to move or shift while you are underneath. This is the same thing that mechanics in shops do when putting a car on a two post lift.

After all, now is the time to find that the ground isn’t really flat or the stands aren’t fully seated on their safety catch. Only after a good shake can you roll under the car with confidence that it will not be coming down on top of you.

Buddy system

It feels strange to do when performing an innocuous task like adjusting a transmission shift cable or removing a driveshaft, but telling someone that you are working underneath a car with jack stands is a good practice. A text or call to a friend just to say “hey, I’m working on my project and am under the car for a bit” is enough of a heads up: if they don’t hear from you in awhile they know to check on your well being. Being pinned or injured under a car with no means to get help should be horrifying to you, and encourage you to whatever is necessary to prevent it.

Keeping a phone on your person is one option, as is using smart speakers or other items that require nothing more than yelling at them to activate them. I personally have a Google Home Mini above my workbench, which allows me to broadcast a message to another speaker inside my house by just yelling at it. This lets me feel safe-ish when I am working on projects while my wife is inside. (Presumably enjoying her time without me.) This practice isn’t for everyone, but it works for me. Find a system that works for you and use it.

Cribbing away that sinking feeling

Motorcyclists are familiar with the peril of asphalt: Ride somewhere on a warm day, set the bike on the kickstand, stop for a coffee, and the bike is laying on its side by the time you get back. Vandals? Inattentive drivers parking too-big SUVs? Nope. The asphalt did that.

Asphalt comes in a variety of flavors and mixtures, some of which isn’t nearly as solid as it feels under your feet. A heavy load concentrated on a small point can sink into asphalt. And the weight of that motorcycle leaning on the kickstand’s relatively small area can punch a hole into asphalt. Lo and behold, the kickstand sinks down enough that the motorcycle tilts and falls over. Bad news, but it points to a bigger problem.

Now picture this kickstand is actually a jack stand under your project. With no warning, the car can shift as the asphalt gives way. Prevent this by using something like a chunk of wood to spread the load of the jack stand to a larger area. The same applies for any soft substrate like gravel or dirt. Cribbing is a common thing in heavy equipment transport/service, and by extension is a smart exercise to do when working on light duty vehicles as well.

Have another safety tip to add to the list? We’d love to hear it, as you can’t be too safe in these situations. So leave a comment below for everyone’s safety and well being.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post 6 tips for using jack stands appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Welcome to Homegrown—a new limited series about homebuilt cars and the ingenuity of their visionary creators. Know a car and builder that might fit the bill? Send us an email at tips@hagerty.com with the subject line HOMEGROWN. Read about more Homegrown creations here. —Ed.

Bill Papke, 76, is a retired architect residing in Ada, Michigan. Explaining what moved him to build a car at home, he notes, “I’ve always been fascinated by concept cars, especially wedge-shaped designs. I own a replica of the 1970 Bertone Stratos Zero and also a 1990 Vector W8, both of which excel in this design genre. When Elon Musk presented his Cybertruck, I realized that I could build my own wedge car defined by four flat planes. My goal was to make it look like it had been chiseled out of a solid chunk of aluminum.”

What lies beneath Papke’s Raazer is a Honda Beat, the last car design to be approved by Soichiro Honda, Japan’s Henry Ford.

Honda began by recycling small engines in a wooden shack located in Hamamatsu. In 1948, when war-torn Japan craved transportation of any kind, Honda started selling motorized bicycles. Barely a decade later, the first Honda dealership opened in America. Soon thereafter, Honda motorcycles outsold Triumphs in England and Harley-Davidsons in the states. Today, the globe’s grandest engine producer powers everything that moves, from lawn mowers to jet aircraft.

