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.

Sorry to have separated this from Part I by nearly a month, but two other stories—the Cobra story and being a hostage negotiator for Larry Webster’s Ferrari turn signal assembly—were both too good not to tell . . .

When I was last in the warehouse in Monson, on the Massachusetts/Connecticut border, where I store five cars, they all had difficulties starting, or running, or passing inspection, or all three. “Lolita,” my ’74 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special was the most troublesome, as it was leaking gas from the 50-year-old rubber O-ring and plastic plug at the bottom of both float bowls. I broke one of the plugs removing it, so I needed to procure the part and go back the following week.

With the leak literally plugged, I got the Lotus inspected. The plan was to then drive it home, but as I described in the first installment, dealing with the vagaries of the other cars made the session in Monson run long, and I didn’t want to drive the tiny Lotus home in rush-hour traffic, so I left the car’s retrieval for another trip.

This created the very happy problem of which car to drive out to the Monson warehouse and leave there when I drove the Lotus back home. Of the “fun cars” at my house, my ’73 BMW 3.0CSi has permanent at-home-pampered-in-garage status. I was planning on taking my 49,000-mile survivor BMW 2002 on its first real road trip, so it needed to stay. Normally, my BMW M Coupe (“the clown shoe”) would be the swapper, but I’d loaned it to a friend for a couple of weeks.

So I did something that you’d think would’ve already happened, but was in fact new to me: I drove “Zelda” the Z3 out to the warehouse. I’ve owned the little ’99 BMW Z3 2.5-liter straight-six roadster for 10 years, interrupted by my selling it to a friend, whose son then drove it over a median strip (no crashed sheet metal, just bent suspension components), and I bought it back so her insurance company wouldn’t total it and part out the car. I’d only sold the car to her in the first place because I’d run out of storage spaces, so when I bought it back, it needed to sit outside, under a cover—something I swore I’d never do to a roadster, but I was out of options, and the car really wasn’t worth anything at that point anyway. It worked out pretty well; I found that as long as it sat covered in the part of the driveway that got sun, both the cover and the car would dry out and stay mildew-free. I haven’t used the Z3 much recently, but whenever I do, I’m instantly reminded how wonderful any drop-top car is in terms of giving you that sense of whole-body relaxation, and a zippy responsive little roadster is just sublime.

So I did a mini road-trip in Zelda, keeping off the interstate and staying on local roads out to the Monson warehouse as a dry run for doing the same but in reverse in the Lotus. It was heaven, until I heard a scraping sound from the left front wheel during braking. I had this same thing happen with the Lotus when I was sorting it out, and it turned out to be due to pistons on one side of the caliper being seized and thus shoving the rotor into the caliper itself, making it sound like a lathe cutting metal. I drove Zelda gingerly the rest of the way, and made a note to myself to buy a left front caliper and be prepared to replace it in the warehouse when I want to retrieve the car.

So now it wasn’t just the five original cars in the warehouse that were revolting.

Still, if the cars could talk, Zelda would’ve said, “I’m being pampered with indoor storage!” And Lolita would’ve said, “He’s not only spending time with me, he’s bringing me home!”

Little did I know that Lolita was about to throw a total hissy fit.

This was the first lengthy drive I’d had in the Lotus since I put it in the warehouse last September to wait out a registration issue (a story I’ll save for another day). Other than the fact that the lowering springs and adjustable shocks I’d installed cause the car to bottom out on anything other than glass-smooth roads, the drive began well. The Europa is the kind of car that, when you drive 42 mph in a 35 zone, you feel like you should be arrested for the amount of fun you’re having, and, off the interstate, there were many of those roads between the warehouse and home.

Then, on one of these lovely leafy winding New England two-lanes, I got caught behind a lumbering gravel truck. While I was bemoaning the truck’s harshing of my mellow, the Lotus began to behave strangely. At first it stumbled in a way that made me think that the plugs were fouling, but I eventually realized the car was losing power. The narrow windy road didn’t have a great breakdown lane, so I toughed it out as long as I could. Fortunately a church appeared. The car basically died as I rolled into the parking lot.

Then I recalled that, during a drive in the Lotus last year, something similar had happened, and I solved it by reseating the distributor cap. I did the same thing here. It took me a little while—the cap isn’t easy to get to, as the Lotus-Ford Twin Cam engine has a Ford four-cylinder block with the distributor driven by the “jackshaft” (the engine’s original in-block camshaft), so it’s down underneath the intake manifold. The car started, revved, and drove.

And then, about 10 miles later, it happened again. The car began missing, ran worse and worse, lost power, then died where the small road I was on intersected with a local two-lane. And the engine exhaled its last gasp with a backfire so loud that a nearby road worker looked for the source of the gunshot.

Fortunately, there was a wide shoulder and plenty of visibility, and cars had to come to a full stop at the intersection anyway, so I felt safe troubleshooting there. I poked around under the hood (well, under the boot; mid-engine car and all that), and found what was certainly the problem.

Federal-spec Europas like mine have dual Stromberg carbs, which have a warm-up circuit that utilizes cross-pipes from the exhaust manifold to heat up the carbs, as well as a second set of butterflies between the carbs and the intake manifold.

I, like nearly every other Federal-spec Europa owner, had removed the cross-pipes and wired the secondary butterflies open. Only I hadn’t used wire. I’d used zip ties. And I could see that the zip tie on the linkage to the front secondary butterfly had broken, leaving the thing free to just flap around. You don’t have “Eureka!” moments often while troubleshooting, but this fit the symptom perfectly. If the thing flapped shut, with one carb completely starved for air, of course it ran horribly.

I didn’t have any zip ties with me. I almost cut a piece off one of my shoelaces, but then I realized the bag the Lotus’ cover lives in was in the car. I cut the bag’s drawstring, used a piece of it to tie the front secondary butterfly linkage open, patted myself on the back for my diagnostic skills, and set off to what surely would be an uneventful remainder of the trip.

Of course, I was wrong. It died again, this time in the middle of a four-way intersection. In general, Lolita has been remarkably reliable since the excruciating resurrection and sort-out depicted in my book, The Lotus Chronicles, but on this trip, it was completely justifying the old adage that Lotus stands for “Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious.” I got the car restarted, and with another lunge-and-gunshot-and-die maneuver, got through the intersection and onto a shoulder.

As I sat in the car and thought, I realized that the common thread here was simple: It was time. The car ran fine for a certain amount of time, then ran worse, then died, then revived when I’d waited for a certain amount of more time. What I was doing during that time wasn’t relevant; it was the waiting that was fixing it.

Clogged fuel filter. This is the textbook system of a clogged fuel filter. Contaminants in the gas tank, likely particulate matter like rust or sediment, get carried into the fuel filter. The flow of fuel deposits them against the mesh screen inside the filter. The longer you drive, the more fuel flows, the more blocked the screen gets. When you stop, the contamination doesn’t go away, but enough of it falls off the screen that fuel can flow again. This tends to be worse in fuel-injected cars, where the electric fuel pump delivers 100-psi fuel pressure (typically regulated down to 30 with the surplus sent back to the tank via a return line) that can easily cause contaminants to block either the big visible filter or the tiny mesh screens that are often hidden in vintage fuel-injected cars, but it can also happen in a carbureted car with a mechanical fuel pump delivering 3 or 4 psi of pressure.

The fact that the filter was (apparently) clogged didn’t really surprise me. When I revived the Lotus after its nearly 40-year slumber, I was unable to remove its twin 5-gallon gas tanks to clean them out, so there was no bag of drywall screws dumped in and the tanks thrown into the back of a pickup truck and driven down a bumpy road. There was no taking them to a radiator shop to have them boiled out. There was no rust encapsulation treatment. There was no Red-Kote internal bladder. Instead, I simply took a Scotch-Brite pad and zip-tied it to the end of a rod that I slid around on the bottom of both tanks, then washed them out with gas (hey, you do know what the title of these columns is, right?). Really, the only surprise was that I got five years out of the first filter. But, yeah, I had forgotten about the rusty tanks.

I didn’t feel unsafe where I was, but I was in a highly visible area to be working on a highly visible car. Now that I had the problem nut-shelled—the data showed that I had five to 10 minutes from first-hesitation to dead car—I continued driving to find a better work area. It arrived in the form of the parking lot of a Lowe’s and a BJ’s Wholesale Club. I drove to the edge of the lot, away from prying eyes who might see the amount of gas I was almost certain to dump onto the asphalt.

The fuel filter for the Europa is very difficult to reach. It’s too low and too far forward to easily access from the engine compartment, but the car itself is too low to easily get at it from underneath, unless the car is on a lift. Because the filter is below the tank, I knew that gravity was going to do its thing and cause fuel to go everywhere when I disconnected the lines from the filter. And, of course, because I was lying on the ground and holding the filter in my hand, I also knew that I was going to have the quintessential mechanics’ experience of gas running right into my armpit. As they say in the Army, enjoy the suck.

Fortunately, I had my regular travel tool kit with me (which I throw in the trunk of whatever car I’m running out to Monson), so in addition to grabbing a screwdriver, I readied a pair of quarter-inch ratchet extensions, hoping I could use them to plug the deluge that would certainly flow out of the fuel lines after I pulled them off the filter. I reached up and under, found the filter, found the first clamp, undid it, got the armpit wash, plugged the line with the first extension, then had the repeat experience for the second. Hey, livin’ the dream, right?

With the filter in my hand, I emptied the fuel inside onto a paper towel, expecting to see rust and sediment.

Nothing.

I tapped the filter on the paper towel. Still nothing.

I was stunned. When I’ve had this problem on fuel-injected cars, what’s come out often looks like coffee grounds.

Crap. Had I gotten this wrong?

I wiped off the inlet end of the filter, pursed my lips around it, and blew, like blowing bubbles through a straw.

It wasn’t plugged shut, but I could clearly feel a restriction.

I wiped off the other end and back-blew through it several times. To my delight, I could see a fine gray mist come out. I returned my lips to the inlet side. The restriction appeared to be gone.

Booya!

I re-installed the filter (and re-experienced the armpit enema), verified that the car started, took my bottle of drinking water and rinsed both my actual armpit as well as that of my T-shirt, and drove the remaining 40 miles home, fragrant but satisfied, without incident. Aren’t vintage cars fun?

So, Lolita is home again. I have a lot of work planned for her. I’m going to yank out the suspension, as my attempt to lower the car to Euro specs looks great but produced a car that bottoms out on the smallest of surface imperfections. The plan is to reinstall the springs that were originally on the car, but keep the adjustable shocks.

But not before I replace the fuel filter.

***

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The post My Cars in Storage Are Revolting (Part II) 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.

First, let me rewind the tape about 15 years. I was driving through Brighton (basically West Boston) with my family in the car on the way to a holiday event at my mother’s. Suddenly one of my kids chirped “DAD! DAD! What is THAT?” Coming at us was a little two-seat roadster with massive tires and flared fenders, a mouth like a bass, and an engine note like a line of howitzers.

“That’s a Cobra replica,” I said, giving a thumbnail of my journeyman’s knowledge of what a Cobra is.

One of the kids asked “How do you know it’s a replica?”

“Because,” I dad-splained, “No one would be driving a car worth as much as our house through Boston at 4:00 on a Friday.”

Now, on to the story…

I have a friend, a genteel guy in his early 80s, who owns a 1965 427 Cobra. I’d seen the car once before, a little over 20 years ago, in his modest garage. At the time, I was too jazzed up to ask detailed questions, but I remember faded paint and a dusty interior, so my assumption is that the car was in original unrestored condition and wasn’t currently running. I shivered when I sat in it and experienced what I’d read about—that the drivetrain in a 427 Cobra is so massive that, to accommodate it, the transmission hump pushes the pedals off-center, so when you’re sitting in the driver’s seat, your legs curve off to the left.

Fast-forward to last month, when I ran into this fellow. He said that he had driven the Cobra for the first time in a couple of years, it ran rough, and then lost power. He described a route that he took where the second part was downhill, then said that the car’s fuel pickup was in the front of the fuel tank, so he hypothesized that, from sitting, water had formed in the tank, and that when he drove downhill, the water went to the front of the tank and got sucked into the carbs, which stalled the car. Miraculously, this happened close enough to his house that he literally coasted it into his driveway. He wanted to know if the water-in-the-fuel theory was plausible (“Does the defense’s theory hold water?”), and if so, what would need to be done to fix it. He said that he wasn’t certain whether or not he’d put fuel stabilizer in the tank before it sat.

I concurred that yes, ethanol in fuel does attract water, which is heavier than fuel and thus does settle at the bottom of the tank (and is also highly corrosive, so, yeah, bad), but with all the bugaboo about the evils of ethanol in fuel, I’d never had a starting or running problem in a car that had been sitting that I could say was caused by ethanol / water, even in cars that sat for six months with no fuel stabilizer. I said that I drain a gas tank only when I open up the filler cap and it smells like varnish, and that two years was kind of a funny window. So could this have happened? Sure. But did it happen and was it the cause of his problem? More of a definite “maybe.”

“What’s involved in draining the tank?” he asked. “I have a couple of oil drain catch pans.” I advised that that’s not a great way to do it, as then to dispose of the gas, you have to lift up the drain pan and funnel it into a gas can, and that’s messy and hard on the back. I said that the better way to do it is to suck the gas out with an electric fuel pump and directly spit it into as many 5-gallon cans as necessary to hold it. I offered that I have a small fuel pump wired with a pair of alligator clips that I use expressly for this purpose, and that, if he supplied the gas cans and a fire extinguisher, I’d be glad to come over and drain it for him. We set it up for 3 p.m. the following Wednesday.

A few days later, with my travel tool kit, the fuel pump, a battery, and some hose in the trunk of my E39 BMW, I drove to the house. I recognized neither it nor the garage, and when my friend rolled up the door, I can’t say that I recognized the Cobra, either, as it was now stunningly attractive. He said that he’d had it painted about 20 years ago—likely shortly after I first saw it—but this is a gentleman who’s unpretentious about these sort of things (in other words, his “painted” could well be someone else’s “restored”).

I unloaded my tools and he got the gas cans and the fire extinguisher, but before we began draining the tank, I asked him to again run down what happened when the car died. He repeated the story. For some reason, I was hesitant to set in motion a messy smelly task unless I had more indication that it was necessary. “Let me just look at it for a bit,” I said.

I eyeballed the big 427. As you likely know, I’m mainly a vintage BMW guy. The only American V-8s I’ve been around were the small-block Chevys in the parade of Suburbans I owned. The engine in this car was so far outside my wheelhouse that I might as well have been a blind concussed cyclops interpreting data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Still, at the basic level, it was just another engine. I put on my Tyvek suit and got down to it, taking care not to scratch the paint.

I noticed—and you can kind of see it in the photo above—some not-inconsequential residue in the valleys on the top of the intake manifold, which I took as evidence that it had been leaking fuel. When I looked closer, I saw what I believed to be active leakage weeping from the base of the forward carb. That might have accounted for the residue in the forward valley, but not the rear one. I took a wrench and snugged down both carbs.

I was curious if the float bowls had anything in them, be it fuel or water, so I asked the owner if I could pull the air cleaners off and verify that the accelerator pumps squirted anything when the linkage was goosed. I worked the linkage and was surprised to see that the front carb’s butterflies opened, but the rear ones didn’t appear to. He explained that this was normal—the linkage was progressive, with the rear carb not being engaged until the front carb was mostly open. I commented that this was like the progressive Weber 32/36s on some of my cars, except they did that between barrels in the same carb, whereas this car progressively engaged an entire carb. I noted that the front carb squirted what looked and smelled like fuel, but the rear one wasn’t squirting anything. Also, the choke setup was unusual, with an owner-installed cable-actuated choke on the front carb, while the rear carb appeared to have the original automatic choke, though it wasn’t closing. Not wanting to break anything, I left that mystery for another day.

Having found the source of one of the two locations of gas residue, I made sure the fire extinguisher was handy and had the owner start the car. It roared to life and began idling as I scrutinized the carbs, fuel hoses, and intake with a flashlight.

Then I saw gas dripping. I barked “SHUT IT OFF!”

The leak was coming from the left corner of the rear float bowl and dripping onto the manifold, almost certainly responsible for the residue in the rear valley. I checked all the screws holding the bowl on. None of them were snug, and the one at the dripping corner was finger-loose. I tightened them all, wiped up all wetness, checked things a second time, and we very carefully tried again.

This time, the engine stayed dry. As it warmed up, the owner blipped the throttle, leaning into it a bit more each time. He smiled.

“This,” he said, “is how it’s supposed to sound.”

I said something about how it wasn’t that I didn’t believe his theory on water in the tank, but that sometimes it’s best to try the smaller, easier things first.

“What do you say we drive to the gas station and put a few gallons of fresh high test in it?” he said.

“Sounds like a plan!” I began walking around to the passenger door when I heard him say something completely unexpected:

“Would you like to drive it?”

Wait, what?

To say that I don’t often have the chance to do things like this is a massive understatement. But at the same time, I long ago developed an adult’s balance of the craving for sensation with both risk and my own comfort level. I thanked him profusely, then politely demurred—unfamiliar car, he should be the one to determine whether or not it’s running right, etc. I don’t regret it in the least.

I pulled closed the feather-light door by its leather strap, then latched the meaty seat belt, its buckle the size of a sandwich. I reflexively looked for a shoulder belt. “There isn’t one,” my friend said. “If you need more stability, grab the dash with both hands.”

By this point, it was maybe quarter to four. It was a cool overcast spring day, just the kind of weather that could have convinced you not to go drive a valuable vintage roadster, because if it rains, putting up the top is like setting up Earnest Shackleton’s tent.

In other words, it made me feel breathtakingly alive.

We ambled our way to the gas station, my friend feeling out the car after its two-year sit and troublesome re-emergence.

Then, on a small road somewhere in New England, without warning, he punched it.

I have never experienced anything so raw and visceral in my life. My genteel octogenarian friend’s blue eyes shone like he was 20 years old.

“This is running great,” he calmly said.

We arrived at the gas station, which was at the intersection of a small local road and a local highway, and not far from an interstate. He put a few gallons of gas in the car, then again asked me if I wanted to drive it. By this time, was 4 p.m., and the traffic density had picked up substantially. Again I thanked him, and again I declined.

“Maybe when it’s not close to rush hour,” he said.

“That would be awesome.”

He pulled away from the pump, but rather than turning around to go back the way we’d come, he positioned the car to turn onto the local highway. I saw that there was an immediate right turn on another local road. I pointed to it and asked “You’re going to take that?”

“Nope,” he deadpanned.

When there was an opening in the traffic, he nailed and wailed. The Cobra exploded forward. Raw passion gushed out of both him and the car as this gentleman, intimately familiar with what the car was and what it could do (oh, did I forget to mention that he is the original owner of the car?), deftly jammed a thumb in the eye of everything ordinary. He slotted the gears, the best WAAAAAAAAA-shift-waaaaaaaa ever known, better than any adolescent boy’s dream of what sex or driving would be like. It was a thing of abject beauty.

Then he pulled onto the interstate, taking the entrance ramp with a ferocity that had me grabbing the dashboard with both hands while I laughed my head off. I commented that traffic was lighter than I would’ve expected at this hour, but his Paul Newman–like eyes just remained laser-focused. Then he took the exit ramp at a speed I would not have thought the car was capable of. The car heard my thoughts and said to me “You know nothing, Rob Siegel.” The Automotive Powers That Be were blessing me with something singular.

This is why we love cars.

When we returned to sedate speeds on local roads and were about a mile from his house, an oncoming car flashed its lights to indicate there was a speed trap up ahead. I happened to glance that the car’s inspection sticker and noticed that it said “21.”

“You know that your sticker’s expired?”

“Oh, it’s way expired,” he said. “If I’m stopped, I’ll say that the car was off the road for a few years and I just now drove it to get gas, which is true.” Then he turned and looked at me and said, “You can get away with a lot when you’re my age and tell the truth.” Words to live by. By chance (at least I think it was by chance), the police officer was parked directly across the street from my friend’s house. My friend pulled the Cobra into his driveway and, from there, slowly into his garage. The officer stayed where he was.

“That,” I said, “is something I’ll remember my entire life.” I offered that I’d be glad to help him with the car again.

“Sure,” he said. “Come back some other time. Then you can drive it.”

When I got home, I looked at the photos I took, and initially was disappointed there weren’t more. Then I realized. Of course. I was living in the moment. It’s burned into my soul. I don’t need no stinking photos.

So, if you witnessed us—a little blue two-seat roadster with massive tires and flared fenders, a mouth like a bass, and an engine note like a line of howitzers, being driven like he stole it by a genteel-looking older man with a glint in his eye and someone who looks like a thin Jerry Garcia in the passenger seat—and if you tell your family “That’s a Cobra replica; no one would be driving a real one through traffic at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday,” don’t be so sure. The universe is full of light, wonder, and unburned hydrocarbons, and if you’re in the right place at the right time, The Cobra Wizard may choose 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 The Hack and the Cobra 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.

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.

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.

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.

With all the chop in the water about whether buying my needy 183,000-mile 2008 Nissan Armada was a good move or an awful one, I thought I’d tell a story that shows that I am, in fact, capable of making rational automotive decisions.

In 1990, BMW’s follow-up to its successful, big two-door 6 Series coupe (the 635CSi) was a new model—the E31 8 Series. The new coupe, badged as the 850i through 1992 and the 850ci 1993 through 1997, was intended to be BMW’s new tour de force flagship, featuring its new V-12 engine, electronic throttle, multilink rear end, stability control, and other state-of-the-art features. Not surprisingly, these changes made the car heavy, complex, and expensive. When it debuted, the 850i was stickered at roughly $77,000 base price, rising to about $94,000 by 1997. [As if those figures don’t sound high enough, adjusting for inflation pushes them to more than $180K today.]

The coupe was received by the press and enthusiasts the way the Porsche 928 was viewed: at best, a touring car; at worst, a boulevard cruiser—but not a sports car. The fact that the car is sharp, with its pointy shark nose and hide-away headlamps, and looked a bit like what was then the current Toyota Celica Supra (second-generation A60), didn’t help matters. A less-expensive V-8-powered 840i was offered 1993–95, but it didn’t sell well either. A total of only 6920 E31 8 Series cars were sold in the United States before BMW pulled the plug.

As used vehicles, the 12-cylinder 8 Series cars were viewed as troublesome money pits with no financial upside. The car’s V-12 engine (the 850i’s M70 and its successor, the M73 in the ci) was designed as two M20 inline sixes mated together, and this design included using two of everything—two ECUs, two air flow meters, two throttle bodies, two fuel pumps, etc. If something went wrong, the car went into limp-home mode. Most of E31 8 Series production was before 1996, which is important because that’s when all cars sold in America received the standard OBD-II connector, so it’s not like you could plug a $50 scan tool into an 850i to find out the limp-mode problem—diagnosis generally required an expensive trip to the dealer. Like the V-12-equipped E32 750i sedan of the same era, you couldn’t give a needy 850i away; running cars needing work routinely sold for two- or three-thousand dollars. Dead ones were even less.

However, time and perspective are funny things. With age, the E31 8 Series looks better and better. It’s a true coupe with no B-pillar; roll down the front and rear windows and there’s an unbroken expanse of space, just like in my ’73 E9 3.0CSi coupe. The rear end of the car has that glorious fat planted look that’s all the rage. And no one remembers the whole Celica thing anymore, just like no one remembers how the 10th-generation Ford Thunderbird looked like a 635CSi.

With the size of BMW’s signature double kidneys increasing over the years to the point where they threaten to devour small countries, most classic BMWs with reasonable-sized kidneys look vintage-correct and unencumbered by marketing run rampant, and the kidneys on the 850i are especially thin for a car built in the last 30 years. And, complexity-wise, the V-12’s dual control system notwithstanding, these days any production vehicle is more complicated than an E31 8 Series.

And—here’s the kicker—the 850i was available with a six-speed manual gearbox. According to Wikipedia, it was “the first V-12 engine mated to a six-speed manual transmission on a road car.” [I suspect someone will sculpt a definition of “road car” to allow some Italian exotic to challenge this.] Only 847 V-12 stick cars were imported to the United States, so they’re certainly not common. Worse, the transmission isn’t the Getrag 420G used by V-8 stick BMWs of that era, but a Getrag 560G whose only other application I’m aware of is a Maserati Shamal, so it’s not like there’s a ready supply of them to press into service to convert an automatic car.

(Note that in addition to 850i six-speeds, there is the über-rare M-prepared 850CSi, basically an M8 without the M badge. There were only 225 of these imported, and their value has skyrocketed.)

With all that in mind, in 2015, when gas was two dollars a gallon, I became fixated on the idea of finding a cheap six-speed 850i. It had additional resonance with me because I already owned both an E9 3.0CSi and an E24 635CSi, so the 850i would make for a set of BMW’s big two-door coupe triplets, one of each generation. (Well, yeah, there are other older and newer coupes, but humor me.)

It didn’t take long before I found the following Craigslist ad:

“BMW 850i V-12 six-speed for sale. I’ve owned the car for about 16 years. It has 150K on her. It needs exhaust work. This summer I took it out of storage and it developed an erratic idle when in neutral. Drives fine. Bavarian in Winchester believes it’s a combination of changing manifold gaskets, exhaust leak and/or O2 sensor. Needs shocks, driver’s side door only opens from inside. Eye turner but you need to put some money into her to be perfect. I’m selling for $5000 or best offer.” The photos weren’t great, but the car looked whole and intact. It was white, so in addition to being a unicorn, every white whale and great white shark joke was in bounds. And it was only 30 minutes away.

I spoke with the seller, and he gave me added information about the car’s condition. “Needs shocks” meant that a broken front strut mount was actually smacking the underside of the hood, so it couldn’t be driven far. He added that the exhaust was loud and there was visible oil burning. He said he’d already taken a deposit on the car but had the feeling the buyer wouldn’t complete the deal.

We stayed in touch. About a week later the seller contacted me and offered the car to me for $4000. I contacted a friend who owned an 850i six-speed and asked him what would be the walk-away criteria. He immediately responded, “Buy it. The transmission alone, if it doesn’t munch synchros, is worth that price.” I lightly protested that I already owned too many cars, and his response was a virtual slap: “Name the V-12 six-speed manual coupes on the planet … 850i, 850CSi, Ferrari something, Lamborghini something, Aston Martin Vanquish. That’s pretty much the entire list. [It’s a] $100,000 running V-12 manual unicorn that you will pick up for $4000. These won’t be around a decade from now. Buy the damned car, sir!”

Well, OK then. I made the appointment to see the running 850i six-speed and withdrew $4000 from the bank. Wouldn’t you?

Two nights later I drove up to Woburn, Massachusetts, to see the car. At a first walk-around it looked pretty good. I didn’t see any obvious rust or dents. There was a barely visible dimple where the strut had hit the underside of the hood. The engine compartment was far from immaculate, but it didn’t look like a dumpster fire either. White wasn’t a lust color for me, but fishers in the muddy end of the pond can’t be choosers.

“Can I drive it?” I asked.

“It needs to be jumped,” the seller said. “850s have two batteries. I replaced one, but the other one is dead.” He pulled another car into position, fiddled with jumper cables, and started the big white coupe.

And that’s when I abruptly came face-to-face with the car’s loud exhaust and oil burning. This wasn’t a minor hole in the exhaust like the ones I recently patched in the Armada. This sounded like straight pipes on a dragster. I immediately thought that if I bought the car and started it like this in my driveway, my then-troublesome longtime neighbor would call the cops on me. And the oil burning cast a blue-white fog around the car like something out of a Mad Max film. (“In 2015, when society isn’t crumbling and gas is $2 a gallon, one man considers doing something really stupid.”) As I walked around the car, I noticed that all the smoke was emanating from the V-12’s right tailpipe, indicating that one bank of the V-12 was far worse than the other.

As the car warmed up, it settled into the oscillating idle that was mentioned in the ad. I got in and surveyed the interior. The 8 Series dashboard with its overlapping gauges is quite a break from previous BMWs. It’s not my cup of tea, but it’s part of the landscape. The interior was generally intact apart from an aftermarket stereo that stuck out too far.

Then I found a problem that sounds trivial but was anything but: The electric seat wouldn’t budge. The seller was probably 6-foot-5, and I’m 5-8 in shoes. I had to slouch so far down to reach the pedals that, like the caricatures of “silver-helmeted” elderly drivers, my head barely cleared the steering wheel. So while I did take it for a test drive, the combination of all these factors—the banging front strut, the deafening exhaust, the James Bond-like oil fog, and the seat—made the drive consist of four very careful right turns that brought me back to the house. It was the antithesis of the get-it-on-the-highway-mash-the-pedal experience for which you’d buy a car like this.

It was a Thursday. The seller said he had other people coming to look at the car on Saturday. My window was right now, but I needed to think about it. The seller was my kind of a word-is-your-bond guy—“Just call me and tell me that you want it, and for four grand it’s yours”—but he’d need to know by Friday night so he could cancel the Saturday appointments.

I went home and did what I do—deliberated in front of an Excel spreadsheet. The pros were the lure of the V-12 6-speed 850i, the bragging rights of snagging one for four grand, and the silly business of owning “coupe triplets.” But the cons—the obvious engine work needed to stanch the oil-burning, the broken front strut, the likely-expensive exhaust repair, the rough idle, the car’s general money-pit nature, plus the omnipresent constraints of space, time, and money and the murky issues of “opportunity costs”—that is, if you commit to this car, you pass on something else—made me think that this was a clear “no.”

My incredibly understanding wife, who had heard the peaks and valleys of my excitement and disappointment, weighted in. “So, you’d buy this, drive it for a while, write about it, then sell it?” she asked.

It was, of course, a very good question.

While I am somewhat strategic in terms of buying needy cars that generate content for these pieces that keep y’all entertained, I do pride myself on being fiscally responsible enough to not cause financial harm to my family. The cars I buy need to make sense to both the left and right hemispheres of my brain. That is, I have to both want them and be able to rationally justify them. At this point (in late 2015), I’d recently published my first book, was gainfully employed at Bentley Publishers, and was writing my second book. I was feeling pretty confident having made the jump from engineer to full-time automotive writer, and I’d gone on a bit of a spree—I’d recently bought the Lotus Europa, the BMW Bavaria, the Euro 635CSi, an E30 325is, and two 2002tiis, all of which nudged the car count up to a then-unprecedented 12. My left brain looked at all this, deemed it the excessive behavior that it clearly was, and gave me an edict: You can buy the 850i only if you can make the case that you won’t lose money on it.

And how did that case go? Thrown out before it even came to trial.

Nowadays, you’d be unlikely to find any bargain 850i six-speed, but in 2015, I checked eBay for completed listings and found a well-sorted attractive example with 200K that sold for $10,500, one with minor issues that sold for $8500, and a needy but drivable car that went for $6500. So if I paid $4000 for the white one, I’d need to make the case that I could make it whole and drivable for $2500, and it wasn’t even close. I sent a detailed email to the seller backing away from the purchase. I’d reasoned it through. I was happy with the decision. And that was that.

Until the following night. My wife and I were out to dinner with a friend. I had a few beers in me. I was telling him the story about the Great White Six-Speed Shark. Suddenly, like Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, I realized that I was an idiot. I’d made the wrong decision. Screw my left brain—my right brain wanted the car! [“I’m just a boy … standing before a Shark … asking it to love me.”] When I got home, I contacted the seller and literally sent him a photograph of the stack of hundred-dollar bills that I had not yet re-deposited in the bank. He said that if the fellow coming up from New York didn’t buy the car, it was mine. However, a day later, he texted me a pic of the car loaded on a trailer.

And that really was that.

Interestingly, a few months later, a cheap, needy, black 850i six-speed showed up in New Hampshire. This one was more drivable than the white one, but it munched second and third gear, and the front end shuddered over 40 mph like it was going to fly apart. Recalling what my friend had said about the unavailability of the 560G gearbox, I made the same decision. The Great White Six-Speed Shark and this black one kind of swirled together in my mind as an 850i six-speed yin-yang Zen-like “this is never going to be your fate” symbol.

A few years later I made one more try. As I wrote about in a piece called “The Rules of Attraction,” if you love the exterior lines of a car, love the look of the interior, and love the way it drives, then you’re hooked. I loved the 850i’s exterior look, but the fact was that I was lukewarm about the interior and had still never driven one at highway speeds to see if I’d actually enjoy it. So I contacted a guy who had an 850i automatic for sale and candidly explained that I really wanted a six-speed but offered to pay him for a decent test-drive in his car. To my surprise, he said, “Actually I have a white six-speed that I’m working on, but it’s not yet drivable.”

Somewhere off in the ether, I felt one side of the yin-yang symbol vibrate. “When you bought it,” I asked, “did it have a broken front strut and burn oil out one tail pipe?”

“How could you possibly know that?” the guy asked. I told him the whole story. He’d bought the car from the guy who came up from New York, who bailed out of it, and he’d never fixed it either. We had a good laugh over it. I never wound up driving his automatic and never followed up on the white car. Things sometimes just run their natural course.

The days of the cheap 850i are over—E31 cars, both stick and slush box, have rebounded from their bargain-basement prices. The days of my lying in a dark room, thinking about an 850i V-12 six-speed and waiting for the pain to pass, have ended as well. But whenever I see one at a BMW event, I walk around behind it and think, “Damn, that’s a nice fat planted-looking rear end that looks NOTHING like an A60 Supra.”

***

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 Great White Six-Speed Shark 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 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.

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

I’ve written a number of stories about selling the 29,000-mile 2008 Silverado HD3500 Duramax diesel duallie that I bought three years ago from my former employer as a mouse-infested mess, resurrected, but rarely used in the way I expected. In the end, it was a ridiculous overkill vehicle for my needs, so in September 2023 I sold it for windfall money, which never happens to me. I don’t regret it one iota. I needed the money far more than I needed the truck.

However, as soon as the truck was gone, I felt its absence. One issue was that I no longer had a vehicle that I could use when I need to drop everything, drive to a well-priced enthusiast car that just showed up online, and tow it home. It didn’t matter that that this was more an emotional issue than a real one (I never once used the Silverado for that in the time I owned it, and the logistics of having to first rent a U-Haul auto transporter makes this ability quite a bit less turnkey than it sounds). It was how I felt. The more realistic issue was that I no longer owned something big that I could use to haul, well, stuff. The tangible examples were trivial—being unable to snag a free king-size Tempur-Pedic mattress and a well-priced workbench. As with towing cars, if I really wanted to do either of these things, I certainly could’ve—I could have rented a truck, or a small U-Haul trailer and towed it behind my little Winnebago Rialta. But again, this had less to do with reality and more to do with feeling that I’d lost a tool that fit my self-image.

So I had another run at it. As I wrote about here, I carefully considered the truck-versus-SUV question, noted that I have no need to haul plywood or 4×8 sheetrock or construction debris or gravel or dirt, and decided that I’d rather have the interior space of a full-sized SUV that can be apportioned to people if need be. At the same time, although I owned six Suburbans to take extended family on beach vacations, I had to admit that in 2024, with my youngest child now 30, the need to carry eight people and coolers and boogie boards onto soft sand is now just a memory.

The requirements for another vehicle shaped up to be:

• Something big enough to swallow, say, a workbench.
• Have a third-row seat because why wouldn’t you want that blade on the Swiss army knife?
• Four-wheel drive so, if needed, Maire Anne or I could have something to drive if the weather turned poor.
• 6500-ish-pound towing capacity (small light cars and a U-Haul auto transporter).
• No exterior rust holes or Check Engine Light (CEL) issues to make it unable to pass Massachusetts state inspection.
• A target budget of around $4000.
• Oh, and I had to not hate it.

The yang to the budget’s yin was the question of how much work I’d be willing to put into the vehicle. One of my “Hack Mechanic’s Tips for Sane Living” is that it’s not a good thing when your daily driver becomes so needy that it’s essentially a project car. While an SUV/stuff hauler wasn’t going to become either my or my wife’s daily, I wanted it to be a tool, not a project. That reinforced my steering clear of well-priced Suburbans, as the ones I saw advertised cheaply needed to have brake lines replaced or had reported shifting issues or lifter noises. I also had no desire to go German, as despite my love for BMWs, few things are as needy as a depreciated high-mileage German V-8. So no BMW X5 4.4s. No Porsche Cayennes. And hell no, no VW Toureg V10 TDIs.

Lastly, regarding fuel economy, there’s no escaping the physics of a 6000-ish-pound, full-sized SUV with a 300-horsepower V-8 for decent towing capacity. Some are better, some are worse, but fueleconomy.gov lists the combined gas mileage of most full-sized SUVs as in the mid-teens. And none of them are like the Tardis on Doctor Who—none are bigger on the inside. If you want cavernous cargo-and-people space, it adds size and weight, which drops gas mileage.

Having owned a string of Chevys, I decided that this go-round I wanted to try to eat from the Japanese buffet. I zeroed in on Toyota Sequoias due to their excellent frequency-of-repair record, but as I wrote about here, the first-generation Sequoias have frame-rot issues so bad that Toyota issued a recall, and here in New England, the ones that have had their frame replaced also rot in other places. Plus people still want a lot of money for them. Looking outside the rust belt didn’t make sense to me, as you pay a premium for the car and a second one for the shipping. That’s something I’d entertain for an enthusiast car, but not for a tool. While the second-gen Sequoias appear to be clear of the frame-rot issue, the asking price for cars with 200,000 miles appears to start near nine grand, and that was more than twice what I wanted to spend.

So I somewhat reluctantly honed in on Nissan Armadas, Nissan’s full-sized SUV based on the Titan F-Alpha platform (and yes, I’m aware of the joke “The “R” in “Nissan” stands for “Reliability” ”). At 207 inches—about 17.25 feet—Armadas are about the same size as the Sequoia, about 6 inches longer than a 2008 Tahoe, and about a foot shorter than a 2008 Suburban. And there are a lot of used ones out there for a wide range of prices. However, there are some concerning commonly-listed problems on sites like RepairPal and CarComplaints including a vexing braking issue (the ABS switching on and the booster failing while driving). There are multiple threads about it on the Armada forum (ClubArmada) that discuss the failure of the delta brake stroke sensor and the resulting class action settlement for 2004–08 Armadas and Titan trucks. Armadas had a minor facelift for 2008, and it’s unclear whether that marked the end of the braking issue. To be safe, I resolved to look for a 2009 or later vehicle, but if you’re aiming at a price point and looking within a radius, bottom-feeders can’t be choosers. I did rule out a well-priced 127K 2005 Armada in southern Connecticut because the CarFax showed six owners, the kind of thing I could imagine intermittent brake failure being responsible for.

For a number of reasons, one Facebook Marketplace ad kept tugging at me: “Snow ready! 4-wheel drive 2008 Nissan Armada LE good tires, heated seats, heated steering wheel, power windows, locks, rear gate, leather, DVD entertainment, power folding third row seats. 183,000 miles. Great family car. We bought a new car.  $4500 OBO.” The photos showed an intact shiny black Armada with a black leather interior. I don’t like fully murdered-out cars, so I was glad that the wheels were mercifully standard alloys. And there was something about the combination of the black leather and the satin-finish wood trim that called to me.

When the seller dropped the asking price to $4000, I asked for the VIN so I could run the CarFax as well as run it through a Nissan VIN decoder to see what options it had.

The CarFax was clean and showed that the seller was the fourth owner. He’d bought it the summer of 2022 and had pulled it off the road this past fall because his wife’s car died, they bought a new Tahoe, and they swapped the plates off the Armada. However, the last entry in the CarFax was concerning—“Mechanical issue reported, vehicle towed.” I asked the seller, and he laughed. “I ran out of gas,” he said. The VIN decoder showed that the car had the tow package, which includes a 9100-pound tow capacity, heavy-duty radiator, re-mapped shift points, rear self-leveling suspension, and shorter-geared differential (3.36 as opposed to 2.94 for the non-tow-package).

The seller and I exchanged more messages, I liked what I heard, so I drove the 50 minutes from West Newton down to Mendon, Massachusetts, to see it.

The Armada and I sized one another up as I did my walk-around and crouch-down inspection. When I opened up the right rear door, I found some hidden rust, including an actual hole, at the back corner of the door sill. “Here we go,” I thought, recalling the Sequoia I looked at a few weeks ago where holes behind the running board proved to the tip of the rust-berg. However, this was the only rust-through I found anywhere on the car. I crawled under it as best I could on the dirt-and-gravel driveway, examined the frame, floor, and trailing arms, and saw the more-than-surface-rust-but-less-than-rust-holes expected of a 16-year-old, 183K, lifelong New England car, but nothing worse.

I started the car and saw that the Check Engine Light (CEL) was lit. I connected a code reader and found an active “Catalyst system efficiency below threshold” code for bank 2, and a stored code for bank 1. I cleared them to see what would happen when I drove it.

The fact that the car was unregistered and uninsured meant that the only test-drive I could take was a low-speed spin on local roads. Fortunately, the town of Mendon is pretty rural. I carefully drove the car maybe three miles, not exceeding 30 mph. The brakes were initially poor due to the rotors having rusted from sitting outside, but with several stands on the pedal, they began to come back to life. A few speed bumps revealed that the front shocks were likely gone, but other than that, the car ran, drove, and shifted fine. I verified that the 4WD worked. The CEL did not re-light.

When I parked the car at the end of the test drive, I held my gloved hand over the tailpipe. If an exhaust is completely tight, it should push your hand off, but I didn’t even feel any pressure. Clearly the exhaust had a good-sized hole in it, but it wasn’t in the least throaty, which was good—the hole was probably after the cat and muffler. I skooched back under to try to find it, but the uneven gravel driveway impeded my automotive spelunking. I then carefully used my ungloved hand to feel all four wheels to check for sticking calipers. The left front wheel felt just a bit warmer than the right, but it was subtle.

Well, then.

I was interested, so I asked the question that has served me well for years: “What do you need to get for it?” The guy thought about it, and said “$3500. Less than that and it feels like I’m giving it away.” I had cash in my pocket, but the fact that I hadn’t taken a real test drive at highway speeds meant that anything else could be wrong with it—it might not shift into fifth, the diff could whine, it could have a bad wheel bearing, the brakes could pull at speed, on and on. I also wanted to know if the CEL would re-trigger on a longer drive. All of that meant risk, and I explained that I needed to think what that was worth to me. So I left without making an offer.

Two miles down the road I thought, “This is stupid, because what’s going to happen is that when you think about it, you’re going to decide that it’s $500 worth of risk and offer him three grand. He’ll counter with $3250, you’ll accept, and you’ll need to drive back down to pay him and get the title, and then drive back a third time with plates to pick up the car [my tolerance for driving uninsured cars where, if something goes sideways, I could lose my house, is very low]. Why not just cut to the chase now?” But something in me wanted to consider this all very carefully, so I kept driving home.

That evening, I ran over my thought process again. Yes, I wanted a tow/stuff-hauling vehicle. Yes, it should be a full-sized SUV and not a truck. Yes, this go-round it should be Japanese. And hell yes, the budget was important because there was no sense in spending real money for something neither my wife nor I would daily drive; whatever I bought was likely to sit 90 percent of the time. It didn’t really need to be much. This one fit the bill and was within easy striking distance. I could buy it and be done with it.

I’ve long said that I think about automotive risk differently than most people. In the collector car world with online click-bid-buy sites, there’s the conception that risk is low when things get bid up because the car looks like new and there are a lot of eyeballs on it. Me, I think that if I spend $40,000 on a car and I’m half wrong about it (condition, provenance, mileage, whatever), that’s $20,000 worth of risk. In contrast, a car like this I could buy in the low-$3000 range had almost no risk. It ran and drove well and needed a little work, the exact amount of which was in the noise. If it wasn’t what I expected, I could bail out of it easily.

I called the seller and offered him three grand. He said he wanted to think about it.

Ten minutes later he texted me “How about $3250?”

Done. I’m either the smartest man or the dumbest, right?

The next day I drove back down, paid him, picked up the title, drove to my insurance agent’s office, and insured and registered the car. The day after that, my wife drove me back down to Mendon (for the third time, but hey, with a 50-minute drive, that’s no sweat), I picked up the Armada, and drove it home. The CEL did re-light on the drive home (and it’s a different code—“system performance bank 1”), but other than that it was fine. It was more than fine—it’s clearly a far more appropriate vehicle for me than the Silverado, which had the turning radius of a U-boat.

Yesterday I crawled under the car in my driveway and found that the exhaust leak is coming from a really badly welded joint between the muffler and tailpipe. I have an appointment with a muffler shop to see if they can splice it. I’ll get that fixed before I dive into the CEL issue, which may not even matter for vehicle inspection since the 16-year-old car is past the 15-year cutoff for emissions testing. I’m scouring ClubArmada to get information on which front struts to order. So, despite what I said about not wanting a truck that’s a project car, that’s what it’s going to be for a little while. And that’s OK.

This morning I spent 20 minutes in the Armada’s driver’s seat with the owner’s manual. This thing has more bells and whistles than a hundred clones of Bobby McFerrin in Notre Dame. It’s my first car with BlueTooth, an in-dash information display (yuck), nav system (which I’ll never use), and a back-up camera. It has an 11-speaker Bose sound system. Front and rear sonar. Power rear gate and rear seats. And that DVD entertainment system my kids would’ve loved on the way to the beach vacations in the Suburbans 15 years ago.

Hopefully, I’ll soon go back to doing what I said I needed a big vehicle for—hauling home cool enthusiast cars. And doing so in a single unaccompanied bag-and-drag trip, not two. And certainly not three. Though its first trip will likely be to drag home a workbench.

But there’s one thing bothering me.

Didn’t Cortés burn his Armada?

***

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The post The Hack Armada: Deal or No Deal? 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.

***

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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.”

***

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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.

***

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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.

***

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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.

***

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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.

***

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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.

***

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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.

***

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

In the summer of 1984, my then-girlfriend Maire Anne and I left Austin, Texas, to return to Massachusetts. We were getting married, the wedding was in Boston (where both of our families lived), and we reasoned that if we returned to Austin, we’d likely do the things married couples do— meaning buy a house and have kids—and before we knew it, we’d be dug in there.

Thinking about how infrequently we’d seen our families since our move south, we decided that a pre-emptive return to Boston was in order. So we quit our jobs, rented a U-Haul truck, and headed north. I drove the truck while towing my recently-purchased, rust-free 1975 BMW 2002 named “Bertha,” and Maire Anne drove her ’69 Volkswagen camper. The only problem was that we had no jobs and nowhere to live.

Until my mother made us an offer we couldn’t refuse.

A year earlier, she bought a big, old 15-room three-story Victorian house in Brighton (Boston). It was built in 1900 by a Chicago plumbing magnate whose two sons were attending nearby Boston College. As originally built, the first floor was to receive guests, the bedrooms were on the second floor, and a back stairway ran from the kitchen to the servant’s quarters on the third floor. I’m sure that, back in the day, it was magnificent. However, a lot of history passed between 1900 and 1983, during which the house reportedly had stints as a boarding house, a “flop house,” a home for young women, and was rumored to have transitioned to being an, ahem, house of ill repute (the presence of a sink in every bedroom was a tip-off that the rumors were true).

When my mother bought it, the previous owner had subdivided the large downstairs rooms in order to rent to as many college students as possible. But she had a vision. She and my sister and her young family moved in, took down the rabbit-warren-like walls, and reconfigured the house as a quirky three-family where the first two floors were a mother-daughter home that shared an entrance and were open to each other, but the third floor was a separate rentable apartment.

When we arrived after the long, hot drive up from Texas, my mother said to Maire Anne and me that the third-floor tenant had just left (more likely was gently nudged out) so we could move into the third floor and stay until we figured out what we wanted to do. So I unloaded the BMW 2002, returned the U-Haul, and we began our stay in what I still refer to as “my mother’s house.” The figuring-out-what-to-do part didn’t come until eight years later when we finally moved out. Looking back, my sister and I joked that our mother bought the house and then shamelessly tricked her two adult children into living with her.

The house had a two-car garage, both bays of which I instantly commandeered for my wrenching passion. Why my mother and sister allowed me to get away with this (which meant that they were kicked out to find curbside parking) is a mystery to me to this day, but I chalk it up to being the youngest child who had a long history of getting away with murder.

My time with the garage actually did not begin well. A few weeks after we moved in, I was backing the 2002 out and accidentally left the driver’s door ajar and caught the edge of it on the garage door jamb, bending it. I ordered a replacement door, shot it in gray primer, and installed it “for now,” thinking that I’d certainly get the car painted soon. Now, 39 years later, I still own the car, and it’s still wearing the gray-primered door.

But that hiccup passed quickly. When it was clear that Maire Anne and I weren’t going anywhere anytime soon, I dug myself in. I vividly remember driving to Sears, buying the 2½-horsepower, 20-gallon compressor I still own, ordering the Central Pneumatic impact wrench and hose from a Harbor Freight and Salvage paper catalog, setting up the air tools in the garage, doing the first WHACKETA WHACKETA WHEEEEE, and thinking that I had arrived as a Hack Mechanic.

In the eight years we lived in my mother’s house, about 20 BMWs, six Vanagons, and an ’84 Alfa Spider cycled through those garages. I did an insane amount of work there. I installed engines. I lowered transmissions onto my chest. I even parted out a 2002 curbside and had the carcass hauled off as scrap, which I’m certain didn’t exactly endear me to my neighbors. The parts from it and other cars that were parted out off-property were stored under the front porch.

To be clear, the garage at my mother’s house wasn’t technically automotive ground zero for me. I began fixing cars when I bought the always-breaking Triumph GT6+ after I graduated high school. During the 2½ years I owned it, it spent nearly half that time on jackstands under the carport of my mother’s previous house in Amherst. And during Maire Anne’s and my stay in Austin, a dozen BMWs came and went from our little duplex on Speedway and West 35th Street. But the combination of the eight-year stint at my mother’s house and the two-car garage allowed me to stretch my automotive legs as never before.

Obviously, non-automotive things happened in the house as well. It takes the right dynamic to be able to move back in with your family. Moving in with your spouse’s family is another matter. But it was great. My family loved my wife, and she them. We had separate floors, so we weren’t always in each other’s business. Plus, Maire Anne and I had a band, and the house had a big basement we could rehearse in. When our first and second children were born, my mother was an always-ready babysitter. She had both of her kids and all of her grandchildren living in her house, so she was in heaven. It was wonderful.

When we were expecting our third child in 1992, Maire Anne and I needed more space and moved to the house we still live in in Newton. Garage-wise, the Newton house with its single corrugated metal garage was a huge downgrade from the one at my mother’s house, but I made due. It wasn’t until the new garage was built 15 years later and I sprung for the midrise lift that I felt like I’d outpaced what I had in Brighton.

The hoard of parts stayed under my mother’s front porch for decades. When, eight years ago, she politely asked me a fourth time to clear it out, I finally complied. I had a take-’em-away-for-free sidewalk sale of doors, transmissions, and subframes. A few items came back to Newton with me, most of which I later found homes for.

My mother passed in 2019, and my sister and I inherited the house. She and her husband continued to live in it, along with a commercial tenant on the first floor and my youngest son, who occupied our old third-floor apartment. But the house eventually became more than my sister wanted to deal with, and late last year we began the slow process of emptying it of people and stuff and readying it for sale.

As I wrote here, the numbers-matching engine to my BMW 3.0CSi was still sitting in my mother’s garage. In addition, I found three rear windshields tucked away in what was literally the old coal room in the basement. I’m still trying to re-home them.

My sister moved out of the house in June, the junkman and the cleaners did their thing, and the house went on the market soon after. With rising interest rates, it wasn’t easy finding a buyer for a charming but still oddly-configured large house, but it eventually sold. We closed on it in early September.

Although my wife and I lived in my mother’s house from 1984 to ’92, it was my family’s house for 40 years. Those memories will ring in my mind forever. The automotive aspect was narrow by comparison (it wasn’t as if I went back there and wrenched in the garage). But there’s no question that my life would’ve been very different had Maire Anne and I done what most folks would’ve had to do when we moved back from Texas—find a regular apartment with no garage.

I said above that it’s a mystery to me why I had free run of my mother’s garage, but that’s not true. I know why. My mother, who I routinely describe as the wisest person I’ve ever met, used to offer this parenting advice: “If your child shows interest in something, treat that like a flower. Because if you don’t, you’ll kill it with neglect, or worse.” It took me years to understand, but letting me monopolize the garage with a pampered classic and a series of highly questionable project cars while she and my sister parked on the street in the winter was one of a long list of times she “enabled the flower.”

Thanks, Ma.

Thanks, Brighton garage. The new owner isn’t a family, so it’s unlikely someone else will indulge their passions, buy something really stupid, work on it inside, skin their knuckles, and hone their Hack Mechanic skills. Here’s hoping my experience still resonates within.

At a minimum, you can probably still hear me swear from when I dented Bertha’s door 39 years ago.

***

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 In praise of my mother’s garage 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.

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.

Two few weeks ago I wrote a piece titled “You’re Slow, Old Man,” in which I poked fun at myself for not being quick or decisive enough to grab or even go see several interesting cars that came onto my radar, while also letting it slip that y’all should cut me some slack because this was against the backdrop of my wife having cardiac surgery. At the end of my column, I said that there was a car that I was actively pursuing, but I didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag lest anyone steal it out from under me. That episode has played out, so I can now make with the reveal.

It was a 1974 TVR 2500M. If you’ve never heard of TVR, they’re a British boutique car manufacturer best known for the three tiny similar-looking models built in the mid-1960s and ’70s—the Grantura, Vixen, and 2500M that share a design including a catfish-sucking-up-the-pavement nose and a big piece of wrap-around rear glass. If vintage Lotuses are too pedestrian for your Brit tastes, you can go TVR and feel at home, as both are lightweight cars built with fiberglass bodies on steel frames. And in the fine tradition of other classic Brits like the Sunbeam Tiger, the most valuable TVRs are the handful of Cobra-like models into which the factory stuffed a small-block Ford Windsor V-8 (the Griffin is a V-8-powered version of the Grantura; the Tuscan is built on the Vixen).

To be clear, the 2500M isn’t one of those. Built from 1972–77, the 2500M has more than just the usual Triumph parts bin brakes and steering components like my Lotus Europa—it has a TR6 engine, as that mill had already cleared U.S. emissions testing. It’s estimated that about 80 percent of the 947 2500Ms produced were sold in the United States. Europe also received both the slower 1600M with a Ford Kent 1.6-liter four-pot, and the quicker 3000M, Taimar hatchback, and 3000S roadster, all powered by the Ford Essex 3.0L V-6. Unlike the Grantura and the Vixen, the 2500M never had a factory Ford V-8 variant, but the North American TVR importer apparently developed a small number (less than 10) of 5.0-liter, V-8-powered cars and badged them as 5000Ms. Due to this history, some enthusiasts roll their own 302-powered 2500Ms.

While I can’t say that a 2500M causes me same knees-weakening-mumbling-in-adoration response that an early E-Type does, I’ve always thought that they’re very cool little two-seaters, scratching the same itch as the Triumph GT6 I owned 45 years ago and the BMW M Coupe (“clown shoe”) that I currently have.

So when I saw this ad on Facebook Marketplace one evening, it instantly had my complete attention:

“1974 TVR 2500M. Very nice, car starts on starting fluid and is a beautiful candidate for your dream restoration or could easily be roadworthy in a couple of weekends.  Only 947 of these produced worldwide 1972 to 1977, this one also has a complete set of 5 rare Wolfrace wheels that were an option from the factory. If you’re truly interested and understand how rare these are to find complete, then please reach out. $11,500.”

The ad had just four photos, all of the exterior. They showed a silver car with a black top, a black factory sliding fabric sunroof, and black trim. There was some patina to the paint, but the car certainly wasn’t a basket case.

I saw that the ad had just gone up 36 minutes earlier, so there was the chance that I could be the first one to respond. However, there were two non-trivial issues that stopped me.

The first was that the car was in central Long Island, New York. Having purchased a BMW 2002 in the Hamptons a few years back, I was intimately familiar with how long a schlep that is. I own a truck but not a trailer, and by the time you factor in picking up the rented U-Haul transporter, it’s difficult to squeeze the 500-mile round trip into a day, particularly if, like me, you’re only good for about an hour of driving after sundown.

The second issue was, of course, the far more important one—my still-recuperating wife. Although a week had passed since her surgery, it was still early enough that I didn’t feel right about vanishing for a full day (and likely overnight) for something as trivial as not just a car, but a British car (sorry). So I sighed, closed the lid on my laptop, and crawled into bed, knowing full well that the car would likely be marked “sold” in the morning.

But it wasn’t. The following evening, I sent the seller a friendly message explaining who I was (and that I’m a fellow Long Island boy—my parents are buried about 25 miles from his location), and what my circumstances were that would likely cause me to miss out on the car, but that he should hold onto my contact information because, well, you never know.

As things returned to normalcy in my house, the seller and I swapped messages, then a lengthy phone call. He said that the car had been previously owned by a fellow in New Jersey who’d had it since the 1980s. It had passed from daily driver to pleasure toy, then sat from about 2006 through ’17. The owner then revived it, thinking he’d undertake a restoration. That never happened, and the seller bought it late last year. He said he had visions of doing a Ford 302 engine swap, but the car was stored at his business, he was retiring and closing the building, and decided to sell it instead. As the ad said, the car reportedly fired up on starting fluid, but he hadn’t put the time into getting it running and driving. He said that he didn’t have a lift, but he’d jacked up the car and found only surface rust on the frame tubes, outriggers, braces, and suspension components. He sent me a bunch of still photos of the exterior and interior, and two videos of the undercarriage. He described some light damage to the fiberglass under one of the wheel wells, possibly due to a blowout, and the driver’s seat needing full reupholstery.

Maybe it was the Long Island secret handshake, but the seller struck me as a straight-up guy. It started the mental gears turning enough that I asked him about the title. He said that he’d never registered the car, but had an open title from the previous owner.

“Signed but undated?” I asked.

“No—signed and dated.”

This was a problem. While I have no moral qualms with an open title, in Massachusetts there’s a quirky issue where you can be assessed a penalty with interest if you buy a car and title isn’t transferred into your name within 10 days, so a title with an old signing date is potentially problematic. The odd thing is that the registry can’t tell you what the penalty is—they refer it to the Department of Revenue, which kills a goat, reads the entrails and comes up with a number. Seriously, I’ve never been able to find a printed reference for what the formula is. But I once saw a Boston television news segment where a guy who’d bought a TR6 decades ago and didn’t register it until a lengthy restoration was completed was assessed over $10,000 in penalties, so it’s something I’m wary of.

While I was thinking all this over, my wife caught me looking at the ad. I spooled out the whole story. “I’m fine,” she said. “If you want to go look at it, go!” (See why I love her?) But it’s a funny thing how, when learning that something you think you want to do is now possible, you examine whether or not you really want to do it.

I’ve certainly had my automotive passions carry me into questionable decisions, but I’m usually pretty rational and steely-eyed in these matters. I like to think it through to where there’s a trigger point that could go either way—e.g., “If I do A, then B will happen, but if I do X, then Y will happen”—and I’m satisfied with either outcome. While I’ve lost some cars I should’ve have, I’ve kept myself out of quite a bit of trouble too (says the guy with the brown Lotus Europa).

I wrote up a list of pros and cons. The pros were that I know what blows my skirt up. I wanted the car. And I joke that the “business model” of this phase of my life is buying needy cars that generate content for these articles, but it’s really not a joke, and the car would be perfect for that. The cons were price, distance, and the title issue.

The bottom line was that if the car was 2/3 the asking price and nearby, I’d have ignored the title issue and bought it already (more accurately, I’d have driven there, looked at the frame tubing carefully, and if it wasn’t rotted through anywhere, bought it on the spot). If I passed on it and found out later that someone else grabbed it for a great price, I’d be pissed at myself. But I now have over 20 grand in my ratty Lotus, it’s probably worth only $10K due to its survivor appearance (I love survivor cars with patina, but the market doesn’t), and I need to try to avoid having that happen again.

The distance was a funny thing. If the TVR was only a couple of hours away, I’d just jump in a car and drive there to make sure I wanted the car, close the deal, and then come back when it was convenient with the truck and trailer. But before I drove 500 miles down to Long Island and back, I wanted to be pretty sure that I was coming back with the car. There was an added complication about a non-running car being difficult to get up on a U-Haul auto transporter, but that was a detail. It was tempting to just zip there and back in my comfortable fast BMW for a look-see, but that seemed like admitting that I was less likely rather than more likely to buy the car.

Regarding the title issue, this risk may not seem like a big deal, but it did affect the value of the car to me. In the past I would’ve just run the car through the Vermont DMV, but with The Vermont Loophole closed, the options were to risk the penalty from the old date on the title, or try to get a clean duplicate title through the previous owner (I searched on Facebook and found his video of the car running in 2017).

Regarding price and value, I looked at 2500M values on Hagerty, at 2500M sales history on Bring a Trailer, and at project cars on GrassrootsMotorSports.com. Hagerty lists the value of a 1974 2500M in “fair condition” (described as “has visible flaws to the naked eye, runs fine but could use mechanical or cosmetic attention”) at $9800. As this one wasn’t a running, driving car, its condition was probably lower than “fair.” BaT sales prices of good and excellent cars seemed to correlate with Hagerty values pretty well, with the highest-priced cars being ones that had undergone a well-executed 302 V-8 conversion. The lowest-priced 2500M sold on BaT was $10K in 2021. It had been sitting for 34 years with a free-turning engine, but from the photos, that car appeared to be in substantially better condition than this one (e.g., shiny pretty paint, unripped seats). At the low end, on Grass Roots Motorsports, I saw stories of 2500M projects where people had picked up smashed glass, rodent-infested, basket-case cars for next to nothing. Clearly this car was in far better condition than those. So I couldn’t find data directly supporting value of a 2500M in the almost-running-but-not-driving survivor condition this one was in.

Then there was the issue of the money itself. Ten-ish grand is a lot of cash to be traveling with. I scoped out that there’s a branch of my bank in the town where the car was, open until 2 p.m. on Saturday. But boy, picking up a trailer on Saturday morning, getting down there, looking at the car, negotiating, and getting to the bank by 2 p.m. seemed like a thin needle to thread.

I decided to bounce it all off my good friend Tom. Tom and I have done each other multiple significant car guy favors. He has eclectic automotive tastes—BMWs, an E-Type, vintage Volvos, a hot rod—so I value his perspective. And he’s got a truck and a covered trailer with a winch, and has said he’s down for a road trip if there’s something I needed to bag and drag. I thought that if I went, I could use the company. We could share the driving. Hell, if I asked him to, I’m sure he’d go down to Long Island, negotiate on my behalf, and do it all.

Tom and I had a long talk. Though he’s an enabler (he literally asked “When do you want me to pick you up?”), he also gave me a dose of reason. He cycled through the Hagerty valuation and BaT sales just like I did, and said, “It looks like you can pick up pretty, shiny, running 2500Ms for $17K. You’re not going to pick this one up for 10 and turn it into one of those for another seven.”

He was right. Although I buy well-priced cars because I like their stories and want to be part of them, and I rarely think in terms like “upside” and “being underwater,” the episode with the Lotus has forced me to not do anything overly stupid.

The 2500M only made sense to me at significantly under the seller’s asking price. When I’m selling a car, I hate the sight-unseen buyer question “What’s the lowest you’ll take for it?” We all joke that the seller’s standard reply should be “What’s the most you’ll pay for it?” Negotiations are always best done with skin in the game—face to face with the seller, having driven there with a trailer and money. I really didn’t want to do to the seller what I hate having done to me. And if I did, it would be meaningless because I hadn’t yet seen the car.

So what was the play?

I sent the seller a lengthy detailed email saying most of what I said above (I’ve always found it helpful when both buyer and seller have the same information), and ended it with this: “If you said, ‘Well, I paid $X for it, I need to get rid of it, but I was hoping to get something out of owning it,’ and if $X was a good number, I’d be interested and would come down. But if you said ‘$11,500 is the firm price, I’ve gotten a hundred messages, someone will pay it, three guys are coming down this weekend,’ then I don’t think there would be a path to ownership for me, and that’s OK.”

The seller sent me an equally thoughtful response, the pivotal part of which was “There’s multiple offers on the car at this point, exceeding the [$10K] car on BaT … While I am motivated to sell, I’m by no means vulnerable or desperate, and will start working on it in September if it doesn’t sell.”

And with that, my patented “If he says yes, I’m good, and if he says no, I’m good” process played out. So, no. Done. Move along. Nothing here to see.

But the seller also offered me this poignant perspective: “Everyone, including myself, would love running survivor TVRs below $10K. Those days came and went years ago. Cars deteriorate more over time, so few survivors exist anymore, and it’s hard to find complete and restorable cars of any brand. They are few and far between. If anything, the buyer in our age group is the vulnerable party. Sometimes you just have to pull the trigger at any cost, as tomorrow isn’t guaranteed and we may not be above ground when the next car we dreamed of comes along.”

He was right. Except for the last part. Maybe I’ve simply gotten spoiled, as well as less hungry, if that dichotomy is possible. My 1970s BMWs and the ratty Lotus Europa certainly aren’t the seven-figure exotics that real collectors have, but I’m blessed to own them. As I said earlier, I’d love to have an E-Type in my garage, but if I really wanted one, I could sell a few cars and make it happen, and I don’t.

The truth is that owning and experiencing any particular car before I die isn’t even remotely on the list of things I want to do before I pass on. I’m simply not wired to “pull the trigger at any cost.” Honestly, I’d rather follow my own quirky automotive compass and hang out with my wife.

Long may you run, TVR 2500M. May we both enjoy our paths.

***

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 TVR that I let get away 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.

There’s a phrase I’ve heard women use: “Closet Shopping.” It describes rooting around in your closet to find clothing that you’ve forgotten about and reconnecting with it, maybe wearing it in some new way.

First, let me say that I don’t think I’m engaging in gender-stereotyping. I’ve simply never heard men use the phrase. I will, however, freely admit that I have two dozen sport coats in my closet from back in the days when I managed a team of engineers and wore a coat and tie to work. They’re mostly Italian labels that I found in thrift stores for the price of a DIY oil change. When my wife and I head out to a social obligation or a nice dinner, I will admit to trying a whole bunch of them on, sighing, wondering why I still own them, then not being able to part with any of them. But I doubt that there is any “new way” to wear a sport coat, at least not one that wouldn’t make me look like I’m off my meds.

I’ve written quite a bit about the 13 cars I own (the Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special, the three BMW 2002s, the 3.0CSi, the Bavaria, the 1979 Euro 635CSi, the M Coupe, the Z3, the 530i daily driver, my wife’s DD Honda Fit, the little Winnebago Rialta RV, and the Duramax Diesel truck), and how the 70-mile distance to the spaces I rent in a warehouse in the town of Monson on the Massachusetts/Connecticut border has made it so it can be months between visits to the five cars that are stored out there.

It made me wonder: Is the Monson warehouse my “closet?” If you own enough cars, is there such a thing as “Garage Shopping?” And, if so, can it actually stave off the desire to buy another car?

Maybe, maybe, and maybe.

To be clear, I’d have to own a lot more than 13 cars to simply forget about several of them and then rediscover them like an old sweater or last season’s Capri pants. I do, however, have recurring dreams about cars I once owned. They’re very specific. The 1970 Triumph GT6+, my wife’s ’69 VW Westfalia camper, a particularly spritely 1972 BMW 2002tii, and a 1983 BMW 533i daily driver (the exception in an otherwise passion-centric list) all make repeat somnambulic appearances where I dream I stashed them in a warehouse or garage and forgot that I still own them until I stumble upon them. But I digress.

But there is something to be said for the proposition that, when you don’t drive a car for a while, you get reintroduced to it when you finally do. And that reintroduction can go either way. It can be like running into an old college flame and thinking “What did I ever see in her?” Or you can react viscerally and walk away weak-knee’d and feeling, “Oh man, am I in trouble.”

A few months ago, I wrote about driving the five cars in Monson after not seeing them since Thanksgiving and not driving some of them farther than around the block for over a year. The experience was generally a positive one, with one glaring exception—when I drove the 1999 BMW M Coupe (the “Clown Shoe”) the 70 miles home, I was painfully reminded of the fact that, after 45 minutes, the seats cause me sharp lower-back discomfort.

Because of this, I began to seriously think about selling the car. I clocked through a few punch list items—I had the wheels refinished and one slightly bent one straightened, shelled out for new tires, repaired a cracked taillight, and investigated refinishing the front bumper cover.

As I wrote (here and here), it’s a lot of work to sell a car, particularly if you want to get market value for it and supply the information necessary to address the questions you’re certain to get peppered with. I had a few friends and online acquaintances who expressed interest in the car, so instead of shooting hundreds of still pics, I did a simple walk-around video of the car, and a second one with it up on the mid-rise lift in my garage.

But before even a quick walk-around video, the car needed a rudimentary cleaning. Really, what the car badly needs is to be detailed. There’s so much particulate matter embedded in the paint that once it gets a clay bar treatment, it’ll make the bar look like it’s been rolled in a granite quarry. And interior-wise, you can probably find a 10mm socket in the dirt in the seat crevices. But doing something is better than doing nothing, so I simply gave it a quick washing and interior vacuuming in my driveway. On the drive to the parking lot where I often photograph cars, the car was still dripping, so I took it up onto the highway for a few exits to blow the water off.

And that’s when I found it in my closet and remembered why I bought it in the first place.

When I bought the car in the winter of 2007, it had four bent wheels and all four shocks/struts were either seized or blown, but it didn’t matter, because when I got it on the entrance ramp to the highway and nailed it, it wound up so quickly that I hit 90 before I knew what happened. By modern standards, the car’s specs (240 horsepower from the S52 engine, 5.3 seconds 0-60) don’t cause hyperventilation, but it was quicker than and completely different from anything I’d ever owned, and between that and the car’s “planted” rear end, I was immediately hooked.

The funny thing is that, 16 years later, that’s still the case. And now that the car is sitting on completely round wheels with brand-spanking-new rubber, the quick drive on the highway was transformative. Mash the gas, and car rockets forward, glass-smooth on the asphalt. Throw it around an entrance ramp, and it feels glued down. Back pain after 45 minutes? Who cares when that’s still 35 minutes away? Since this is a family publication, I’m not sure I can print the meeting-the-hot-old-flame analogy, but you get the picture.

I’ve been strident about my view that, as a regular non-hedge-or-trust-fund Joe with finite resources, a car needs to be for something in order to stay around. The 3.0CSi is to look at and swoon over, and after 37 years, I still get to be its partner (sort of how I look at my wife). The other vintage BMWs are for long-distance driving to events. The ratty Z3 roadster is for top-down stress-busting, even on a trip to the hardware store. The Lotus Europa is for driving on twisty roads through leafy suburbs west of Boston at 4 mph over the speed limit and having so much fun that I feels like I should be arrested. The Rialta is for quick inexpensive beach getaways. The dailies and the truck are for the disposable stuff of life. By this analysis, the M Coupe hasn’t been for anything in many years, and thus has felt like the odd girl out.

But maybe, if money and space concerns don’t get too pressing, being the feels-like-nothing-else-I-own-and-I-go-ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod-when-I-nail-it car is enough.

Regarding the overly-stiff seats, when I wrote the “maybe I’ll sell it” article, I received numerous comments that I could replace the seats with something more comfortable like the vintage Recaros in my old BMWs. It’s not that simple. Like most cars built since the 1990s, the M Coupe has seat belt tensioners—sensational devices that are triggered along with the airbag and other Supplemental Restraint System (SRS) components to pull the seat belts tight in the event of an impact. The belt tensioners are a part of the seats and thus are not easily or safely retrofit onto an old Recaro.

However, years back, some Clown Shoe folks alerted me that I wasn’t alone in finding the seats uncomfortable, and that some people found that simply tilting the normally-unadjustable seat base slightly back by adding spacers in the front makes a difference by providing more leg support. I tried throwing a few washers under the front seat bolts six years ago and didn’t find it to be a magic bullet. However, someone sent me a link to an inexpensive adjustable kit for the M Coupe. I have it on order.

Holy hell. I’ve not only found an old article in the closet, I’m about to wear it in a new way. I’d better check my meds.

***

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 go “closet shopping” for cars? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Last week, I talked about the pros and cons of doing a “prophylactic” replacement of the perfectly-functioning fuel pump in my 1996 Winnebago Rialta (a Volkswagen Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body). The argument for replacing it was that:

1. Fuel delivery problems are on my “Big Seven” list of things likely to strand a well-used car;
2. Other items on that list had already reared their ugly heads, failed, and nearly stranded me;
3. The receipts from the previous owner didn’t show fuel pump replacement; and …
4. I’d already bought a new fuel pump to have with me just in case, but because it lives inside the fuel tank, replacing it roadside isn’t trivial. That is, fuel pump replacement in a modern car is the antithesis of an old-school mechanical fuel pump that’s held to the head with a pair of nuts and two hose clamps and can be swapped almost as easily as a fuse.

The cons were a combination of the usual “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” argument coupled with the issue of the poor quality of new parts raising the real possibility that I might replace a high-quality working pump with something that could fail sooner. The thing that tipped me toward replacing it was when a friend of mine posted about having the fuel pump fail on his well-sorted car during a thousand-mile enthusiast tour.

So, a month before a scheduled trip to the Cape with my incredibly supportive wife, I dove in, but I had a special degree of curiosity as to whether I could have easily replaced it roadside had it failed. I did what was necessary to pull up the rug, expose the fuel pump, and remove it. This was more invasive than simply lifting up the back seat, as was required to do this repair in my 2003 BMW a few years back, but it wasn’t as bad as I expected. The surprise was that the plastic twist-lock fitting holding the fuel pump to the bracket on the bottom of the tank appeared to be stuck fast. While old plastic obviously doesn’t rust like steel or corrode like aluminum, with age it can certainly stick and bind. The time and effort it took simply to rotate it 30 degrees was enough that I was glad I was doing it in my driveway instead of on the side of Route 6 on the Cape.

The work that remained was simply transferring the rest of the components—the flexible corrugated plastic hoses connecting the pump to the flange, and the fuel level sensor—over from the old pump to the new. On paper, this is trivial, but the actual mechanics of it were surprisingly challenging.

I put the fuel pump assembly in a disposable aluminum roasting pan to catch the dripping fuel and carried it to a table in the garage where I could work on it in the shade.

Before I detail the swap-over of the components, I should note that whenever you have reason to open up a fuel tank, it’s an opportunity to look inside and check for contamination. I’ve removed fuel senders from metal tanks in running cars only to be greeted with what looked like a mixture of pot roast and chewing gum. While the plastic tanks in modern cars don’t rust like the old metal ones do, there can be a surprising amount of sediment at the bottom. If it looks like someone emptied a beach pail in there, everything stops while you drain the tank and clean it out. Fortunately, the Rialta’s tank showed only a tiny bit of sediment, small enough that I was confident the screen at the bottom of the pump and the upstream filter would keep it out of the injectors.

Back to the task at hand. The flexible plastic lines are attached to the fuel pump with single-use crimped “pinch clamps.” While I understand that they’re used on in-tank fuel pumps because they’re vibration-resistant, I really dislike dealing with them. I do have a set of “ear” clamp cutters that are supposed to bite through them, but I don’t have the upper body strength that I used to. If there’s no fuel present, I’ll sometimes cut them off with a cutting wheel on a Dremel tool, but the sparks raised makes its use out of the question if there’s fuel present.

I was able to carefully pry the barbed end of the band clamp off with a small screwdriver and unwind it off the hose. Prying it this way puts leverage on the plastic fitting that the hose is attached to and thus risks cracking it, but as I was replacing the pump anyway, I took the risk.

The next step was to pull the plastic hoses off the fittings. As you’ve probably experienced, even with rubber hoses, when the rubber has hardened with age, this can sometimes be surprisingly challenging, but as was the case with the plastic pump on the plastic bracket, these had a death grip.

I really didn’t want to damage the plastic hoses, as that would mean replacing them, which would necessitate removing them from the underside of the send/return flange, and if I broke either of the plastic fittings there, I would’ve been in a world of hurt. I used a number of prying tools to carefully work them off. When the gap between the end of the hose and the base of the fitting became wide enough, I was able to use a 7mm box-end wrench to contact the hose 3/4 of the way around and efficiently pry it off. For the last mile, where the gap was very wide, I used a pair of these wrenches.

Cutting off a couple of crimped-on clamps and pulling plastic hoses off fittings doesn’t sound like much, but the whole episode took several hours. Granted, that was a leisurely pace in my garage with hydration breaks, but the ability to do it while sitting on a chair at a work table rather than hunched over by the side of the road was key. It may seem trivial, but I was struck by the minor detail that I do not routinely travel with two 7mm wrenches in my road tool kit.

To connect the flexible plastic lines to the new pump, I simply needed to remove a little black cap over one of the fittings. However, regarding “simply,” as Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” I assumed the cap was rubber and I could just flick it off with my thumb, but it turned out to be made of vinyl or plastic and had become rock-hard either while the pump was on the shelf in the warehouse or in the RV’s storage bin. It wouldn’t budge. I was being stopped by a little eraser-sized cap. It was like the fuel pump’s guard dog was jumping up and grabbing my ankle as I was climbing the fence to escape. I gently pried the cap forward using the same trick with the two 7-mm box-end wrenches. That is, until I heard a piece of plastic crack. My heart stopped. I thought it was the plastic fuel fitting itself, but it turned out to be a thin little support bracket the fitting was attached to. I stopped prying immediately and carefully cut slots in the cap with a single-edged razor blade instead.

That left transferring over the fuel pump sender. I had to compare the old and new pumps to see where the pump ended and the sender began. I found that the sender was held in place by two plastic tabs that clipped into slots. Anyone who’s dealt with unseating old plastic electrical connectors knows that these are the kind of things that snap if you even look at them. I carefully released them with a pair of screwdrivers and drew the sender upward, then transferred it over to the new pump.

And, with that, I could finally install the Rube Goldberg-like assembly in the fuel tank. I turned the key and cranked the starter, knowing that it might take the system longer to start than normal while the pump pressurized the system, but about five seconds later it fired up. I didn’t see any leaks, so I buttoned things up.

And, with that, the Fuel Pump Follies had finally ended.

So, could I have done this on the road if the fuel pump died? Now that I’ve been through it, yeah … I could have thrown a disposable roasting pan in the cabinet and those two magic 7mm box-end prying tools in the toolbox (and, make no mistake, I’ll stash those items, along with the original pump, in the RV) and bailed myself out of trouble if necessary, but the weight of data falls clearly on the side of prophylactic in-driveway replacement.

Unless the new one dies. In which case I’ll never utter the word “prophylactic” again.

***

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 Fuel Pump Follies (Part 2) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

One of my recurring sermons in the “Church of Hack” isn’t about the seven deadly sins—it’s the list of the “Big Seven” things that cause a car, particularly an older one, to be in the breakdown lane with the hood up. Once more for those in the cheap seats, that list includes issues with ignition, fuel delivery, cooling system, charging system, belts, clutch hydraulics on a manual transmission car, and ball joints. I preach over and over that addressing these things in a preventive fashion is an effective vaccine against the virus of roadside failure.

However, as I wrote a couple of years ago, the quality of replacement parts these days, even “genuine” Original Equipment (OE) dealer parts, is often poor, as the quality control applied to parts for our old cars (which exist in the thousands) simply isn’t the same as it is for new cars (which are pumped out in the hundreds of thousands). This has come to affect how I deal with “Big Seven” preventive maintenance. Prophylactically replacing an inexpensive normal-wear-and-tear item—like a set of points, or a larger item like a fuel pump, water pump, or an alternator—before a big trip used to be a slam-dunk for me if I didn’t know how old the part was. Not anymore. These days I generally need a reason to replace these items, since the part in the car may be of better quality than the one you’d be buying. Make no mistake—if something is exhibiting a problem, you shouldn’t ignore it. But I don’t spend the amount of time and money that I used to spend while replacing working parts. If this sounds like me discovering the well-known “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” paradigm, yeah, OK, there’s a hint of that in it. But I think of it more as somewhere between a Beatles-ish automotive “Let It Be” and a kind of informed laziness.

Last year, I highlighted this issue when I discussed performing another round of preventive maintenance on my little ’96 Winnebago Rialta (a Volkswagen Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body on it). Shortly before a summer jaunt to the Cape, the car died, fortunately in my driveway. The cause turned out to be a crack in the case of the ignition coil pack—as soon as it got wet, you could see it arcing to ground instead of to the distributor.

Even though I found the culprit, the search led me down the rabbit hole of reading about “sudden death syndrome” on the Rialta forums. Some posts laid the blame on the overload sensor on the in-tank fuel pump; others implicated the ignition pulse module that lives inside the distributor. My solution at the time was to spend $56 on a new OE coil pack, $167 on a new OEM fuel pump, and $65 on an aftermarket pulse module, but then install only the coil pack, as that was the component that was visibly failing and was trivial to replace. In contrast, there was no evidence that either the fuel pump or the pulse module was bad, and both are a pain to replace—the fuel pump is inside the gas tank, and replacing the pulse module requires yanking the distributor. Still, having those parts in one of the RV’s cabinets made me feel better, as a) if one of them failed while on a road trip, I thought that, if push came to shove, I could probably replace them roadside, and b) even if I couldn’t, having the parts might save two days if I had to have the car towed somewhere for repair.

As summer arrived and we began planning to use the little RV to drive to the Cape again, I was fine with those decisions. Let it be and all that.

And then, a surprising thing happened. My friend Keith Martin, publisher of Sports Car Marketplace (SCM) magazine, reported that on the “SCM 1000” enthusiast tour, his well-sorted ’72 Mercedes 250C died. The cause turned out to be a failed fuel pump. My knee-jerk reaction was, “Who doesn’t replace the fuel pump as part of sorting out a car prior to a thousand-mile trip?” But then I thought about both my revised way of looking at preventive maintenance and the Rialta with its fuel pump of unknown age sitting in the driveway, and I thought “Oh. Right. Me.”

And just like that, “If I had to, I could replace the Rialta’s fuel pump by the side of the road if it died” morphed into “And if you have to, you’re going to feel like an idiot that you didn’t just nut up and do it in your driveway instead.”

The Fuel Pump Follies had begun.

First, let me say that I dislike in-tank fuel pumps even though they make sense on paper, and I get why nearly all cars now have them. Putting the pump directly where the fuel is means it doesn’t have to suck fuel out of the tank; it can just push it forward. Plus, submerging the pump in fuel keeps it cool. And you don’t have the pump exposed underneath the car where a stone can get it.

But, as with many things, the apparent simplification of putting it out of sight makes the actual piece of equipment more complicated. On a vintage car, the fuel pump, the level sensor, and the pick-up tube (the thing that reaches down to the bottom of the tank and attaches to a fuel hose at the top) are three different things. On a modern in-tank pump, they’re all part of the same assembly. The fuel pump often twists or snaps into a holder on the bottom of the tank. The level sensor is usually a float on the end of a coat-hanger-like arm attached to the side of the pump. The bottom of the pick-up tube is actually the bottom of the pump itself, which is connected via in-tank hoses to the flange at the top of the tank to which the rubber fuel send and return lines attach. These three parts have to be withdrawn together. It’s like pulling a squid with rigor mortis out of an opening the size of a soup bowl.

I replaced the in-tank fuel pump on my 2003 BMW E39 530i last year, and it wasn’t too bad. The top of the fuel tank was easily accessible under the back seat. Removing the Byzantine pump-float-flange-hose assembly required watching a few videos. To save money, I purchased only the pump “insert” as opposed to the entire assembly, so I needed to cut off the crimped-on hose clamps (I hate those things), and disassemble the “cradle” that contained the pump. It was tedious but straightforward. It made me think that, if necessary, I could do the same repair roadside in the Rialta.

However, on the Rialta, accessing the top of the gas tank requires removing one or both front seats and pulling up the carpet, and doing that requires removing the bases of the gearshift lever and the handbrake. None of this is rocket science, but bear-hugging seats and yanking up rugs are exactly the sort of things that are likely to anger up my cranky back. I read on Eurovan forums that it’s possible to expose the access panel over the fuel pump by cutting the rug, but you need to be careful not to slice the wires running beneath it. I entertained that approach, but someone posted “Sheesh, you’d need to be a real hack to do that. I mean how hard is it to remove seats and a bit of shifter and e-brake trim?”

Point taken, perhaps more personally than most, uh, hacks.

So in I went, taking mental notes on whether I was indeed saving myself from a difficult or impossible roadside repair, or whether, like on a carbureted car with a mechanical fuel pump, it was more a matter of taking five minutes to loosen two nuts and two hose clamps.

The seat removal was surprisingly easy. My Rialta has captain’s chair-style seats that swivel on a six-inch-high pedestal, so there was easy access to the bolts holding the driver’s seat. And rather than having to bear-hug the far-from-featherweight seat out of the car, I was able to simply tip it backward into the coach section of the RV.

Removing the gearshift and handbrake bases was trivial. Lifting up the carpet had one hitch: The hole in it was clearly too small to lift over the big swiveling plate that the seat bolted to, and that plate was held to the pedestal with a very tight 24mm nut. I zipped it off with the impact wrench. Had I been roadside, I could’ve cut a clearance slot in the carpet instead. The carpet came up easily (I was concerned because one video showed a mechanic fighting against adhesive; mine had none). With a bit of finagling, it lifted over the seat pedestal, shifter, and handbrake. As I peeled the carpet back and flopped it over the passenger seat, I realized that the fact that I needed to remove only the driver’s seat and not both of them was probably due to the fact that mine were the pedestal-mounted style and thus had a much smaller footprint on the carpet than they would’ve had if they were floor-mounted. The handbrake lever was bolted to the floor with three stout nuts. They came off without a fight, giving full access to the fuel tank cover panel.

So far, the idea that I might have been able to do this as a roadside repair wasn’t at all far-fetched.

Then I unscrewed the access panel to the tank. The top of the flange where the hoses attach—the thing that you lift up to pull the pump out—was covered with leaves, acorns, seeds, and mouse detritus, stuff that you definitely don’t want falling into the tank. I grabbed the shop vac and sucked it all out, wiped anything loose off the plastic face, and vacuumed again. Yeah, I thought, this would’ve slowed me down roadside.

Next, I disconnected the three hoses (fuel send, fuel return, and the line to the gas generator) on the flange. The hoses were old and stiff, and getting them off required a fair amount of careful pushing, tugging, and twisting. I was keenly aware that I needed to re-use the flange, so if I broke the plastic nipples, I’d be in trouble. While it wasn’t strictly necessary to disconnect the cable from the handbrake lever, doing so got it out of my way. Working slowly and carefully, I got the hoses off.

I then undid the big plastic lock ring holding the flange to the top of the tank, allowing me to carefully draw it upward and look into the tank. I could see the plastic corrugated hoses connecting the underside of the flange to the fuel pump. To get a better understanding of the layout, I unboxed the new fuel pump I’d bought last summer. I could see the slots on the bottom where it locked into the flange on the bottom of the tank. I gleaned from their configuration that the pump must lock in by twisting it to the right, and unlock to the left. I watched a video to be certain.