The Honda Beat was a mid-engine two-seater originally designed by Pininfarina for urban use. Known as kei cars, these machines were powered by engines whose displacements were limited to 660cc and whose output was capped at 63 horsepower. Two years ago, Papke found just the 1991 Beat he needed for sale on Bring a Trailer. He explains: “The Beat I purchased was in excellent shape with only 42,000 kilometers on its odometer. I chose that particular car because of its short wheelbase, seating locations, and convertible body style.”

The design process began with sketches, which were followed by a clay model. Papke adds, “Later I built several 1/24th scale models from my CAD drawings to match the dimensions of the Beat’s unibody chassis.

“The frame supporting my body panels is made of 1/8th-inch wall thickness aluminum extrusions cut to length on a compound miter saw. I hired a mobile welder to assemble those pieces. Another vendor used my CAD files to cut my body panels out of quarter-inch aluminum sheets with a waterjet. The flush-mounted frameless windows are 3/16-inch laminated automotive glass. The bodywork is fastened to the aluminum frame with epoxy and wrapped with titanium-colored vinyl sheeting. In addition to the $12,000 Honda Beat’s cost, I spent roughly $13,000 on materials.”

“The entire construction process took only a year. While Raazer has license plates for legal street use, I drive it only to car shows and exhibits. I’ve entered it in the sculpture category of ArtPrize, a competitive event that will occur this September in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The total prize money at stake in that event is $400,000.”

Asked what project will follow this car, which resembles one of the Great Pyramids of Giza, Papke replies: “Another wedge, of course!  This time it will be an even simpler design with just three flat planes. Fewer than that is impossible. As your article’s title predicts, my next car will be called ‘Edge’.”

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post Homegrown: The Raazer’s edge appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I recently had to spend a day in a hospital waiting room while a family member underwent a procedure (they’re fine). I took some unusual reading material with me—How To Repair Your Foreign Car: A guide for the beginner, your wife, and the mechanically inept by Dick O’Kane (Doubleday, 1968). A friend bought it for me five years ago, and I hadn’t gotten around to reading it. I thought something light would be a good counterpoint to the gravitas of the hospital.

Let me back up a bit. The three books that most influenced me as an automotive writer were Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A manual of step-by-step procedures for the compleat idiot by John Muir, and Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford. I read Zen when I was in college 45 years ago, and like many young men overly impressed with their own intelligence, loved its odd epistemological ramblings and its tenet that working on a motorcycle is a microcosm of rationality itself. I re-read it when I was writing my first book, Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic, and was surprised by how badly it (or I) had aged. What were mind-blowing Carlos Castaneda-like revelations when I was 18 on the metaphysics of quality now struck me as a self-indulgent series of digressions; the chapter on “stuckness” that I remembered so fondly was a joke; and there was but a single diagnostic example of the kind of Zen-based maintenance that forms the book’s title (the author realized that his bike was running rich at high altitudes and leans it out).

In contrast, the “Idiot Manual,” as John Muir’s Volkswagen book is usually called, really is the “philosophy lesson disguised as a repair manual” that Zen pretends to be. Muir really does dispense hippie-cowboy-Zen wisdom, sort of an automotive version of Sam Elliot’s character in The Big Lebowski. His book was a huge entry point for me into both wrenching and writing. It’s what got me working on my then-girlfriend’s (now wife’s) VW bus in the late ’70s. The idea that a real repair manual can be written in the first person and be entertaining enough to read cover to cover was the inspiration for my book Just Needs a Recharge: The Hack Mechanic Guide to Vintage Air Conditioning.

I thought that Matt Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft bogged down after it came out of the gate, but the third chapter, “To be master of your own stuff,” hit the nail on the head in terms of why it feels so damned good to fix things yourself. I’ll freely admit that I thought, “Well, if he can write about this, so can I” when I was collecting similar themes I’d been writing about for decades for BMW CCA Roundel magazine, and I used them as the basis for Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic.

Then, when I began writing Memoirs, I discovered a fourth book—Old Tractors and the Men Who Love Them: How to keep your tractors happy and your family running, by humorist and CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Roger Welsch. As per the subtitle, this wonderful book delved into the relationship between hobbies/passions and human connection.