Then I donned gas-resistant rubber gloves, reached in with my right hand, and tried to twist the pump free.

It wouldn’t budge.

I watched another video where a mechanic said that the thing to do was get both hands through the hole and on the pump. I scraped the back of one of my hands doing so, and still couldn’t get the pump loose.

I rooted around in the garage looking for an oil filter strap wrench to get some leverage on the pump, but all of mine were too small. I entertained using a large pair of slip-joint pliers, but there wasn’t an obvious way to get them in and orient them. Plus, I really didn’t want to damage the level sensor, which I could feel but couldn’t see.

I probably tried eight times to twist the damned pump free. Finally, keenly aware that I’d feel stupid as all get-out if I reinjured my back trying to remove a fuel pump that had absolutely no symptoms of being troublesome whatsoever, I went for it, grabbing the pump and twisting it to the left as hard as I could. Mercifully, it gave up before my back did, and I pulled it out.

Yeah, I would’ve totally hated trying to do this by the side of the road in the hot sun.

[Next week, I finish this it-wasn’t-broke-but-you-fixed-it-anyway repair and reveal whether the swap and the installation went easier than the removal.]

***

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 Fuel Pump Follies (Part 1) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Whenever anyone mentions having an electrical problem with a car, someone always gives the well-meaning advice to “check the ground.” My experience is that this isn’t the slam-dunk many think it is—I’ve found that most electrical issues are instead tied to bad components or the connections between them.

Of course, sometimes it is the ground. The most dramatic example is with a poor engine ground connection when trying to start the car.

Witness the situation that occurs in the vintage BMW world where I spend most of my time. Someone will pose a question to bmw2002faq.com—the hive mind of 2002 information—asking, “My 2002 wouldn’t start. I turned the key and it wouldn’t crank at all. Then I hit the accelerator pedal, tried again, and it started right up. But afterward, there was a bit of a burning smell from under the hood. What’s going on?” Those of us who have seen this before can answer the question immediately because the symptom is so specific.

On every car, the battery’s negative terminal is attached to two places. The first is the car’s metal body. This provides the common ground path for every single electrical device.

Well, except for one—the starter motor (and any other electrical devices that are integral with the engine). Because engines have rubber mounts to prevent their vibration from telegraphing through the body of the car, they are usually not grounded without a second ground connection from the negative battery terminal directly to the engine. Whether there’s a single Y-shaped ground cable connected to the negative battery terminal where one strap goes to the body and the other to the engine (as is the case on a BMW 2002), or a ground strap from the negative terminal to the body and then a separate one connecting the body to the engine, varies according to make and model.

Both of these ground connections must be present for the car to start and run properly. With age, it’s not uncommon for one or both of them to fail due to the braided strap corroding and breaking. If the engine strap is intact but the strap to the body has failed, the engine should still crank, but other electrical components may work intermittently, if at all. Conversely, if the chassis ground strap is fine but the strap to the engine has failed, the lights, fans, etc., should all work fine, but with no direct grounding of the engine, the starter probably won’t crank.

I use words like “may” and “probably” and phrases like “if at all” because if one of the ground straps fail, there can be “unintended ground paths” that may allow current to flow though the other one, at least until enough current flows through something that it’s not supposed to that something burns up.

And, with that background, I can explain the strange condition where a BMW 2002 won’t crank until you hit the accelerator pedal, then starts, followed by a burning smell afterward. As shown above, the negative battery cable on a 2002 is a braided Y, where one braid goes to the chassis, the other to the block. When the braid to the block corrodes all the way through, the engine has no direct ground path. After all, the engine is on rubber mounts, as is the transmission, the shift platform, and the exhaust.

But there is an “unintended ground path” and it’s quite a surprising one. It’s the accelerator linkage. The linkage is a series of metal ball-in-socket rods. There’s a lower rod that connects the accelerator pedal to the throttle linkage rod. One end of the throttle linkage rod is connected to the carburetor or injection pump (which, in turn, is connected to the block via the intake manifold and head). The other end goes into a plastic bushing in the firewall that supports it and aids in rotation.

Wait. Plastic doesn’t conduct electricity, right?

No, it doesn’t.

So how is this a ground path, and how does hitting the accelerator pedal make the starter crank?

This is the fun part.

There’s a throttle linkage return spring about the diameter of a fountain pen connecting the linkage to the firewall. Unlike the rotating end of the throttle linkage rod itself, the spring isn’t sitting in a bushing. The top is just hooked over the cowl and sits in a small hole in the metal. Similarly, the bottom spring hook is in a hole in the linkage. Over time, the paint in the upper hole wears away, allowing metal-to-metal contact. Poor metal-to-metal contact with an inner coating of rust, to be sure, but contact just the same.

So, hit the gas pedal, it stretches the spring, which pulls the hooked ends tighter against their metal holders, maybe jostles them around in the holes. Turn the key, and suddenly hundreds of amps of current find a ground path. They flow through this little piece of metal like an entire city’s water supply being shoved through a soda straw. With all that current, the spring can literally glow like the similarly-shaped elements in a toaster. So, yeah, there can be a smell.

Credit for discovering this rather remarkable failure mode and disseminating the knowledge goes to my BMW 2002 colleague Mike Self, but being an old guy who has seen it happen, I get to act like I’m a wizard when someone describes the symptom and I blithely nail the solution as if it’s the product of deductive reasoning instead of my friend Mike having told me.

I just encountered a pretty cool variant of this issue on a modern car. My friend and neighbor Dave has a 2014 MINI that wouldn’t crank. I walked two doors down to check it out. The battery read 12.6 volts, so it appeared to be fully charged. I connected my battery jump pack, and tried four times. On three of them, nothing happened, but on one, there was the CLICK of the starter solenoid. The rest of the car’s electronics seemed to work, just not the starter.

As I was musing whether the problem could be caused by the interlock that prevents the starter from engaging unless the clutch pedal is depressed, Dave said, “When the car was in for service last year, the mechanic said that the ground strap was corroded. Do you think that could have something to do with it?” He then showed me a video that the mechanic shot, clearly showing a ground strap green with corrosion, and a weak spot forming at the strap’s connection to the chassis.

It made perfect sense to me that this was the problem—the strap had corroded through, or nearly so, and the engine no longer had a valid ground connection.

To be clear, Dave wasn’t asking me to repair the car. He was just wondering what I thought was going on, and how serious the problem was. And besides, in order to replace the ground strap, I’d need to jack the car up, set it on stands, and pull off the engine’s under-cover—and his driveway, where it was parked, was too uneven and sloped to safely do any of that.

Dave isn’t a car guy, but he’s smart enough to have asked me the following very interesting question:

“Is there some way to ‘jump’ the ground path?”

A light bulb went off in my head.

“Do you have a set of jumper cables?”

“Sure.”

Like most cars these days, the MINI is a front wheel-drive car with a transverse-mounted engine, so instead of the engine mounts both being just above the oil pan like they are on an old-school rear wheel-drive car, one of them was up high, connecting to the right inner fender wall. I clamped one end of a jumper cable to the big aluminum bracket connecting the engine to the mount and the other end directly to the battery’s negative post.

I then had Dave start the car. It took a couple of tries with me reseating the jumper cable’s clamp and pulling the ends of the handles apart in order to get their teeth to bite more firmly into the bracket, but the MINI started. It certainly removed any question that the problem was due to the engine not being grounded. And from the video, the root cause of that was almost certainly the corroded ground strap.

Dave asked if I could drive the car to the repair shop. I carefully disconnected the jumper cable providing the ground path. The car continued to run, but we both heard a sharp click, likely an electrical relay—one that also relied on the electrical ground path through the engine—de-energizing. If this was an emergency, I could’ve gone to AutoZone, bought a beefy generic ground strap, and connected it semi-permanently from a good ground point on the chassis to a good ground point on the engine. But it wasn’t, plus Dave had AAA, so after a free tow and a small repair bill at a local shop, the original ground strap was correctly replaced.

This is a good thing to be aware of, and a good work-around to be able to put in both the mental and physical tool kits. Now, you can be the wizard who pulls this out of his bag of tricks at a car event and saves the day. Extra credit if you can point to a spring glowing red like a toaster.

Hey, everyone likes to feel well-grounded.

***

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 Insights on being well-grounded appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Last week, I discussed how a soft pedal in my ’74 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special followed my having driven with the handbrake on. The fact that the softness didn’t respond to bleeding, and that the 50-year-old master cylinder (MC) was the only original brake hydraulic component left, led me to the decision to replace the MC. I would’ve replaced it four years ago when I sorted out the car, but the original Girling component is no longer available, and any replacement requires adaptation.

I decided to do the Datsun F10 master cylinder conversion, as that swap appeared to be well-reviewed on the Europa forums. The part has long been No Longer Available (NLA), but I found a New Old Stock (NOS) one on eBay for $110 and dove in.

Oh, my word. What a colossal pain in the patootie.

What I read in the forums was that you needed to slightly ovalize the mounting holes in the F10 MC to get them to slide over the car’s mounting studs, but that the rest was “straightforward” since the original pushrod assembly could be reused. There was the complication that the fittings on the original MC are English, whereas those on the F10 master are metric, but several articles breezily stated that this could be handled by a trip to the local auto parts store for fittings and adapters.

“Straightforward” my … well, you know. Routing out the mounting holes with a Dremel tool was “straightforward.” Nothing else was.

Although the pushrod itself was compatible, there was a non-trivial issue. The end of the pushrod is shaped like a rounded golf tee and is captured behind a washer that’s held in place with a retaining clip. So transferring the pushrod from the old MC to the new one should just involve undoing the clip, then clipping the pushrod and washer onto their new home.

Not so fast, Lotus breath.

It turns out that the ends of the two master cylinders—the portions that hold these washers and clips—are different diameters. The original one is a shade under an inch, the replacement MC about 0.83 inches (it’s Japanese, so it’s likely a metric 22mm), so the original pushrod washer is too big to fit. The new MC also came with a washer behind its clip, but its center diameter is too large to capture the pushrod. This would’ve created a situation where, if the brake pedal flopped forward, it would allow the pushrod to fall out.

Further, the original washer is “cupped” to accommodate the shape of the end of the pushrod, and even the venerable website McMaster-Carr, on which you can usually find any common industrial part, doesn’t sell cupped washers.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to shave the outer diameter of a washer. You put a snug-fitting bolt through the center, tighten it down with a nut, and stick it in the chuck of a drill to spin it around. Then, while it’s spinning, you grind it down by touching it against a file.

In about 10 minutes, I made the cupped washer the correct size. It was also too thick, but that was handled by shaving it on a belt sander. With that, the original pushrod was installed in the G10 master cylinder.

I mounted my newly-adapted prize in the car so I could begin adapting the brake lines. In the photo below, you can see the two lines hanging down next to the new MC. They’re poised to enter on the left side, but the new MC’s fittings are on the right.

I had to dig on the Europa forums to find the information, but the fittings on the original brake lines are 3/8-24 UNC bubble flares, whereas those on the new MC are metric 10mm x 1.0 SAE inverted flares. On paper, I’ll admit that the adaptation doesn’t sound like it’s that big of a deal. I mapped out two ways to approach it. If you want to risk cracking the original brake lines, you simply buy adapters that have a female 3/8-24 UNC input and a male 10mm x 1.0 SAE output, screw them into the new MC, bend the brake lines 180 degrees so they go into the right side of the MC, screw the fittings into the adapters, boom, done.

If you don’t want to bend 50-year-old British steel brake lines and risk breaking them, you fabricate a pair of short adapter lines instead. You use a pair of female-to-female 3/8-24 UNC unions and build two lines with a male 3/8-24 bubble flare at one end and a 10mm x 1.0 male SAE flare at the other. I vastly preferred this second option. I’ve fabricated brake lines before and have a length of easy-to-flare-and-bend Cunifer copper-nickel tubing and two flaring tools in the garage.

But there were several things that made this job confusing from the get-go. The first one is subtle. There are two primary kinds of flares used in automotive brake lines. For the most part, American and Asian cars use an SAE “double flare” that looks sort of like the horn of a tiny trumpet. It’s referred to as a “double flare” because the flaring tool that makes it folds the metal of the horn onto itself to double its thickness.

European cars use a DIN/ISO bubble flare that looks like the cap of a mushroom with a flat bottom. The Lotus, however, like other Brits, uses a British bubble flare. It’s similar to the DIN/ISO flare, but has an angled rather than a flat bottom, so in profile it looks more like a flying saucer from a 1950’s film than a mushroom cap.

From a practical standpoint, what this means is that if you’re building adapter lines, as I was about to, you need to be really certain about what you’re buying. I pored over the web and found Federal Hill Trading Company (“FedHill”) in central Massachusetts. Its website contains better information on these different kinds of flares and a larger variety of clearly identified fittings than any other site that I found. Right there on the home page is a menu option labeled “British-Girling Fuel / Hydraulic / Brake Line Tubing, Nuts, and Fittings.” I was in love.

I called FedHill, spoke with the owner, Tim Beachboard, and described my Lotus-F10 master cylinder swap. He pointed me at the parts I needed, including the unions that were not just F-to-F 3/16-24 unions, but F-to-F 3/16-24 British bubble flare unions. He also quizzed me on whether I had a flaring tool capable of making a British bubble flare (I did). I thanked him profusely for his time and expertise, and placed the order.

A day later, everything arrived. Like a kid on Christmas morning, I tore open the package and began test-fitting the pieces. I immediately realized that I had a problem.

It turns out that the original brake master on my car didn’t have two 3/16-24 fittings. It had a 3/16-24 fitting for the rear brake line, but the front brake line used a larger 7/16-20 fitting. When I searched on the Europa forums, I found a small handful of references (like two) to this. It appears to be unique to the tandem master cylinders in U.S.-spec twin-cam cars like mine.

OK, I thought, no big deal. I’ll go back on FedHill website and order the parts needed to build the front brake’s adapter line.

The problem was that I couldn’t find a 7/16-20 British bubble flare union.

I called Tim at FedHill and explained about the two different-sized brake line fittings. He listened carefully, then said not only didn’t he have a union that size, but I’d be unlikely to find one anywhere online. He advised that I’d probably need to cut the end off the front brake pipe, slide off the 7/16 fitting, slide on something more conventional, and re-flare it, but he cautioned that that might not work on 50-year-old steel pipe. He said that I should be prepared to have to replace the entire line, undoing it from whatever it connects to at the other end. Since this line runs inside the tunnel under the car, that definitely wasn’t something I relished.

To sum it up, he uttered the last words you want to hear from someone with that level of expertise—“Basically, you’re screwed.”

Recalling the famous “Trust, yet verify” quote of an American president in the 1980s, I then spent several hours online looking for a 7/16-20 bubble flare (British or otherwise) brake union. Tim was correct—no such thing is available. Further, while there are a whole variety of adapters to turn 3/16-24 male fittings into something else, there’s nothing remotely like that for a 7/16-20 bubble flare.

I did, however, see a 7/16-20 SAE female brake nut on the FedHill website, and wondered if I could make it work. I ordered it and a corresponding male fitting, and began making some test flares with my $42 flaring tool.

Since copper-nickel brake line is soft, I had a hard time imagining that I wouldn’t be able to build something that would seal. I needed to see a candidate connection with my own eyes. So I slid the 7/16-20 SAE brake nut on a piece of tubing, made an SAE flare, and prepared to tight it against the 7/16-20 fitting at the end of the brake line.

I didn’t need to snug anything down to see how ridiculous this was. It was like watching a pair of sixth graders kissing with their lips barely touching.

Just to help my understanding of things, I then made a single flare—the kind you’re told you should never ever use on brake lines because the metal is too thin—and screwed the two fittings together. In the photo below, you can see where the female fitting cut a ledge in the copper because neither the nut nor the flare were designed for this.

It took me several hours before I fully understood what the fundamental issue was. It’s this: You never have two flared pieces of tubing mating against each other. Ever. You have one flared piece mating against the inside of some solid fitting, whether it’s the master cylinder itself (as was the case here), or the crimped-on concave steel end of a rubber brake line, or a union. This female nut wasn’t something you use to seal two brake lines together.

Sometimes in a project—or in life—you’re faced with several different options to accomplish some task. You go down one path until you find something that’s a hard “no,” and that makes you choose the other path, even if it’s a rocky one. As much as I didn’t want to cut the flared end off a 50-year-old brake line, I had no choice.

So off it came. And that was challenging, as there was very little room to maneuver the tubing cutter.

I was now committed. And that was scary because there was an immediate problem. The flaring tool needs to grab a few inches of tubing, and there wasn’t a few inches of tubing before the 90-degree bend in the pipe.

So, with everything I’d gone through to avoid having to bend the old brake lines, I very carefully relaxed the 90-degree bend just enough to be able to slide the fitting back enough to clamp on the flaring tool. I found that the metric 10mm x 1.0 fittings were a looser fit on the tubing than the 3/16-24 ones, thus requiring less bending of the line. So, since it was up to me how I fabricated these adapters, I slid on a metric fitting and made an SAE flare.

With this hurdle finally cleared, the fabrication of the two adapter lines took maybe 15 minutes. Because the Lotus is extremely low, I didn’t want to run the adapter lines underneath the master cylinder lest some speed bump or misplaced rock rip them out, so I looped them up above it. However, when I went to tighten down the fittings, I found that there wasn’t sufficient clearance to get a wrench on one of the unions. I own a set of crow-foot wrenches (two actually—one English, one metric) because once a year, you run into something like this. Today was the day.

The only remaining task was installing the remote reservoir. As I mentioned last week, I have a Motive power bleeder that I’ve been unable to use on the Lotus because I could never find or fabricate an adapter to the original Girling reservoir that fit well enough that it didn’t spew brake fluid everywhere. I mounted a spare ATE reservoir from a long-ago-parted-out BMW 2002 and ran the hoses to the master.

With the surprisingly-troublesome Lotus Europa / Datsun F10 brake master cylinder swap finally complete, and my fantasies of ordering a hit on everyone who’d ever called this swap “straightforward” fading, I power-bled the brakes, folded myself into the little car, drove it down the block, and was stunned to find that the problem that made me go to this level of effort in the first place hadn’t changed a whit—the brake pedal still traveled noticeably further than it should, firmed up with a single pump, then repeated the process 10 seconds later.

Most days I love cars. This was not one of them.

[Next week: Find out if I fixed this or rolled the Lotus into a swamp.]

***

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 Great Lotus Europa / Datsun F10 Master Cylinder Swap (Part 2) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

As I wrote about last month, the original numbers-matching engine to my 1973 BMW 3.0CSi E9 coupe had been sitting in the corner of the garage at my mother’s house since I pulled it out and swapped it for a newer freshly-rebuilt engine in 1989. My sister and I inherited the property after my mother passed, and some cleanout of items like the engine was long overdue.

I wrote (in a lot of detail) why continuing to hold onto the engine made very little sense to me. My argument for dragging it straight to the recycle bin was that a) I am never going to rebuild and reinstall it, and b) after I die and my heirs advertise the car, if someone wants to own a fully-original numbers-matching E9 coupe, why on earth would they choose to buy this one that’s been not only color-changed but repainted in a non-factory color? These factors resulted in my somewhat passionate defense of why I think that not feeling responsible for the rest of my days for a hypothetical future of a 350-pound lump—simply because it has seven numbers stamped into it—doesn’t make me a bad person.

However, the steps required to remove the engine from the garage were the same whether I was going to tow it back to my house in Newton, Massachusetts, or to the recycle bin—it had to either be put in the back of the truck or dragged into a trailer.

In days past, when I’ve needed to move an engine, I’ve disassembled my engine hoist and loaded it into the back of the truck. Like most hoists, it has four main pieces—the base, the backbone, the arm, and the hydraulic cylinder. The backbone is held to the base with three bolts, and there’s a pivot bolt on the arm, another on the cylinder, and a few other small fasteners. Disassembling it, loading it, driving to the scene of some engine-related crime, reassembling it, using it, and disassembling it again to take it back home never used to be a big deal. But now that I’m closing in on the big six-five and have back issues, doing this alone is trolling for back pain. Yes, I can ask for help, but I prefer to use that free spin card only when it’s truly necessary.

So instead, I thought I could put the engine on a furniture dolly, then use my Warn PullzAll 120VAC electric winch to pull it up a ramp and into the back of the truck. What’s more, I had the bright idea that I could dry-run this on the other big part in the garage—the entire front subframe from another E9 coupe I’d parted out a few years before pulling the engine from mine. The subframe was standing upright in the back of the garage, resting on the engine. Sure enough, all by my lonesome, back-injured self, I was able to tip the subframe over onto the furniture dolly and winch it up a board I found in the house (it turned out to be the top piece of a discarded piano) and into the truck.

I then disassembled the subframe in place in the back of the truck, kept the steering components, and drove the bare subframe directly to the scrap metal bin (if there’s a part that lasts the lifetime of a BMW E9 coupe and thus there’s virtually zero demand for, it’s the front subframe). Gee, I thought—maybe this was more of a dry run for what to do with the engine than I’d planned.

Although this was successful, it made me realize that while tipping the 350-pound engine onto the furniture dolly to get it out into the street probably wasn’t unreasonable, winching it up a narrow wooden board acting as a ramp certainly was. I was going to need a little U-Haul trailer.

I broke the job into two steps. In the first, I went over to the house with the goal of getting the engine on the dolly. I was smart enough to know that it was doubtful I could do it alone, so I pressed my youngest son, who lives upstairs in the house, into service. It was pretty comical. Not surprisingly, the weight of the engine immediately caused the dolly to tip up. We wound up needing to brace the dolly against the wall and have him stand on one end as the engine tipped onto it. We then employed a 10-foot-long 2×4 to lever the engine so its center of gravity was about in the middle of the dolly. Finally I ratchet-strapped it in place. It looked like a very greasy Christmas goose.

About a week later, I rented a little U-Haul 4×8 cargo trailer. Having seen landscapers wheel all manner of lawn equipment out of and into similar small cargo trailers, I just assumed that the U-Haul ones had a smooth fold-down wooden rear ramp, and that this would be preferable to the open utility trailers where the ramp is a decidedly less-smooth metal grate or a corrugated piece of floor. It wasn’t until I rented the utility trailer and they had it all hooked up that I walked behind it and saw that the door opened to the side instead of folding down. My mistake—the side-opening door is clearly shown on the U-Haul website. I had them exchange it for a small utility trailer.

Rolling the engine into the street and positioning it at the bottom of the trailer’s short ramp was trivial—the furniture dolly did its job flawlessly. Winching it up the ramp, however, was not. Even with a small piece of plywood at the bottom as a little helper ramp, the little wheels on the furniture dolly didn’t like the metal grating on the ramp, and they bit into the gap between the ramp and the bed of the trailer. Fortunately, I’d brought a four-foot pipe with me, and judicious levering of the dolly coaxed the wheels into position. Once the engine and dolly were on the bed of the trailer, it still didn’t roll easily, as the corrugated floor tripped up the wheels. But I got it in and strapped down. If I had to do it over again, I’d bring two larger thin sheets of plywood to completely cover both the ramp and the bed.

As approached the turn-off to my street, I realized that all I had to do was continue straight for another half a mile and I’d be at the Newton recycling center, where I imagined simply unstrapping the engine, lowering the gate, hitting the accelerator pedal in the truck, and letting nature take its course.

But I’d already made the decision: The engine was coming home. And not because I suddenly imagined a scenario where it might be used. Or because, as I said at the end of the original piece, that the numbers-matching engine is like the character in The Sixth Sense who thinks he still has someone to help in this world (although if someone with a very original 3.0CSi coupe—which was a Euro-only model—contacted me saying that their engine just put a rod through the block and for originality’s sake they’re trying to find a block with a European VIN as close to theirs as possible, I’d be all ears).

No, the thing that tipped the scales was about as undramatic as they come. Many decisions I make are based on this simple bit of mental calculus: If it costs you nothing to leave an option open, why not do that? Ninety-five percent of the work had already been done. All I needed to do was clear a spot for it at the end of my driveway and throw a tarp over it.

Unloading the engine in the driveway was trivial, as gravity was on my side. I pulled the vehicles on the right side of the driveway (the Winnebago Rialta and the BMW Z3—the truck usually sits there as well) out into the street, and used the 4-foot pipe to lever the engine and dolly out. They made quite a racket going down the trailer’s gate, but once they were on the asphalt, they gracefully rolled down the driveway and smashed through the garage door.

Just kidding.

So yeah, I kind of kicked the can down the road. But that’s OK. Since the engine will now be sitting outside (tarped, but still outside), at some point soon I’ll source a valve cover and spend an hour with plastic wrap, rubber bands, and Gorilla tape sealing up the coolant inlets and the ports on the head.

Although the plans my wife and I were hatching during the pandemic to find a garage-centric property have stalled, I doubt the house in Newton will be my final abode. If I were to bet, I’d wager that within the next few years we go somewhere else, and I’ll need to move the engine again. Maybe it’s best that I think of it not as an albatross, but as a good luck charm.

Oh, my God. I figured it out. You know what the dead numbers-matching is? It’s the car’s Picture of Dorian Grey (the Oscar Wilde novel about the portrait in the attic that looks worse and worse while its real-life subject commits all manner of sins but never ages). This is perfect. By dumping the thing at the end of the driveway under a tarp, I’ve ensured that my precious E9 coupe will remain forever young. Maybe if I pull the tarp off the engine and let the rain get it, the little scrape on the car’s right rear wheel arch will self-heal.

***

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.

The post The end of the numbers-matching engine story (for now) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

After putting a lot of thought into dealing with the 34-year-dead, numbers-matching engine to my 1973 BMW 3.0CSi, I was prepared to go over to what used to be my mother’s house in Brighton and drag it back to my house in Newton. I’d already elicited my youngest son’s help to ratchet-strap the greasy lump onto a furniture dolly. The trussed-up, numbers-matching turkey just needed to be winched into the back of a rented U-Haul trailer. I loaded up some odds and ends into the only-slightly-mouse-infested truck (the 2008 Chevy 3500HD Duramax diesel), turned the key, and …

Oh, dear.

Last fall, I wrote about a frustrating crank-but-no-start problem that vexed the truck for nearly a week, then vanished without my really having identified the cause and fixed anything. I’d read about a problem that this generation of Duramax diesels have where any cracked fuel lines or worn o-rings can cause the fuel pump to suck air rather than fuel, but because the truck had thrown a P2510 code and this is also correlated with cranking but not starting, I went down that electrical rabbit hole, checking grounds and disassembling the fuse box looking for corrosion and not finding anything wrong.

At some point, I cycled the central locking (and with it, the alarm system), and the truck started as if nothing had happened. I chalked it up to the alarm and locking systems somehow having gotten out of sync. The problem never recurred.

Until yesterday.

Now, when someone says that their car or truck died and they have to sell it because they “no longer trust it,” I usually roll my eyes. Nearly all automotive problems can be solved. As I say over and over, the main things that cause cars to die are fuel delivery issues, ignition issues, cooling system issues, charging systems issues, and belts (and on vintage cars, add clutch hydraulics and ball joints). These are all solvable problems. People may say they’re selling a car because they no longer trust it, but odds are that the driving forces are really the superposition of age, mileage, repair bills, changing family needs, and the desire for something newer and nicer.

However, the truck is different. It’s a big dually diesel that the company I worked for purchased to tow a 32-foot trailer. I bought it from them for a song when they all but abandoned it in a parking lot and mice got into it. Because of the big utility body on the back, it’s often mistaken for a commercial vehicle (it was a commercial vehicle). Insuring, registering, and getting it inspected in the state of Massachusetts took a bit of doing, as I had to find people who understood that you can have a 10,000-lb GVWR truck registered that way. But the combination of the truck’s size and weight, and the fact that it’s a Duramax diesel, means that if it breaks down on the road it’s going to be more difficult to deal with than a passenger car, and any repairs are going to be expensive. And that’s even before considering the nightmare scenario of it dying while I’m towing something.

So my first reaction to the return of the mystery cranks-but-won’t-start problem was, in fact, the very one that I scoff at when I hear others speak it: “If I can’t trust the truck, I’m going to have to sell it.”

Fortunately, the no-start couldn’t have happened in a better place than my own driveway, and I had no hard timetable for using it to move my old numbers-matching engine or anything else, so I calmed down, rolled up my sleeves, and had at it. This time, because there were no DTC codes when I plugged in the $25 code reader (which I keep in the truck for exactly this reason), I focused on the fuel delivery system.

Diesel trucks like this are outside my mostly-small-European-car wheelhouse. I did some reading and learned that most diesel pickups have an engine-driven mechanical injection pump that generates the thousands of PSI needed by the injectors, as well as a secondary “lift pump” to get the fuel out of the tank and up to the engine. However, the GM Duramax diesels built between 2001 and 2016 weren’t equipped with a lift pump, the logic being that their Bosch CP3 and CP4 mechanical injection pumps were capable of generating enough suction that a lift pump wasn’t strictly necessary. This means that, in order to prime the fuel system (to get it full of fuel so it’s not sucking air), you have to rely on the big push-button that sits on top of the fuel filter head. You take a screwdriver and open up the bleed valve located on the top of the housing, pump the button until fuel without air bubbles comes out, close the valve, then continue to pump until the button feels hard.

This all works fine until it doesn’t. Aging fuel lines and rubber seals in the filter head can make it so the fuel system “loses its prime” and doesn’t regain it even with repeated pumping of the push button. It turns out this is a fairly common problem in Duramax diesels. However, when I began reading about installing a lift pump, the applications I saw had to do with increasing power for towing big loads on long hill climbs, something I’m unlikely to do. It took me a while to understand that the lift pump also solves the priming problem.

Initially, I was skeptical that the truck had a priming problem. It had only been sitting for a few days. I’d previously let it sit for weeks without having this happen. And I pumped and bled the fuel system twice, to no effect. But when I tried it the third time, after closing the bleed valve, I kept pushing the pump button until it was rock-hard and my thumb was sore, and the truck fired up. I had to admit that the diagnosis fit the symptoms pretty well.

I also watched several diagnostic videos where people trouble-shot crank-but-no-start problems on Duramax diesels by using a scan tool to look at fuel rail pressure (FRP). I thought, “OK, so I need to spend the money to buy a GM-specific scan tool—this $25 OBD-II code reader I keep in the truck isn’t going to do that.” But when I read further, I learned that fuel rail pressure should be part of the data stream supplied by the CAN OBD protocol, and that even an inexpensive code reader should display it. Sure enough, with the truck running, I could see fuel rail pressure of 42540 kilopascals—about 6200 PSI.

When I got the truck started, my initial reaction was to drive it directly to a nearby repair shop whose parking lot is routinely full of dually diesel landscaping vehicles, but now that I was armed with a) the knowledge that it was a priming problem, b) a data point that it started when I fully primed it, and c) the ability to confirm fuel rail pressure if the problem recurred, the my-truck-isn’t-reliable-what-am-I-going-to-do cloud dissipated, and I felt like I had some space to look at which solution to implement.

As with many problems, it depends how much you want to spend.

The least expensive approach would be to spend 10 bucks and buy a rebuild kit with the o-rings and seals for the pump filter head. If you’re going to go that route, the pump filter head has to be removed from the side of the block, so you might as well also spend the $120-ish bucks to replace the two rubber hoses plumbing the filter head. Of course, no-start problems can also be caused by collapsed fuel lines at the back of the truck. So down the rabbit hole you go.

The next improvement you can make is to spend about 100 bucks to purchase an adapter plate you can install on the underside of the filter head to allow use of a 2-micron Caterpillar 1R-0750 filter (the stock filter has a 10-micron mesh). Unfortunately, this does away with the stock water separator, so you either have to add it back in a different way or go for a lift pump where it’s integrated into the package (below).

While there is an available in-tank lift pump, most are external kits that combine a pump, a 2-micron filter, and a water separator. If, like me, you’re coming at this from the background of adding a $50 electric fuel pump to a vintage carbureted car to deal with priming empty float bowls after a winter-long sit, you’ll get sticker shock—the lift pump kits from AirDog and FASS seem to start at around $650 and require a some amount of fabrication to install in such a way that they’re not waiting for a stray rock on the highway to take them out.

So, I’ve got some decisions to make. If you’re like me, you don’t mind spending money on cars when it’s something that improves appearance or performance or comfort, but you bristle at paying for parts or repairs that merely return the vehicle to a baseline. After spending nearly $800 replacing the truck’s stolen catalytic converter, looking at spending nearly that on what’s essentially preventive maintenance isn’t a slam dunk. Still, as I often say, vehicles are not organic systems. They do not heal themselves. Problems don’t get better. They get worse. This truck has now exhibited this problem twice. I’d be an idiot not to deal with it, and I try to not be an idiot.

I’ll let you know what happens.

***

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.

The post Trouble with the truck. Again. appeared first on Hagerty Media.

In my first book, Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic, I wrote about the taxonomy of a hobby. That is, if you find some hobby where there’s a physical object, an activity, and a social component, and you’re attracted to all three, you wind up getting sucked in, and the hobby becomes a passion. This is obviously the case with me (and almost certainly you) with cars, but it holds for most hobbies.

For example, my wife is an avid quilter, and all the things I do with cars have their counterpart in the quilting world. One of the wonderful things that comes from being part of a community of people with a shared passion is the sense of human connection. We tend to inherently trust people who love the same things that we love. This often translates into a near-automatic sense of kindness and generosity. Obviously that can happen without the shared interest (and the world would be a far better place if that happened more often), but if you’re into vintage cars, and like working on them, and you see one broken down by the side of the road, of course you’re going to stop and help.

It’s a beautiful thing to be either the giver or the receiver of this kind of automotive grace. The fine tradition is to “pay it forward”—that is, if someone helps you and doesn’t charge you for it, you then help someone else. When this happens, no matter which end of it you’re on, you can almost feel yourself putting your oars into the spiritual water that keeps the world, or at least our little corner of it, going ‘round.

In 2019, I was at the BMW event “The Vintage” in Hot Springs, North Carolina, a tiny little town up in the mountains about 50 miles north of Asheville, when a man approached me. “Something went wrong with my car as I was heading down the last set of switchbacks,” he said. “I heard something go whump-whump-whump-whump-WHACK, then saw black pieces trailing away behind me in the rear-view mirror. I asked around, and people said that you and your friend Paul Wegweiser are apparently the people to ask about field fixes.” He apologetically said, “I found you first.”

What he was describing was the textbook symptom of the giubo (pronounced “GWEE-bo”) going bad. It’s the rubber donut connecting the transmission output flange to the driveshaft input flange, a common wear-and-tear part on vintage BMWs. I lay down next to his car on the grassy field where 600 vintage BMWs had assembled in Hot Springs, stretched my arm up as far as it would go, and laid my fingers on the giubo. Sure enough, I could feel that there was a piece missing.

I had a spare giubo with me, and told the gentleman that I’d replace his if he found a shady place with a cement floor—that is, for safety reasons, I wasn’t going to jack up the car and crawl under it on grass or dirt. Plus, it was beastly hot out, and a car can easily tip off jacks and stands if they sink into asphalt. At the end of the day, he circled back with me and said that he found a local Porsche guy who lived less than a mile away and said he had a small barn with a cement floor we could work in. So we babied his car over to the Porsche guy’s barn and I began to have at it.

Replacing a giubo isn’t terribly difficult, but the eight nuts holding the bolts to the two flanges are 17mm nylocs, so once they’re loosened, they don’t just spin off; you have to keep wrenching down the entire extent of the threads. That, combined with the need to raise the rear wheels to turn the giubo to access the bolts at the top, the need to rotate the nuts and bolts only on the metal flange and not against the rubber (which means using a wrench and not a ratchet), and the heat in the garage, made it slow going. From wheels-up to wheels-down and done, it was a couple of hot sweaty hours. But I got it done.

The owner was extremely grateful. He tried to pay both me and the guy whose barn we were in. But then the barn owner—a man of few words—said something to the guy. It was terse, direct, and beautiful:

“It’s called ‘pay it forward.’ This is how it’s done. Next time, you help somebody.”

The car owner nodded and put away his wallet. We all shook hands, knowing we’d left this world a slightly better place.

Of course, just because I fix cars doesn’t mean that I’m always on the giving end of “pay it forward.” While driving home with friends from The Vintage the previous year in my 1979 BMW 635CSi, I heard some alarming noise from under the hood, stopped, and found that the cooling fan had shed one of its blades.

I made some phone calls to try and find another fan. Unfortunately, although the car’s M30 inline six-cylinder engine was used in BMWs from 1968 through 1995, there were three different configurations of water pumps, fan clutches, pulleys, and fans, and only the most recent configuration is readily available. So, to fix mine in a timely fashion, I needed to replace not just the fan but everything it attached to. (It’s not as if I had those parts with me either.)

Fortunately, my friend Luther contacted me saying that he was about a hundred miles north of my current location and had all the parts needed for the conversion. With one of the fan blades missing, the fan felt badly unbalanced, and I worried that it could self-destruct and pierce the radiator, so I removed the fan entirely. As long as I was driving on the highway at speed, there would be plenty of airflow, but if I got caught in traffic, I risked overheating the engine and cracking the head. I did a quick hack with the electric condenser fan (the one in front of the radiator for the air conditioning) to allow me to run it without the A/C on to provide some additional air flow to the radiator, but when I tested it while parked, the temperature rose alarmingly. Still, I didn’t have much choice, so I went for it. Fortunately I hit almost no traffic.

When I arrived at Luther’s, he had all the parts laid out for me. More than that, he noticed something I’d missed—my coolant expansion tank was cracked. Amazingly, he had a spare one of those as well.

A few hours of work later, I was on my way with a rebuilt cooling system. I remind all my road trip companions of this whenever we travel—that I am as likely to be the beneficiary of pay-it-forward as the provider.

But really, those two pay-it-forward examples are just the pre-amble. Without them, you’d think I’m trying to write a column merely by printing someone else’s email (below). Here’s the real story …

In early March, I received the kind of email that makes you glad you’ve lived your life a certain way. It is reproduced verbatim below.

***

Hi, Rob. I don’t expect you to remember me, but you saved my butt on the side of the road near BC [Boston College] about 35 years ago.

I was driving my ’76 2002 outside of Cleveland Circle when the engine cut out. I pulled over, opened my hood and started trying to diagnose the issue. I realized fairly quickly that this was not likely to be a “side of the road” kind of repair, and I began to wonder what to do next. I was a broke college student before cell phone ubiquity, so simply calling AAA and waiting for a tow was not an option.

You pulled over a few minutes into my pondering. You got out of your Bavaria, approached me and asked what was going on. I described the symptoms and what I had tried so far. You took a look, had me crank the engine, and almost immediately said I needed a fuel pump. It was near dusk on a weekend, so finding a fuel pump for a ’76 2002 would be really challenging, aside from the fact that I was dead on the side of the road.

Amazingly, you said you actually had a spare fuel pump at your place and offered to swap that one in. You drove me to your home (I believe in Allston/Brighton), got the pump and some tools, and we drove back to my stranded car. You then helped me remove the faulty one and install the replacement. With a quick turn of the oblong key, my car came back to life.

I thanked you up and down and asked what I could do to repay you. You wrote your address on a piece of paper, and said if I could replace your spare fuel pump, we’d be square.

A few days later, I got a new fuel pump and planned to drop that off the following weekend. Then I couldn’t find the piece of paper with your address. I kept the fuel pump in my trunk, and whenever I was in the Allston/Brighton area I’d try to replay the drive to your house in my memory to try and find it. Never found it.

Fast forward all these years and I was looking for an independent BMW shop for repairs to my 2012 X3. Yes, I’ve been a BMW owner consistently since 1985. I went to the BMW CCA website—which I haven’t been to in years—hoping to find a recommendation. In my browsing, I found a post you wrote and immediately recognized your name and photo after all these years. A quick additional search brought me to your website.

So, first of all, thank you for your kindness to a stranded college kid a long time ago. There are many people I’ve helped on the side of the road in the years since, and your example factored into many of these interactions.

Regrettably, my ’76 2002 is long gone, along with the fuel pump still in the trunk. I’d be glad to send you another one if you still want, and most of all I wanted to again thank you for a random act of kindness many years ago. Your act may have had a small impact in the universe, but the ripples remain to this day.

All the best,

Dave Mahoney

No, I did not ask Mr. Mahoney to send me a fuel pump. I rather love the idea that the one that he bought to give to me, and put in the trunk of his now-departed 2002, is still running around in the world, waiting to help someone else.

Oars in the water. Pay it forward. Keep our corner of the world spinning.

***

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.

The post This is the best pay-it-forward story ever appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If you’re like me (and I think we’ve firmly established that you are), your house is full of an odd assortment of stuff. Some of it is precious. Some of it is junk. Most of it is somewhere in between. But much of it consists of objects that are touchstones, things imbued with stories and meaning. This is the story of a rather unlikely one.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about helping my 95-year-old neighbor Jeanette with the perpetually-draining battery in her 2014 Honda Accord. That’s actually the iceberg’s tip of a longer story. Or I should say, the story of an iceberg that thawed.

When my wife Maire Anne and I moved here to Newton 31 years ago, we were the first new blood in a neighborhood of people who had lived here their entire life. We bought our house from the son of its original owner. The house on our right had both the same floor plan and pattern of ownership—the elderly original owner still lived in the house with her daughter Jeanette and Jeanette’s husband, Hank.

Hank and Jeanette seemed to be a nice retired couple. So I was surprised when Hank jovially stated, “Some of the neighbors call me Hank the crank.”

It didn’t take long, though, before I found out why.

It’s hard to say exactly what set Hank off. It may have been that, shortly after moving in, I drove my lightly-used Vanagon Westfalia camper all the way down my driveway and into my backyard, as I had nowhere else to park it. It may have been that I transgressed an unwritten law about not parking in front of his house even for short periods; I soon learned that he had absolutely zero tolerance for leakage of fluids of any kind in what he considered his part of the street. Some of it may simply have been generational—me the 32-year-old software engineer with the flashy red BMW 1973 3.0CSi and him with land yacht of a 1992 Lincoln Town Car (hey, maybe he needed dibs on the space in front of his house to be able to turn that barge around). Or it may have been the sheer volume of cars that came and went. Or the fact that, since my single-car garage held the 3.0CSi, I was always wrenching in the driveway.

Whatever the reasons, things deteriorated, and quickly. He accused me of running an unlicensed repair shop and a used car dealership, neither of which was true. He took to watching my comings and goings, paying careful attention to the dates on my cars’ registration and inspection stickers and calling the police on me if I mistakenly drove a car with expired tags after a winter sit. He became aggressive and hostile, calling me “college boy” and swearing at me in front of my children.

The low point came in 2004 when I wanted to build a new garage. The original corrugated metal single-car structure was one foot from the property line, and the town’s zoning requirements required any new construction to have a four-foot setback. My little 6600-square-foot piece of suburban paradise didn’t have enough room, so I applied for a variance, not understanding that Hank knew people on the commission and had poisoned the atmosphere against me.

When the hearing was held, despite my having hired an architect to develop and present plans for a beautiful new stand-alone garage in harmony with the lines of the house, something that would’ve looked worlds better than the rusting, leaning, paint-flaking World War II-era excuse for a garage, the fix was already in, and I received a rubber-stamp denial. The head of the commission solemnly intoned, “No one needs a garage, and certainly no one needs a three-car garage.” Hank stood in the back of the room, arms folded, smiling. I was gut-punched. What could this guy who drove a Lincoln—the poster-child for floaty “same-day steering”—know of my passion for cars?