To be clear, How To Repair Your Foreign Car hasn’t worked its way in as a fifth face on this automotive literary Mount Rushmore. But it’s a charming little book that’s a decent primer on how to troubleshoot common problems on your vintage car, foreign or otherwise. And, in more than a few places, it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

The author, Dick O’Kane (1936–2019), was a print and television copy writer. How To Repair Your Foreign Car was the first of his eight automotive/mechanical books. Mr. O’Kane had such an endearing gift for flippant names and phrases that you’d assume he was British (he was from Arkansas and Rhode Island). For example, his term for a generic British car is “Trashwell-Snailby,” and when it breaks, you have to take it to “Filth & Greed Motor Imports Ltd.” The sound of a fan belt snapping is “THWOMPETYbangbangbang CLUNK!” Really, the tone of the entire book is contained in the chapter, “Why, When Britania Rules the Waves, Will Her Cars Not Go Through a Puddle?”

Mr. O’Kane’s book is an entertaining readable narrative in which he applies simple common-sense diagnosis and repair to the things that are most likely to be the causes of a car dying or not starting, and offers that if it’s not these things, it’s something more serious and you’ll need to pay for a tow and a repair. There is an appealing economy and clarity in that approach. The neat thing is that his list lays directly on top of the first six of what, for decades, I’ve written about as “The Big Seven” things likely to strand a vintage car (ignition, fuel delivery, charging, cooling, belts, clutch hydraulics, ball joints). The mind-blowing part is that it’s one thing for me to be applying this to the bulk of little “ferrin” cars from the European invasion of the late ’60s and early ’70s that are now 50 years old, and quite another to find the same set of common problems described in a book from 1968 when the cars were nearly new. Although most cars from this era are similar (that is, carbureted and free of emission controls), the “foreign” part of it is there because it was the author’s passion, and it provides a nifty foothold to describe what probably did happen a lot back in the day—if you took a Beetle or a Porsche into a corner service station where the mechanic was used to servicing Chevys and Fords, he’d be flummoxed not only by it not being ’Murican but by the engine being at the wrong end.

The book begins with a “What Makes it Go” chapter, which is quick primer on engines and the suck-squeeze-bang-blow four-stroke cycle, followed by “And All of a Sudden It Stops,” in which car-dies-while-running problems are, as you would imagine, triaged primary as fuel or ignition related (unless they’re accompanied by a large, expensive bang). O’Kane quickly has you examining battery terminals, looking for broken ignition wires, checking for spark, and verifying that the fuel pump is pushing fuel into the carburetor, giving just the right amount of detail for a first troubleshooting encounter if you’re not naturally a grease-under-the-nails person. Subsequent chapters drill down into ignition, fuel delivery, cooling system, charging system, the clutch, and the distinction between car-dies-while-running and car-won’t-start. It’s a good approach. He swims in the old-school waters that rough running is almost always an ignition-related problem, and that “carburetor” is a French word meaning “leave it alone.” Of course, when the book was written, it wasn’t yet old school.

O’Kane seems to get genuine enjoyment out of describing bashing things with a hammer—voltage regulators, SU electric fuel pumps, starter solenoids. This, of course, makes for great writing, and fits with the quintessential experience of driving your, ahem, Trashwell-Snailby in the rain when the car dies. The common thread with these devices is that they contain electromagnets with contact points, and if they’re stuck, a little mechanical persuasion sometimes helps them open or close. I wish that he’d drawn the common thread connecting them, but he is forgiven because his description of the three states of operation of the voltage regulator is perhaps the clearest I’ve seen anywhere.

Given that it’s a 55-year-old book, there are, of course, anachronisms. I laughed every time I read that working on the car yourself would save you from paying the $7-an-hour labor rate at the dealership, or that certain technical questions could be answered by your “dealer shop manager.” More serious is the fact that he says you can check for spark at a plug wire by simply holding it in your hand while someone cranks the engine. This is horrifying. Coil voltages have crept up significantly over the years, and any spark testing should be done by holding the plug connector ¼-inch from ground with insulated pliers.

Furthermore, if the car suddenly dies, O’Kane is correct in telling you to look for broken ignition wires at the ignition coil, but he omits the simple description that the wire to the coil’s “+” terminal should be carrying battery voltage, and the wire on the “-” terminal should connect to the condenser on the distributor. Then again, this is in keeping with the “ferrin car 101” nature of the book; there aren’t scary-looking wiring diagrams anywhere. And the instruction that, if a car is overheating, the stuck-closed thermostat should be removed, is a bit too 1968 to be useful. Yes, thermostats can stick closed, but not all of them can simply be removed. And the stuck-thermostat trope is usually false; hot-running on old cars is almost always due to insufficient heat transfer (clogged radiator) and insufficient air flow (fan and shroud).

But this is just quibbling around the edges. It’s astonishing to me that a concise little book written 55 years ago about troubleshooting and repair of lightly-used foreign cars could still be so close to the mark and be such a joy to read. Not every page contains humor, but when I read the single-sentence chapter on “Patching Your Own Flat Tires,” I laughed so hard that other people in the waiting room began looking at me. And the chapter on “Dignity: Routine Care and Maintenance,” which gives you creative ways to lie about the fact that your precious foreign car is actually dead by the side of the road, is a whole new comic vein that I intend to mine.

I deeply regret that Mr. O’Kane and I never crossed paths, shared libations, and swapped stories before his passing in 2019.

If you have a friend or loved one who is into simple old cars, be they foreign or domestic, and enjoys good writing, hunt down a copy of Dick O’Kane’s How To Repair Your Foreign Car (used copies are available through Amazon vendors). Then wait for the laughter. And for them to bash their voltage regulator with a hammer.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best of the Hack Mechanic: 35 years of Hacks, Kluges, and Assorted Automotive Mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post A new review of an old book that you may want in your library appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Of the few things we vintage car folks have to concede to modern car lovers is the fact that our choice of locomotion is loud. All the noise is worth it for the experience, but taking out some with the use of some hidden modern materials is about as controversial an opinion as upgrading to disc brakes. For all the support for sound deadening and damping, there is an awful lot of confusion around the web regarding usage and expectations.

On modern cars it is called NVH: Noise, vibration, and harshness. These three aspects factor into so many points of vehicle design in the modern era. As cars became a near-mandatory part of society, the time we spent in them increased and brought along an expectation that we are comfortable in them. Even a Model T is comfortable when you consider the time it was built.

“What did you say?”

Let’s address the first of the trio: Noise. This is the sound waves emitted from various parts of the car as they function. The lifted Jeep Gladiator next to you on the highway chose those mud terrain tires for function but the side effect is a lot of noise, especially when the tread gets worn. Even highway tread tires make some noise, so no one is immune. There are a multitude of other items on this list including exhaust, heater blower motors, suspension creaks or squeaks…

New cars have all the same noises that we notice on our vintage cars. They are just muffled, insulated, or disguised. Some are just plain quieter too. Insulation for this part of the NVH formula is usually a product that is designed to cut the transfer of sound waves from where they are created to where the driver sits. Paddings and foam layers do the task well but coverage and placement are key as the goal is to cut down on the noise but also not end up in a tiny, mobile recording studio. Even a Jaguar isn’t meant to be Abbey Road.

The whole goal is to cut the oscillations of the sound waves. The power of a sound wave diminishes as it passes through a material, and certain materials like foam, cardboard, leather, and synthetic fabrics, and even the passengers ourselves, absorb and reduce those sound waves before they can get to our ear drums. That is what we perceive as a reduction in noise.