I regrouped with my close friend and contractor Alex. We managed to design a garage that, rather than being standalone, was attached to the back of the house, thereby avoiding the capricious variance-for-the-setback issue. As long as we were within the letter of the law, there was nothing Hank could do. But when Alex came by with a small backhoe to dig the foundation, he nicked a section of the fence that Hank had put up, knocking it over. Hank ran out of the house, red-faced and screaming. I thought he was going to have an aneurysm. Alex repaired the damage, but Hank was so furious at not being able to stop my garage construction that we didn’t swap a word with him or Jeanette for nearly 10 years.

But time softens most wounds. As Hank aged, things got harder for him. During the winter, I began to snowblow Hank and Jeanette’s sidewalk and driveway. The first time I did it, Hank opened the front door and yelled, “Robby!” I thought, what, he’s going to chew me out for this? But to my surprise, he thanked me profusely. I kept doing it, and the relationship thawed. That spring, when I took my first drive in my flashy red 3.0CSi, Hank, rather than scrutinizing the dates on the tags, commented on what a beautiful car it was.

When Hank and Jeanette bought their Accord in 2014 (the car whose battery I wrote about replacing), they showed it off to me, seeming to want my approval. I nodded and said, “Yup, Honda builds a great product. You can’t really go wrong with an Accord.”

Then I wondered, “Did you trade in the Lincoln?” I asked. “No,” Hank said, “it’s in the garage.” (Their house still has the corrugated metal structure similar to the one I had torn down).

Then Hank said something startling. “You know, we’ve been thinking … maybe it’s time we built a two-car garage. The guy who did yours seemed nice. What was his name? Alex?” I had to stifle laughter at the irony.

The following fall, I realized that I hadn’t seen Hank for a bit, and asked Jeanette what was up. “Oh, you didn’t know about the accident?” She said that Hank had become increasingly frail and had signs of the onset of Alzheimer’s. He wanted to take a Sunday drive in the Lincoln, but neither she nor her brother thought that was good idea. After a discussion, Hank agreed to let her brother drive. As they were pulling onto the highway, the Lincoln got sideswiped by a tractor-trailer, spun around, and was hit on the other side as well. All occupants were shaken but OK. But the Lincoln was totaled.

The heartbreaking part was that, as Hank’s dementia advanced and he went into memory care housing, he kept asking about the Lincoln, not accepting that it was gone, and wanting to see it and drive it again.

“Gosh, he loved that car,” Jeanette told me. “It only had 20,000 miles on it. People kept asking him if he’d sell it.”

Suddenly it all came into focus. Hank probably bought the car the year we moved into the house. It had vanity plates on it with his initials and birthdate. The guy that I was at war with for nearly 25 years was, in his own way, a car guy. How could I possibly have missed this?

I never saw Hank again—he passed in 2015—but I took solace in imagining that, somewhere along Alzheimer’s winding paths, he would reunite with his beloved Lincoln.

Jeanette and I have never spoken about my adversarial relationship with Hank. And why would we? It’s all water under the bridge and has no effect on whether or not I would help a 95-year-old neighbor. But I was surprised, and touched, when she knocked on my door, and I opened it to find her holding something.

“Robby,” she said, “I found this in the basement. It’s the cover to Hank’s Lincoln. Do you want it?”

Despite my not owning anything it would fit without leaving two feet of fabric fore and aft, I said, with the utmost sincerity, “It would be my honor.”

So there, on a shelf in my basement, it sits. The cover to Hank’s beloved Lincoln. As I’m now the age I was when I met “Hank the crank” and settling into the “get off my lawn” phase of my life, it’s a gentle reminder to be kind, even to people you don’t like. Even to people who weren’t kind to you for decades.

Plus, if I ever jump outside my 1970s BMW comfort zone and buy some 18-foot American luxo-barge, I’ve got it covered.

***

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.

The post The poignant tale of Hank’s Lincoln appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If my Hack Mechanic worldview is about anything, it’s about trying to thread the needle between not craving what you can never have while also being the person with the Cheshire-cat smile while driving the less-than-perfect car you could actually afford. My 37-year-long ownership of my 1973 BMW 3.0CSi is the physical manifestation of all this. Recently, some long-lost photographs of the car came to light that show how, through creativity and dumb luck, I pulled off what on paper is barely possible.

The story begins when my not-yet-wife Maire Anne and I were living in Austin, Texas, in the early 1980s. I’d already gone through half a dozen BMW 2002s, which I was very good at finding by driving around and simply looking down people’s driveways. While doing this, I spied the butt of a car I didn’t know existed—the E9 coupe (the BMW 2800CS/3.0CS/CSi sold from 1968–74). I was transfixed. “Screw 2002s,” my internal car muse said. “I want me one of these.” Unfortunately, due to their classic-even-when-new lines, E9s never really depreciated like 2002s; pretty shiny examples cost 10 grand even 40 years ago.

When we returned to Boston in 1984, I kept looking for an E9 I could afford. Of course, the northern winters made this even harder, as even back then, E9 coupes were legendary rust buckets. The E9’s Karmann-built body seemed to have been pre-rusted at the factory (if you learn only one automotive joke, it should be “Karmann invented rust, then licensed the process to the Italians”), and its construction included a trap under the front fenders where dirt would accumulate, stay wet, and rot out the shock towers, fenders, and firewall from the inside, so by the time you saw the perforations at the bottoms of the fenders, you were faced with nosebleed-level bodywork.

But in the summer of ’86, I read a newspaper ad (remember those?) that said: “1973 BMW 3.0CSi hit front partially repaired no rust many new parts $5200.” In those ancient single-landline-phone days, I wound up talking with the owner’s mother. She said the car hadn’t run in over a year, was under a tarp in her driveway, and was a piece of junk she couldn’t imagine anyone would want. I, of course, was excited beyond words.

When I arrived, I slid off the tarp and found, as Mom had promised, one seriously ugly E9 coupe. Unfortunately, no photos exist of the car in its driveway-find state, but an accident had bashed the nose, creased the fenders and bowed the hood, and a previous owner had applied a balm of aluminum, pop rivets, and bondo. The right fender was particularly cringeworthy, as the crease had been jig-sawed, overlapped, riveted, and filled. In addition, the front windshield was smashed, the rear windshield was missing, the bumpers and trim were off, and the interior was out of the car. Oh, and it was dead. “How much does my son want for this thing?” she asked. She nearly choked when I told her. “If it was up to me,” she said, “you could haul it off for 50 bucks.” This was promising.

The seller, it turned out, worked at a BMW dealership, had been accumulating parts to fix the car, then lost interest. Mom opened the garage and showed me a giant box holding a new rear windshield. There were other boxes with interior parts and much of the trim.

I opened the car’s hood and found that the original Bosch D-Jetronic injection had been removed, but in its place was a set of brand-new Weber 32/36s. Unfortunately, a compression test revealed 80 psi in five cylinders and zero in the sixth. I coaxed it out of its year-long slumber and started it, and it ran just long enough to scatter a family of mice living under the hood while fogging the driveway with a James Bond-level of oil smoke.

So, yeah, the car was a basket case. However, it did appear to be an incredibly solid basket case. I didn’t know then what I know now about how E9 coupes hide their rust, but I couldn’t find a rust hole anywhere on it.

The seller and I were both about to go on vacations. In those hazy pre-Internet days when there weren’t 10,000 eyeballs on a car, you could do that without someone swooping in and stealing your prize. It took about a month for us to get back and the negotiation to play out, but in September 1986, I bought the basket-case Polaris (silver) 3.0CSi with the Navy velour interior for $1700. I had it towed to my mother’s house in Brighton, Massachusetts, where Maire Anne and I were living in the third-floor apartment. When the flatbed disgorged it in front of the garage, even my relentlessly-supportive wife and mother both thought I’d inhaled too much brake cleaner. A guy who lived across the street and was watching laughed and asked rhetorically, “Is that supposed to be worth something?”

I installed the glass and interior and began mechanically sorting out the car. I lucked out on the engine—the lack of compression in one cylinder was due to a valve so badly adjusted that it was remaining open. With use, the stuck rings freed up and the fog-like oil burning ceased. Owning a rust-free E9 for $1700 sounded like I was living the dream, but this particular car was anything but the lust-worthy one I first saw in Austin. Still, I was a man with a vision.

Restoration—whatever the hell that means—is hellishly expensive these days, but it was never cheap. The moment you take a step up from a bottom-dollar Maaco spray job, costs skyrocket. My E9 may have been essentially rust-free, but it still needed a nose and fenders, and it had dents in every body panel. Complicating things was the fact that on nearly every other car, the fenders simply bolt on, but on an E9, they’re lap-seamed at the corners of the front windshield, so the windshield has to come out to replace them, then they have to be carefully cut off.

I decided to break the project into two steps. I bought a new nose and fenders ($1400), then paid a shop to cut the old ones off and weld the new ones on ($2300, which included a new OEM windshield to replace the one that cracked during installation). While the fenders were off, the shop repaired a single quarter-sized rust hole underneath. I then drove the car that way for a year while I saved money to get it painted.

However, as the clock ticked toward 1988 and Maire Anne was pregnant with our first child, the idea of dropping thousands of dollars to get an enthusiast car painted was insane. I marvel that I did it anyway. I found a shop that was active in the local BMW community and whose owner, coincidentally, was redoing an E9. He quoted me $4000 to pull the glass, take the body down to metal, level the panels, and shoot it with seven coats of color and seven coats of clear, all wet-sanded. You can look at the photos below and recoil at the use of body filler, the amount of overspray, and the fact that the engine wasn’t removed when the engine compartment was painted, but please spare me the “do it once, do it right” lecture. Those three things made it affordable—a $4000 paint job and not a $15,000 paint job. Plus, I still didn’t have all the money needed for the paint job, so I took out an unsecured bank loan for $4000. The method to this additional layer of madness was that I expected that Maire Anne and I would be looking for a house in the next few years, and this would help me to build credit.

I was never really bowled over by the car’s Polaris paint, and with the body stripped, I had the opportunity to change it. I saw a new Signal Red Mercedes 560SL and absolutely loved the color, which is a bit richer and deeper than Verona (BMW’s red in the early 1970s). Remember—these cars weren’t worth the six figures they potentially are these days, and people didn’t bat an eyelash about color-changing them with colors outside the manufacturer’s palette. So Signal Red it was.

As the shop began reassembling the car, it was quickly obvious that any old trim was going to stick out like a sore thumb against the new paint, so I ponied up for any chrome and rubber that wasn’t part of the original haul from the previous owner’s garage.

The just-painted car was absolutely stunning. The story I often tell is that, shortly after getting the car back, I was at a stop light in Boston when a guy in a new Porsche Carrera pulled up next to me.

“Gorgeous car!” he said.

“Thanks,” I replied with a smile.

Then the other shoe dropped. Remember that I was 29 years old and looked like a young skinny Jerry Garcia. “How does a guy like you afford a car like that?”

“Drugs,” I said, and drove off.

This was the summer of 1988. New baby and a freshly-painted E9 coupe … I really was living the dream. In terms of the car’s outer-body restoration, that was pretty much it; no other paint or bodywork has been performed since on the car. The total sunk cost at the time came to about $13,700. I rationalized that, since it was about the value of the car, I did pretty well, but against the backdrop of a young family, it was bordering on reckless financial endangerment. In hindsight, it’s astonishing that I pulled it off. In terms of the bulk of spending, that was pretty much it. But in terms of the “rolling restoration,” it was just the beginning. Fortunately, the rest of the work I could do myself.

A few months after the car was painted, I (incredibly) stumbled into another rust-free E9 coupe—a white car with a tan leather interior and working air conditioning. It was so well-priced that I couldn’t not buy it. Due to the working A/C, I thought about keeping it and selling the red one, but instead I swapped interiors and sold the white car for a good profit, so I actually made money on the interior swap. The beige leather against the new red paint made me swoon. I completed the interior with a new rug.

My red/beige E9 was now stunning, but the drivetrain felt tired, and the car was a bit of a rattle bucket. It turned out that the guy who painted it was very talented with a spray gun, but did a poor job reassembling the car. I spent decades tracking down rattles, many of which were due to improperly-attached trim, as well as under-hood and interior components.

In late 1988, I happened into a low-mileage engine from a 1984 BMW 533i for a song, as well as a five-speed gearbox. So I dropped in the replacement drivetrain, laughing at the irony that now I was pulling the engine instead of doing it before the engine compartment was painted.

The decades that followed brought installation of air conditioning, an L-Jetronic fuel injection retrofit, suspension upgrades, and a set of Alpina 16-inch open-lug wheels, but the car didn’t really see much road time. All that changed dramatically in 2010 when I began road-tripping the car to what was then called “Vintage at the Vineyard” in Winston-Salem, later changed to “The Vintage” in Asheville, North Carolina.

But in 2014, during the drive down to The Vintage, I hit 500 miles of drenching unrelenting rain, exposing the car to more moisture than it should receive in an entire lifetime. During the bumper-to-bumper rainy traffic on that same trip, a clevis pin and chain flew off the back of a semi and embedded itself in the E9’s front grille. The combination of these things made me shy about road trips unless I could see a clear end-to-end forecast, which of course you can’t if the trip is more than a few hundred miles. The car saw little road time for the next six years. I eventually relaxed, and last year drove the car back to The Vintage.

There are many angles from which one can analyze my 37-year-ownership experience of the E9. Jay Leno has famously said that he likes to take cars in rough shape and restore them to 100-point cars, then drive them back down to five-point cars before restoring them again. If I had Jay’s money, maybe I’d do that, but especially with today’s restoration costs, that will never be a play I can make. So I’m careful with the car.

The whole originality-and-correctness thing is its own topic. Judging by Hagerty values and the sales on Bring a Trailer, a photo of this car would sway you into thinking it’s a $100,000–$140,000 E9. But if I ever sold it, purists would rip it apart for the color change, the selection of a non-BMW color, the non-numbers-matching engine, and the swapped interior (the seat and door card pleating changed in 1974, so technically it’s wrong for a ’73). I did the engine, fuel injection, and A/C retrofits myself, and while they look OK to me, it’s telling that, 35 years ago, my column was named “The Hack Mechanic” and not “The Anal-Retentive Correct At Any Cost Mechanic,” so there are nits to be picked there.

One could, if one really wanted to, even argue about the use of base-coat/clear-coat paint. There’s an argument that the shine of base coat/clear coat is just a parlor trick, that classic cars that were original shot with single-stage paint should be repainted that way, and that wet-sandedsingle-stage paint produces a depth of finish that base coat/clear coat can’t match.

What I will say is that, when I bring the car to events ranging from informal cars and coffees to BMW gatherings, when the car is in direct sunlight, and the base-coat/clear-coat finish lights up as if it’s illuminated from underneath, no one has ever said, “Gee, it’s really a shame that you changed the color and butchered the car” or “a straight color would be prettier.” Instead, the response is simply “wow.”

Over the years, I’ve become an avid promoter of living with patina as a much easier (and waaaay less expensive) way to go through automotive life. And I’ve become critical of restoration, saying that the term encompasses such a broad range of actions that it’s become almost meaningless. Most people who say, “I’m restoring such and such” either don’t have a clue of how expensive it’s going to be or have way more money than I do (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Restoration is a fool’s game, and that if you want a pretty shiny car you should buy a pretty shiny car instead of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The E9 is the only car on which I’ve ever had anything remotely akin to an outer-body restoration done, and it’s difficult for me to imagine ever embarking on another one, as the numbers don’t even come close to adding up.

Having said that, it was possibly the best $13,700 I’ve ever spent. I would never have the life-long relationship I have with the car had I left it Polaris/Navy. I wouldn’t love it the way I do. It would’ve vanished long ago in the tidal churn of cars coming and going. Anyone who says, “Gee, it’s a shame you didn’t do it right” or draws conclusion that “The increased value of the car now would completely outpace what it would’ve cost you in 1988 to do it right then” completely misses the point: That never would have happened. It’s really an automotive miracle that the needle got threaded and I’ve had this gorgeous thing to enjoy for the last 35 years.

I hope you love a car as much as I love this one.

“Is that supposed to be worth something?” More than you can possibly imagine.

***

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 37-year-long rolling resto of my BMW 3.0CSi appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I spend far less time on Bring a Trailer than perhaps you’d think. There are reasons for this. The primary one is that one of Rob Siegel’s Tips For Sane Living is “don’t crave things you can never have.”

So the carnival of vintage Ferraris, insanely-low-mileage Porsches, and oh-my-god-I-thought-this-car-was-an-urban-myth vehicles rarely make me lift my head out of whatever well-worn road-trip veteran I happen to be wrenching on, or whatever affordable needy classic I happen to be chasing.

The secondary reason is that nearly all of my meager income comes from automotive writing. While I marvel at the success of BaT’s business model that crowdsources free expertise under the guise of social media, I feel very little desire to contribute. It’s like bar and restaurant owners expecting musicians to play for exposure instead of money. If I want to bathe myself in social media, I can do it on Facebook and serve my own agenda, not BaT’s.

However, if someone sends me a link to an auction that they want my opinion on, or one that includes my “thehackmechanic” BaT handle in a comment that automatically generates an email, I’ll have a peek. For the most part, if the link is some best-of-the-best car that causes a hedge-fund manager and a real estate agent in Beverly Hills to bid against one another, I move on because I really don’t care.

But in late January, three people invoked my name in comments on an interesting basket case 1969 BMW 2002 on BaT. So, like Beetlejuice, I was summoned.

The auction was titled “No Reserve: One-Owner 1969 BMW 2002 Project.” The photos showed a long-neglected, heavily patina-laden Chamonix (white) 2002 that was wearing the mummy-like dust of lengthy storage but was sitting on wheel dollies in a well-lit warehouse surrounded by other nice-looking classics. It was sort of an odd juxtaposition.

The fact that this car was on Bring a Trailer at all drew quite a number of positive “BaT getting back to its roots” comments, and I suppose that there’s something to be said for that. After all, the majority of cars up on BaT are buffed and polished eye-candy—cars where the buyer brings a trailer to keep the dirt off his or her new purchase, not because the car is a long-dead project.

At first glance, the body of the 2002 appeared shabby but solid, meaning that there weren’t plainly visible, fist-sized holes in the corners of the front fenders as is often the case on abandoned-in-place 2002s. However, as you clicked through the photos, you came to ones that showed the hood and trunk lid both so badly rusted that the BMW emblem was literally falling off. The description said the car was being sold on behalf of its original owner, a gentleman who had parked the car in his garage in 1979 due to a bad clutch slave cylinder. At some point, the garage’s roof reportedly began leaking, which is what reportedly caused the car’s odd top-down rust. Very sad, especially considering how easy it is to replace a slave cylinder.

The seller used the term “barn find.” In my opinion, the whole “barn find” thing is largely a load of BS. I understand that the mystique is that it connotes that the car is a fully original time capsule, but there’s nothing about dust, mold, mildew, spider webs, and rodent droppings that make a car pure and unmolested. Roll the car out of the barn, begin itemizing its issues, and the aura of originality usually gets blown away by the stiff wind of real-world needs with real-world costs. From a purely practical standpoint, a recently running car with perhaps a few ill-chosen modifications will be much easier to revive than something that’s been sitting since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and when people thought John Travolta was a great dancer.

Further, this was not a completely intact car. The radiator and other parts were sitting in the trunk. The passenger seat and rear seat had been removed, though they were included. The console was missing.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a two-part series on how to sell a car (part 1 and part 2). While not everyone has to do exactly what I do, it’s generally to the seller’s benefit to provide a thorough description of a car and give it some appropriate level of preparation. I joked that the latter doesn’t need to be much more than running it through a car wash and throwing out the Dunkin’ Donuts cups, but it’s true. It seemed odd to me that someone would go to the effort to drag a car like this out of the garage where it had been sitting for 44 years (and from the presence of the wheel dollies, “drag” must’ve been the operative verb), transport it to what the seller referred to as “our private auto museum,” and photograph it without bothering to clean the dust and grime off the windows, vacuum up the schmutz under the hood, and remove a Styrofoam coffee cup and an umbrella from the back floor.

Further, as the photos show, there was a good deal of stuff in the car and trunk. The car would’ve been better represented had the seller taken it all out for the photos. Then the rugs could’ve either been peeled back to show the condition of the floors, or the seats could’ve been put in, giving the car the image of being intact and complete. To do neither under the auspices of it being a “barn find” seemed a cop-out. The seller seemed to regard this as a point of pride, as he wrote, “I made sure not to disrupt the car from the way it was when we pulled it out of that garage.” I’m sorry—it’s not a crime scene or Native American burial site. I could relate to one commenter, who took the seller to task: “Don’t they have Windex in Virginia? Or shop vacs? It seems by not lifting much of a finger you’re kinda maybe giving the auction a little bit of a different kind of a finger.”

One of the things I say over and over about selling vintage cars is that by meticulously documenting a car’s condition, you remove questions about what the car might be and instead reveal what it actually is. This removes risk to the buyer, and therefore likely increases the number of bids. While there were 211 photographs, many were redundant shots of the outside of the car. Photos of the shock towers were provided, and there were a few shots of the rocker panels, but the only undercarriage pics were what could be photographed from floor level. While it’s non-trivial getting detailed undercarriage photos of a dead car, if you have a “private museum,” don’t you also have a lift? Or at least a floor jack?

In addition to inadequate undercarriage photographs, the seller stated, “I have not tried to turn the engine over by hand.” Several commenters asked for a definitive answer regarding whether the engine was seized, and the seller simply repeated his stance. This mystifies me. Especially with the radiator out of the car, it’s 10 seconds worth of work to put a 30mm socket on the crankshaft nut and try to turn the engine. If the seller didn’t have one, he could’ve tried to rotate it by grabbing the fan. If that didn’t work, he could’ve simply said so.

Now, I’ve been tough on the seller here. Let me back off. As I said in my piece, it’s a lot of work selling a car, and this one wasn’t even his. In fairness, there’s zero question that the seller did the owner a huge favor by getting the car out of what was presumably a cramped, decrepit garage and putting it in a well-lit space where it could be walked around and photographed. Considering that the car needed to be on wheel dollies, this alone was likely a substantial task. You may remember that I recently represented a 2002tii for a woman whose husband-owner had passed away. Bringing that car up to the condition where it was the best version of itself, describing and photographing it, and managing the sale was months of work. So, I totally get why the seller might have drawn the line where he did. But an hour or two more work may have made a non-trivial difference in the car’s sale price.

I’m very careful commenting on BaT auctions, as I once had a guy literally chew me out in public because he said I affected the value of his auction by commenting that the orange aftermarket color scheme of his interior wasn’t my personal taste (for the record, I only made the comment after the auction had closed, and it was hideous), but because three people had asked for my input on the basket-case 2002, I felt like I needed to comment. Other folks who know more than I do about the differences between early model year 2002s had already weighed in on the fact that the car was a largely original “first-series ’69” that carried with it some seldom-seen braking system components. To me, that was less of an issue than the car’s condition. I chose my words carefully:

“I’m pretty reticent about injecting my opinion here on BaT, as I have my own view of things, and they usually don’t involve spending a lot of money to turn X into Y. I wouldn’t touch any car without either crawling under it and examining the undercarriage myself or seeing a complete set of photos, especially one like this that already shows rust-through on the normally solid surfaces of the hood and the trunk lid, but I’m not going to be “that person” on BaT who asks for more photos but has no intention of bidding. I guess all I’ll add is that, even if it’s just revived and not restored, a car like this is going to need everything. If the undercarriage is in fact solid, and you want a ratty runner, and you can do all the mechanical work yourself, it could be a fun project. If, on the other hand, you want something where the end product is pretty and shiny … well, you can fill in the end of that sentence yourself.”

Actually, I have to admit that I was considering bidding on the car myself. After all, it did look pretty solid, bids were low even at the end, and it was close enough (it was in Virginia) for me to drag it home. But without further disclosure on the areas that I mentioned above, there was more risk in it than I was willing to take. Zero regrets.

It’s funny how small things can sway a decision. The rear half-shafts on most 2002 have CV joints at both ends. As long as the boots don’t tear, they’re incredibly long-lived. However, the photos for this car showed that this had one CV joint and one universal, and the CV boot had dissolved. While it’s not a big deal to swap half-axles, my knee-jerk reaction was, “To make the car drivable, I’d have to deal with this, too?” Moreover, it would be one of many decisions on originality—whether to just throw a used set of dual-CV half-axles in or pay to have these rebuilt. To me, it was the visible tip of the iceberg on the car needing everything.

But over and above the specifics of the BaT auction, I wanted to knock something around with respect to the value of a car like this, and what its future might be.

BMW 2002s are a huge part of my life. I’ve owned 40 of them. I currently own three. I know them well. Their value, particularly the 1968–73 round taillight cars in excellent condition, is quite strong. The Hagerty Valuation Tool lists values for a roundie 2002 as ranging from about $17K in fair condition to about $90K in concours condition. That sounds a bit high, but it’s more or less in line with the snapshot of as-sold values on BaT. The fuel-injected 2002tii is worth even more, and the rare Turbo more still. Hagerty doesn’t list values for cars in rough condition, and not many of them make it to BaT, so it’s more difficult to get a reliable metric on a car like this.

But, not to make too fine a point of it, a ’69 BMW 2002 is not a ’69 Porsche 911. A small-bumpered long-hood 911 in similar condition would probably be worth eight to ten times the $3800 that this car sold for. Folks would likely be falling over each other to laud the car’s originality, crow about what an easy restoration it would be, and bid on it. And the hypothetical 911 that pops out at the end, whether it’s a resurrected ratty runner, or a rolling repaint, or a full-blown restoration, would obviously be worth way more. This 2002 simply doesn’t have that kind of upside. Even considering that the worst rust on it is on the two easiest-to-replace body panels (the hood and the trunk lid), the car’s poor condition looks like it extends to just about everything. I’m a big believer in, as I said above about the widow’s 2002tii I helped sell, making a car the best version of what it already is. Taking a sow’s ear and trying to turn it into a silk purse becomes incredibly expensive. Unless you restore cars for a living, you’re generally better off buying a different car rather than trying to do so.

Further, despite the comments from 2002 purists on there being only a small number of first-series ’69s left and how cool it would be if this one was kept original and brought back to its former glory, my feeling is that the market doesn’t yet fully value such fine details on these cars. It certainly values a round taillight 2002, particularly a 2002tii, not being a complete Frankencar and having the right seats, dashboard, and instrument cluster as opposed to ones that time-traveled in from the later big-bumpered square taillight cars. But things like braking system details, I don’t know. Forcing all those details to be correct, as opposed to using more readily available parts from later 2002s, is likely to be an expensive layer on top of what would already be an expensive revival. If the car’s new owner wants to “correctly” “restore” it (I put both words in quotes because I hate both of them), that’s his call.

But if the buyer isn’t looking for perfection, if he does much of the work himself, if the frame rails and floors are free of rust-through, if the engine turns and is revivable with a fresh head gasket and a valve job, if the interior isn’t a gag-worthy water-damaged mouse-infested hazmat zone, and if he doesn’t get wrapped around the axle (or, in this case, the half-axle) of correctness, I think he’ll do handsprings over what he picked up. If I see the car in May at The Vintage (the annual low-stress BMW event in Asheville, North Carolina), hastily patched up and running, and making it there by the skin of its teeth, I’ll buy the new owner an evening’s worth of beers. If he just threw in a set of later half-axles, I’ll make that two evening’s worth of beers.

***

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.

The post The basket case BMW 2002 on BaT appeared first on Hagerty Media.

If you’re like me—and let’s hope that you aren’t, but let’s admit that you probably are—few things feel as sweet as the kind of well-scored Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace deal that only you could find, bag, and fully appreciate.

If you’ll forgive me an opening digression, my wife tells me that I have this really annoying tendency to buy myself presents right around Christmas. She’ll say, “You should’ve left me a hint! I would’ve bought that for you!” So I tried that tack for two years. I literally left browser windows open on her computer for a Harmony programmable remote and a Warn PullzAll 120VAC winch. Then, when these items weren’t wrapped as presents on Christmas morning, her response for the winch was that she’d missed the clue, and for the remote was “I’m not going to buy you that!”

So that’s part of backdrop against which I tell you how delighted I was to score a Recaro rolling office chair right before Christmas—my present to myself in which I delighted at the search, the find, and eventually the physical acquisition.

And, of course, there’s a story in all of it.

I have to admit that I have something of a Recaro seat fetish. I’m not talking about the new Recaro racing buckets—I’m talking about the vintage Recaro LS, LE, SE, and LX models from the 1970s and ’80s. Back in the day, these were the shiznit. Bolstered and very supportive, these seats performed the miracle of both holding your butt in place while also being incredibly comfortable for long drives. If you track-drove your car and had the cash, you’d buy one Recaro to install as a driver’s seat. You only bought two if you had enough income to regard the form of the matching set over the function of you being the only one in the car the vast majority of the time. I still smile when I see old barn-find or ran-when-parked cars with one Recaro in them. You know, 1980s driver’s school car. Bam. I’ve got you nutshelled.

If you don’t know, Recaros—as well as their sport seat kissing cousins Konig and FloFit—have a standard 16-inch side-to-side bolt pattern for the rail spacing on the bottom. Recaros were factory standard or optional seats in a variety of cars, from a host of Volkswagens to Fox Body Mustangs. Any set I’ve ever bought, if you remove the model-specific seat rails—and this includes the big heavy electric seat bases on quasi-modern Volkswagens—what’s underneath is the same standard 16-inch rail spacing.

To mount Recaros in your car, you need to adapt that 16-inch rail spacing to whatever the side-to-side bolt pattern is for the rail spacing for your seat sliders. There are two different ways to do it. If Recaros were available as a factory option for your car—as was the case with the 1977–82 BMW 320i—then there was a set of factory adapters that bolted to the bottom of the seats. So, for a car like a BMW 2002, whose seats were the same size as those in a 320i, you order or scrounge or fabricate a set of these adapters, bolt them to the 16-inch rails on the bottoms of the Recaros, bolt the original seat sliders to the adapters, then bolt the sliders to the floor of the car where they always went. The other way to do it is that Recaro, or the aftermarket vendor selling the seats, typically offered mounting hardware that featured a standard set of very heavy-duty sliders that bolted directly to the bottoms of the seats. Then you needed to procure a car-specific adapter base plate that sat between the sliders and the floor.

While I absolutely love the look and feel of period-correct interiors in 1970s German cars, the big wide horsehair-stuffed seats are miserably uncomfortable for long drives, so I have Recaros (or Konigs or FloFits) in most of the vintage BMWs that I distance-drive. In my prized 3.0CSi, I have a set of beige cloth Recaro SE seats that I picked up 13 years ago on Craigslist whose color, by chance, is close enough to the beige leather rear seats and the vinyl door panels that the eye isn’t drawn to the difference.

In two of my 2002s, I’m currently splitting a set of Konig seats, allowing me to get the benefit of a firm supportive seat in each car. Although there’s no confusing either of these with a track-day car, the 40-year-old context of a lone Recaro-style seat makes me smile. I drive these cars, my back needs the support of the sport seat, I had a pair of Konigs sitting in the basement, and one went into each car. Boom, done. Cost: zero.

The point of all this is that what makes all this Recaro seat installation work is a uniform rail spacing on all Recaros (and Konigs and FloFits), and adapters that are specific to the make and model of your car.

With that, let me wind the tape back 40 years for a moment.

When Maire Anne and I returned to Boston in 1984 after our 2½-year stint in Austin, we brought with us a rust-free 1975 BMW 2002 (“Bertha”) that I’d bought that spring. I actually wanted a big-bumpered 2002 to withstand the demolition derby that is Boston parking and commuting. Over the next four years, I transformed the car into a cross between a daily driver and a weekend track rat, throwing in a goosed-up engine with a hot cam and dual Webers, a full Koni track suspension, and many other mods.

I was always buying, repairing, and selling whatever 2002s I could get my hands on, so when I found a 2002tii that had a full Recaro interior with the very zingy “orange spectrum” fabric—the car had two Recaro front seats and their adapters as well as a back seat reupholstered in the orange spectrum fabric—I bought the tii, swapped interiors with Bertha, and sold the tii.

In 1988, my close friend and fellow 2002 guy Alex got married. He and his wife were planning on taking his car on a big western road trip to do “the grand circle” of national parks. He couldn’t get the car ready in time, so as a wedding present, I loaned them Bertha (which, in addition to the comfortable Recaros, had working air conditioning). They loved the car, and when they returned, agreed to buy it.

That was, unfortunately, the beginning of a long and sad period for Bertha. Like me, they lived in Boston, and the car was often parked on the street. In 1990, Bertha was stolen and recovered. When it was stolen and recovered a second time, the recovered car was damaged—it ran horribly from what appeared to be a bent valve, and one of the windows had been smashed. Alex rolled it into a neighbor’s garage. He never expected it to sit there for nearly 30 years. I’d routinely ask him about Bertha, with my nods and winks about buying it back turning into outright pleading as the years went by.

Finally, in 2018, Alex relented and sold me the car back. The problem was, like an idiot, I hadn’t actually looked at it, and when I rolled open the door to the garage where the car had been sitting since 1990, my heart sank. The garage backed into a pond, and the humidity, combined with insulation batting that had been stored on the hood of the car, had nearly destroyed the once-proud car.

The interior was an absolute disaster as well. Prior to the thefts, Alex had already worn the fabric on the bottom cushion of the driver’s seat, and swapped it with the passenger seat. This was now augmented with the shattered glass from the theft, spider webs, mildew, and rodent damage. The orange spectrum Recaros were now a sad worn memory of their former eye-popping glory. To see them in shambles was heartbreaking.

But if you’ve already decided to jump in, it really doesn’t matter how disgusting the water is. And jump in I did. Due to the pricey real estate and the nice lawn on his neighbor’s pond-facing garage where the car had been stored, there was no easy way to get a ramp truck down there, so I spent a week in the garage reviving Bertha enough to drive the car out under its own power, the video of which can be seen here. I then worked on the car over the next year, eventually driving it to The Vintage in Asheville in 2019. The entire story is chronicled in my book Resurrecting Bertha.

But there was something about the exposure the seats had gotten to the humidity from the pond that gave the orange spectrum fabric all the strength of a used Kleenex, and by the time I got back from my 2,000-mile round trip to Asheville, the base of the driver’s seat was a shredded mess.

Now, with everything I’ve said above, it’s clear that I keep my eyes open for vintage Recaro / Konig / FloFit seats, and when I find a well-priced set, I snag them, even if I don’t have something to install them into at the moment.

So imagine my delight when, on December 23^rd—two days before Christmas—I saw an ad for this rolling office chair on Facebook Marketplace (FBM), clearly showing a Recaro seat in the same orange spectrum fabric as Bertha. The asking price: $250.

Recaro rolling office chairs were—and still are—sold directly by Recaro. They featured a standard commercially-available rolling swivel base, bolted to the bottom of the chair via (you guessed it) an adapter plate that mates to the seat’s standard 16-inch rail spacing. From everything I’ve written above, you now understand that, to put this in a car, all you need to do is unbolt the swivel base from the adapter plate, unbolt the adapter plate from the rails, bolt on the adapters and sliders for your car, and it’s in like Flynn. These Recaro office chairs do show up regularly on CL and FBM, although one in orange spectrum fabric is, as they say, hen’s-teeth rare. As a buyer, a big advantage is that the people who have them as office chairs usually don’t know that the seat is worth more as a car seat than as an office chair. Of course, it would be worth way more if it was part of a matched set, so it cuts both ways.

Still, I totally, immediately, and unambiguously wanted this one. The problem was that the seat was in southern Connecticut, not far from New Haven, plus it was the day before Christmas Eve, my wife had the flu, and there was no way I was going to drop everything and get down there that evening, or anytime in the next few days, for that matter.

I messaged the seller, explained all this, and said that I’d gladly meet his asking price and would Paypal him half the money immediately, but that I probably wouldn’t be able to get down there until after New Years Day. To his immense credit, he agreed.

You do know what I did next, right? (You probably do, since we’ve established that you are like me.) To make the road trip more worthwhile, I spent hours trying to find cars to look at and other things to buy between Boston and southern Connecticut.

About a week after New Years, I lined it all up. I have a 1999 BMW Z3 (“Zelda”) that I sold to a neighbor, then bought back a few years ago after her son drove it onto a median strip, damaging its front end enough that the car surely would’ve been totaled and parted out if I hadn’t. I repaired it (bent lower control arms and wheels and blown air bag) and have been driving it around since spring 2021, but its front bumper cover (what most folks would call the air dam) was shattered in the impact. I’ve kept it held together with packing tape and Gorilla Glue, but have always had an eye out for one that’s the same Boston Green color as Zelda so as to save me the cost and effort of painting it. There are plenty of used Z3 front bumper covers around, but not many in Boston Green. Plus, bumper covers are BIG, and thus expensive to ship.

So when I found a guy in Springfield, Massachusetts—not directly on the way to southern Connecticut, but squaring off a rounded corner was close enough to make it work—who was parting out a couple of BMW Z3s, and one of them was Boston Green, I was almost giddy. Unfortunately, when he sent me the photos, his bumper cover had some separations in the bottom portion. Still, it wasn’t cracked all the way through, it was much better than the one on Zelda, and Zelda is far from a perfect car, so I told him that I’d be in his area the coming Saturday and proposed giving him a hundred bucks for the bumper cover and both of the inner fender liners, which I also needed. To my delight, he agreed.

The morning that I left, I saw a well-priced 1987 BMW E30 325is on FBM only about eight miles west of the guy with the bumper cover. Odds were that it was going to be rusty, but hey, you never know unless you look, right?

Game day came, and I needed only to choose a car. My resurrected truck—the 2008 Chevy 3500HD Duramax dually, the one that had its catalytic converter was stolen—was the logical choice to swallow these large items, but the fuel cost for the 300-ish mile drive wouldn’t be trivial. So I took my 2003 BMW E39 530i stick sport instead, as its fold-down rear seats give it near-wagon-like flexibility. Things were a little tight, but it was well worth being able to cruise at traffic speed in a car I actually enjoyed driving, plus it would burn only about $50 in fuel instead of more than twice that in the truck.

First stop was the bumper cover and the fender liners. The nice young Russian man was great, even handing me a baggie of fasteners that held everything in place. The parts, though, occupied more space than I expected, especially considering how little the Z3 is.

Next was a quick jaunt to see the BMW 325is. As expected, it was rustier than I wanted to take on, but seeing it enabled me to stop thinking about it.

That left the leg down toward New Haven for the Recaro office chair. I gave the seller the remainder of the $250, we unbolted the rolling base, and I stuck the Recaro seat on top of the passenger seat of my E39.

When I got home, I realized that I had no space in the garage for the chair, and the cats would tear it up if I put it in the basement, so I brought the two sections of the chair into the living room, where there’s light and floor space, and a door to keep the cats out. (Yes, I have a saint-like wife.) I cleaned it up and photographed the adapter that held on the office chair base before I removed it.

And then, to my surprise, I stopped. Instead, I reinstalled the rolling base, and rolled the chair into the dining room, which doubles as an office. As soon as it was in there, juxtaposed against the room’s Mediterranean orange walls and the orange tablecloth left over from Thanksgiving, I realized it was far more likely that the chair’s fate would continue to be an office chair and not a replacement for Bertha’s driver’s seat, as I had envisioned. And I’m cool with that. I mean, Bertha is a car with the patina knob turned up pretty high. Having a cherry set of vintage Recaros in it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Of course, the joke is that while a single Recaro seat, particularly an orange gradient one in excellent condition, is a freaking steal for $250, I’d never pay $250 for an office chair.

***

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.

The post This Orange Spectrum Recaro seat is the only office chair I’d buy for $250 appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Last week, I began writing about how to sell a car that falls outside the Kelly Blue Book or JD Power (formerly NADA) Guide values because it’s either vintage, needy, high mileage, or all three. I talked about the need for preparation and description, and the choice of a selling platform: fixed-price like Facebook Marketplace (FBM) or Craigslist; and auctions like eBay or Bring a Trailer. (Hagerty Marketplace, you should be aware, offers both Classifieds and Auctions.) Today we’ll talk about photos and videos, price, the difference between an offer and a commitment, and the passing of papers.

The Photos

On the one hand, the needed quantity and quality of photos depends heavily on how the car is being sold. If it’s going on a fixed-price local platform like Facebook Marketplace (maximum of 12 photos) or Craigslist (24 photos), you’d think that the pics just need to be good enough for people to decide whether or not to come see the car in person. On the other hand, the increasing national use of FBM and CL for sight-unseen purchases means that you need to be prepared to send anyone who expresses interest a full detailed set of pics via something like a link to Google Photos.

If the car is worth a lot of money and you’re putting it on Bring a Trailer or other auction site, professional photos that use a narrow depth of field on the details (e.g., a perfect taillight in focus and the rest of the background blurred) are worth every penny, but these days, any DSLR in auto mode or any modern cell phone with multiple cameras will do a presentable job provided you follow a few simple rules.

For the exterior, shoot the car on a sunny day in an uncluttered environment like an empty parking lot. A scenic backdrop is better, but most of us don’t live in Sedona. If the car is a bright color, the degree to which sun makes the paint pop can dramatically help the presentation of the car. All photos should be in landscape mode, not portrait mode (hold the phone horizontal, not vertical), and the car should fill most of the frame of the photo. At an absolute bare minimum, shoot it from eight angles—front, back, left and right sides, and the oblique views. Twice that many is better. Don’t block out the license plates with your thumb. It just looks stupid. Either leave the plates visible, take them off, or blur them with Photoshop. Another pet peeve of mine is photos with the shadow of the photographer lurking like Bigfoot. Just take the 30 seconds required to re-orient the car and re-take the photo.

The exterior whole-car pics are just the beginning. Take detailed photos of bumpers, grilles, lights, trim, and wheels. Photograph any dents and non-trivial scratches. Shoot several pics of the engine compartment, and the trunk showing the rear shock towers and the spare tire well.

For the interior, unless you know exactly what you’re doing with a flash, bright sun isn’t a good idea, as you never get the whole interior either fully in or out of shadow. It’s better to shoot it in the shade.

Remember that for a vintage car you need to prove its condition. You don’t say “rust-free”—you prove it with pics. Unless you have a lift, it’s difficult to photograph the undercarriage. Even if you jack the car up and put the cell phone flat on the driveway, the photos often show things too close and out of context. If the car runs, it’s well worth driving it to any repair shop and handing over the necessary number of $20 bills for them to put the car up on their lift while you snap away for five minutes.

Lastly, if the car not only doesn’t run but is marooned in a garage or barn with boxes on top of it, it’s best to do some upfront work to try to get it out where it can be walked around and photographed. While some cars are so iconic and valuable that, even in barn-find condition, your inbox will explode with interest, most cars will benefit from potential buyers being able to see the condition the car is actually in.

The Videos

Videos aren’t required to sell a car, but they’re strongly advised on BaT; they provide dramatically more information than still photographs and go a long way toward showing prospective buyers what the car actually is. I shoot a full walk-around video showing both the exterior and interior, a cold-start video, a driving video that includes around town as well as nailing and wailing on the highway, and a full undercarriage examination. One of my walk-around videos can be seen here.

Price

On auction sites, the price is set by the high bid, but on fixed-price sites like FBM, you need to list a price. On a modern car that’s more of a daily-driver commodity, you can look up the book value and price your car accordingly, but for a classic car, you need to triangulate off the Hagerty values, recent sales on BaT, and completed listings on eBay to see what cars in comparable condition have actually sold for. Because I have such an active Facebook presence, I’ve done pretty well by describing and photographing my cars in crushing detail, pricing them realistically, and putting them on my FB page, as well as other marque and model-specific pages (e.g., the “BMW 2002” page and the page for “The Vintage,” an annual event I attend in Asheville). I’m then usually contacted by someone who I’ve either met or who knows folks I know, trust is established, and we work it out.

If the car isn’t a classic, I list it on FBM, hold my nose, and deal with the garbage messages like everyone else. It’s rarely productive to combine poor condition and high price and be one of those “I know what I have” people, but I’ll sometimes price a car aggressively, say in the ad “Price is absolutely dead nuts firm,” and mean it.

Generally, though, you need to show some price flexibility as a seller. A potential buyer may say “I’ll come there prepared to do the deal with a truck, a trailer, and cash, but I want some sense of how firm the price is before I allocate the whole day to it,” and that’s understandable. It’s part of the larger context of seller and buyer feeling each other out. I may respond, “There’s some flexibility for the right buyer once he or she is standing in the driveway.”

Last week I talked about the increasing frequency of ads that say “don’t ask me a million questions,” which drives me crazy because of the implication that the seller’s time is more valuable than yours. Something else I’ve been seeing more often is the “soft auction,” where a car is posted with a price so low that it’s guaranteed to generate many responses, but the seller has no intention of selling it at that price. Typically the ad is then edited and the price is either raised dramatically or the seller says, “Message me your best offer.” If you really want to do something like this, I suppose you could advertise, “I’m showing the car Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Come see it, give me your best offer, I’ll select the highest one on Sunday at 10 p.m.,” but I maintain that if you’re going to auction off a car, it’s really far better for both buyer and seller to put it on a real auction site with the structure of a starting price, a possible reserve price, and bids that are publicly visible as they come in, as there’s nothing in a “soft auction” to prevent the seller from pulling the car or the high bidder from not following through.

The Difference Between an Offer and a Commitment

If the very first contact from a potential buyer is a message that says, “Would you take $X?,” it’s difficult for me to take that seriously. What, no questions about the car? No requests for more photos of the floor pans? You don’t want to talk to me on the phone? I sure would if I was the buyer.

A distinction needs to be drawn between “I’ve read your description, I want the car, and I’ll offer you $X, and wire you the money right now” and “I’ll buy it for $X and will pay for it when I pick it up.” The first is a commitment. The second sounds like a commitment, but it’s really an implied sight-unseen offer. Be wary of it. History has taught me that sight-unseen offers like this, if they’re absent a wire transfer or the binding commitment of the “Make Offer” button on eBay, are usually worthless, as the lowered price simply becomes the starting point for a new negotiation. What often happens is that once the seller sees and drives the car, they often say, “Oh, I didn’t know about X, Y, and Z” and try to get you to take less so you don’t lose the sale. I’m sorry, but the buyer can’t have it both ways—they can’t have the sale locked up with an accepted offer and you therefore considering the car as sold so you’re not showing it to anyone else, and also be able to lower the price further when they see the car. When a buyer makes an offer and a seller accepts it, in my opinion the buyer loses the right to renegotiate the offer. One big advantage of an auction is that it largely removes this possibility. (I say “largely” because I’ve had one or two eBay buyers try it. I sent them packing empty-handed.) This is another area where as complete a description as possible is to the seller’s benefit—there are fewer things the buyer can claim he or she didn’t know about. Obviously, if a car is grossly misrepresented by a seller, that’s an exception.

The Deposit

I hate deposits and try to avoid them. It gets dicey when you accept a deposit and the buyer changes their mind and wants it back. If someone comes and looks at my car, wants to buy it, and we shake on a price, they can come back tomorrow with the cash or talk with their bank about a wire transfer. I’m an old-school word-is-my-bond guy and won’t sell it out from under them. If they change their mind or vanish, so be it. The exception is that if someone sees the car advertised, contacts me with extreme interest, and asks me if I can hold the car for a day or two until they come and see it, I’ll sometimes take a small ($100) non-refundable deposit. In this instance, it’s clear that the deposit is really just buying their place at the head of the line.

Payment and Papers

If you’re selling a car in person, you sign over the title to the buyer (here in Massachusetts, every registered car, no matter how old, has a title), and they give you the money. In states where titles aren’t required for a car over 15 years old, a previous registration and a bill of sale in the same name usually take the place of a title. But the point is that, for an in-person sale, the money and the paper transfer occur at the same time. The buyer then owns the car, and how they get it home—drive it legally, drive it illegally, or tow it—is up to them. I’ve had buyers ask me if they can drive the car home on my plates and insurance. I’ve done it for friends, but in general it’s a poor idea, as you really don’t want to experience the nightmare scenario of someone getting into an accident in a car that’s in ownership limbo (e.g., the title has been signed over to them but it’s still on your insurance).

In-person payment can be cash (which carries with it magical negotiating powers), wire transfer (sort of), or check, if you the seller are comfortable with it. Bank transfer apps like Zelle are great, but they have a low limit—typically around $4000, though it varies bank to bank—that essentially limits them to inexpensive cars. It’s sometimes enough, though, that when combined with a trip to a nearby ATM for cash, a buyer can pay you on the spot. Otherwise the buyer needs to initiate an actual bank-to-bank wire transfer to the seller, which usually requires a physical visit to the bank and is usually not instantaneous. Bank checks or money orders can be used, but as a seller, you need to be clear that you’ll wait for them to post to your account before you’ll release the car. The exception is if the check is drawn on a bank where there’s a branch nearby and you and the buyer can actually go there and have them verify the check or even cash it.

I know that I’m writing this from the seller’s standpoint, but I’d add that, as a buyer, looking at a car during bank business hours and scoping out in advance where the nearest branch of your bank is can eliminate the need for showing up with an uncomfortably large amount of cash for a car you’re not even certain you want. This is why I maintain my account at an evil-empire-style big bank—they’re likely to have a branch office within a 30-minute drive of any car I look at in New England.

If the car is a remote sale either via auction or online purchase, money and papers have to be passed somehow. For high-dollar cars, there are escrow services that do this, but I usually just do the human-to-human thing and have a phone call with the buyer. We talk, establish trust, then agree to simultaneous exchange. They begin the process of wiring the money or sending a bank check, and I sign and date the title and put it in a USPS or Fedex envelope with a tracking number and send the buyer a photograph of me doing so. I’ve never had a problem doing it this way.

Once payment and papers are exchanged, the buyer is the owner, and you as the seller need to be extremely careful with the car. In one of the BaT sales I brokered, the shipper refused to drive into my neighborhood, insisting the streets were too narrow and the power lines were too low for his two-level tandem transport (and he was probably right). He asked me to meet him at a service area on I-95. I was happy to do so, except that with the sale of the car consummated, the owner (actual seller) had cancelled his registration and insurance. I contacted the buyer and explained this, and it turned out he hadn’t insured the car yet (this was his first remote purchase). A few frantic phone calls later and the car was insured. I drove it the five miles with a set of my old plates on it, as I was willing to risk getting stopped for driving an unregistered car but not for an accident in an uninsured car. The first is a potential ticket. The second is potentially losing my house.

As we wrote in Part 1 of this story, although it’s still young, Hagerty Marketplace offers the added reassurance of holding purchase payments in escrow until the sale is complete, and the $99 seller’s fee is currently being waived.

That’s most of it. Classic cars usually find a good buyer—often someone not unlike yourself—but garden-variety needy high-mileage daily drivers are tougher to sell. It often seems that the more you lower the price, the more of a zoo the whole thing becomes, and when you find someone who communicates in complete sentences, does what he or she says they’ll do, shows up when he or she says they will, and offers you something in the same planetary orbit as your asking price, you’re glad to take their money and end the whole episode.

***

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.

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The post Professor Siegel’s Guide to Selling a Car (Part 2) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

The past few weeks, I’ve written about looking at cars with the hope of picking up a winter project. Not surprisingly, this showcased several of the things that drive me crazy about car ads, and about the process of buying and selling. While it’s all still fresh and irritating, I thought I’d share some of my pointers on how to sell a car.

Let me first say that I’m talking here mainly about vintage cars—but also needy cars, high-mileage cars, or cars that are all three of those things at once. If, instead, the car you want to sell is only a few years old and in excellent condition, with normal mileage, its value is generally a fixed quantity that can be looked up on Kelly Blue Book (KBB) or the NADA Guide (now called the JD Power Guide).

That known value brings make-it-easy-though-not-top-dollar options such as dealer trade-in and services like Carvana, Vroom, CarGurus, CarMax, etc. But if you have an old or needy car, make no mistake: Selling it yourself is a giant pain in the patootie.

“It’s Supposed to Be Work!”

One thing I noticed in my recent searches was a significant number of ads where the description said, “Don’t ask me a lot of questions, just come and see it,” or “I’m not going to answer a million questions or take a million photos.” The vehicle was usually some ran-when-parked-long-ago car, or well-priced because it needed work.

I really don’t understand why people think this a productive way to sell a car. To me, it screams that going to see the car will be a waste of time, as I’m likely to find things that, if they were simply disclosed, would’ve saved both me and the seller the effort. The funny thing is, when people do this, they’re likely to get a hundred messages, half of which are worthless—time-wasting, insultingly low, sight-unseen offers—with the other half being people asking those unwanted questions anyway.

It’s really as simple as this: Selling a car is supposed to be work. If you’re not willing to do the work, just donate the car to charity, or drive it down to the local used-car lot and see what they’ll offer, or ask your mechanic what they’ll give you for it.

Seriously: You can’t have it both ways. If you want to maximize your sale price, you need to put up-front work into the sale. The good news is that, by writing up a thorough, honest description and providing a good set of photographs, you provide information up front. Which reduces the number of questions from potential buyers.

Which Selling Platform?

There are two basic ways to sell a car—auction it, or sell it at a fixed price. Don’t confuse them. No one wants to see your no-price “testing the waters” ad. Either do your homework on your car’s value and state your price, or create an auction listing and let people bid.

Sales are also broken into two groups: local versus remote. In the grainy, sepia-toned past, selling a car meant putting a fixed-price ad in the local newspaper. That got supplanted by car-specific local weekly publications (here in New England, we had The Want Advertiser). Those weeklies, in turn, eventually had their lunches eaten by Craigslist.

These days, much of the action is on Facebook Marketplace (“FBM,” for short). Even a few years ago, an FBM or Craigslist sale was inherently local—that is, you’d post your car on those platforms, and the people who would respond were either in your city or within a small radius of your zip code. The result was often in an in-person visit and direct sale. (This was stark contrast to an eBay or Bring a Trailer (BaT) auction sale, transactions almost always sight-unseen.) Over time, that changed—a FBM or Craigslist response can now come from anywhere in the country. This makes a thorough description and significant photo documentation even more important.

Finally, there are marque-specific publications and websites. I’m most familiar with the classifieds in the BMW Car Club of America’s Roundel magazine, and on its website, bmwcca.org. With marque-specific websites, the tradeoff is specific interest versus quantity of eyeballs. You may have a model only appreciated by other marque aficionados, but these days, it’s often smarter to aim for the sheer volume of eyeballs on Bring a Trailer.

The Old Standby: Fixed-Price Sales

I’ll talk mostly here about Facebook Marketplace, as the volume of cars listed on Craigslist has dropped substantially since FBM’s launch.

From a buyer standpoint, Marketplace is laughably bad. Much of that badness can be traced to an architecture that appears to prioritize algorithm over search engine. Search for “1972 BMW 2002” and you may or may not be shown any 1972 BMW 2002s. Repeat that search a few times, the site will learn that you’re interested in 1970s European cars, and it will show you those whenever you jump on.

Cars will also mysteriously appear and vanish depending on whether you sort your search by price or by year, and cars within your search radius may be mysteriously excluded. It’s maddening.

From a seller’s standpoint, though, FBM has positives. The service offers free listings—Craigslist charges a fee—and uploading photos and a description is easy enough. You’re allowed a max of 12 photos, four more than with Craigslist. Other advantages: Communication with the seller happens through Facebook Messenger, and the site will provide a satisfaction score for that person’s previous Marketplace transactions. Finally, the buyer and seller can see each other’s Facebook profile, so you can get some sense of who the other party actually is.

Still, there are several downsides. FBM forces you to choose make and model from a laughably incomplete picklist. (The site, for example, doesn’t even know what a BMW 2002 is.) If a car isn’t on that list, sellers will often intentionally list it as the wrong model (“Yeah, I know it’s not a 1973 BMW M3, but that’s the closest thing I could select.”) Or they’ll advertise it as an “Item for Sale” instead of a “Vehicle for Sale,” in which case the car won’t show up in a vehicles-for-sale search.

The main downside of selling on FBM, though, is the app’s social-media-connected nature. Something about Facebook seems to bring out the worst in people. Any listing is virtually guaranteed to receive many insultingly low, sight-unseen offers. Sometimes those offers are full sentences. (“I’ll show up today with $500 and tow it away.”) Sometimes they’re text-speak. (“Wld U tk $500 4 it?”). Sometimes they’re nothing more than a number. (“$500.”) Also, Facebook’s auto-filled buyer message to a seller is, “Hi, is this still available?” so you’ll receive many of those, no further explanation or comment.

I’ve tried writing descriptions that begin with, “Any lowball offers and Is it available? messages will be ignored.” It makes no difference. You simply have to read every ad response you get and respond to the intelligent ones.

Another option (though I haven’t used it yet) is Hagerty Classifieds. Listing is free for Hagerty Drivers Club members, and there are no fees for either sellers or buyers. The submission process is template-based, somewhere between the completely open format of eBay and the highly-regimented submission steps of BaT. And the resulting description is your own, not the strange word salad that pops out at the end of the BaT process.

Buyers contact sellers through Hagerty’s website, which adds a measure of protection. Other advantages include access to Hagerty’s Valuation Tools and a 10-percent discount on shipping via Reliable Carriers.

The Wild West: Online Auctions

Any auction site offers five substantial benefits.

The first: Auction sites provide the structure for a starting price and, if you want, a reserve price. Bids are publicly visible as they come in.

Second: The auction process almost always produces a buyer. If you can’t sell a car by auction, it’s either because you set a reserve that wasn’t met, or because your winning bidder and every other bidder after that flaked and disappeared. (Rare, but it happens.) If you want to get the car out of your driveway and money into your bank account, that virtually guaranteed sale is a huge advantage.

Third: There is usually some sort of protection service in place—to assure the seller that the buyer will pay, and that the car will be as represented. This can be anything from structured insurance or assurance services, offered by the auction house, to your ability to leave feedback ratings after a transaction.

Fourth: You don’t need to deal with the torrent of insulting, sight-unseen offers that accompany selling a car yourself.

Lastly, online auctions are an inherently remote process. Yes, anyone who happens to be local can still contact you and ask to inspect the car. But those folks are usually a tiny trickle compared to the potential throngs beating down your door if you only advertise locally.

The downsides are simple: Auction houses have fees for listing and selling. Auctions can take a while to play out. As with any remote sale, you need to be prepared to assist the buyer with shipping—at a bare minimum, you have to be available to meet the truck, sometimes on short notice.

If you have a highly desirable car and can stomach the lead time and the description process, Bring a Trailer can certainly produce very high sale prices. As I’ve written, however, the BaT process is lengthy, from auditioning to get your car on the site to the actual listing, and the description process is frustrating.

eBay has the advantage here, in that it leaves you in control of the description process. Your listing can go up instantly, as soon as you’re done building it. These days, many cars on eBay are from dealers using fixed-price ads with high asking prices, not actual auctions. But that only makes a real auction—where an actual bargain might be found—stand out all the more.

You also might want to consider Hagerty Auctions. Although still young, the service offers many of the features of the company’s classifieds, plus a high degree of curation from Hagerty. For added reassurance, Hagerty holds purchase payments in escrow until the sale is complete, and the $99 seller’s fee is currently being waived.

I don’t have direct experience with the other auction platforms.

Selling: Car Prep

For the love of everything good in this automotive hobby of ours, wash and vacuum the car. It takes half an hour.

Okay, if you need to hand-wash it, it’s more like an hour. But you’re not prepping for a concours. Just throw out the Dunkin’ Donuts cups on the floor, vacuum the rugs and seats, pull the suction-cup phone mount off the windshield, and stow any cables. Is that too much to ask?

I also strongly recommend that you take ten minutes to open up the hood and remove any leaves, acorns, and pine needles that have found their way in. That one change goes a long way toward making an engine not appear neglected.

A tougher question: Should you have any repairs done? If the car only needs a battery, then absolutely, spend the $150. A car that starts and runs is worth more than one that doesn’t. From there, though, the cost-return relationship grows dicey. As a DIY mechanic, I make a punch list for any car I’m selling and clock through as much of that list as I can. I figure that it’s better to not have to state and apologize for a needed repair, but then, I don’t pay for my labor.

A car’s value is impacted by two sets of variables. The first is year, make, model, and mileage. The second is overall condition—the shape of the paint, body, interior, and mechanicals. For all intents and purposes, you can’t change anything in the first group. You can easily change three of the four items in the second group, however. Isolated small mechanical issues—a lit ABS warning light, for example—typically affect an older, high-mileage car’s sale value less than you’d think.

Selling: Writing the Description

The single biggest thing you can do to help sell a car is provide an accurate description.

The blurring of the difference between local and remote sales only makes that description more important. Unlike late-model cars, which rarely deviate far from as-new condition, vintage cars can be in any condition. From rust-free to solid to good bones to basket-case.

By fully and accurately describing a car’s condition, you reduce the risk for a buyer—you are eliminating much of what the car might be and replacing it with knowledge of what the car actually is. (Or at least, what you say it is, and what you know to be true, assuming you’re honest, which you should be.)

Not to toot my own horn, but some readers have referred to my ads as a gold standard for car descriptions. I write ads this way because, when I look at a car, I can tell if I’m interested or wasting time in the first 30 seconds. It is possible to write a for-sale description that conveys the same level of detail most people would see in person. (Note: With a BaT auction, you can’t write the main description, but you can post your description in a comment; see my link above.)

When I see an ad for a car I’m intimately familiar with, and the ad says, “rust on frame rails, rear shock towers, and floors,” that’s great. I don’t do bodywork, so I know that my interest in the car ends there. But if the ad doesn’t describe the condition of the car’s body, and no photographs of those areas are shown, every single other person interested in the car who knows anything about the model will ask the seller about those areas. To think you can avoid that conversation by using the idiotic “Don’t ask a million questions” line is . . . well, idiotic.

When writing a description for a vintage car, start with visible bodywork. Describe it at the walk-around level. Is the paint pretty or shiny? Is there peeling clearcoat? Are rust holes visible? If so, where, and how extensively? (In the corners of the doors or fenders, small bubbles forming at the corners of the doors, you get the idea.)

People are going to see these things anyway, when they come to look at the car. Just use the ad to tell them about all of it. It’s not hard to do.

Next, describe the condition of hidden areas of the body—the undercarriage, engine compartment, and trunk. Again, be truthful. “Some surface oxidation but no visible rust-through” is a very good description, if it’s accurate. Do not say “rust-free undercarriage” unless you are certain that that is the case. If the car has been sitting in a barn with a dirt floor for 30 years, you can say, “Standing at the side of the car, I don’t see any rust on the floor, but I haven’t crawled under it because I can’t safely jack it up.” That’s just being honest.

Look at it this way: If you write an ad that says, “Paint on hood and roof is cracked, one rust hole in left rocker, small bubbles at bottoms of doors, rust-through in spare tire well, no rust on shock towers, floors, and frame rails,” you’ve nut-shelled the body condition. The folks who want a perfect car won’t waste your time (and you won’t waste theirs), and the ones who want an affordable driver now know your car is right up their alley. A butt for every seat, and all that.

Next week, we’ll talk about photos and videos, price, the difference between an offer and a commitment, and the passing of papers.

***

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

The post Professor Siegel’s Guide to Selling a Car appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Last week, I described seeing a 2005 BMW X3 six-speed manual with 170,000 miles advertised for $1000 on Facebook Marketplace. The ad said the low price was due to a possible issue in the transfer case or differential.

A few days before Christmas, I drove the hour and a half down to New Bedford, Massachusetts, to look at it. The front body panels were mismatched from a low-cost, do-it-yourself accident repair. Further, the car was incredibly difficult to start, the exhaust was disconnected, most of the dashboard warning lights were on, there was water on the front passenger floor, and the handbrake lever was missing.

The car was unregistered, so I only drove it 200 feet. Whatever issue caused the seller to suspect and highlight the potential transfer-case issue didn’t raise its head in that short trip. There were, however, so many other problems that the transfer case faded into the background like the MacGuffin at the end of a Hitchcock film. Even if I wanted the car—and I wasn’t sure I did—I hadn’t brought a trailer with me, so there was little reason to commit.

So I thought about it.

Whenever I look at a car and am not immediately hit with a slam-dunk “run away” or a “shut up and take my money,” I’ll come home, sit at the laptop, and list the pros and cons. The main positives? The X3 was cheap, it was available, it ran and drove, it could be trailered home for maybe a hundred bucks in U-Haul fees and diesel fuel, and it could sit in my driveway instead of occupying precious garage space. Finally—and this was the biggie—could generate a winter’s worth of Hack Mechanic columns.

The cons, once enumerated, clearly outweighed the pros. The big one was how the mismatched body panels put a hard cap on resale value—an important consideration given how I have zero lust for an X3, rare manual transmission notwithstanding. I saw the car only as something to keep my hands busy, to use as a winter beater, and to maybe make a little money on at the end of winter. The hard starting was also a concern. A dead vehicle in my driveway, one not easily moved into the garage for work, was wholly unappealing. Even the fact that several of the tires were low from sitting buttressed the feeling—along with registration, taxes, insurance, inspection, and the bare minimum of needed repairs, my thousand-dollar purchase would likely double in cost before I could begin to use it as daily transportation.

Plus, as I looked further on Facebook Marketplace, I began to see more X3s and X5s between $1000 and $2500. While some were even less appealing (e.g., “needs engine”), other ads reported only dashboard warning-light issues. The fact that the car in New Bedford was a rare manual example wasn’t enough to trump both its other needs and the numerous other available choices.

Eventually, I began to look at the New Bedford car from a more subtle, yet realistic, angle. As I’ve written, I’ve never owned a new car. Instead, I have for decades daily-driven well-used BMWs that are near the bottom of their depreciation curve. I do this because I like the cars and want the blend of performance, handling, and comfort they offer, but I don’t want the financial load of either an outright purchase or a monthly car payment. Two things have made this possible—I can fix cars myself, and for 35 years, I had a very short commute. (Okay, three things—the third being an incredibly understanding wife). These days, I work from home, and since my wife’s car is a Honda Fit with only 60,000 miles on the clock, we do own something reliable. So it’s easy to continue my old habits.

In general, fully depreciated, high-mileage BMWs advertised for astonishingly low prices usually have a combination of issues. Even if the body is great and the interior presents well, the Check Engine Light (CEL), ABS, and traction control lights are often on. CEL issues on a car that generally runs well can be as trivial as an occasional misfire from a single cylinder (usually due to a bad stick coil) or a dead oxygen sensor. They can also be something like a dirty catalytic converter, or an evaporative system leak that’s difficult to find. Other common maintenance issues are oil leaks, power steering leaks, and worn front-end bushings.

Individually, none of those are a big deal. They’re typically well within the skills of a backyard mechanic, but they can easily result in a repair quote for thousands of dollars. At that point, “estimate shock” often causes the owner to bail out of the car.

From a reliability standpoint, I’ve written multiple articles about “The Big Seven,” the problems most likely to strand a car. Years back, when I first came up with that list, it was mainly targeted at the stuff that would likely make a vintage car die on a road trip. These days, it applies pretty well to modern daily drivers—just remove “clutch hydraulics” and substitute “crankshaft position sensor” for “ignition issues.”

It’s been nearly six years since I bought my high-mileage 2003 530i on a blustery, 10-degree Presidents Day weekend when I had little to do but pound on Craigslist for bargains. The car was literally embedded in a snowbank in the seller’s driveway. He insisted that it had “an electrical problem,” because when he tried to jump-start the dead battery, it made “that clicking sound.” I showed up with a fully-charged battery, dropped it in, turned the key, and the car fired up instantly. When we shoveled it out of the snowbank, a test drive revealed only flat-spotted tires and a check engine light, later traced to a simple rotted vacuum line.

I’ve been daily-driving the car ever since, and true to “The Big Seven,” the only strand-me issues have been a weak fuel pump and a bad voltage regulator. Although the car hadn’t had any cooling system issues, BMWs built in the last 30-ish years are notorious for the use of plastic in the cooling system (the radiator tanks, expansion tank, thermostat housing, hose ends, and water pump impeller are all plastic). If any of these components crack, they can cause catastrophic coolant loss, and unless you stop the car immediately, the engine will quickly overheat and crack its cylinder head(s).

When I found that several cooling system components on the 530i still wore their original 2003 manufacturer’s date stamp, it was clear that I was tempting fate. So two summers ago, I bit the bullet and dropped around $500 for new OEM cooling system components. While no one can make any guarantees about the reliability of any 200,000-mile car, I feel pretty confident jumping in the 530i to do things like, well, drive 90 minutes in winter to look at a thousand-dollar X3.

And that gets to the heart of the matter. Even if I dragged that New Bedford X3 home and addressed its problems, would I really then de-insure a reliable and reasonably well-sorted 530i and slap its plates on a highly suspect X3 for the winter simply because the SUV has all-wheel drive and the 530i doesn’t?

No. I would not.

Don’t you love it when you think things through until it’s clear you’ve made a rational decision?

Even so, are who we are. My answer at that point wasn’t, “I wouldn’t touch this needy pig with a ten-foot torque wrench.” It was, “Okay, so maybe not $1000. Wonder what he’d take for it?”

I sent the seller a couple of texts—one before Christmas, one a few days after—using language like “What’s your availability for me to come down there with a trailer and see if we can make something happen?” I got no response to either.

That’s fine. These things have a way of working out. One door closes, another one opens. You never know what the Automotive Powers That Be might dangle in front of you next.

Of course, it could go the other way. TAPTB might say, “We were going to dangle the rust-free, running E-Type for $5000, but he passed on the X3, so screw him.”

Somehow, though, I suspect those guys are a fair bunch. Not unduly sadistic. They might note that I’ve kept folks entertained for decades, writing for outlets like this one. At which point the response would probably be something like, “We were going to dangle the rust-free, running Opel GT for $4000, but he passed on the X3, so screw him.”

I can live with that.

***

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.

The post Is it too late to buy myself another car for Christmas? (Part II) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Now that my 2008 Chevy 3500HD Duramax is mobile again after the catalytic converter episode from hell, I’m left wondering if there’s time left for me to use the resurrected truck as intended. Maybe I should tow home some cheap, highly-questionable, dead, or needy car?

A search like this quickly separates into two main categories: vintage cars and daily drivers. The big dividing line, at least in my world, is that of physical space.

My vintage cars are kept out of the weather, either in my garage or my rented off-site storage. And as I’ve described previously, the garage at my house is a 17 x 31-foot shoebox attached to the rear corner of the house. All access is through a single-width roll-up door. While it’s possible to fit four cars if you put one on wheel dollies and slide it sideways, that packs them in like sardines, making it impossible to move either of the two cars on the left without reversing the roller-dolly stunt. (Plus, the open floor space that would hold the fourth car naturally gets filled up with tools, parts, and junk.) For these reasons, the garage usually houses three cars. Unless, of course, I find something I can’t live without.

So, what can’t I live without? First, recall that I’m an inveterate bargain hunter, so I’m looking for cars that are, ahem, affordable. I have a never-ending attraction to needy BMW 2002s, but with appreciating values, they’ve become considerably more difficult to find in said condition where the “need” isn’t bodywork on an utterly rotted basket case. I’d love another vintage Lotus, or even a more conventional Brit like a GT6 or a TR6. These, of course, are even more legendary rust buckets than my beloved 2002s, so anything solid is typically pricey. I’ve had a craving the past couple of years for a 1970s type BC Fiat 124 Sport Coupe, but I blew my one chance at buying the only affordable one in this part of the country last winter.

Since I often still search for Fiats, a solid-looking and well-priced 1987 X1/9 showed up on my Facebook Marketplace feed. I spoke with the seller, who’s a guy like me except his poison is ’60s-era muscle cars. He wound up with the Fiat for a song after seeing it at a local swap meet. He got it running, but it’s really not his jam.

The car looks decent for the $3200 asking price, and the idea of having two little mid-engine 1970s cars in the garage (the X1/9 and the Lotus Europa) is appealing, but ultimately it just doesn’t fully heat my car-passion furnace.

A few years back, I had a serious jonesing for a BMW 850i—the 12-cylinder-powered successor to the 635CSi two-door coupe. When they were new, they developed a reputation as boulevard cruisers, not sport coupes, and their value went into free fall. For a while, there seemed to be no bottom to their depreciation curve, and Craigslist was full of $3000 neglected money pits. Over time, though, the market began to appreciate them, and values rebounded. A decent-looking 840i (the eight-cylinder version) appeared on my Facebook Marketplace in Patchogue Long Island in sitting-for-two-years ran-when-parked no-I-won’t-start-it-you-take-the-risk condition and a five0-grand asking price.

It was gone in 12 hours. Damn, I’m getting slow in my dotage.

For the aforementioned garage space reason, as winter approaches, newly-purchased non-Hagerty-insured daily driver cars are a bit easier to contemplate. They can sit outside without me feeling like it’s an act of violence. Of course, nearly any cheap car I buy is cheap because it needs work, and unless it’s a very simple very quick repair I’m willing to do in outside in the cold driveway, that means pulling a car out of the garage and temporarily letting the new patient reside inside. Even still, all that beats sourcing an over-wintering indoor space.

What would be a good candidate cheap daily driver winter project? Well, I’ve been driving my E39-generation 2003 530i five-speed Sport package sedan for nearly six years. I’ve written about how it’s been the best daily-driver BMW I’ve ever owned. It’s not, however, a stellar winter car. It’s adequate—it performs well enough in the snow as long as I’ve got deep-tread snow tires on it—but it certainly isn’t in the same league as something with four-wheel or all-wheel drive. Of course, the Chevy 3500HD has four-wheel drive, but its sheer size makes it a poor choice if I just need to run to Trader Joe’s for eggs and milk. With the fat utility body on the back, it barely fits in the parking spots.

Before I had the 530i sedan, I had two BMW wagons. The first was a 1999 528iT. Despite it being an E39 5-series car like my wonderful 530i, it was the worst daily driver I ever had. It drove great and had oodles of room, but for some reason it was one of those repair-of-the-week cars. I sold it and got an E46-generation 325XiT wagon. Reliability-wise it was better than the 528iT, and the all-wheel drive made it great in snow, but I never really liked the way the AWD made the steering feel. And when the front CV joints started clicking, and replacing them meant having to pop the front axles out, the job was so onerous that I decided I never wanted another AWD BMW again. The winter performance simply wasn’t worth the maintenance on the parts driving the front wheels.

All-wheel drive is funny. I live in suburban Boston (Newton), which means my house is not on a hundred acres off some windy dirt road through the mountains. Really, I just need to be able to back out of my own short driveway, which is occasionally troublesome as it slopes down toward the garage.

Nonetheless, a few years back I bought a 2005 BMW X5 with the unicorn-rare combination of six-speed manual transmission, Sport package, and factory tow package, figuring that it would be like the Swiss Army knife of vehicles. I could daily drive it and use it to tow. Unfortunately, I never really warmed to the car. It was simply too big and bulky for what I wanted as a daily driver, and I was relieved when I sold it the following spring and went back to driving the 530i.

But I’ve kept my eyes open for another BMW wagon. The successor to the E46 wagon is the E91-generation wagon, based on the 2006–2011 E90 3 Series platform. Like the E46, the E91 was available in both rear-wheel drive and all-wheel drive configurations, but here in New England, nearly all these wagons on BMW dealer lots were AWD, and most were automatics. RWD six-speed manual transmission wagons exist, but they needed to be special-ordered that way, making them exceedingly rare.

As E91 wagons are moving along their depreciation curve, high-mileage needy examples have dropped substantially in value. If I take the unicorn-rare 6MT RWD wagon off the table, I see numerous AWD-automatic examples for under $4000. I could drive the truck up to Burlington, Vermont and tow this one (below) home for $1500. Of course, it’s got 225,000 miles and is throwing Bank 1 (cylinders 1 through 3) codes. And with the cost of diesel for the truck, the round trip from Boston to Burlington is nearly $300 in fuel. But it would be a nice winter beater (or, as we say in Boston, a wintah beatah).

For a $3500 asking price, this E91 wagon (below) two hours north of me in New Hampshire even has the six-speed manual and the Sport package, but the “runs but needs work, good parts car” description is always a bit ominous. I messaged the seller asking what its exact needs were. He listed an oil leak from the valve cover onto the exhaust manifold (common on these N52 engines), the ABS warning light being on, the need for front struts and a front wheel bearing, and a few electrical issues. Doesn’t sound too bad. If it was closer, I’d look at it.

With both needy cars being two hours and four hours north of me, respectively, we get into the issue of the logistics of showing up with a truck and trailer. On the one hand, nothing says “I’m here to play” like showing up with cash, a truck, and a trailer, fully prepared to cut the deal and drag your prize home. I own a truck, but unfortunately I do not own a trailer. I’ve been back and forth over this for years. Although renting a U-Haul auto transporter is cheap—only $65 a day with insurance and taxes—whenever I need to do it, I’m reminded what a pain in the butt it is. In the first place, even though there are U-Haul dealers just 5 miles to the east and west of me, it’s astonishing how much time it adds onto the day to have to drive there, wait in line, pick up my reserved trailer, and drop it off at the end of the day. It easily adds two hours onto whatever drive I’m making. Second, it seems that whenever I need to rent an auto transporter on short notice, these two dealers are usually out of them and I instead need to go to one farther away, adding even more time on both ends.

Now, finally, I can tell you about the thousand-dollar 2005 BMW X3 six-speed.

I wasn’t really looking at X3s. I didn’t really like the X5 that I had, and I’d much rather get a wagon. But as part of a search for a well-priced standard-transmission BMW wagon, I happened into this ad for a 2005 X3 with 170,000 miles for $1000 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on Facebook Marketplace:

“I’m selling this suv/truck for parts clean title it has differential or transfer case problem but the engine is good lots of new parts and it runs. It’s a mechanic’s special please do not ask too many questions. The price is firm. As is.”

Transfer case problems on these vehicles are usually due to a failed plastic gear on the transfer case actuator—a relatively easy and inexpensive repair. The three small photos appeared to show an intact vehicle. And it was a six-speed, which is rare. (Like the wagons, most of these cars were automatics.) The seller was difficult to get hold of, but he eventually responded. I could come down anytime, I said. He replied that he was available between 4 and 6 pm on weekdays. That’s not a great time to be driving the hour and a half south from Boston to New Bedford, but I committed.

And that raises the age-old question of car hunting: Do you just jump in the daily driver and shoot down to have a look, knowing that if you want to buy the car you’ll need to make the drive again with the truck and trailer, or do you try to do it all in one trip— go through the effort to rent the U-Haul auto transporter and tow it down with the truck? I’ve always felt that if it’s a one-hour drive, you just have a look, and if it’s a three-hour drive, you err on the side of the truck and trailer. If it’s in-between, call it a gray zone.

I let the availability of the auto transporter dictate the answer. None of the nearby U-Haul dealerships had one, so I took $1000 in cash and drove my 530i down to New Bedford.

The sun was setting by the time I got there. When I saw the X3 parked on a side street, my heart sank. The nose, hood, and front fenders were a different color than the rest of the car, so clearly it had been hit and home-repaired. And three of the tires were low to the point of being nearly flat.

The seller showed up. He explained that he lived in Brockton (about an hour north), he had since bought a pickup, and his brother was letting him park the now-unregistered X3 in front of his repair garage here in New Bedford, where it had been sitting for three months. He rooted around in a nearby junkpile, found a piece of a 2×4, and used it to brace one of the wheels, explaining that the car’s handbrake lever was missing. We tried to start the car and found that the battery was dead. I’d brought my battery pack and hooked it up. The engine cranked, but the car wouldn’t start. “Sometimes it’s just hard to start,” the seller said, and positioned his pickup to jump it. He cranked and cranked and only got a burble out of it. This had the hallmark of a complete waste of time, but to my surprise, the X3 eventually started, accompanied by a very loud exhaust. After the incident with my truck, my first thought was that the catalytic converters had been cut, but when I crawled under it, I found that they were intact, and the noise was coming from a missing clamp connecting them to the head pipes.

Because of the potential issue of the transfer case, I’d brought my Foxwell NT510 BMW scan tool with me to see if the car had thrown a transfer case-related code. There was one (minor, an out-of-range resistance value, not a failure), but of more concern were the hail of codes related to oxygen sensors (likely related to the disconnected exhaust), misfires, operating temperature, and the cam position sensor. Even with all that, the car seemed to idle okay. However, when I sat in it, I noted that most of the dashboard warning lights were on, and cringed when I saw that the passenger-side footwell had an inch of water in it, so it was leaking from somewhere.

The seller went into his brother’s shop, came out with a portable air compressor, and inflated the tires. He explained that the car wasn’t registered, but that I could drive it up and down the side street. I did, and it drove surprisingly well, at least as well as one can ascertain in 100 feet at 20 mph. Whatever he interpreted as being a transfer case issue wasn’t preventing the car from being driven.

Tough call. Even with the mismatched color of the body panels, the disconnected exhaust, the pile of codes, the specter of a potential transfer case problem, the water on the floor, and the odd missing handbrake lever, a thousand bucks is a very good price for a running X3 six-speed. The car seemed like it fit the bill for the sort of pull-it-into-the-garage-a-few-hours-at-a-time project that might work well for me over the weekend. (Hey, these columns don’t write themselves without a continuous stream of stupid decisions on my part!)

Still, it was too much risk. I would’ve jumped at it if there were one fewer demerit, but the totality of issues made me err on the side of “no, at least not now.” Plus, even if I wanted it, there was no reason for me to commit and hand over the cash, as I’d need to come back anyway with a truck and trailer.

When I got home, I ran a CarFax on the VIN. It showed only a minor accident last March—I assume the one that required the replacement of the front body panels—with the note “airbags not deployed.”

As I write this, it’s four days before Christmas. Heavy rain is forecast for December 23, followed by freezing temperatures. Even if a trailer is available nearby on Saturday December 24, I don’t want to spend it ice skating on frozen roads towing a highly-questionable car that I’d largely be buying so I can have the bragging rights of having gotten an X3 six-speed for a thousand bucks. I’m sure the seller has more important things to do the day before Christmas as well. We’ll see what happens.

So, no car for Christmas for this guy.

Wait a minute. I have all this wrong. What I should be doing is contacting people who have had their catalytic converter stolen and seeing if they want to sell their car cheaply. You know, I hear that replacing them is a real pain in the butt …

***

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.

The post Is it too late to buy myself another car for Christmas? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the catalytic converter being stolen from my 2008 Chevy 3500 Duramax diesel and my decision to replace it with a correct, legal, recertified, used cat I found on eBay for $725 shipped. Then, last week I wrote about preparing for installation of the new part, which would’ve been trivial if one of the studs hadn’t snapped off the Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) that mates with the rear of the cat assembly, requiring that I heat it taffy-soft with an oxy-acetylene torch and punch it out. Fortunately, the sawed-off front pipe was held to the motor with only a heavy-duty band clamp, so I had that off in seconds.

I ended last week’s piece by saying “The important thing is that, with both pieces of the cat pipe and the broken stud removed, I’m now ready to install the new cat assembly when it arrives. I’d ask, ‘How hard could it be?’ … but, well, you know.” And with the newly-purchased replacement cat assembly in front of me, and knowing that attachment was just four nuts on four studs in the back and a single clamp on the front, I thought I’d have it installed in an hour.

Oh, my word, what a colossal pain in the patootie.

The problem wasn’t so much the cat assembly’s physical size and weight, though at a full four-feet long, it certainly wasn’t dainty. The issue was alignment. The problems all stemmed from that odd front clamp.

The first surprise was that there was no way to install the cat assembly without first dropping the big cross-brace that supports the massive Allison six-speed transmission and the transfer case. I didn’t need to do this when I removed the sawn-off front and rear pipes because the absence of the cat in the middle gave ample clearance to maneuver these pieces out. I’ve removed the transmission brace many times on my vintage BMWs, but on those, the brace is about the size of a ruler, whereas the sheer size and weight of this one on the truck and the load it was supporting spooked me. But a floor jack with a piece of wood beneath the transmission pan and a second block of wood under the transfer case supported it nicely, my impact wrench removed the big bolts, and out came the brace, enabling the cat assembly to be slid into place.

No, the total and unexpected ball-buster was the single-clamp attachment at the front of the cat pipe. The very thing that made it take just 30 seconds to remove the sawed-off front pipe also made it incredibly challenging to get the cat assembly back on.

As per the photo, the front end of the cat pipe has a flare that mates to the rounded end of the pipe that comes down from the engine. There’s no gasket or crush ring between them. They’re just held together by that weird heavy-duty band clamp. Turns out it’s called a Marman Clamp—a circular clamp with a V-shaped groove in it that, as you tighten, squeezes both halves. They’re used quite a bit in the aerospace industry, and have the very odd bit of trivia of being first produced by a company owned by one of the Marx brothers, Zeppo Marx. But there’s virtually no room for error. While they save both weight and space over a conventional flange-and-bolt arrangement, the mating surfaces have to be perfectly aligned. It’s not like the flange connecting the back of the cat to the DPF where, when you tighten the nuts on the studs, it pulls the halves toward each other. Coincidental but appropriate to the Marman clamp’s aerospace history, using it felt like docking the Space Shuttle.

Hugely complicating the alignment issue was the fact that, due to the Marman clamp, the truck’s cat assembly isn’t self-hanging. That is, on every other exhaust component I’ve ever installed, you muscle it into position, reach up, thread the nuts onto the studs or pass bolts through flange holes and spin the nuts on them, then let go and the exhaust piece hangs securely on the fasteners you just installed, allowing you to tighten everything round-robin while you check and adjust alignment. Instead, I had to support the front of this big heavy assembly with a floor jack while eyeballing the mating of the front pipes from inside the right front wheel well (having removed the fender liner), and only put on the clamp when the alignment was nearly perfect. It was a total PITA.

Initially, no matter what I did, I could not get the front of the cat assembly into position to line up with the pipe coming down from the engine. The assembly was free to move (that is, I hadn’t yet tightened the bolts on the flange in the back holding it to the DPF), but something was rotating the front of it off axis. I reinstalled the transmission cross-brace just in case the slight backward tip of the engine was causing the problem. It wasn’t. I disconnected the brace on the side of the transmission that held the cat assembly’s rubber hanger to add an extra degree of freedom to the movement. It didn’t help. I used two floor jacks, three ratchet straps, and several blocks of wood to coax it into alignment with the engine pipe, spending most of the day under the truck trying to get this one damned joint to line up. Nothing worked. It was maddening.

What’s more, snow was in the forecast, and I was doing this work in the driveway because the utility body on the back of the truck makes it too tall to fit in my garage. This was my window of opportunity. I wanted it completed now, but the misalignment was thwarting my every attempt.

Finally, I noticed that one of the two rubber hangers was missing from the muffler in the back of the truck. This was causing the whole 15-foot-long exhaust to twist. I supported it with a hose clamp—which had the added benefit of allowing me to be able to adjust the rotation—and tried again. The alignment was much better, but I still could not get it perfect.