Another huge part of noise control is sealing the outside, well, out. That means weatherstripping. The foam rubber that seals the window to the door and the door to the body are all places where sound and therefore annoying noise can leak into your car. Sound waves will diffract after passing through an opening which causes them to bounce around inside a car and feel even louder.

Why is there a Home Depot link in your car forum?

That’s pretty much it for stuff that makes noise as it functions in your car, but what about stuff that makes noise just from the nature of driving? Sounds funny to say, but we are talking about stuff like the sheet metal of door skins, floor panels, and firewalls. Things like this that have any large flat panels become defacto speakers when the vibrations that come with putting hundreds of spinning parts inside a larger bunch of spinning parts all going down a bumpy road come into play. Things are going to vibrate.

But similar to the thoughts above about changing the sound wave size rather than eliminating it, adding mass will slow the movement. Less shaking, less noise. This is why there is a great debate about sound-damping materials. The most popular options are your Dynamat and Husthmat types brands and the idea is to add mass. Those products come in a foil-backed butyl rubber sheet that can stick to just about any part of the car that can vibrate. If your hands are of the roofing callous kind, this material sounds familiar, but don’t be tempted to go to the home center and grab a stack of asphalt insulation tiles and start sticking it on the floor.

Butyl rubber is less susceptible to both heat and off-gassing. If you think new car smell is bad, imagine the smell of a warm asphalt roof each time you get in the car on a warm summer day. Asphalt would also likely slide down any vertical surface if the car got nice and warm like a summer day in the sun. That could seal off drains in door panels, pool up and make for uneven floors under the carpet, or melt onto wire harnesses and cables making working in the future even more difficult.

The second big debate in this space is coverage. Listen to some people and every square inch covered is the only way it’ll ever work. Here’s the thing though, the science doesn’t back this up—and neither do the manufacturer recommendations. The very companies trying to sell you the stuff typically say to cover 30 percent of available surface area for any noticeable effect, and past 60 percent there is a diminishing return. That’s in direct competition to their bottom line. Why lie?

The science is even simpler. A large panel catches the right harmonic of vibration and is now emitting tiny pressure waves that hit your ear drums. All we have to do is change the frequency that the panel vibrates so it is outside of most normally appearing driving conditions. A thin sheet of rubber and foil puts enough of a kibosh on the party vibes that sheet metal has a dull thud rather than a tinny sound when hit with a stone like in a fender well or floorboard. Larger panels like roof shells or firewalls will quiet down significantly as the panels will move less. Less movement, less noise.

Harshness

All cars fall somewhere between the Beast of Turin and a Rolls Royce Phantom. Anything can improve if you want to really engineer a solution. Does it always make sense in putting a band-aid on a bullet wound? Are any of the add-in sound damping and deadeners sold for vintage cars magic bullets to modern comfort? Hardly, but with proper application and expectations you might enjoy driving your car even more than ever. But remember, that Rolls Royce Phantom has hundreds of pounds of insulation material and engineering that is all focused on separating the occupants from any sign that they are indeed driving an automobile.

Harshness is the combination of how the sounds produced by the car wear on the operator. This one is less quantifiable and more personal. While the noise level can be measured in decibels, harshness is unique to each person. I’ve been able to tolerate weeks driving Hagerty’s 1917 Peerless Green Dragon which is one of the harshest vehicles I’ve spent real time in, yet I find my 2015 Chevrolet Express van in need of more sound deadening and insulation. Different expectations.

This is all to say that insulating your vintage ride can be well worth the effort but be sure you understand what products you are using, how they are designed to work, and what you should expect from them. A full layer of Hushmat brought down the noise in my 1965 Chevrolet Corvair, but my wife still finds it too harsh to enjoy. Her loss, but more importantly not my hearing loss—at least not anymore.

***

Check out the Hagerty Media homepage so you don’t miss a single story, or better yet, bookmark it. To get our best stories delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletters.

The post What is sound deadening and how does it work? appeared first on Hagerty Media.