Tired, achy, and cold, I went for it, tightening the Marman clamp, hoping against hope that the groove would snug down on the flange on the cat pipe and the rounded end of the pipe coming down from the engine and seal the two tight. But I was beginning to be resigned to the likelihood that, when I was done, started the truck, and put my hand around the joint, I’d feel it leaking and might need to bring it to someone with a garage and younger back muscles and bones to finish it. However, to my surprise and joy, it was tight.

I snugged down the nuts on the studs holding the back of the cat assembly to the DPF, reinstalled the bracket with the cat’s rubber hanger in it, and torqued the bolts holding up the transmission cross-brace to spec.

I felt like I’d been run over by the truck, but I was done.

It all made me think.

I’m 64 years old, have been working on cars since my teens, and have spent 35 years writing about the sense of Zen wrenching gives me—analyzing a problem, the joy that comes from solving it your way, and saving money while doing so. Most of the work I do is either on the vintage BMWs and the Lotus Europa that I love, or on the daily-driver BMW (currently the E39 2003 530i stick sport) that I like. The vintage cars are simple, and the work on them can occur at whatever pace seems natural, as I can simply close the garage door, shut off the lights, and return to them tomorrow, the day after, or next week. The daily driver is different because it’s newer and thus much more complex, and its role is such that it needs to be kept running. Working on it is usually less Zen-like and more an exercise in driving something that I wouldn’t be able to afford if I had to pay someone to keep up with the maintenance issues. In other words, when working on the DDs, I like the result more than the process. The work I do on the Winnebago Rialta is similar; it’s a pain to work on, but I like the payoff of having the little RV to go to the beach with my wife.

In contrast, with this cat replacement, I enjoyed neither the process nor the result. There was nothing joyous about spending $800 and nearly three days because some low life chopped the cat out of my truck, a vehicle that I only own because it fell into my lap at a price I couldn’t pass up and I don’t really like or use all that much. Yes, when I was done I was glad that I had the truck back—I mean, you never know when some must-show-up-with-a-truck-and-trailer vehicle will appear on Facebook Marketplace. But so far, that’s been a hypothetical rather than an actual benefit.

As for ensuring that it doesn’t happen again, basically, you can’t. There are three main approaches: a cage around the catalytic converter, a plate blocking access to it, and an alarm system that senses the vibration of the Sawzall. The skinny on the web is that cages and plates can be cut through just like the cat pipes, and the alarm just becomes one more whoop-whoop-whoop-EEEE-YAW-EEE-YAW-whoop-whoop-whoop everyone swears at and then ignores when it goes off in the middle of the night. Cost and availability-wise, the click-and-buy online price for a cage for a truck with four-inch exhaust pipes is nearly $800, so that’s not going to happen. Regarding a plate, unlike with a high-target car like a Prius, I can’t find a click-and-buy bolt-on shield kit for this particular truck, so installing one means fabricating it, and my tolerance for doing that now that the snow’s fallen is pretty low. Amazon sells an alarm for $30, cheap enough that it’s difficult to see the downside, so I have one on order, but it’s clearly in the “better than nothing” category as opposed to a real solution.

But hey, bottom line, I got out of the stolen-cat episode for $800 and three days of wrenching. I guess I’m still going to call this one a win … as long as I soon use the truck to tow home something that I’ll actually enjoy working on.

***

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

The post How I survived catalytic converter theft (Part 3): The Marman clamp from hell appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Last week I wrote about having to deal with the Thanksgiving Surprise—the theft of the catalytic converter off my 2008 Chevy 3500HD Duramax diesel. Since my insurance on the truck carries a $2000 deductible, I resolved to replace it myself.

Even the legality of procuring and installing a used cat notwithstanding, I couldn’t find one, so I ponied up $725 for a legal recertified cat from a vendor on eBay. While waiting for it to arrive, I set about removing the pipes from which the old cat was Sawzalled. In the front, this was just a heavy-duty band clamp holding the downpipe to a flange coming down from the turbo. In the back, it was a four-bolt flange affixing the cut-off four-inch-diameter section of pipe to the front of the Diesel Particulate Filter. One clamp and four nuts. How hard could it be?

Well. You know that meme about how every 20-minute job is just one broken bolt away from becoming a three-day ordeal? Funny story …

The front attachment of the cat pipe was trivial to remove. The heavy-duty band clamp was best accessed by removing the right inner fender liner, a procedure that takes perhaps two minutes, and something I was well-acquainted with anyway as it needs to come out to access the fuel filter. With it out, an 11-mm deep socket loosens the nut on the clamp. I assumed that there would be some sort of a sealing ring inside, but there isn’t. I made a note to, prior to reassembly, clean both flanges with a Scotch-Brite pad and give both sides a little coating of muffler paste.

It was the nuts on the four-bolt flange on the back that mates to the DPF that caused problems. The nuts thread onto M10 (about 3/8-inch) splined studs that are pressed into the back of the flange.

Thirteen years ago, when I was removing the exhaust from my 1999 BMW M Coupe (a.k.a. “the clownshoe”) in preparation to replace the clutch, the exhaust manifolds had these same splined studs, and when I tried to drop the center resonator, I snapped four of the six of them. It was the event that caused me to buy an oxyacetylene torch and learn how to use it.

To be clear, there are three distinct ways to use a torch to help remove a fastener, and which you use depends on whether it’s tight, snapped and stuck, or hopelessly impacted. A MAPP gas torch that you can buy at any hardware store is usually quite effective at heating a nut on a bolt or stud hot enough to loosen it. Get the nut red hot, and the heat performs two tricks—the differential rate of expansion between the nut and the bolt makes the nut slightly larger, plus the heat helps to break of the bond of corrosion between nut and bolt. I combine that with letting the nut cool slightly and then touching the threads with beeswax. Wait a minute and the nut often spins right off with an impact wrench.

However, in the case of a snapped-off splined stud, you want to heat the remaining portion beyond red hot to the point where it has the consistency of taffy, and then give it a sharp hit with a punch and a hammer, a process I refer to in my first book as “heat and beat” (or, if you prefer, “smelt and pelt”). MAPP gas isn’t hot enough to do that. You need oxyacetylene. The idea is that by heating it to the point of malleability, the splines on the fastener release their death-grip on the inside circumference of the flange, allowing the snapped-off piece to pop out when smacked, ejected like a carrot by a Heimlich maneuver.

The third technique is to use a cutting attachment to the oxyacetylene torch (what’s commonly called a blowtorch), set in motion the “can’t be tight if it’s a liquid” thing, and reduce the stuck fastener to a runny lava-like puddle. This really is a method of last resort, as that much heat usually deforms the flange in which the fastener was stuck.

One thing to keep in mind is that a MAPP gas torch is smaller, lighter, and more easily maneuverable than even a small oxyacetylene setup, so I’ll typically try the former for nut loosening, and only resort to the latter if it’s absolutely necessary. Also, the tongue of flame shot out by the oxyacetylene is about nine inches long, so you need to be very careful around wires and rubber components. I hoard disposable aluminum roasting pans in the garage so I can cut them up and use them to shield adjoining areas from the heat.

Given all that, when I looked at the flange on the DPF and saw that the studs were splined and pressed in from the back and recalled the experience on the M Coupe’s manifold studs, I thought, “I really don’t want to snap these off.” So even before attempting to loosen the four nuts, I heated them all with the MAPP gas torch and wicked beeswax into the threads. I then put the impact wrench on the nuts.

Over the years, I’ve said something that many folks are surprised at: For the most part, an impact wrench isn’t for taking off incredibly tight fasteners—it’s for taking off normally-tight fasteners incredibly quickly. You can usually generate a lot more torque by putting a pipe on the end of a breaker bar than you can with an impact wrench running on a compressor at a nominal 100psi, and that’s not always a good thing, because what you DON’T want to do is apply so much torque that you snap the fastener. The impact wrench usually has the advantage of chugging away doing its whacketa-whacketa thing at a decreasing amount of torque as the pressure in the compressor tank bleeds down (at least until the compressor cycles and re-pressurizes the tank), so as long as the bolt or stud is of a stout diameter, you’re less likely to snap it than if you push with a dying strain on a pipe on a breaker bar. If you see the impact socket turn or hear whacketa-WHIRR-whacketa-WHIRR as the nut begins to spin, you know it’s slowly loosening the nut. If not, you apply more heat and try again.

So, having heated the nuts and waxed the threads, I put the 15mm socket on the impact wrench, squeezed the trigger, and held it for two seconds on all four nuts. None of them budged. I repeated the process—more heat, more wax. Lying beneath the truck, I tried to get my eyes on the impact socket so I could tell whether or not the nut was spinning. This was challenging, as the cut-off cat pipe and the DPF flange were just behind a frame cross-member. But when I looked, sure enough, I could see that the whacketa-whacketa was slowly turning first nut. I gave each set of threads a blast of SiliKroil, and the first nut spun off with the whacketa-whacketa-WHIRR-whacketa-WHEEEE that’s music to a mechanic’s ears. I did the same with the second and third nuts—watching them, verifying that the nuts were responding to the impact wrench’s torque, then holding in the trigger and going for it. Off they spun.

It was on the last nut and stud that I made the mistake. This nut was more difficult to lay eyes on than the other three, and I just assumed it would behave the same way as the others. Instead, I heard the whacketa-whacketa transition abruptly to WHEEEE without passing through WHIRR and knew I’d screwed up—despite two applications of heat and wax, the impact wrench had snapped off the stud.

On the one hand, yes, I had that living-the-meme 20-minutes-will-now-become-three-days feeling. Or that feeling that you get when you slip and gash yourself and, while it’s nowhere near life-threatening, you know everything will come to a screeching halt while you wait for four hours in an emergency room to get stitched up. But on the other hand, I not only had an oxyacetylene torch 40 feet away in the garage, and I’d used it to solve exactly this problem 13 years ago. So, I knew what to do and how to do it.

First, I cut up an aluminum roasting pan and packed it in around the rubber exhaust hanger to the left of the flange so the tongue of flame wouldn’t melt it. Then I pulled my small oxyacetylene setup out from the back of the garage, struck the igniter to get the ragged smokey acetylene flame, began to dial in the oxygen, and realized that the tank was empty. Damn. OK, undo the hoses, pull out the oxygen tank, drive it down to Igo’s Welding Supply in Watertown, Massachusetts, and an hour and $20.19 later I was in business.

Except that, due to the position of the frame cross-member, it was challenging getting the flame trained directly on the snapped-off portion of the stud, and even more challenging to position the punch on the offending stud fragment and smack it with the small sledge while it was still soft and cherry red. Ten times I tried doing the “heat and beat” thing, and 10 times it had no effect. When I looked closely at the stud, I could see that all I’d done was flare the end of it and mash it into the flange, which made it even more difficult to punch it out.

And then I ran out of acetylene. Idiot! I should’ve checked the pressure in both tanks when I went in for oxygen. Another trip to Igo’s and $35.07 later and I was back at it, and again the snapped-off stud wasn’t going anywhere.

When something like this happens, you need to ask yourself whether you should just keep at it, or whether you should try something different. I had no doubt that I could get better accuracy both with the torch and with the hammer and punch if the frame cross-member wasn’t blocking access. I undid the front of the DPF from its rubber hanger to try to tip it down, but the strain on the lines plumbing the DPF made me stop. I also thought about using the cutting attachment (“the blowtorch”), but the idea of applying that much flame made me nervous. Plus, I really didn’t want to damage the DPF.

So, I kept at it, applying as much heat with the torch to both the front and the back of the snapped-off stud as I could, and hitting the punch as hard as I could without risking slipping and hitting my wrist with the sledgehammer (I did that once while separating a ball joint with a pickle fork 30 years ago and never forgot it). Slowly I began to see the splines emerging from the back of the flange. After smacking the punch as hard as I dared, the red-hot little bugger finally let go.

For reasons unknown, I’m not finding the splined stud listed in the GM parts catalog for a 2008 3500HD; it shows them as integral parts of the DPF. For now, I’ll replace it with a M10 x 1.5 bolt. If I find the proper part number for the stud on a Duramax forum, I can install it later.

The important thing is that, with both pieces of the cat pipe and the broken stud removed, I’m now ready to install the new cat assembly when it arrives, which should be any day. I’d ask, “How hard could it be?” … but, well, you know.

***

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

The post How I survived catalytic converter theft (Part 2) appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I’ve written multiple times about my 2008 Chevy 3500HD Duramax diesel. How my former engineering job had largely abandoned the 28,000-mile truck when the company closed the building … how it became a gag-worthy mouse-infested mess … how I made a criminally low offer for it (that took four months to be accepted) … how I largely de-moused it … and how I thought I’d use it to buy and tow home a whole bunch of cars but instead have only moved two cars and a bunch of BMW parts with it, helped my niece move, made cardboard and motor oil recycling runs in it … and how I park it in a $50/month rented space about a mile from my house to make space in my driveway.

As if that isn’t enough, I never expected to add, “… and how I had to deal with a stolen catalytic converter.”

My discovery of the theft happened in a funny way. Prior to Thanksgiving, my wife had arranged to borrow one of those tall outdoor heaters from a friend so that we could put it on the back deck in case someone wanted to escape the crush of people inside for a bit—maybe have a beer and a private conversation outside. So, I walked over to the truck’s parking space (which is in the parking lot of a dance studio located right next to what used to be the town dump but is now the recycling depot), reconnected the batteries, and fired it up.

As soon as the truck was running, I could hear an unusual whirring sound, as if a blower fan was running. I never for a moment thought it could be a cut catalytic converter, as it wasn’t a big woof-y, truck-y exhaust sound. It was more the kind of air-movement sound a cooling fan makes if the viscous clutch is locked up. I opened the hood, but the sound wasn’t coming from there—it seemed to be emanating from below, near the center of the truck. I crawled under and guessed that the source of the whirring was the transmission. I realized this was the coldest it had been outside this season, and that I hadn’t changed or even recently checked the transmission fluid. Maybe that’s all it was.

So, I drove the truck on a quick errand to see if warming it up made the noise go away. It didn’t. When I got home, I looked for my mechanic’s stethoscope but couldn’t find it. I crawled under the truck again, listened to the noise, put my hands on the transmission pan, and convinced myself the noise was indeed coming from there. To avoid any damage, I decided not to drive it the 20-ish miles to pick up the heater and instead used the Winnebago Rialta (the little VW Eurovan-based RV). I made a mental note to, after Thanksgiving, take the truck into the local transmission shop, which had looked at the transmission on my Suburbans years back.

The Monday after Thanksgiving, I set the plan in motion. I started the truck, crawled under it a third time to verify the presence and location of the noise, then drove it two miles to the transmission shop. I described the “whirring” sound to the shop owner. “Whirring, not whining?” he asked. I nodded. He looked perplexed and came outside to look at it. He stuck his head under the truck, and immediately said the last five words I expected to hear:

“Your cat has been cut.”

I was astonished—both that it had happened and that I had completely missed it. In my defense, aside from the exhaust sounding pretty much normal (particularly with the windows up), the cut sections of pipe where the catalytic converter once resided are close to the inside of the right frame rail. Even after the guy told me what had happened, I had to crawl way under and look up and to the right to see the cut pipes. On the drive back from the transmission shop, I did notice that I could hear more spin-down noise from the turbo on deceleration than I remembered. I assume that it’s the turbo’s presence in the exhaust (rather than having an open pipe coming down from the exhaust manifold) that made it not sound like a straight-piped menace.

Catalytic converters are stolen because they contain the valuable rare metals platinum, rhodium, and palladium to catalyze (react with) the exhaust. The scrap value is widely quoted online as being between $300 and $1500. Toyota Priuses are prime targets for cat theft because the hybrid vehicle’s cat contains a higher concentration of these precious metals than most other cars. Catalytic converter theft has been a hot topic for awhile, but it has accelerated dramatically in recent years, reportedly because mining of these materials was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In early November, there were news reports of federal authorities busting a company in New Jersey and arresting a nationwide ring of cat thieves, and there is legislation advancing at the state level to engrave the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) into cats as a theft-deterrent. Diesel trucks used to be overlooked due to their cats working differently—they don’t contain rhodium, and thus having much lower recycling value—but their high ground clearance and easy cat access has recently made them targets.

I, of course, never gave any of this a second thought. I live in Newton, Massachusetts, one of the safest small cities in the country. I haven’t had a vehicle vandalized since we moved here from Boston 30 years ago. And I don’t own a Prius.

When it happened, of course, hindsight kicked in. This is a big dually truck that you can practically limbo under while wielding a battery powered Sawzall. My parking spot in the lot next to the town recycling center is in an industrial area. And the fact that many people likely saw the truck sitting for weeks made it a likely target. It’s a wonder it didn’t happen sooner.

So, after you shake your fist and swear at the lowlifes who cut the cat out of your ride, what do you do? The basic sequence is:

1. File a police report. My local police station is processing several cat thefts a day (“mostly Priuses”).
2. Contact your insurance company to find out your coverage. If you file a claim, you’ll likely need the police report, which is why I listed it as the first step.
3. Learn what the laws are in your state. That may be a rude awakening. California, for example, requires the catalytic converter in all vehicles to be either the OEM part or an aftermarket State Air Resources Board-approved unit, and prohibits generic catalytic converters that are based solely on physical shape, size, configuration, or pipe diameter. Other states are likely more accommodating, but you’ll need to check.
4. Get several estimates. As with nearly any repair, having it performed at the dealership will be the most expensive option.

Be aware that, in addition to state laws, certain Federal laws are in play. The first is that, not surprisingly, it’s illegal to remove a cat and replace it with any kind of bypass pipe. Another is that it’s illegal to sell or install a used catalytic converter unless it has been properly recertified, which involves testing and labeling. I doubt that black helicopters are going to swoop down on you if you buy a used cat and install it yourself, but what it means is that established independent repair shops likely won’t want the risk of offering it to you as an option. And technically, it’s illegal to be operating the vehicle with the cat removed, although it would take particularly bad luck on your part for that to be discovered, and a police officer would need to be having a particularly bad day for you to be written up about it, especially if you had the copy of the police report of the theft with you.

Regarding the hazards of short-term driving of the vehicle with the cat cut out, there are several issues. The first is whether the remaining sections of the exhaust are dragging or scraping against anything, as along with the cat, the thieves may have chopped out a hanger that supports the center of the exhaust. If you hear scraping, unless you’re a mechanic and can either ascertain that it’s a trivial issue or wire the exhaust in place, don’t drive the car—call for a tow.

Then there’s the health issue of the presence of exhaust fumes that are now likely gushing out directly under the car. This is the kind of thing you don’t want to be wrong about, particularly if you’re about to drive in traffic with children or infants as passengers. Err on the side of safety. The third is whether it’s harmful to the engine to drive with the exhaust open and the cat missing. For short distances, like to get the car repaired, it’ll likely be fine, but without the cat to clean the exhaust, the oxygen sensor after it (if it’s still there after the car was butchered with a power saw) is going to give readings to the vehicle’s electronic control unit (ECU), which will likely cause the check engine light (CEL) and potentially other dashboard indicators to come on. Depending on the car, it’s possible the ECU may throw it into a reduced-power limp-home mode. So, it’s best to drive it as little as possible.

In my case, I’m blessed with being a do-it-yourselfer and not needing to have the truck repaired quickly. After looking at the problem for a few days, here’s how it’s panning out:

• The part that was taken—the OE General Motors “oxidation catalytic converter” (#15283013) used on trucks with Duramax LMM engines from 2007 through 2010—lists for $1837 with a $400 core charge (which, of course, I don’t have, BECAUSE IT WAS STOLEN). Discounted online dealer price is as low as $1200, but with the core charge, shipping, and taxes, it comes to nearly $1750. Plus, there’s a gasket, a clamp, and a hanger. You can see how if, you took it to a dealer, you could get quoted three or four thousand dollars for the job.
• I have never, ever, deleted a catalytic converter from a car, and I have zero interest in starting now (yeah, I know; someone else already deleted it, but I need to do something to be able to drive the truck, and that is not going to be a bypass pipe).
• I have a $2000 deductible on my truck’s comprehensive insurance. This means that I won’t be filing a claim and instead will either fix it myself or try to find some small low-overhead shop (e.g., not a dealer) to do it.
• The original cat on the truck is welded between two pieces of double-walled 4-inch pipe. On the front end, it’s attached to the engine with a heavy-duty band clamp, and on the back end, has a four-bolt flange that’s bolted to the Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF). So, if I want to replace the whole cat assembly myself, it looks like it comes off fairly easily (or as easily as any old exhaust bolts come off).

• When the cat was removed, so was the post that a rubber hanger attaches to, so the front part of the back of the exhaust is currently just resting on a frame cross-member. I’m lucky that it is, or the whole thing could’ve tilted down and ripped out the lines plumbing the DPF. Even the cat notwithstanding, I’d be foolish to drive it anything but short distances at low speed until it’s properly hung.
• Instead of replacing the whole section, if I want instead to have someone weld a new compatible aftermarket catalytic converter into the existing pipes, it looks to me like there’s still enough of both pipes present to allow it. That is, if I can find someone to do it. I called two shops that have done custom exhaust work for me over the years. The first one won’t touch it, because they don’t know that much about diesels and aren’t sure which cat would be needed to properly play with the DPF. The second shop said they’d need to see it but ballparked it at $1500 job and said they couldn’t get to it for two weeks because—ready?—they need to install new cats in a fleet of 56 city trucks, all of which had them stolen.
• A vendor on eBay sells recertified cats for GM trucks and has the one I need in stock, shipped, for about $800. That price initially went tilt with me, but now is looking pretty good.

• Let’s say that, for the sake of argument, there wasn’t a law against installing an uncertified used cat, and that I went looking for such a thing as a less expensive option. What I may or may not have found after searching for several hours on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist for a cat for a 2007–

10 Duramax LMM was one guy in northern Maine selling a complete low-mileage exhaust system for $650. When I hypothetically asked whether he’d sell me just the cat and ship it, he hypothetically declined.

• I also may or may not have seen ads on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist for inexpensive used cats from the previous generations of Duramax diesels (the ones before the DPF became a federally mandated component), and while the bends of the pipes and the connections on the ends look the same as mine, they’re not listed as cross-referencing. I posed a question on the Duramax Diesel forum, but no one answered it definitively. A friend who knows diesels (but not Duramaxes) says the cat on a diesel with a DPF is a diesel oxidation converter whose job is to oxidize the fuel being injected into the exhaust to create enough heat to burn the soot out of the DPF, and that the previous generation of cat wouldn’t do that. Thus, it’d be iffy to buy one of them. If I saw them. Or was even looking for them. Which I may or may not have been.

1. Let me cut the weasel-wording. I’m a practical guy who tries relentlessly to contain cost on 13 vehicles, and this is a truck I barely drive. If the only two options were 1) Take it to the dealer and pay up to my $2000 deductible, or 2) Entertain the possibility of buying some cheap, used, high-mileage catalytic converter assembly that would hang and seal the exhaust but might not perform the intended emissions function due to age or compatibility or both, you can see how the second option might be tempting. And if my truck was high-mileage, finding another high-mileage cat like the one that had been taken might seem justified. However, this is a 28,000-mile vehicle. Even the legality notwithstanding, the idea of finding and installing a $150 200,000-mile cat just doesn’t sit well with me.

For all these reasons, I pulled the trigger on the $800 eBay recertified cat. After a bit of back-and-forth, the vendor (KGC Warehouse) was kind enough to knock $100 off the price, which was greatly appreciated, especially considering that it was the only correct click-and-buy recertified cat I could find.

Lastly, there’s the question of preventing it from happening again. In the Prius world, there are now click-and-buy cages and shields you can install that make the cat more difficult to remove. I haven’t seen such a product for the truck, but it’s probably not too difficult to fabricate an aluminum plate. But really, I’m hoping that simply parking the truck down at the end of the driveway of my house on my sleepy dead-end street instead of in the highly visible parking lot next to the town recycling center will make the difference.

Sigh.

If you’re like me, you absolutely hate to be put into a situation where you feel put over a barrel and have to pay an insane sum of money simply to regain functionality that you already had. After all, this isn’t something fun like fresh paint or a hot engine or new wheels or new Recaro seats—it’s a freaking catalytic converter that some scumbag stole. At least I’m getting out of it for closer to washing machine money than Hawaiian vacation money.

***

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

The post How I survived catalytic converter theft appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There’s a special poignance when you do something for the last time. The last time you drive a beloved car before you sell it. The last time you’re in a house or apartment before you move away. The last time you see a loved one before they pass.

The last drive of fall before putting the car away for winter isn’t quite up there with the above list—the seasons are at their very core cyclical, so you know the layup is only temporary and that spring will push the shoots out of the ground and the car out of the garage. But still, here in New England and other similar climes, “The Last Drive That Isn’t Really The Last Drive” is a ritual.

Maybe you’re putting the car away in far-flung storage. Maybe it’s in your garage, but it’ll be blocked in by other vehicles. Maybe there’s a big project you’re planning that you know will take the car out of commission until spring. Maybe it’s none of those, and with good weather and salt-free roads, the car may see use all winter. But even if that’s the case, it doesn’t make the drive any less poignant or feel any less special.

I just went through this with Lolita, the 1974 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special, and Rene, the ’73 BMW 3.0CSi. I had very different reactions to both.

Lolita had two separate goodbyes. The first was an absolutely wonderful leaf-peeping trip to western Massachusetts. A few years ago, I wrote about driving the car out to Amherst to the very spot I first saw a Europa. I began following that same path out Route 2, but this time, just to change it up, I got off the highway onto smaller Rt 2A, something I’d never done in the hundreds of times I’d run back and forth between Amherst and Boston. I was astonished by what I saw.

It’s one thing to see whatever selection of trees happen to be visible from the highway. It’s quite another to drive through the centers of small New England towns where many of town squares or commons are populated by prized maples. Every New Englander knows that the maple is the Lord God of autumn, and to drive through one little town after another and see the maples on fire with foliage left me so mumbling and weak-knee’d in oh-my-god, oh-my-god, oh-my-god adoration that had there been anyone in the car with me, they would’ve thought I was having a series of When Harry Met Sally  (“I’ll have what she’s having”) experiences. I was so totally in the moment that I didn’t stop and take any photos until I was nearly in Amherst and took in the iconic overview of Quabbin Reservoir.

Unfortunately, on the drive home, something odd happened. The Lotus’ brakes began feeling spongy. They’d pump back up firm, but the next time I hit the pedal, even if it was just a few seconds later, they felt soft again. I stopped, verified that the fluid level in the reservoir was full and that there wasn’t brake fluid dripping anywhere. I did, however, find that I’d left the handbrake on for who knows how many miles, so maybe I’d heated up the rear brakes enough to boil the brake fluid.

Of course, you don’t want to be driving if you think the brake master cylinder is failing. The classic symptom is putting your foot on the brake pedal and having it go slowly to the floor. The Lotus wasn’t doing that, but it was still odd and unnerving. Weighing the risks and the options, I drove home very carefully, taking the Mass Pike back instead of curvier Rt 2, figuring that the interstate route would involve less braking.

When I got home, I ensconced the Lotus up on the mid-rise lift, figuring that that was it for the fall. As I wrote about here, bleeding the brakes on the car has proven troublesome, as my Motive power bleeder doesn’t have a cap available for the Lotus’ odd Girling master cylinder, and as a vacuum-style bleeder didn’t prove useful. So, I tried something new—I ordered a set of Speed Bleeders. These are bleed nipples that have a little check-valve in them that allows one-person bleeding. That is, you don’t need to have someone like your less-than-thrilled spouse pumping the brake pedal while you open and close the bleed nipple. I installed the Speed Bleeders, pushed a reasonable amount of fluid through the system, and the pedal felt firm.

Then, a few weeks later, I was invited to give a talk on the Lotus’ six-year-long resurrection at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Massachusetts. It was basically a live synopsis of what’s in my book The Lotus Chronicles. The museum folks said that, if possible, it’d be great if I had the car with me as a live prop for the talk. The lure of actually having Lolita inside the museum was too good to pass up. I guess Lolita wasn’t done for the season after all.

The evening of the talk, I took the car down off the lift. When I backed it out of the garage and stopped at the top of the driveway, the pedal was alarmingly soft. Oh. Right. Forgot about that. I’d installed the Speed Bleeders and ran a bunch of fluid through them, but never actually test drove the car to see if it fixed the soft pedal.

So, I drove the Lotus several circles around the block, jamming on the brake pedal to the point where the brakes locked up, basically daring the system to break. I then went through all the same fluid inspection steps again, and again was convinced that the car was on the safe side of the line—that is, that the pedal was soft but would pump right back up. It never ever went to the floor.

And, with that, I decided to drive the car the eight miles over to Larz Anderson.

It was the least-relaxing drive I’ve ever taken in any car. I rarely drive the Lotus at night, as it’s so little and low that I’m not convinced that people see it. I’d never driven the car in rush-hour traffic before, and the amount of stopping complicated the issue of hitting the brake pedal to pump it up before I needed to actually brake. And the car has so little suspension travel that hitting any bump or pothole feels like you’re about to bend the front wishbones, which you probably are, and in the dark, I wasn’t able to see the potholes. So, imagine the joy of experiencing all three of these in one drive. The entire drive over to the museum I thought, “Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! You’re driving a car with potential brake failure, and for what? So, you can have it as a prop for a talk? Idiot!”

But safety-wise, it was fine. I’d checked the car thoroughly before I left. I wasn’t really driving a car whose brakes could fail at any moment—I was driving a car that probably had a little air in the lines. I made it there and back without incident. It was wonderful having the car with me inside Larz Anderson for the talk, and it generated a lot of attention.

However, I was relieved when I got the car home and was more than happy to put it in the garage and back on the lift, this time knowing it’d stay there until the problem was found and fixed.

Fast-forward a few weeks to two days before Thanksgiving. The temperature had dropped to the mid-40s, but the weather and the roads were still clear. My middle son, Kyle, was in town from Santa Fe. We were assigned the task of picking up the turkey my wife had ordered at Verrill Farm in Concord. As I say over and over, part of the joy of owning a cool car is that driving it turns any mundane task into an occasion. So, Kyle and I drove my favorite car—Rene, the ’73 BMW E9 3.0CSi I’ve owned for 34 years—to pick up the bird. This wasn’t a foliage drive, as any leaves with color had already dropped, but the stark pre-snowfall browns and the hard sunshine made the E9’s Signal Red paint positively pop. Again, I was living in the moment, and forgot to photograph the turkey in the box in the trunk, but we did stop for an impromptu photo shoot.

The only thing more flamboyant than the car was Kyle. He’s always marched to his own drummer, and that’s only accelerated in his adulthood.

The drive in Rene wasn’t long, maybe a half hour each way, but I’m intimately familiar with these roads in the leafy suburbs west of Boston, as I regularly exercise the Lotus there. We had a delightful hour piloting the beautiful E9 coupe along the gentle curves and through late November’s bare branches.

When we returned, I put Rene back in the garage and under cover, but I left her in the easily accessible spot just behind the roll-up door. After all, I still need to take Kyle to the airport. Maybe that will be the E9’s last drive of fall. But who knows? As long as the roads stay salt-free, I’ll continue to turn errands into events for as long as I can.

***

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

The post What’s more important than fall’s last drive? The next one appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I got an email recently from a good friend who lives in Vermont. He said that both his wife’s Subaru and his daughter’s Subaru (hey, it’s Vermont—it’s the law) were nearing the end of their useful lives, so they’re looking at getting rid of them and buying new cars. He and his wife are honing in on a Nissan Leaf EV. It’s a high-demand vehicle with a roughly $38K MSRP.

Even the EV part of it notwithstanding (no value judgement either way), my knee-jerk reaction was, “Holy hell, that’s a lot of money.” It brought to the forefront something that I’m obviously aware of but don’t fixate on:

I’m 64 years old and I’ve never bought a new car.

Among the many ways I’ve been fortunate in this life is that the combination of a) being able to fix cars, b) having a short or non-existent commute, and c) having a very understanding spouse has meant that I’ve been able to get away never owning a new car.

I’ve regarded this as neither hardship nor penance. Quite the contrary. If I had the cash to outlay on something new, I’d look at the price and instantly think about what cool used or vintage car that sum might buy. If I’d consider a loan or lease, I’d look at the monthly payment and think, “OK, this month, that could buy the stainless-steel exhaust for the BMW 2002; next month, Bilstein shocks and struts; and the month after that …”

As I said, I’ve been fortunate. I’ve worked from home since 2017, but for decades I had a commute that was just five miles each way. This allowed me to limp back and forth to work in just about anything. Similarly, until the kids were born, my wife was quite content to drive our ’69 VW Westfalia camper the few miles back and forth from Boston’s Brighton neighborhood into Harvard Square, where she worked.

Once child #1 arrived in 1988, it was obvious that the camper wasn’t the best transportation for the baby’s doctor visits, so I bought a 1983 BMW 533i on the thin premise that it would do double duty as a family car and was something that I actually enjoyed driving whenever we needed to head out of town.

It worked, sort of, until child #2 came along, at which point it was obvious that the car was too small for our needs. Of course, the late 1980s/early ’90s was very much the heyday of the minivan. I went through a couple of well-used Volkswagen Vanagons. As compared with any other minivan, they were enormous inside, but their reliability was pretty poor. I eventually got religion in terms of the need for my wife and family to have something that was safer and more reliable. The newly introduced Toyota Previa caught my eye, as it was rear-wheel drive, looked cool, topped Consumer Reports’ ratings in terms of frequency of repair, and was available with a five-speed stick, which my wife, bless her, prefers driving to this day.

When I read that for the 1992 model year the Previa was available with an anti-lock braking system (ABS) and an air bag, I decided that it was time to suck it up, be a grown-up, and pay for a new car. I ordered the pricing information from Consumer Reports so I could do the “I know what it costs I’ll pay you X above dealer invoice” thing.

Armed with the numbers, I walked into a dealership for the first time in my life, and explained exactly what I wanted—Previa, rear-wheel drive (they were also available in an All-Trac configuration),five-speed, ABS, airbag.

“That’s a problem,” the salesman said. Not what you expect to hear.

“Why? I know that these options are available,” I said, rattling my papers like evidence presented by a prosecuting attorney.

“The five-speed is being phased out for the 1992 model year. And when it was available, it was part of the base DX option package. However, the newly available ABS and air bag are part of the LE package. The five-speed did overlap with the ABS and air bag for a few months, but because they were part of different option packages, you’d have to find a car that someone had special-ordered that way in late 1991 but didn’t pick up, so it’s on a dealer lot by accident.”

“So, I’m sitting here prepared to buy a Previa if it’s configured a certain way, and you’re telling there’s no way to get it?”

He sighed. “I could make some calls to other dealers to check inventory, but the chances are just about zero. Besides, why do you want a five-speed in a minivan?”

“It’s what both my wife and I want.”

He did the “if I find one, you’ll have to act fast” thing, but it was clear he had nothing to sell me. We were done.

I scoured the newspaper and the local Want Advertiser publication for the elusive loaded early ’92 Previa five-speed / ABS / bag, and never found it. I think the existence of such a thing was perilously close to an urban myth anyway. But a few weeks later, I found a used low-mileage ’91 Previa five-speed (no ABS or bag) for a fair price and bought it.

I didn’t set foot in a dealership again for years. Until I was working insane hours in my engineering job. I was doing a lot of work-related travel, and my incredibly understanding wife gently intimated that she would appreciate it if, when I was home, I was really home and with the family and not working on the cars so much.

BMW had recently come out with the little 318ti, an entry-level four-cylinder hatchback version of the E36 sedan. I’d been daily-driving an E36 325i four-door for a few years, but with 200K on it, it was getting needy. I wondered if the thing to do was to pair the still-reliable Previa with a not-insanely-priced new BMW for me. That would leave only the vintage cars to work on, which wasn’t a must-be-done-by-tomorrow-thing anyway.

And then, I read in the BMW Car Club magazine that BMW had come out with a “Club Sport” edition of the 318ti. It had the same 138-hp four-cylinder engine but was kitted out with some of the M sport suspension components from the M3, had an M3-styled front air dam, mirrors, side sills, and rear apron, sport seats, and steering wheel, and 16×7-inch wheels. Only 200 were being built. I was intrigued.

I went into my local BMW dealer with a copy of the magazine and asked about price, availability, and delivery of the 318ti Club Sport. He poked around at his desk and said that he could not find any order information on the model. He then said dismissively, “If it’s a Club Sport, maybe you need to order it through the club you’re in.” Attaboy, there, mister salesman. Way to take a lifelong buyer of used BMWs and make him feel right at home in a dealership.

As was the case with the Previa, I searched and found an affordable 318ti. It had just 42,000 miles on it, which, to me, made it like a new BMW. And it cost a quarter what a new Club Sport would’ve. It became my daily driver for the next few years. The idea of it being a zero-maintenance car, though, went out the window when a little plastic coolant neck snapped off the back of the head, causing the car to dump most of its antifreeze.

As my kids got older, I went back to daily-driving inexpensive high-mileage cars. My wife’s driving patterns, however, changed, as she started her own business and drove to customer sites. The now-long-in-the-tooth Previa gave way to a lightly used Mazda MPV. When my oldest son crashed it, we bought a lightly used 2008 Honda Fit that a couple in Connecticut had purchased for the wife when gas spiked to $4.50/gallon. She never warmed to driving a stick, so when gas prices dropped, they sold it. When my oldest son crashed that, we bought the 7000-mile 2013 Honda Fit Sport that we still own (and I was only kidding when I was shaking my fist at it here). It was a repaired salvage car I found on eBay. The before-repair photos showed a folded-under left front strut from a curb strike. I couldn’t figure out why that would be enough for an insurance company to total a car. It turned out the curb had dragged under the floor pan, putting a crease in it. I didn’t care. For the low mileage and low price (it was less than half of new), it was an absolute steal.

The little Fit now has over 60K on it. It’s doing fine, but I like to think ahead, as I hate being put into any situation where I need to make a snap decision and it costs me large amounts of money. If the Fit suddenly dies or gets totaled, I’m not sure what would replace it. As my wife and I are now in our mid-60s, the idea of a car with the modern suite of active safety features (e.g., automatic braking, lane departure warning) is appealing. I guess that one of the positive unintended consequences of owning 13 vehicles is that if the newest and most dependable one suddenly kicked the bucket, there’s still my daily driver 2003 BMW 530i, the truck, the little RV, and the nine cars on the Hagerty policy, so it’s not negligence on my part to not have scoped out what comes next.

But it won’t be a new car. I get that many folks have long commutes and need the comfort, reliability, and bells and whistles that come with new cars, but we don’t, and without that need, it’s just too much money.

Besides, the coin that my friend in Vermont is about to drop on a new Nissan leaf would buy a nice Porsche 911SC. Hey, for $38K, I bet I can pick up the Porsche and one of his needy Subarus.

***

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

The post Why I’ve never bought a new car—and never will appeared first on Hagerty Media.

About five years ago, I wrote a piece for Hagerty defending vintage car ownership. In it, I said that, on the surface, owning multiple vintage cars may seem as irresponsible as former first lady of Philippines Imelda Marcos owning thousands of pairs of shoes and hundreds of fur coats, but I defended myself and like-minded car nuts by arguing that, from an environmental standpoint, lightly driven vintage cars have a very small carbon footprint. I joked that my 1974 Lotus Europa, having been dead for 40 years, still owes the world a few decades of carbon.

Not long after, I began seeing articles about electric conversions of classic vehicles. There were press releases from both Aston Martin and Jaguar saying—in response to some European cities proposing the closure of their downtown sections to internal combustion vehicles—that they were offering well-heeled clients factory electric conversion of their precious E Types and DBwhatevers. Reading further, this allowed for cost-sharing of the new electric platforms being developed for Jaguar’s I-Pace crossover and Aston Martin’s Rapide E, so the motives were perhaps not as bright green as they seemed.

Aston Martin’s release really caught both my eye and my ridicule, as it referred to its electric conversion as a “cassette,” with the implication that it could be easily slid in and out. “The cassette system offers the perfect solution, offering owners the reassurance of knowing their car is future-proofed and socially responsible, yet still an authentic Aston Martin, with the ability to reinstate its original powertrain if desired.

OK. Well. First, “future-proofed?” Really? Is it going to automatically encase itself in carbonite like Han Solo when sea levels rise or if an asteroid pulverizes the planet?

Second, knowing nothing about electric conversion but a little about engine swaps, the idea that every aspect of a gas-to-electric conversion can be encased in a “cassette” may be good public relations, but it is of dubious engineering merit.

You might infer from this that I’m anti-EV. Not true. I think that electric vehicles, when recharged with power generated by renewable energy sources (e.g. solar and wind) are part of a necessary response to climate change. But I am resolutely anti-hyperbole.

Since then, the electric conversion of classic vehicles, or at least the aggressive marketing of it, appears to have only increased. Nowadays, it seems that you can’t throw a bad condenser without hitting a laptop displaying an article about electrifying classic cars. Shops performing conversion work appear to be springing up in many American cities. Some are single-marque or single-theme, while others are equal opportunity converters.

Normally I wouldn’t pay any of this much mind, but an electric-converted 1974 BMW 2002 recently went up for auction on Bring a Trailer. As I’ve owned 40 of these little German sedans and still own three of them, I couldn’t help having some academic interest. Plus, there’s the odd bit of historical trivia that BMW actually built two electric 2002s that were used during the 1972 Munich Olympics. With 12 Varta lead acid batteries under the hood, the cars had a range of 37 miles at a constant 31 mph. Fortunately, EV technology has advanced over the last 50 years.

The work on the BaT 2002 was performed by a shop in Austin, Texas, that has received favorable press. The company’s website and videos show converted high-dollar classics like an E Type, a long-hood 911, and an Alfa GT Veloce. The company owner and his engineers exude passion for the work and respect for the art form that is a vintage car, and they reason that electric conversion a) makes a car environmentally palatable, b) increases performance, and c) solves the problem of the unreliability of a 50-year-old internal combustion vehicle. If I can nitpick about that last point, in one video, one of the engineers perhaps drank from Aston Martin’s fountain, as he strays from passion to hyperbolae and says that classic cars “are fickle finicky vehicles, but when it’s [sic] run by a massive battery and an electric motor, it’s basically as reliable as a microwave oven.”

I’ve written multiple articles about what I refer to as “The Big Seven” things likely to strand a vintage car. They are ignition, fuel delivery, cooling, charging, belts, clutch hydraulics, and ball joints. I fully agree that if you replace an internal combustion engine and its cooling and charging systems with a modern electric system, you eliminate the first five of these, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. But you still have a classic vehicle with its attendant electrical quirks (funny, right?), old brakes, steering, and suspension, and now you’re adding in the range and “who repairs it?” issues of a one-off electric conversion whose battery capacity is unlike to be that of a ground-up design.

But even assuming there’s a step increase in reliability, there’s a huge overriding issue with these conversions. And it’s not the whole “you’re destroying a classic” argument. As far as I’m concerned, it’s your car—go to town and paint flaming purple Smurfs on the hood if you like. In the case of the BaT vehicle, a BMW 2002 is a common model. There are a lot of them. It’s not like someone is electrifying James Bond’s DB5 (and, even if they were, if you believe Aston Martin, you could always just hit the eject button and swap back in the internal combustion “cassette”).

Nor is it the “you’re destroying the classic’s soul” argument. There’s a whole continuum of paths for ownership of a classic car, from keeping it bone stock, to light modifications for drivability and reliability, to hot-rodded, to wild engine swaps, to turning it into track-only vehicle or a race car. Electrification is somewhere on the right edge of this curve.

Personally, I think if you want a newer, quieter, more-powerful car, you should just buy a newer, quieter, more-powerful car and stop trying to turn your classic into something it isn’t. But to single out electric conversion and point at it—Invasion-Of-The-Bodysnatchers-style—as an affront against man, and God, is silly. That being said, I do have some “soul” concerns. I’ve experienced how even mild modifications such as a stiffer suspension or a five-speed retrofit can change the car in unintended ways, affecting the way it sounds, feels, and vibrates. The relationships we have with our beloved cars are intimate things, and changes in a car’s vibe can affect our connection with it. Even over and above electrification’s obvious “no more gas, oil, and exhaust fumes” and “no more WAAAAAAAAAA-waaaaaaa when you wind it out” issues, I do wonder about the degree to which removing some of a car’s grit and rasp and replacing it with an antiseptic Stepford-wife, golf-cart whine may stress or break the owner-vehicle bond.

But the issue, the thing I’d like to see addressed in the first sentence of every article about electric conversion, is the high cost. The website of the company that converted the BMW 2002 on BaT estimates conversion cost at $50K–$150K, depending on the vehicle’s make and model, the need for general non-electric-conversion restoration work, the desired level of performance, and other factors.

Holy electrons, Batman. You’d have to leak a lot of gas, oil, and antifreeze to approach that.

It made me wonder who spends this kind of money. One of the company’s videos talks about people who “want the ability to appreciate that art form, but they want… a sense that they’re doing it with less impact to our planet” and “want the seamlessness of not worrying, just driving.” That’s great PR, but to me that price tag instantly makes this kind of conversion the province of folks with summer homes in the Hamptons.

My ever-reasonable wife asked me, “How does that compare with the cost of a new EV? Couldn’t a buyer be someone who simply wants a cool vintage electric-converted car to use as a daily driver?” Left-brained me answered that vintage vehicles and daily drivers are usually two different things, and that only a died-in-the-wool car person would likely put up with the wind and road noise, primitive suspension, reliability, and safety issues of a classic car, electrified or not, to try to daily it for anything other than trivially short commutes.

Let’s look at the specifics of the electric-converted 1974 BMW 2002 on BaT. What the car had going for it was that it was converted by a known company, the photos of the converted portions appeared to show excellent work, the car was painted the highly desirable color of Colorado (pale orange), and although it began life as a big-bumpered square tail light 2002, it had received a small-bumper conversion.

In addition, part of the converter’s design philosophy is to maintain the manual transmission and clutch, as that keeps the car fun to drive, and it doesn’t interfere with the look and feel of the gearshift lever. This car actually had a five-speed in it, which was pretty cool.

But there were some negatives. The rectangular holes for the original front bumpers’ hydraulic cylinders hadn’t been covered up; the car had been shaved (de-trimmed); it had air conditioning via a modern climate control box, whose vents were occupying the places in the dashboard where the original vent sliders were; and the dash had a stitched leather cover. OK, perhaps only the big bumper holes are a demerit, but while there’s nothing cringe-worthy with any of the other issues, there’s no denying that they collectively moved the car away from a bone-stock configuration. I’d think that from a value standpoint, a blue-chip electric-converted 2002 would be a flawless 1968–73 round-taillight car that looked absolutely stock until the hood was opened. This wasn’t that.

Plus, as pretty as the car’s exterior was, it had not had a rotisserie-style restoration, so the floor pans and subframes showed the small amounts of oxidation that every unrestored car has. Nothing wrong with that; every car I own looks likes this underneath. I imagined that the owner thought of the car as being in the Goldilocks zone for an electric conversion. That is, if it was too rare, too original, or too mint, you might not want to modify it, whereas if it was too beat-up or rusty, it wouldn’t be worth the expense and effort.

However, as I wrote when I tried to sell my 49,000-mile survivor 2002, what’s valued on BaT and causes bidding wars to head for the stratosphere are cars that present themselves in such a way that potential well-moneyed buyers think they’re bidding on a completed fully-executed whole that needs nothing. The contrast of a car’s freshly painted exterior with an original undercarriage conveys the image that the car is unfinished and holds the price on BaT down for any car. This was no exception.

The kicker was that although the car had a standard J1772 charging connector, and the conversion included a nifty adaptation of the stock gas gauge to display the reserve charge, the seller quoted the car’s range as only about a hundred miles. Gee, maybe things haven’t progressed as far as I would’ve thought since the 1972 Olympics.

Together, all these things added up to caveats that caused the bidding to top out at $42,500. Given the cost estimates listed on the conversion company’s website, I can’t imagine that the sale price wasn’t substantially less than the seller had in it.

But still, $42,500 is a lot of money, at least it is to me, and that got me thinking.

As I say over and over, I am neither wealthy nor a collector. I own 13 vehicles (including a truck, little RV, and two daily drivers) because they’re either useful to me or they resonate with me in some way, but I struggle daily with both the financial and the storage repercussions. I see many cars locally on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace that fall into what I think of as a “whim-able” price window. I used to regard this as four grand, in which all sorts of depreciated BMWs and running oddballs like Saab Sonnets, Fiat X1/9s, and ’63 Rambler 770s fall, but I’ve widened my view a bit to eight grand, as that also captures things like running but needy pre-1975 C3 Corvettes.

Still, in an environment of tightly-constrained money and space resources, the thought experiment I perform for any purchase—particularly one that’s outside my wheelhouse—is “What would I actually use the car for?” I know what I use the 1970s BMWs for. I road-trip the hell out of them. Yes, I also pleasure-drive them and use them to run errands—there’s nothing like taking a beloved classic to get milk on a Sunday morning to turn it into an event—but the road-trip part is in both my and the cars’ DNA. The Lotus Europa still hasn’t seen a big road trip, but I adore driving the featherweight little thing on twisty local roads. So, if the answer to the usage question is “I’d probably just drive it to cars and coffee a few times a year,” that’s a fail. I simply don’t have the space or the money to support owning something with that usage profile.

In truth, of course it’s less black and white than that. My 1999 BMW M Coupe (“the clown shoe”) is barely driven these days, and although my 49,000-mile 2002 did recently get a short road trip to Vermont, it’s more of an errand and a local events car. And some of my other ’70s BMWs haven’t seen a multi-day road trip in years.

But still, hypothetically, what would I actually use an electric 2002 (or any electrified classic whose range is only a hundred miles) for? That would seem to effectively rule out spirited day drives with my local 2002 pals. Yes, in theory, 30 minutes of a quick charger attached to the J1772 port should give an 80 percent charge, or another 80 miles, but that doesn’t feel like much. Me, I’d rather have the unconverted car with the range, the fumes, and the chunky rasp when I get on the throttle. And save the $42,500. Or the $50K–$150K, depending on how you want to look at it.

In my first book, there’s a chapter, titled “Restoration and why it makes no freaking sense,” in which I say that buying a car into which someone else has already sunk restoration money is almost always cheaper than spending the money yourself, but note how people pay to have cars restored anyway because it’s all about choice—what pops out at the end is the manifestation of all those choices, and so, naturally, you love it. I think that choosing to have a vintage vehicle electrified is a boutique subset of this larger restoration issue in that people who do it want to do it, probably because a) it fits their environmentally-friendly self-image, and b) they can afford it and the left-brain analytics probably don’t matter that much. I have no argument with that, but if you say that you’re doing it strictly for environmental reasons, and if your daily driver isn’t an EV, I think the justification is pretty thin. And if you say you’re doing it so you can still drive your beloved classic when gasoline is as controlled as ivory, okay, but you’re paying a very hefty premium to be on the bleeding edge. From this standpoint, the buyer of the electric 2002 on BaT made out very well.

So now I can tell you the surprising part: The BaT seller of the electric 2002 and the guy who paid to have the conversion work done was my old friend and BMW 2002 mentor from my days in Austin, Terry Sayther. Terry is 40-year member of the BMW Car Club of America, had a shop in Austin for decades, has forgotten more about 2002s than I’ll ever know, and has done a whole variety of engine swaps. In other words, the last thing he is is my hypothetical hedge-fund closet environmentalist EV-converted classic owner.

When I asked him why he did it, he said he wanted to experience an electric 2002 in the same way he wanted to experience a 2002 with a 240-horsepower S52 engine from an E36 M3 (which he also owns). He said that the electric 02 was very much a pleasure to drive, was a good city car (though more range would’ve been nice), was great to use on date nights with his wife, and, yes, did attract a lot of attention at cars and coffee events. So, you can ignore most everything I said.

Except the price tag.

If I’m still alive when gas really is akin to ivory, and the price of an electric conversion is comparable to that of an engine swap, I’ll likely change my tune (I’m above most things a practical man). Until then, you’ll recognize me because I’m the guy smiling as his car’s leaky fumy internal combustion engine is being wound out.

Really, I just want folks to be careful and realistic. The fact that an expensive boutique-converted electric BMW 2002 has only a hundred-mile range strikes me as a valuable illustration of where EV conversion technology is today and what is and isn’t reasonable to expect when you have to deal with the constraints of a vintage car. The time may come when electric conversion is the necessary and affordable way to keep driving your classic, but that time is certainly not today.

Oh, and that factory Jaguar electric E Type? Be careful what you wish for. This was the 2018 press photo of the dashboard in the prototype. If I ever owned an E Type, plunked down mortgage levels of money for electric conversion, and the interior came back looking like this, I’d want 10 minutes in a windowless room with the people who cashed my check.

***

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

The post Want an electric conversion? Be prepared to pay big money appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Those of us who are backyard mechanics know the drill. Maybe the request comes from a buddy with the same vintage car that has become our shared lifelong passion (in my case, that’s 1970s-era BMWs). Or maybe it’s a single mother at the end of her financial and emotional rope who just received a nosebleed-inducing quote on a muffler for the minivan. She knows your spouse, your spouse mentions it to you, you sigh, and against your better judgement you say, “Tell her to bring it by.”

It’s rarely a good idea. It can often land you in “no good deed goes unpunished” territory.

Having said that, before I spin out the stories, let me immediately walk it back. Believe me, being an automotive savior is just about the best feeling ever. Whether it’s a jump-start … or cleaning someone’s corroded battery terminals and having their car spring to life … or an illuminated check engine light for which you can read the code and assure the person that it’s a get-to-it-when-you-can issue and not something imminent that’s about to cause damage … or a low tire for which you show up with a cigarette-lighter compressor, a can of Fix-O-Flat, and a floor jack and use whichever is necessary and appropriate … few things feel as good as being a knight in shining armor.

The problem is that although some repairs are a quick-in-and-out, most aren’t. Many have an unclear diagnostic process and a slippery slope for completion, and you, as a do-it-yourselfer, aren’t often equipped to deal with them, particularly on an unfamiliar car. It’s one thing if you snap off a bolt on your own car and have to spend hours dealing with it before moving back onto the repair itself; it’s quite another if it’s someone else’s car. If you’re doing it for free, you begin to resent it. If you’re not doing it for free, it raises all sorts of other issues—insurance, permits, etc. It’s easy for both parties to feel dissatisfied with the result.

The first time this happened was during my sophomore year in college, fairly early on in my wrenching years. I’d owned my 1970 Triumph GT6+ since graduating high school. As I’ve written, it constantly broke down, so both the car and my ability to fix it myself became pretty well known in my circle of friends. My friend Paul had a VW Beetle that needed brake work. He was poor and begged me to fix it. I eventually relented and told him that if he bought the parts, I’d install them for him. Unfortunately, in addition to front pads and rear shoes, I discovered that the car had a leaking rear-wheel cylinder. This was a rusty New England car with Fred Flintstone floors, and the brake lines didn’t look much better. I explained to Paul that there was risk of the line snapping when I unscrewed it, but there we were, with the car jacked up in the dorm parking lot, at 3 o’clock on an October afternoon with daylight burning. He asked me to press on, and—you guessed it—twang went the brake line.

Nowadays, of course, I’d know how to deal with it. First, I would have tried to prevent it from happening by first heating up the brake line fitting with a torch and using penetrating oil or wax to loosen it. But at the time, I probably still thought that WD40 loosened stuck fasteners (it doesn’t). And now, when a brake line snaps, I known how to deal with it, either by buying a replacement, or by making my own with copper-nickel tubing, a flaring tool, and the correct fittings. At the time, however, this exceeded my nascent mechanical capabilities, so there was little choice but to take it to a real repair shop. To avoid paying for a tow, I put the brakes back together as best as I could and drove the car to the shop at 2 a.m. with only the other half of the tandem braking system and the handbrake to slow it (a risk I’d never take now). Paul wound up having to pay more than what it would have likely cost him had he simply taken it in for a brake job. He didn’t blame me for what had happened, but it was a highly unsatisfying experience for both of us. It warned me off working on other people’s cars for about 15 years.

Then, in the late ’90s, my wife and I were in a band with a guy named Blair who owned a 1979 VW bus. The exhaust in his bus had gotten loud, he knew that I fixed my own cars, and that my wife and I had owned a succession of similar buses (as well as Vanagons), and he asked for my help. I gave him a lengthy monolog on the slippery slope of exhaust work—that if one exhaust component has a hole, the odds are that the others aren’t far behind; that new and old pieces often don’t seal well against one another; that, on air-cooled VWs, the heater boxes are a part of the exhaust and they’re bolted to the head; and that having to remove the nuts on head studs is rife with danger because if the stud snaps, you’re in for a world of hurt, as the head may need to be removed in order to drill out and replace the snapped stud. This dissuaded him for several months.

But as the van’s exhaust got louder and louder, Blair begged me to give it my best shot and swore that if something went south, he wouldn’t hold it against me. He bought an all-new exhaust along with replacement heater boxes. I did use heat and penetrating oil on the nuts holding the boxes to the head studs, but regardless, when loosening one of them, I felt that sickening sensation of it twisting without any accompanying screeching or the loud crack of a nut coming free, and the stud snapped off.

Blair shrugged, but that was only because he didn’t really understand how serious this was. In theory, you can try to drill the stud out with the head in place, but I was concerned about messing up the head. I put the replacement heater boxes and the new exhaust on, and it was way quieter than it was before, but it was obvious that some exhaust was leaking past the gasket on the exhaust port that had only one stud instead of two, and such things only get worse over time. Again, I was left with the feeling that I’d done something wrong. “I am never going to do this again,” I said to myself.

And I didn’t. For almost another 15 years.

Until a woman I went to high school with put out a call on social media saying her car needed brakes and she didn’t have any money. She’s someone who used to be a very good friend and unfortunately had developed health issues, lost her job, and was on disability, so I said I’d look at it. It was a rusty old Subaru that anyone with a paycheck and a commute would’ve junked, but it was all she had. Fortunately, she had a printed estimate from a repair shop that itemized what was needed, which included not only rotors and pads but also a front caliper. When I called a local parts store to find out availability of the parts, there seemed to be some confusion over the size of the rotors, so I put the car up on my mid-rise lift and measured them directly, then picked them up. Unfortunately, when I began the repair, it turned out that the pads I was sold didn’t match the rotors, and by this time, the store had closed. Oh, yeah, it was Sunday evening. She didn’t have to work the next day, but I did.

I made it into the nearest AutoZone by the skin of my teeth and bought pads that matched the rotors. I put everything together, bled the brakes, was about to test-drive the car, and found that the brake pedal went right to the floor. If a central brake component like the master cylinder is replaced, it’s not uncommon to have to bleed the brakes multiple times, but it’s a little unusual when it happens on replacement of an outlying component like a caliper. Finally, I got the pedal to firm up, but something in the brakes still didn’t feel right. It was probably just that more bleeding was needed, but I would’ve hated to be wrong and for it to be the master cylinder.

It was now 9 p.m. on a Sunday, I’d been dealing with the car for almost nine straight hours, and my wife was entertaining the woman in the living room. There was nothing wrong with any of this—in fact, it fit with my self-image of helping people, particularly old friends—but it did need to have an endpoint. I sent her home with the instructions to call me if the brake pedal travel suddenly increased (it didn’t). It was a very odd feeling sending an old friend off in a car whose brakes had some vague asterisk on them, and I was relieved when I learned that, a few months later, she did get another car. But not unlike the first two examples, I was left feeling like I’d done something wrong, and I swore I’d never do it again.

And I didn’t, until circumstances forced me to. And again, the issue was brakes. When I abruptly lost my job in 2016 and had to scramble for income, I did briefly hang out a shingle and let it be known in the local vintage BMW world that I’d wrench for actual money. A friend of mine had bought a long-stored BMW 2002 and asked me to sort it out. He had it towed to my house. As part of the work, I did what I considered a full brake job—front calipers, rotors, and pads, rear drums shoes, and wheel cylinders, and new braided stainless flexible brake lines. About a month later he called me, saying that he was about to drive the car that morning, but the brake pedal went right to the floor. When he looked closer, he saw that the brake fluid reservoir was empty, and found brake fluid on the garage floor, in front of the driver. I was absolutely livid. I told him I’d have the car towed to my house at my expense and would fix it. It turned out that the brake master cylinder had been leaking fluid asymptomatically into the power assist booster, only spilling on the ground when the booster had literally filled up. I replaced them both at no charge. With the nightmare of someone getting killed due to brake failure on a car whose brakes I’d just worked on, I realized that I either needed to go all in and get permits and insurance or stop. I stopped.

Now, in truth, there have been exceptions to this. I’ll swap batteries for friends, natch. And when my friend Bob—the guy with whom I road-tripped 3000 miles to Mid-America 02 Fest from Massachusetts to Arkansas and back—asked me if I would try to locate a snotty metallic rattle that occurred under the car at certain RPM, that was an easy favor for someone who ran and got me antifreeze when my car blew a coolant hose on a different road trip. And then there was the time my friend Mike bought two 2002tiis, had me sort them out, and offered me a week in his house in Nantucket (my wife really liked that). And after I sold my 1999 BMW Z3 roadster to our friend Kim, I continued working on it for her, including fixing it when her son ran it into a median strip, as I couldn’t stand the thought of the car being totaled and parted out (I eventually bought it back). And the whole episode of the “mitzvah 2002tii”—helping a widow sell the car her husband had bought new 50 years ago, including performing a lot more mechanical work than I’d anticipated—was enormously satisfying.

The big one—I mean huge—was installing the engine in my friend Alex’s piece-of-junk Passat wagon. I got into it like the frog not knowing when to jump out of the pot of water as temperature was increasing. The engine in the wagon died, Alex needed a place to park it “temporarily,” then he found a replacement engine and needed a place to put that. As winter neared, I needed it all out of my garage, and the only way to make that happen was to do most of the work myself. Alex is one of my dearest friends, and he is the contractor who did most of the work on our house, including building the garage. He has done me more favors and saved me more money than anyone, so helping him with his car was a no brainer.

In general, however, there’s a good reason to say no to repair jobs on cars that aren’t yours. True, part of that is risk and liability, but a bigger part of it is that if you wrench on your own cars for that combination of money-saving, self-reliance, and the Zen that comes from taking on a problem and fixing it your way, realize that much of that goes straight out the window when it’s not your car.

In other words, if you do it because it’s fun, make sure it stays fun.

***

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

The post Here’s why I don’t work on other people’s cars for money appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about taking Hampton, my 49,000-mile 1973 BMW 2002, on a road trip. What I didn’t say was that Hampton was actually my second choice. When I saw that the weather forecast for the weekend in Vermont appeared clear, my first inclination was to drive the jewel in the crown: “Rene,” the 1973 BMW E9 3.0CSi I’ve owned for 37 years. After all, Rene’s gorgeous Signal Red paint and tan leather interior mesh perfectly with the fall foliage.

The reason that I didn’t road-trip Rene was that when I pulled off her cover, I found that the inspection sticker had expired in September. This reminded me that when I last road-tripped the car down to Asheville, North Carolina, in May, a hole in the already-weak muffler had yawned open, making the exhaust, shall we say, throaty. Since I’d installed the PrimaFlow exhaust and HeaderCraft headers on the car shortly after I bought it in 1986, I had nothing to complain about in terms of the longevity of the parts. But this, combined with the regular inspection woes of a vintage car—Rene’s taillights are notoriously finicky, and no amount of cleaning terminals and bending them to make firmer contact with the tips of the bulbs seems to make them reliable—made me think that getting the car stickered wouldn’t be a simple 20-minute trip to and from the inspection station, and even odds were that it might result in rejection. So, I whispered promises of “another day” in Rene’s ear, covered her back up, and took Hampton instead.

It’s important to keep your promises to those you love, so when my wife and I got back from Vermont, I had a look at Rene’s inspection issues.

When I put the car up on the mid-rise lift and looked at the muffler, the problem was immediately obvious. The muffler was riddled with rust holes.

I’ve written numerous stories about exhaust work—you can look here and here—and talked at length about how, if you’re smart, you’ll replace it all if any section is rotted out. The logic in this is several-fold. First, if any one section has actual rust holes, you can be certain that the other sections are far from pristine and are likely not far behind in terms of perforation. Second, even if the exhaust was original multi-piece and is held together with clamps, trying to remove a single section is often difficult, as sections that slide over each other become rust-and-heat-welded together over the decades (though I’ve discussed methods for separating them in the earlier articles). Third, even if you can get your hands on a new or good-used separate component (nearly impossible in my case, as I believe that PrimaFlow is long out of business), getting the new section to seal against the old ones can sometimes be maddeningly challenging. All this makes it so, if you have the money, the wise move is to just cut the whole rusty thing off with a Sawzall and install a fresh exhaust.

However (you knew there was a however, didn’t you?), one of my mantras is that with 13 cars, none of them get everything they need, and I make no apologies for my New England thriftiness. Original equipment exhausts for the lovely E9 coupe are no longer available. Aftermarket stainless exhausts are available from a few vendors, but they cost several thousand dollars. So, I did what I’ve done on a few other cars—I bought a section of stove pipe, cut it to fit, and band-clamped it in place to encase the entire muffler.

That left the regular pre-inspection wipers/lights/horn checkup. As expected, I needed to do some terminal-bending to get the taillights to stay on. The wipers moved across the windshield with all the speed of a 15-year-old dog being rousted off the sofa, but they worked. And the horn …

I said the horn …

Oh dear.

Over the decades, I’ve found horn issues to be quite common on my vintage cars. Fortunately, they’re usually straightforward to troubleshoot. Horn-doesn’t-honk problems can be caused by the horn itself going bad, the switch or its related contacts in the steering wheel not working, the relay that actually energizes the horn failing, or a wiring issue. I’d say that the order in which I listed them above roughly corresponds to their likelihood, but to troubleshoot a horn, you need to have some understanding of relays.

More information can be found in the first in a series I wrote on relays, but here are the basics. A relay is nothing more than a switch whose contacts are pulled together by an electromagnet. Standard terminal numbers are used on most of the relays installed on cars for the last 40 years. Terminals 86 and 85 are the connections to the electromagnet. Connect one of them to 12V and the other to ground (the polarity isn’t important) and it pulls the relay closed, which then connects terminal 30 to 87, which supplies voltage to whatever you want to turn on. The clicking sound that every relay makes when energized is the sound of the electromagnet pulling the contacts shut.

For a horn, because the horn contact goes through the steering column and you don’t want a twisting 12V contact to accidentally short out to ground, the ground side of the electromagnet in the relay is usually connected to the horn switch, not the positive side.

The horn switch usually has three parts. There’s the pushbutton switch itself that’s usually in the middle of the steering wheel or on the spokes. One side of the switch has a wire connected to it which goes to one of the electromagnet terminals (85 or 86) on the relay. The other side makes contact with ground, which is usually the metal frame of the steering wheel itself since it’s bolted to the well-grounded steering column. But because the switch is mounted on a rotating steering wheel, and because wires that twist 360 degrees are sure to break at some point, most steering wheels on vintage cars employ an arrangement with a circular contact ring and a little sprung plunger that touches it, enabling connection to the relay while the steering wheel is turning. The contact ring may be on the back of the steering wheel, and the sprung plunger may be mounted on the steering column, or it may be vice versa. Note that on modern cars with multi-function steering wheels with radio and cruise control operation, things other than the horn require this kind of a rotating contact, so it’s handled via a more complex “clock spring,” but on a vintage car, it’s almost always a simple ring-and-plunger arrangement.

So, from a relay-centric standpoint:

• Relay terminal 86 (or 85) is fed 12V.
• Relay terminal 85 (or 86) is connected through the horn’s sprung plunger and circular contact ring to the horn switch.
• Relay terminal 30 is fed 12V from the battery.
• Pressing the horn switch connects terminal 85 (or 86) to ground, which energizes the relay’s electromagnet, which pulls the switch closed, which connects 30 to 87, sending voltage to the horn.
• So as long as the horn works and its negative terminal is connected to ground, energizing the relay makes the horn blare.

Now that you can see how the relay factors into the horn’s functionality, you can see that the seat-of-the-pants way to diagnose horn problem is as follows:

• Turn the key to ignition and press the horn button.
• If you can hear the horn relay click each time you hit the horn button, it means that the relay, the horn button and its contacts, and the relay wiring are working, so if the horn doesn’t honk, the problem is with the horn or its wiring.
• But if you don’t hear the horn relay click, then the problem is either in the relay and its wiring, or the horn switch and its contacts.

In the electrical book I wrote for Bentley Publishers, there’s a highly-detailed blow-by-blow description on how to use a multimeter to check each of these steps, but here I’m going to assume that you know how to use a multimeter.

Most horns have a metal diaphragm inside that’s driven by a little contact-and-release electromagnet. Because they’re typically mounted behind the front grilles, horns exposed to a lot of weather, and they do eventually go bad. It’s best to rule them in or out as the culprit. You can easily take a pair of wires with alligator clips at both ends and stretch them from the battery to the horn. If the horn doesn’t blare when wired straight to the battery, clearly it’s bad.

This is not quite as definitive a test, but you can also pull the horn relay out of its socket and use a short piece of jumper wire to connect socket 30 to 87, thus bypassing the relay and powering the horn directly. Note that this is how you would jumper any relay, whether it’s for the horn, high beams, or fuel pump.

As the photos show, I did this with Rene, and the horn instantly blared. This indicated that the problem was either in the switch or the wiring between it and the relay.

So, I inspected the horn switch and its contacts. On a 50-year-old car, it’s not at all unusual for the plastic holding the sprung plunger to crack and the plunger and spring to fall out. Simple visual inspection usually reveals the answer. In my case, in order to see the plunger and contact ring, I needed to pull some of the trim pieces off the steering column, but it clearly revealed that the plunger and contact ring were both fine.

Just to be certain, I set my multimeter to measure resistance, connected it between the back of the plunger and ground, and verified that when I hit the horn button, the resistance between it and ground was essentially zero. So, hitting the button did complete the path from the wire connected to the plunger to ground.

If there was nothing wrong with the horn or the switch, then the problem had to be in the relay or its wiring. The high beam and horn relays on this car are the same. I verified that the high beams worked, then swapped relays. No difference. OK, so it’s not a relay problem, and the horn worked when I jumpered over the relay, so the high-current switch side of the relay (30 and 87) had to be fine. It had to be a problem on the low-current electromagnet side (86 and 85).

I used the multimeter and verified that relay socket terminal 85 had voltage on it.

This meant that the problem had to be that socket 86—the ground side of the electromagnet—wasn’t being grounded when the horn button was hit. I set the multimeter to measure resistance, connected it between terminal 86 and battery negative, and held in the horn button. Instead of the meter reading essentially zero resistance, it read infinite resistance, indicating that 86 was indeed not being grounded when the horn was hit.

Gotcha.

This is the part where most mechanics will say that they need a wiring diagram—that they need to see schematically how the horn button is connected to relay pin 86 and know what color the wire is. It is part of my Hack Mechanic creed—my internal wiring, if you will—that most of the time, a wiring diagram isn’t necessary for this sort of thing, because as long as things like moving doors or trunk lids aren’t an issue, it’s comparatively rare for wires to mysteriously break somewhere in the middle. It’s my experience that most of these mysteries can be solved by simply looking at the ends of the circuit. Most of the time, a metal terminal has pushed its way out of a 50-year-old plastic connector, or the terminal is hopelessly corroded, or the wire has broken off the end of the terminal.

I looked at the fragile plastic socket from the top and didn’t see either of the first two issues. This meant that I needed to slide it out and look at the underside. I unclamped the battery to create room to carefully slide it forward. My eyes bulged out at what I saw underneath—the brown wire connected to the underside of terminal 86 was held in place with electrical tape.

And, better yet, when I tugged the brown wire, it slid out of the tape. I unwrapped the tape and found that the wires had just been twisted together; there was no crimp or solder holding them. No wonder the horn stopped working.

Having owned Rene since 1986—I was a 28-year-old kid when I bought it—there are certain, ahem, things I’ve done to the car in the name of expediency, saving money (*cough-stovepipe-wrapped-muffler-cough*), or youthful stupidity. The license plate lights, for example, are spliced into the taillights using speaker wire and twist-on wire nuts. Hey, it was 1988, the car had just been painted, the guy who did it didn’t hook up the plate lights correctly, I couldn’t figure out why, I needed to get it inspected, and they’ve worked fine ever since. That I remember. But I have zero—I mean ZERO—memory of cutting the ground wire to the horn relay socket. It’s odd to blame a previous owner on a car you’ve owned for 37 years, but it’s what I got.

I temporarily twisted the wires together, put the relay back in, verified that the horn gleefully tooted when I hit the button, then installed the kind of butt-splice connector that, when heated with a heat gun, melts a glob of solder and heat-shrinks the tubing to create a weathertight seal.

And, with that, I got Rene inspected. Here’s hoping there’s still time in this spectacular New England fall to drive her before all the leaves are gone.

***

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

The post Inspection Woes: Troubleshooting a non-working horn appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I write a lot about the joys and pains of owning vintage cars. Much of my content revolves around a) doing preventive maintenance so you can live the dream and road-trip the cars, and b) putting the cars away for the winter and pulling them out in the spring.

But there is another way to use a vintage car.

Daily drive it.

Wait, what?

Before you start lobbing tomatoes at me, let me be clear about two things. First, I believe that while it is your car and you are free to do anything you want with it, there are certain bounds of propriety that you should accept if you want to be a responsible member of the vintage car world and not look like a spoiled brat with a trust fund. If you live in a location, like my beloved state of Massachusetts, where at the first snowflake they lay down so much salt that you can hear the bridge decks rusting, it is jarring to even think of someone taking a rust-prone classic like a Jaguar XKE or a vintage 911 and doing donuts in the parking lot with it. And it’s downright heartbreaking to hear of someone daily driving such a car in salty slush.

There are limits, and when exceeded they get you reported to the oft-whispered-about Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vintage Cars (SFTPOCTVC). They have British Racing Green helicopters. You don’t want to know what the penalties are.

Second, if you insure your car with a specialty insurance provider, there are restrictions on your policy that essentially require that you don’t daily drive it—for instance, Hagerty requires that all household members with a valid driver’s license have a regular-use vehicle for daily driving and maintain regular-use insurance in their own names. The idea is that if you own and insure a daily driver, you’re likely to also drive it, which means you’re not driving your classic every day. (If you have any questions about what your policy entails, call your provider and speak with a representative.)

But let’s assume for the moment that there are no insurance limitations or weather concerns. You love your car, and driving it gives you great pleasure. Why wouldn’t you daily it if you could?

Or maybe I should phrase it in a less value-loaded way: Would you daily-drive your collector car if you could?

Let me start with a story. About 15 years ago, I had a 1973 BMW 2002tii (similar to the one that I sold for my friend Mike on Bring a Trailer) that I’d just finished sorting out. I had it on eBay, and a local fellow came to check it out. He said he’d craved one of these cars for decades. He looked at it, drove it, loved it, and literally pulled out a checkbook and began writing me a check for my asking price.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“Beacon Hill” (a classic old downtown Boston neighborhood).

“Boy,” I said, “renting garage space down there must be pricey.”

“I don’t have a garage.”

“So where would you park it?”

“On the street.” I was stunned.

“You don’t even have off-street parking for your other car?”

“This would be my only car.”

“We need to talk.”

I explained that if he took an old rust-prone car like this with its small ornamental bracelet-like bumpers and parked it on the street in downtown Boston, in nine months it would be unrecognizable due to bumper bashes, weather, and likely vandalism, and that the best thing I could do was not take his money and force him to think about what he was proposing.

He wasn’t happy. The guy was a surgeon and was not used to being talked to like this. He yelled at me, saying, “Who the hell do you think you are not to take my money?” I calmly held my ground.

In the morning, he called me. To my surprise, he thanked me for forcing him to think things through. He realized that he wasn’t only looking to buy a vintage car—he needed to buy a support structure for a vintage car.

Now, OK. That’s an extreme case. You’re not like that. You’re likely Hagerty client who already owns a vintage, or classic, or valuable car and understands about the larger support structure and the myriad of issues of caring for the car.

So, given that, would you daily drive the car if you could? Do you even want to?

It’s an interesting question, n’est pas?

I first insured a car with Hagerty nearly 20 years ago. It was the 1973 BMW 3.0CSi that I’ve owned since 1986. Since it has a Karmann-built body, and since the essential must-know automotive joke is that Karmann invented rust, then licensed the process to the Italians, it goes without saying that the car never sees snow or salted roads, as you can hear it scream like the demons in Constantine when holy water is mixed in with the sprinkler system. But for decades, whenever the weather was amenable, I commuted to work in the car the five miles each way on local roads. Stopping myself from doing so when the car went on the Hagerty policy took some adjustment, but it was the right thing to do. The policy for the guaranteed value of $14,000 cost me something like $120/year, which was about 1/5 of what I was paying for conventional insurance. Obviously, both the guaranteed value and the premium have increased since then.

Not entirely coincidentally, around this time, I bought my 1982 Porsche 911SC. Knocking down the premium on the 3.0CSi by putting it on the Hagerty policy was one of the things that enabled the purchase of the Porsche. I daily-drove the bejesus out of it, which certainly took the sting out of the restricted use of the 3.0CSi. At the time, Massachusetts had insurance laws that allowed a Hagerty-type policy only on cars that were at least 25 years old, so the SC remained insured conventionally for years.

History rapidly repeated itself when, in 2007, I happened into a decently priced 1999 BMW M Coupe (a.k.a. “the clownshoe”). The 911SC had just turned 25 years old and thus qualified to go on the Hagerty policy. It and the 3.0CSi officially became weekend cars, and the M Coupe became the fun daily driver. At some point, Massachusetts insurance rules changed, allowing me to put the M Coupe on the Hagerty policy as well.

I mention these three cars to make the point that I had been daily driving them before I elected to take the trade-off of increased coverage (and, in my case, lower premiums) for restricted use.

Now, in truth … yeah. You got me. I wasn’t really daily driving these cars, in the sense that they were my only car. I always (well, almost always, and we’ll get to that) had a dedicated daily. Even during non-winter seasons, I take pains to keep the rust-prone cars out of the rain, and obviously they’re only brought out in the winter if there’s a long-enough snowless stretch and a good-enough hard rain to wash the salt off and ensure that a winter drive isn’t utter SFTPOCTVC-taunting folly.

Taking a step back, let me pose a counterpoint to my own question. There are certainly very good reasons why you might not want to daily drive your classic even if there weren’t insurance or rust issues. It might be not wanting to put miles on a low-reading odometer. Or you might be concerned about scratching the beautiful paint or dinging the restored body. Or, if you have a decently long highway commute, the reliability issues of an old car might be a primary concern, or the wind noise from the old door seals might be fatiguing. Or the car’s climate control system might be inadequate for your location’s heat and cold. Or you might have been caught in the rain in the car once and found how stress-inducing vintage cars can be in even short heavy downpours, with their uneven braking and wipers running at the speed of a 90-year-old man picking up his mail. Or it might be as simple and understandable as liking pecan pie for Thanksgiving desert but not wanting to eat it every morning and evening. Or enjoying a short visit with your aunt Minnie but not wanting her to move in with you. Nothing wrong with any of that.

I daily drove BMW 2002s from 1982 through ’88, then moved onto whatever needy affordable BMW 3 or 5 Series sedan I could find. From 2008 through ’16, I drove BMW wagons—first an E39 1999 528iT that broke all the time, then a more-robust 2001 E46 325XiT. When the 325 wagon was beginning to get needy, and a friend of mine offered to buy it, I took him up on it. I certainly had other cars to drive—in addition to the Hagerty cars, I had a ratty 2000 Suburban that came on and off the road depending on whether I needed to use it, and my Z3 roadster wasn’t yet on my Hagerty policy—but I unexpectedly found myself without a dedicated daily driver.

Then I stumbled onto a ’74 2002tii for a good price. Suddenly I had the chance to wind the clock back to the 1980s and daily-drive a BMW 2002 again. The guy who’d owned it for 30 years drove it to one of the lawn events at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Massachusetts, with a “For Sale” sign on it. After chatting with him for a bit, he asked my advice on how to price the car. A few days later I went to his house and examined it thoroughly. Both of the rear shock towers had rust that was concerning but not unsafe, the exterior had a few rust blisters, and the car immediately needed a few minor repairs, but in general it looked good and drove well.

I said something like, “In better condition, it would be worth $Z. If you did this and that to it, it would be worth $Y. But to someone like me, as-is, it’s worth closer to $X.”

“I’m not afraid of $X,” he said.

“Just to be clear,” I said, “I’m not offering you $X.”

I paused.

“But if I WERE offering you $X …”

After a brief negotiation, I wound up with the car, which came with the name “Otto.” After I fixed a few things, I found that, to my surprise, it was one of the most solid-feeling, low-thunk, low-rattle 2002s I’d ever owned.

At the time, I had another 2002, a rust-free, small-bumpered, round-taillight ’72 2002tii that was easily worth four times what I’d paid for Otto. The chrome-bumpered cars are much trimmer and prettier than the ’74 and later cars with the big federally mandated 5-mph bumpers, which on a 2002 have all the delicacy of a tugboat. However, the small bumpers will crumple instantly if they’re nudged, whereas the big bumpers generally will withstand not only parking bumper-to-bumper taps, but also people texting at red lights and rolling into you.

I’d recently left my 30-year engineering job and began working full-time at Bentley Publishers in Cambridge. It was slightly farther from my house, maybe eight miles each way instead of five, but still an easy commute along local roads. Something about the combination of having just become a full-time automotive writer, selling the wagon, and buying this unexpected big-bumpered driver-quality 2002tii made me think … DAILY DRIVER!

So, instead of adding Otto to my Hagerty policy, I treated myself and put the car on my regular policy and began daily-driving it to work. To increase my comfort, I transferred the pair of Konig (Recaro-style) seats from my other 2002 into the car.

I had an absolutely delightful four months with Otto. I drove it into Cambridge nearly every day. I didn’t scan the rear-view mirror in terror while sitting at stop lights as I do in the small-bumpered cars (and yes, people rolled into Otto’s bumpers twice). If I had somewhere to go after work, I simply drove the car and parked it, whether that was in a lot or on the street. And, since I had the car conventionally insured, I didn’t need to worry about violating my Hagerty policy. It was liberating.

And, while I don’t own or drive these cars to have people look at me, I have to admit that, from a self-image standpoint, it was kind of cool to be the guy choosing to daily drive a BMW 2002 30 years after that fat part of the curve of the car’s usage profile had passed.

When the snow began to fall, I did pull Otto off the road for the winter (I’m not a Philistine) and daily drove the ratty Suburban for one final season before selling it. That winter, I happened into the 2003 530i stick sport that I still have, the car that’s proven to be the best daily driver I’ve ever owned.

When I prepared Otto for sale the following spring, I performed a routine compression test and found that the car had low compression in one cylinder. A leak-down test revealed that the head was cracked. I knew that Otto’s sale value was going to be capped by the rusty rear shock towers, so pulling off the cracked head, sourcing another head, getting the valve job done, transferring the components, and reassembling the engine ate up any profit I might have had in the car. But I didn’t regret any of it for a moment.

So, should you daily drive your vintage car? Obviously, you need to take into account the value of the car, its fragility, the climate, where you work, and other real-world factors. If you’re serious about it, and the parameters are such that the SFTPOCTVC won’t bust you, and you work out the insurance issues, you might want to give it a test drive before a full-on commitment. Sort of like having pie for breakfast every day for Thanksgiving weekend. Or a week with your aunt Minnie.

Just don’t tell me you’re doing it on Beacon Hill, or I’ll give you the what-for.

***

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

The post Daily driving a classic can be a lot of fun, but should you? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I’ve written repeatedly about “Hampton,” the remarkably original survivor 1973 BMW 2002 that I bought in Bridgehampton, Long Island, from its original owner 3 1/2 years ago. Part of the appeal of the car was that, when I bought it, it had 48,125 documented original miles that aligned with its intact survivor vibe.

Now, 48,000 miles is a funny number. It’s not remotely in the same league as the sub-thousand-mile cars that get bid up to crazy prices on Bring a Trailer. But a BMW 2002 with that mileage is a rare beast. When I bought my ’74 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special nine years ago, it had 24,000 miles on it. That’s not why I bought it, but I did think that the mileage made it something special. I was completely wrong. There appear to be a fair number of Europas, particularly Twin Cam cars, with that kind of mileage on them, because a) They were generally bought as third, not first or even second cars, b) The water pump is integrated with the front timing cover, the seal leaks from sitting, and because of the mid-engine design, the engine has to be removed to rebuild the pump, which is part of the reason behind c) the widely-repeated saying that Lotus stands for “Lots Of Trouble Usually Serious.”

But a BMW 2002 isn’t like that. These cars were bought as primary transportation, owners drove the wheels off them, and they were and continue to be generally quite reliable, making sub-50,000-mile 2002s pretty uncommon. When I bought Hampton in the spring of 2019, it had been sitting in a barn for a decade due to a change in family fortunes. I don’t usually flip cars, but I saw dollar signs. I cleaned it up, sorted it out, put it on Bring a Trailer, and was surprised when it didn’t meet a reasonable reserve. I think the main reason why was that although folks say that they love original survivor cars (“It’s only original once,” and all that), BaT’s click-and-bid-bid-bid machinery is more hospitable to eye-candy cars with powder-coated subframes and dry-ice-blasted engine compartments, neither of which Hampton has. I wasn’t planning on keeping the car, but when it didn’t sell, that seemed to be my lot, at least for a while.

During this unexpected second act of the play of ownership, I’ve been very conscious not to rack up the mileage. Virtually all the 800-ish miles I put on the car was running it back and forth to the warehouse in central Massachusetts where I rent space. I never really “pleasure-drove” it anywhere. While some component of that was that the nearly-bone-stock Hampton doesn’t have the snap of my fuel-injected 2002tii or my other 2002, with its high-compression twin-Webered-and-cammed engine, the bigger reason was that I was adamant about not rolling it over to 49,000 miles (“le petit rollover”), much less 50,000 (“le grande rollover”).

However, over the past few months, there was a shift in my thinking. First, the idea of hoarding mileage—owning a car and not driving it because of worry that that will affect its value—is antithetical to everything that I do. The value of Hampton will be increased by a) detailing the engine compartment and undercarriage (the latter of which will likely never happen), b) wire-brushing, treating, and repainting the little bit of seam rust on the hood and the door bottoms, c) having paintless dent removal performed on the little dings, and d) the passage of time. I now realize that zeroing in myopically on the mileage and saying the car be worth $Y with 49,000 on it but only $X with 51,000 is just plain silly.

Second, even though the other 2002s, the Lotus, the BMW M Coupe, and other cars are well-ahead of it in the pleasure-driving queue, Hampton is the prettiest 2002 I own, and its survivor vibe gets under your skin. The original paint and bone-stock interior are often conversation pieces. I had a guy chat me up recently outside a liquor store and ask if he could smell the car’s interior. Rather than look at him askance, I understood the request completely. The horsehair padding (“Gummihair,” as the Germans called it) of the seats has a very characteristic smell. He opened the door, stuck his head in, inhaled deeply, and smiled. “That is exactly how a BMW 2002 is supposed to smell,” he said. He was right.

And so I began to use the car more. After identifying and fixing a long-standing hard-starting problem, I focused on another carburetor issue, that of lean-running. Using a portable exhaust gas analyzer I bought 40 years ago in a pawn shop in Austin, I verified my suspicion that the car’s hesitation at even throttle and numbness on modest acceleration was indeed accompanied by the meter on the gas analyzer swinging well into the lean zone. I ordered an assortment of idle and main jets, and with a little tweaking, was able to a) get the needle on the gas analyzer to sit much closer to the middle, b) the hesitation to go away, and c) the car to wake up when I squeezed the throttle.

But while iteratively doing that, I was running the car a few exits up and down I-95 and put another hundred or so miles on it. As I homed in on the final jetting, I didn’t cringe as the odometer did le petit rollover to 49,000 miles. Instead, I smiled at the fact that I’d largely let go of the “I shouldn’t be driving it” issue and was actually performing useful tuning that would increase my driving enjoyment.

Since my usage of the car was increasing, I installed a spare Recaro-like Konig driver’s seat I had in the basement. While I absolutely love the look of BMW’s 1970s seat pleating, the big wide, flat horsehair-padded seats are uncomfortable for anything other than short drives, and with my back injury in August, I need all the lumbar support I can get. Plus, for enthusiastic driving, the bolstered seat held me in place much better. Not that I was sliding the car around entrance ramps. That would be pleasure driving (haha).

I was so pleased with this shift in tone and purpose that I decided that Hampton deserved something of a coming-out party. After all, even close friends of mine in the vintage BMW world had never seen the car. One good friend joked that the car was an urban myth. So, I took it to “BMW Day” at the nearby Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, Massachusetts. There were any number of cool cars there, including a survivor 1935 315/1 roadster, so it’s not like Hampton was the belle of the ball. But enough of my local 2002 friends laid eyes on it to retire the “urban myth” joke.

In fact, it got the gears turning in my brain to something bigger:

Road trip!

The following weekend, my wife, Maire Anne, and I were planning to drive up and see some close friends in Manchester, Vermont, one of whom is a former bandmate who had asked me to sit in with his band in a gig they had during Columbus Day / Indigenous People’s Weekend outside the Orvis building. Road trips in smelly, old,  vintage cars aren’t really my wife’s thing, so I was planning on taking my smooth and quiet 2003 BMW 530i. Plus, rain was forecast, and as much as I love pounding out big miles in the vintage cars, driving them in drenching rain is stress-inducing to the driver and rust-inducing to the car.

However, the morning we were planning to leave, I looked at the weather radar, and it showed that the precipitation bands were predicted to head well north of our destination, so any rain was likely to be episodic rather than drenching. I ran the smelly-old-vintage-car question past my better half, and she signed off on it, so into the trunk went the Tech21 guitar amp, and onto the back seat went the Peavey T-60 and the Taylor GS guitars. The projected 150-ish-mile trip was a Goldilocks-just-right distance, as I felt comfortable bringing a toolbox and a few reasonable spares (fuel pump, distributor cap, plugs and points, fan belt) but eschewing the floor jack, two gallons of antifreeze, timing light, and more that I’d take on a real road trip.

We had a picture-perfect drive up through fabulous foliage. The windows were down and the sunroof open for most of it. As we approached Manchester, we could see the storm center hovering ominously off to the northeast, but although the temperature dropped about 15 degrees, there was absolutely zero rain.

The only problem we had on the trip was that my supposed hard-starting fix last month wasn’t the magic bullet I thought it was. With the colder overnight temperatures, the car had trouble starting in the morning. Adjusting the automatic choke so it rotated hard closed didn’t fix it. Then the problem started happening even when the engine was warm. Fortunately, I brought a battery jump pack just in case I ran the battery down and needed to self-jump, which I did. Curiously, starting with a fully open throttle turned out to be the magic trick. I’m still not sure what the cause of the problem is. But all in all, it was no more than a minor annoyance.

One of the reasons BMW 2002s had a cult following when they were new is that they were small sports sedans that did a lot of things well. They were stout, had an acceptable amount of power, could seat four, had a real trunk, and were almost criminally smile-inducing on a curvy road. All of that is still true. Further, while there’s no pretending that you’re not in a 50-year-old car in terms of wind noise, the car’s two-liter engine, snickety four-speed gearbox, front disc brakes, McPherson strut front suspension, and fully independent rear suspension still make the 2002 a joy to drive. That can’t be said of all vintage cars. I may have missed the extra power and the wonderful wind-up of the 2002tii when I wanted to squeeze the accelerator to keep pace with traffic up a hill, or the roar of the dual Webers and the hot cam when I wanted to mash and pass, but what Hampton lacked in snap, it more than made up for in panache.

In addition, not only were Maire Anne and I happy road-tripping the perky little 2002, Hampton seemed happy. Before the car was put in storage in 2009, it had been a summer car in the Hamptons, used only to tool around between a vacation home and the beach. This was probably its first road trip in over 20 years. Deciding to drive the car, to use it as intended instead of hoarding its mileage like virginity in a 19th century British novel or vintage scotch seemed to lift a pall that had descended upon it after it didn’t sell on BaT and I stuffed it away.

The roughly 310-mile round-trip ticked the mileage up to 49,365. I can’t say that I’m going to start planning road trips in the car to Nome or Seattle or even Asheville. It still is likely this car is sojourning with me rather than a long-term soulmate. And I have other cars, and they all get their turn. But that’s the point—Hampton is now getting its turn with the rest, and I will now use the car for what I want instead of feeling like keeping the mileage down is the single most important thing.

After all, when le grande rollover happens, the car and I should be livin’ the dream on some road trip, not running cardboard boxes down to the recycling depot. Or getting an inspection sticker. Or tweaking the jetting on I-95.

***

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

The post The low-mileage car gets a road trip appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A few weeks back, I wrote about the alternator dying in the Winnebago Rialta (the little 1996 Volkswagen Eurovan-based RV my wife and I use for short beach stays). Normally I would’ve done exactly what I did earlier in the summer when the alternator died in my daily-driver 2003 BMW 530i—make sure the bearings aren’t crunchy, then simply replace the voltage regulator, which is a part that usually just screws onto the back of the alternator and can often be swapped with the alternator still in the car.

However, I’d already sussed all this out several years ago when the alternator first began showing signs of not charging the battery unless the RPMs were up. On the Eurovan, the voltage regulator is behind a cover on the back of the alternator that’s so close to a plastic coolant neck on the engine that there’s no way to get the cover off without removing the alternator. I didn’t know this, and when I tried pulling the cover in situ years back, I leaned the cover against the plastic coolant neck and was horrified when the neck began to drip coolant. Fortunately, it seemed to stop on its own accord. I figured that it was probably weeping from the rubber o-ring beneath the neck, but of course it could be a crack in the plastic part. Since we had a trip scheduled in a few days, I ordered the o-ring and the plastic coolant neck—a $5 Dorman part on Amazon—as well as its companion plastic part a few inches lower, a $5 Üro Parts plastic thermostat housing to have as spares in case something went sideways on the road, which it didn’t.

Fast-forward four years. I’m nursing a back injury that happened, coincidentally, during one of the trips in the RV in August. The RV is not an easy vehicle to work on, and shoving the big floor jack and the metal plates around to jack it up safely on my asphalt driveway was sure to anger up my back. Fortunately, there was just enough room to skooch my torso under it. Breaking it up into a series of 15-minute wrenching sessions, I managed to drop the A/C compressor, then pull out the dead alternator.

Unfortunately, the idea of just slapping a new regulator on it vanished when spinning the alternator revealed noisy bearings. And taking it to a local auto electrical rebuilder didn’t seem like a great idea either, as the alternator had no stamps or markings on it whatsoever, making it likely that it was some cheap Chinese-made clone. Reading on the Rialta forum, I learned that my Rialta is supposed to have an up-rated 120-amp Bosch alternator to keep the coach batteries charged while driving, but many repair shops don’t know that and throw in a 90-amp Eurovan alternator instead. Although Bosch-rebuilt alternators don’t have a great reputation, I ordered one from FCP Euro to take advantage of their lifetime warranty. When the alternator arrived, I planned to install it in the same back-friendly piecemeal sessions I used to remove it.

But then I remembered the weeping cooling system. I examined the underside of the engine and found coolant weeps coming from three places. The first was just a trace oozing down from the spot I’d noticed years back on the upper coolant flange when I tried to remove the back cover of the alternator. The second was a similar weep from the plastic thermostat cover. The third was more of an actual drip from a sensor/switch integrated into the lower radiator hose.

The last of these—the switch in the hose—is an easily-accessible location, so I elected to simply replace its o-ring, since if I was wrong and the switch itself was leaking, there was no it’ll never-be-easier-than-it-is-now dynamic. However, the upper plastic neck is virtually inaccessible with the alternator installed. The thermostat cover is easier to get at with the compressor removed, but it’s still accessible. Normally I wouldn’t be installing Dorman / Üro Parts components, but I had already bought them as road spares four years ago, and I figured they had to be better than the 26-year-old original plastic parts.

And now comes the slippery slope. A 1996 Eurovan is far from a new car, but the construction of its cooling system is still quite modern, and I don’t really mean that in a good way.

Vintage cars have simple cooling systems. There are typically five hoses—upper radiator, lower radiator, thermostat/water pump, and two heater hoses. Maybe there’s a sixth for pre-heating the intake manifold. The components—radiator, coolant necks, expansion tank—are metal. There are no coolant sensors or switches, just a single temperature sensor connected to the gauge. It’s neither difficult nor terribly expensive to renew an entire cooling system if that’s what you feel you need to do to help ensure reliability. Radiator, hoses, water pump, thermostat, renewing the mechanical belt-driven cooling fan if you want to be thorough, done.

In contrast, on a modern car, there’s an explosion of hoses, a variety of sensors and switches, plastic coolant pipes or necks, electric cooling fans, the sensors, switches, and relays that control them, and frequently an auxiliary electric water pump to circulate coolant after the car is shut off. I have a particular loathing for these bolt-on plastic coolant necks, as I once had one snap on a BMW 318ti with only 42,000 miles on it and dump all its coolant. In addition, the five-cylinder engine in my Rialta has its water pump behind a not-easily-accessible cover, driven by a toothed belt. It’s very expensive to replace everything in the cooling system, and while it’s probably not necessary if you’re just trying to stanch a few small drips, it’s hard to know where to draw the line.

Over and over, I say that if I had to choose one word to describe myself, it’s pragmatic. I asked myself, “What’s the goal of this cooling system work? Is it to drive the RV up to Fairbanks in the winter and Yuma in the summer? Nope. Or is it instead it to be able to use it for maybe one more beach trip in the fall and not leave it in compromised condition over the winter? Yup.” Right then—so no full-on cooling system assault. If a part is leaking or obviously worn, replace it. If it involves a 26-year-old plastic coolant neck that might snap, replace it. If there’s an it’ll never-be-easier-than-now issue with a component, respect it. But other than that, don’t do more than necessary.

So, with that approach established, I ordered a few things. The Rialta has always run a bit hotter than I’d like, even in temperate weather, and the cooling system warning light (which is both a low-coolant warning and a high-temperature warning) comes on shortly after starting the engine, even though I’ve never found anything wrong. There are two coolant sensors—one for the dashboard gauge, the other for the ECU—that plug into the upper coolant neck. Like the neck, they’re difficult to reach with the alternator installed. They were inexpensive on RockAuto, so I bought them. I also ordered a new thermostat to go inside the new plastic thermostat cover. I selected one with a slightly lower opening temperature than the original thermostat.

When the parts arrived, I test-fit the new thermostat in the Üro Parts cover and immediately found an issue. Unlike the old cover, the new cover had a pair of prongs, presumably to hold the thermostat in position. But in addition, the cover didn’t seem to be deep enough—the back of the thermostat appeared to hit it. I tried the original Wahler thermostat that was in the car, and the clearance problem was so bad that I couldn’t see how the o-ring between the thermostat and the cover could seal.

Well, I said to myself, this is what I get for buying Üro Parts components. I sat down at the computer and searched for a genuine OE thermostat cover and learned that they are no longer available from Volkswagen. All of the covers from my usual parts sources appeared to be Üro Parts, Dorman, or other Chinese sources.

Then I looked on the website of a vendor for Eurovan parts in California that I use when I need expertise and I’m not shopping exclusively on price. It showed Meyle versions of both the upper coolant neck and the thermostat housing. Meyle is a generally well-regarded German aftermarket parts supplier. The cost was four times what I’d paid for the Dorman / Üro parts from RockAuto, but I figured the peace of mind would be worth it. I clicked and bought.

When the parts arrived and I unboxed them, I was disappointed. The upper neck came in a Febi box and was stamped Febi, not Meyle. That was OK, as I also regard Febi as a reputable manufacturer, but the thermostat housing was unboxed and had the logo scratched off. That in and of itself is also OK, as often the only difference between a dealer-purchased Original Equipment (OE) part and an Original Equipment Manufacture (OEM) part is that the OEM part says, for example, “Meyle” but has the VW logo scratched off. However, other than the scratched-off logo, the thermostat housing looked exactly like the Üro Parts one I already had, right down to the casting marks. And more to the point, it had the same clearance issue with the thermostat not fully seating.

I emailed the vendor describing this, and to his credit, he immediately refunded me for the thermostat housing, saying he’d bought them as “OEM-neutralized” and apologized that they clearly weren’t OEM. However, he said that he also sells the Üro Part thermostat housing and didn’t understand my clearance issue because he’d never had a complaint about the part.

Thinking that I must be missing something, I took another careful look at the fitment of the thermostat. I realized that what I thought was the thermostat hitting the back of the housing was in fact it touching the tops of the prongs in a very particular way—the prongs were pressing against the top of the inner thermostat plate. I theorized that this was probably by design to hold the thermostat partially open to help air bleed out during filling, as the plate would move when the housing was tightened down onto the o-ring.

So, with that newfound knowledge, I took the new Üro Parts housing and o-ring and the new, slightly cooler, aftermarket thermostat and installed them in the car. The original Wahler thermostat came with a small hole and a little ball check valve on it to aid in bleeding. Despite the pronged design of the new housing, I drilled a small hole in the new thermostat to be sure it would bleed. I also installed the new Febi coolant neck with the two new coolant sensors and o-rings.

I tightened everything down, filled the system with coolant, started the engine, bled the air out, and checked for leaks. I didn’t see any, but I did notice that the prongs on two of the non-worm-gear constant-tension-style clamps were poking directly into the hose beneath them. I squeezed the clamps and rotated them 90 degrees to remove the interference, and when I did, one of the hoses began dripping and wouldn’t stop no matter how I repositioned the clamp. I’ve had this once-removed-and-it-won’t-reseal problem with the coolant hoses with integrated plastic ends and internal o-rings that snap-fit onto plastic necks in my BMW, but this was different. I had no choice but to drain the coolant, clean the inside of the hose, and apply a thin coating of Permatex Aviation Form-A-Gasket. Well, of course, I did have a choice—I could’ve installed a worm-gear clamp, or I could’ve gone down the slippery slope of replacing more components. But this worked.

OK, all buttoned up. Let’s just heat it up to operating temperature, then run it around the block. I was more than a little bit alarmed when, just idling in my driveway, the temperature gauge headed straight for the top.

I crawled under the car and felt the hose coming from the thermostat, and it was cold. This is the classic symptom of a thermostat that isn’t opening. However, I’ve been fooled by this before, as it can also be a temperature gauge that’s malfunctioning and an engine that hasn’t been run long enough for the thermostat to open. And, after all, I had just replaced the sensor that feeds the gauge. Since replacing either the thermostat or the temperature sensor both required dumping the coolant (again), and since the thermostat was easier to reach, and since this was a new untested thermostat with this odd clearance issue, I elected to swap the thermostat out for the original one. I pulled the new thermostat and tested both it and the original one in boiling water. They both opened about when they were supposed to. Nonetheless, I put the original ’stat back in (still using the Üro Parts cover) and refilled the system. I can’t explain why, but it worked fine, creating a nice, hot, lower radiator hose. Maybe I hadn’t fully bled the air out the first time.

Unfortunately, the temperature gauge still rapidly pegged.

Then I noticed that neither the electric cooling fans nor the electric run-on water pump were coming on. I trouble-shot the two-speed fans, jumpering the connector on the temperature sensor that screws into the side of the radiator. The high speed came on, but the low speed did not. A-ha! It turned out that a splice I’d put in the wire four years ago to connect a switch to manually turn on the fans had come loose.

Unfortunately, even with the fan wired correctly, the temperature gauge still pegged, and the fan still didn’t come on. However, from a seat-of-the-pants standpoint, the engine didn’t seem all that hot. Did I really have a problem, or was the temperature gauge far off?

There’s a saying: If you’re going to shoot the messenger, you’d better make damn sure he’s full of crap. OK. It’s my saying. But it’s the truth. I don’t lightly ignore a temperature gauge. I needed independent confirmation of the actual cooling system temperature.

So I pulled out the infrared temperature gun. I don’t regard these as the panacea that other folks do, as they’re very sensitive to what they’re aimed at, and unless you have a baseline that correlates their readings with that of a properly functioning temperature gauge, it’s dangerous to rely on them. However, everywhere I aimed the IR gun, the temperature read under 180 °F. So I let the engine run a bit longer. The fan came on in the 169- to 192-degree range that it’s supposed to. Conclusion: Something is clearly amiss with one of the new senders, or there’s another more subtle long-standing problem with the gauge, the warning light, and the electronics that drive them.

So, I’ve stopped it from leaking and made it drivable again, but the gauge-accuracy issue is worse. When I’m not so back-hobbled, I’ll try putting the original coolant temp sensors back in. Either that or cut a hole in the hood so I can lean out the window and shine the IR temperature gun in there while I’m driving.

Ah, the never-ending joys of vehicles that are too new to be simple and too old to simply work properly.

***

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

The post The slippery slope of cooling system repair appeared first on Hagerty Media.

As some of you know, I have a 2008 Chevy 3500HD dually with the Duramax diesel and a utility body on the back. It was owned by the company at which I spent my 30+ year geophysics career. It was purchased new, and we used it to tow a 32-foot trailer loaded with purpose-built geophysical surveying equipment designed to find unexploded ordnance (dud bombs) on old military training ranges.

I’m no truck driver, but someone needed to drive the rig to job sites, and since I needed to be there anyway, a trucker friend taught me just enough about backing up a trailer that I became competent enough to drive it, as long as I didn’t need to do one of those back-up-and-block-traffic-and-nail-the-loading-dock-perfectly-on-the-first-try maneuvers that pros do.

But by 2013, most of the geophysics work had dried up. The company closed the building I worked in, and the remnants of my team scrambled to find small inexpensive industrial space. The truck had a short second life towing a boat that the company had for another geophysics project, but after that, the truck, with only 28,000 miles on it, largely sat.

In 2015, I left my full-time job there and became the writer that I remain, but until this year I maintained a consulting agreement with the company. In an unofficial favor-with-benefits arrangement, I kept the truck inspected and registered on the company’s behalf and, yes, occasionally used it to tow cars under the auspices of “keeping the equipment exercised.” A few years ago, when it was clear that the geophysics work was completely dead, I made them a low offer for the truck, trailer, and equipment. Initially they said “yes,” but reneged when they found that the truck was still on a corporate depreciation schedule.

Last year, the company abruptly closed the small industrial space and liquidated everything inside. The truck and trailer were kept in a paid storage lot a few miles away and thus were spared the liquidating axe, but the company didn’t really know what to do with them (or, for that matter, even what they were and how they were originally used). And by then, years of outdoor storage had taken a brutal toll on the truck, as mice had gotten in, and the thing smelled like an abandoned slaughterhouse. I photographed the damage, which included brown fluid literally dripping out of the headliner and sent it to my former employer with an almost criminally low offer and a note saying, “You should’ve sold it to me when it was worth something. Now it’s not. Take it or leave it.” It took them a few months, but they accepted the offer.

So, last spring, for the cost of a 20-year-old rusty Suburban, I officially became the owner of a Duramax diesel with only 28,000 miles on it.

Job One was, obviously, to de-mouse the thing, whose smell would’ve gagged a maggot. About a year ago, I wrote a series of articles about “the mouse-infested truck” (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). By replacing the headliner and drilling a hole in the heater box to remove the mouse nest and bodies (I was unwilling to go to the level of effort required to pull the box), I knocked the smell down to a very tolerable level so I could drive it, although I was smart enough to never ask my wife to ride with me. I replaced the dry-rotted tires and changed the oil and the fuel filter, but with the car’s mileage still under 29K, it didn’t seem to need anything else.

Owning 13 cars, even with five cars stored in rented warehouse space on the Massachusetts-Connecticut border, my driveway gets congested. When I bought another BMW 2002 last spring that clicked the total vehicle count up to 14, I put the word out that I needed a nearby parking space for the truck. A friend responded that he rents five spaces at a dance studio about a half-mile from my house and offered me one of them for $50/month. It was perfect. The truck was just a short walk away. Since I didn’t drive it often, I’d leave it with the batteries disconnected. If I needed to use it, I’d hoof it on over, unlock it, reconnect the batteries, and fire it up.

As it happens, I haven’t used the truck to tow as many cars as I’d expected. I dragged my 49,000-mile BMW 2002 from the old storage space to the new one at the start of last winter. And, when I took delivery of my friend Chris’ 1972 BMW 2002tii, which I just sold for her on Bring a Trailer (“the mitzvah car”), I towed it home rather than risk the hour-long drive on unsorted mechanicals and 14-year-old tires. But that’s been it. With the big Duramax diesel, the Allison six-speed transmission, and the dually wheels, this is a rig that could pull one of those four-car haulers. Using it mainly to run cardboard boxes to the dump, pick up well-priced wheels and Recaro seats, and occasionally help my nieces move between apartments is massive overkill, but hey, they’re called crimes of opportunity for a reason.

But I do enjoy owning it. And it’s been dead-nuts reliable. Unlock the door, unlatch the hood, connect the batteries, twist the key, and go.

That is, until last week.

My wife is an avid quilter and recently bought a large free-motion quilting sewing machine and the table to go with it. She asked if we could use the truck to pick it up (we joke that her goal is to own as many sewing machines as I own cars, and she’s well on her way). I said that that was, of course, fine, but cautioned that her exquisitely sensitive sense of smell would undoubtedly pick up on the truck’s residual rodent aura. She said, good-naturedly, “I’ll bring a mask.” We walked over to where the truck was parked, I hooked up the batteries, turned the key, and the big Duramax snapped to attention. Then, to my surprise, it suddenly died two seconds later and would not start for love nor cranking.

To handle the immediate quilting-related need, the combination of my wife’s Honda Fit hatchback and my BMW E39 530i’s fold-down rear seats moved the sewing machine and the table. When we got back, I examined the truck.

The old-school adage is that starting requires fuel and spark (well, more like fuel, spark, air, compression, and timing). Of course, there’s no spark on a diesel, but a modern diesel has an ECU controlling the injection. Still, the smart bet was that the no-start was a fuel delivery issue. I know very little about diesels in general and the Duramax in particular, but I verified that the fuel filter was tight, then re-primed it and bled the air out with the plunger button on the top. It made no difference.

I really dislike using my phone for troubleshooting; if I’m going to pore over user forums, I’d much rather sit in front of the laptop. Fortunately, with the dead truck so near my house, it was easy to do a little online research, walk or drive to the parking lot of the dance studio, open up the hood, reconnect the batteries, try one thing, then close it up and head back home. I checked for fuel leaks and collapsed fuel lines but didn’t see any. Friends advised that the problem was likely in the electric lift pump, but this vintage Duramax (2008 with the LMM engine) doesn’t have one. I verified that certain ECU fuses weren’t blown and swapped certain relays. None of made a difference. The engine cranked easily but made no attempt whatsoever to start.

The next step was to check for codes. My old Actron OBD-II code reader has, for reasons unclear, never recognized the truck, so I ordered a $25 code reader on Amazon. When it arrived the next day, I reconnected the batteries, plugged in the code reader, cracked the key to ignition, and was presented with a P2510 code.

Anyone who has used an OBD-II code reader knows that codes generally fall into one of two categories—instantly useful and “what the hell does that mean?” In the former category, I’ve found that misfire codes usually pay for the code reader in just one use—if it says “Misfire on cylinder #2,” pull off the false valve cover, swap the coil-on-plugs for cylinders #2 and #3, clear the code, start the engine, and if the code moves to cylinder #3, replace the coil-on-plug, boom, done. On the other hand, the dreaded P0456 (“minor evaporative leak”) code can leave you pulling your hair out if you need to fix the underlying condition and clear it in order to have the vehicle pass inspection. So it depends on what the code is and how clearly it leads to a specific cause and a course of action.

Many of us who are not professionals rely on user forums to crowd-source this kind of diagnostic information. If your vehicle has a problem and is throwing a code, and if 90 percent of the posts on a user forum for the vehicle say “It’s the borfin control valve, I replaced mine and the problem and the code went away” and if said borfin control valve is a $30 part, most of the time throwing $30 at the problem is money well spent. Pros may decry this kind of parts-swapping, but I’ve found that if there’s a clear consensus in the posts, it usually works pretty well.

Unfortunately, when I did a deep dive into the Duramax forums, I learned that the P2150 code is in the “what the hell does that mean” category. Even though the code says “ECM / PCM Power Relay,” the consensus on the forums was that the code very rarely means that there’s a problem in the relay itself, and instead is usually indicative of a chafed power wire, a bad ground, or corrosion inside the fuse box.

Great.

Now, I’d been posting all this on Facebook in near real time. My friend from whom I sublet the parking space saw my reports on the dead truck and sent me a message saying that his lease explicitly forbids working on vehicles in the lot and cautioned against anything but the quickest of hood-up hunch-confirmations. “Heard and understood,” I replied. “No filter or fuel hose replacements, no dismantling the fuse box. Got it.”

Another friend who is a pro saw my post, asked for the truck’s VIN, and ran the code in Identifix, which, like Alldata, is a subscription-based database of troubleshooting information. He sent me the P2510 test plan for the truck. I greatly appreciated it, but reading it made my eyes cross, as the test-plan-ese it’s written in may be easily understandable to certified technicians who are used to reading these things, but I’m more a seat-of-the-pants guy (Yes, I know, it’s ironic that I, who wrote an automotive electrical book, don’t take to test plans and wiring diagrams like a duck to water). I’m all for a systematic diagnostic approach when it’s necessary, but I’ve also seen Alldata-generated approaches not only fail but cause damage—I’ve bought dead cars where someone has clearly gone full Alldata on it and cut open the wiring harness and the rubber boot on the connector feeding the ECU so they could back-probe the pins, when all that turned out to be wrong was that the distributor cap was missing the little spring and carbon nub that’s supposed to make contact with the rotor.

However, I had to admit that since my forum search wasn’t unearthing a definitive “It’s almost always solved by replacing X,” I probably had some systematic troubleshooting in my future.

The test plan said that the P2510 code is due to the “relay responding incorrectly to the ECM command to de-energize.” As I described here, every relay is a little remote-controlled switch that has a low-current control side and a high-current load side. A relay not de-energizing is likely because the high-current side is sticking closed, or because one of the pins on the low-current side is staying energized and the other is staying grounded. I found the relay; the test plan was helpful in identifying the generic OBD-II code description of “ECM / PCM Power Relay” as meaning, on this truck, the relay labeled “PWR / TRN.” I pulled the relay out, tested continuity across the high-current side (pins 30 and 87), found them “normally open” as they should be, and verified that they closed when power and ground were applied to pins 86 and 85 respectively.

The step-by-step part of the test plan says:

1. With the ignition ON, disconnect the PWR/TRN relay and observe with the scan tool for loss of communication. If the scan tool can still communicate with the vehicle, test the IGN 1 voltage circuit supplied by the ECM relay for a short to voltage. If the circuits test normal, replace the ECM.
2. With the ignition OFF, probe the relay control circuit 19 X2 at the underhood electrical center [the fancy name for the fuse box] with a test lamp connected to battery voltage. If the test lamp illuminates test the relay control circuit for a short to ground. If the circuits test normal, replace the ECM.
3. With the ignition ON, probe the relay control circuit 19 X2 at the underhood electrical center with a test lamp connected to a good ground.
4. If the test lamp illuminates, repair the short to voltage.
5. If the test lamp does not illuminate, replace the relay.

I went out to the truck to try these things, but I was stymied by the references to “relay control circuit 19 X2.” It wasn’t until later that I found that the test plan refers to a wiring diagram that has “19 X2” on it. It’s a pin on the ECM connector. When I traced it back on the diagram, I found that 19 X2 connects to relay terminal 86, which is the ground leg of the low-current control side. Why a test plan wouldn’t just say “relay terminal 86” which is right there in front of you—instead of forcing you to find it on a wiring diagram and then trace it back to the relay—is beyond me.

But I didn’t know this at the time, so I gave up. It was clear to me that to do anything more, the truck had to come home where I wouldn’t feel like I was running afoul of the “no work on cars in the lot” rule, and for that to happen, it needed to suffer the indignity of being the tow-ee rather than the tow-er. It was now Friday morning. I thought that I’d wait until the weekend when the place was likely to be empty to call AAA for the tow.

On Saturday morning, I drove to the lot on a reconnaissance mission to verify that it was a good time to arrange for the half-mile tow back to my house. To my surprise, the lot was 2/3 full of cars, and the other 1/3 was taken up by a cordoned-off area with chairs, a PA system, and people in formal attire who were dancing. The dance studio from which the parking space was rented was obviously having some sort of an event. The truck wouldn’t be moving today.

I went back early Sunday morning. The lot was empty of cars, but the cordoned-off area with the chairs was still there. I took the opportunity to do one more thing. I unlocked the truck, connected the batteries, plugged in the code reader, verified that the P2510 code was still there, then cleared it and tried to restart the truck. It still didn’t start, but the code didn’t repost. Hmmmm.

Then, while sitting in the truck, I did something else—I toggled the central locking on the key fob on and then off, then tried to start the truck again. I hadn’t been using the key fob to lock the truck, as a) I was in the habit of disconnecting the batteries and then manually locking the door, and b) I once had left the central locking on, and when I connected the batteries, the alarm went off. But whether it was coincidental or not, this time, the truck immediately started. I drove it straight home.

So, was the whole P2510 thing a red herring? Was it a code that had been sitting in the ECU for months and had nothing to do with the truck’s no-start? Was the root cause something to do with the anti-theft that simply needed to be toggled with the key fob? (It wasn’t as simple as accidentally hitting the lock on the key fob after I’d started the truck. I tried that and it didn’t recreate the problem.) There are many times when I say “don’t know, don’t care,” but here, the last thing I want is to be towing something with the truck and have it die, so I investigated further.

Because a number of posts pointed to the P2510 code and the no-start being caused by a corroded fuse box, and several folks reported that a new $220 fuse box solved their problem, I had a look. From the top, the fuse and relay sockets looked nothing like the fluffy-white-corroded or mouse-damaged examples I saw online, but the fuse box is easy enough to remove, as it’s just a plastic plate with integrated terminal blocks to which a series of big connectors plug into from the bottom.

Other than being a little dusty and seeing a few small moth cocoons inside, the underside of the fuse box looked fine to me, with no corrosion on the terminals.

Perhaps most important, I didn’t see any rodent-gnawing of the wires that led into the connector to which the PWR / TCM relay was plugged.

I put it all back together, started the truck, then tugged at all the sections of the wiring harness to see if I could recreate the problem. I could not make it die.

So, it’s a zombie truck. It died suddenly, it rose from the dead, and I don’t know why. But if it dies again, at least now I can make a better shot at going through the test plan. I’m trying not to be afraid of driving it. After all, there are still dump runs to be made, and Recaro seats to be snagged. And I need to ensure that the number of cars outpaces the number of sewing machines.

***

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

The post I’m not sure how it happened, but my truck is a zombie appeared first on Hagerty Media.

This week, “The Hack Mechanic” answers questions from Hagerty Drivers Club magazine:

Eric Weil writes: I have a ’62 Corvette. As my wife and I age, the standard steering is getting to be too much. I’m considering converting to power steering, but I am uncertain if I should convert to electric power assist or to standard power steering requiring a new power brake cylinder.

Rob Siegel answers: You have three options: 1) Fit a pump and a power-assisted steering box to the original front end; 2) Fit an electric assist to the original front end; or 3) Replace the front end with a power-assisted rack-and-pinion unit. Like many things, it comes down to effort, complexity, cost, and how far you want to move away from originality.

The electric power-steering assist kits are the least invasive, as they use an electric motor mounted in the steering column under the dash and leave the rest of the steering alone. The EPAS Performance kit costs about $1450 but requires cutting your existing steering column. For about $2300, the EZ Electric Power Steering kit comes with its own integrated column, letting you stash your original one. The Steeroids gives you pump-driven power assist and updates the entire steering of the car, replacing the steering box and kingpins with a rack-and-pinion setup, reportedly eliminating the bump steer associated with the original system. At $3500, however, it ain’t cheap.

If you’re satisfied with the way the car steers, the existing steering is in good shape, and you want to make only minimal changes from stock, then I’d go with the electric EZ system. If, however, the front end needs rebuilding anyway, and you want power assist with generally improved steering, check out the Steeroids system.

Jim McDougal writes: I have a problem with the fuel gauge in my ’61 Corvette. For a few years, it read OK when the car was stopped but bounced around between accurate and full when the car was moving. It now always registers full when the ignition is on. I have tried to jumper the gauge ground, but that didn’t work. The sender unit checks out fine. Taking the gauge out is doable but difficult, so any ideas are appreciated.

Rob answers: You say the gauge is no longer bouncing, but a jumpy gauge is a common problem in C1 Corvettes, caused by the use of a shared ground between the tank and the rear lights. The fix is to jumper not the gauge but the sender—to give it its own dedicated ground connected directly to clean metal on the frame. You need to isolate the problem to the gauge, the sender, or the wiring. Check the back of the gauge. The “I” terminal should be receiving 12 volts. The “S” terminal should be connected to the brown wire from the sender, which provides a variable resistance between it and ground. Zero resistance should read empty; 30 ohms or more should read full.

You can test the gauge by disconnecting the brown wire from the “S” terminal and cracking the key. With it disconnected, it should read full. Then connect a jumper wire from the “S” terminal to a perfect ground and crack the key. It should read empty. The problem may simply be that there’s not a good connection between the gauge and the sender, or between the sender and ground.

***

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

The post Corvette Conversions: Steering solutions and fuel gauge fixes appeared first on Hagerty Media.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the second of the two “mitzvah” BMW 2002s that I’m helping sell—the woman’s late husband was the original owner—finally went up on Bring a Trailer. I’ve touched on some of this before, but now that it’s done, I can lay it all out.

When I first saw the car back in June, the owner, Chris, said that her husband Jim, who’d bought the car new back in 1972, had told her as his health was failing, “Don’t sell the baby [the car’s nickname] for less than $60,000.” These days, best-of-the-best nut-and-bolt-restored 2002tiis can reach six figures, so on paper, that number was not out of the question. However, although the nearly rust-free Fjord metallic blue 2002tii was very pretty, Jim was not an open-checkbook-restoration owner, and the shop that did the rust remediation was not a vintage BMW specialist. It was clear to me that that the car’s value was capped well under $60K.

The car had a replacement nose and visibly non-original welds that attached it to the fenders. It had a non-numbers-matching engine (it was a factory replacement; the original engine is still in Chris’s garage). There was the presence of a hard gravel-guard-like undercoating in the engine compartment and under the car, as well as non-original waxy Ziebart-like coating in the trunk. The original front seats had been reupholstered in black when the rest of the interior was Navy. The odometer showed 203,000 miles. Plus, there were some howling but correctible errors, including misrouted fuel lines, and AutoZone battery cables, and indoor/outdoor carpeting instead of proper floor mats. There were some mechanical issues as well. For instance, the brake/clutch reservoir was down to the point where the clutch line runs down to the master cylinder, a sure sign that the clutch hydraulics were leaking. And when I drove the car, the brake pedal travel was way too long, indicating that the rear drum brakes were worn, out of adjustment, or both. Plus, the car’s inspection sticker had expired, and it wouldn’t pass until the directionals were repaired. Oh, and the 12-year-old tires were dry-rotted.

Even knowing BMW 2002s well, I usually make it a point not to answer those “What’s my car worth?” questions, but my feeling was that, as-is, in drives-but-needs-work condition, the car was probably worth something in the low 20s. If the top layer of the maintenance issues were addressed so the car could be inspected and safely driven, and the howling engine compartment errors were corrected, I told Chris that I thought it might be a $30K–$35K car. I felt like Wayne Carini when he says that a lot of his time is spent telling people why their grandfather’s ratty, barn-find ’55 Chevy isn’t worth $110K like the one they just saw sell at a Mecum auction.

But I liked her, and I was moved by the story, so back in June, I took possession of the car to make all that happen, as I thought I could do better job of it than anyone else. I really don’t work on cars for other people, but if you’re doing to do a mitzvah (a good deed), sometimes you need to go all-in.

I estimated to Chris that, with parts and a reasonable labor rate from me, it’d run about $1500 to get the car ready for sale, plus a flat $500 fee for me to represent the car for her on Bring a Trailer, to include photography, description, managing the auction, and handling shipping after the sale. Even with me charging only about a third of the hours that I actually worked, it came to nearly twice that. The car required new rear brakes (shoes, drums, wheel cylinders), clutch hydraulics (master, slave, and hose), new injection belt, valve adjustment, correcting the battery cabling and fuel hose routing, fresh oil and filter, coolant, brake fluid bleed and flush, transmission and differential fluid levels checked, sanding and painting the original steel wheels, new tires, front wheel bearings, breather hose, lock rod bushings, plugs, points, condenser, general cleaning, sourcing a missing piece of the original carpet, and more.

I finished the work in mid-July, photographed the car, and submitted it to BaT. They accepted it quickly, but I didn’t receive a draft description until the end of August. There was then the usual back-and-forth with BaT about the description. For some reason, this time they were less accommodating than when I had two other 2002s on BaT and refused my request to “list the bad stuff”—the incorrect non-tii-specific nose, the undercoating, the welds—upfront in the auction description. The goal of upfront disclosure is that when the seller reveals flaws, it shows they have nothing to hide, and cuts way down on the sniping from BaT commenters. So, I did what I did in the other two auctions and crafted a highly-detailed warts-and-all description, and when the auction went live, I posted it as the first comment. Well, the first five comments (it was long).

Since the car had been sitting in the back of my garage for two months, once the auction was live, I pulled it out and test-drove it. I noticed that one of the four o-rings on the injection pump’s suction valves was leaking and found that the car drifted ever so slightly to the right, especially in the right lane of a crowned road. Although it didn’t pull to one side on hard braking, after a spirited drive I put a hand on both front wheels and both calipers and found the right side slightly hotter than the left (yeah, I know, you’d expect it to the be other way around—that it would pull or drift to the side without a sticky caliper). The leaky o-ring on the injection pump was easy to remedy—I replaced all of them. But the light drifting to the right was an issue that was right on the line of what I felt needed disclosure. I had checked the calipers—pulled them off and manually retracted all four pistons in each—months ago and found nothing wrong. So, I offered in an auction comment that if a buyer wanted to send me new or rebuilt calipers and new rotors and pads, I’d install them at no cost.

The BaT reader response to my candor was incredibly supportive. Comments included:

“Thanks, Rob, for a master class on BaT auctions.”

“I would never buy a used car without laying eyes on it, let alone a ’70s BMW from the Northeast, unless Rob Siegel was selling it. I think all BMW enthusiasts know to bid with confidence because Rob’s assessment of this car is almost certainly better than their own.”

“I believe that thehackmechanic does this work because it’s his life passion. There is no other way to beef up your BaT seller status than to show outstanding commentary with those interested and to provide a long history of the car being sold. This goes a long way I think, and future cars will sell higher with little effort due to Rob’s reputation.”

“When I ultimately get the early ’68 2002 that I’ve been (glacially) reviving ready to go up here on BaT, I am going to use this very auction as my template.”

“I have never felt better about an auction on BaT than this one. I wish all were conducted as well as this.”

I’d be a lying so-and-so if I said that I’m not flattered by this. At some point we all decide how we want to go through this world and what we need to do to look at ourselves in the mirror and like what we see. In a world where there’s so much dishonesty, double-speak, omission, obfuscation, and outright lying, I do take it as a point of pride that, when I sell a car online, a buyer who knows these cars well should be able to get the same information that they’d get if they came and looked at it in person. In theory, that’s not difficult, but it is time-consuming.

However, I am also keenly aware that my form of hyper-disclosure does not automatically increase a car’s sale price and can, in fact, have the opposite effect. The spectacularly-high sale prices BaT is famous for are, obviously, paid by people who have that kind of money, and as I’ve long said, what brings those bids has far more to do with the image of the car—the well-photographed eat-off-it engine compartment and all that. As flattered as I am by the comments, the people doing the actual bidding probably care as much about my hyper-disclosed details about as much as they’d want to know that Charlize Theron has irritable bowel syndrome. (To be clear, I made that up. Ms. Theron, tell your lawyers to stand down. But yes, dinner at Le Cirque on Thursday night is fine.)

I’d listed the car with a $30,000 reserve. Two days after the auction began, the bidding reached $20K, but then it largely sat there. I fielded questions and kept readers engaged with new photos (if you don’t know—and I didn’t until a friend told me—part of the game with BaT is that every time you include more photos, it generates an email to anyone watching the auction).

Chris herself chimed in with the simple but heartfelt post: “Hi, I’m Chris and this 1972 BMW 2002tii was my husband’s pride and joy for almost 50 years! It was affectionately referred to as ‘the baby’ and was treated as such! He built a small garage for it in the back of our home, and we enjoyed drives on country roads, but never in inclement weather! My wish is for a new owner who will love and care for it as he did.” It generated more thumbs-ups than anything I’ve ever posted, anywhere.

One fellow contacted me and asked if we could talk on the phone. He was a guy from Canada who was a BaT newbie, said he was very interested in the car, and wanted to know what would happen if the car didn’t meet reserve. I explained that the BaT process is that, if reserve isn’t met, seller and high bidder are encouraged to negotiate. “Would you then go further down the list of bidders, or would you talk with me?” he asked. I delicately answered that the odds his winding up with the car if he hadn’t actually bid were less than if he had. As the auction entered its final few hours and others commented that the car was worth much more than the bid level, this fellow chimed in, commenting, “I know that there are people just lurking, trying to either ruin the deal for the seller or the buyers while having no intent whatsoever to bid on the car, and that should not be allowed IMHO.” It was a curious comment considering our phone call and the fact that he hadn’t bid. I commented—not directly at him—“We are short of a reasonable reserve. Chris does want to sell this car. If it falls short of reserve, the person we’ll negotiate with will be the high bidder. If you want to be that person, then be the high bidder.” To his credit, this fellow then put skin in the game and bid. Twice.

The other odd thing that happened down the stretch was that I got a comment—from the same fellow—asking what it would take to install air conditioning in the car. I answered, including a link to my vintage air-conditioning book. A fellow replied that my approach of using original evaporator assemblies was not a good one, and that a modern climate-control-based system was a much better way to go (a very simplified description of a complicated subject). I replied that, in my opinion, a clearly aftermarket-looking console and evaporator assembly were appropriate for a “build” with a remodeled interior, flared fenders, and other restomod accoutrements, but for a highly original car like this, a buyer would probably want to see an original-looking console and A/C faceplate. All of that was fine. But when, in a second post, he touted his hundreds of satisfied customers, I recognized him as a proprietor of a shop in Texas that sells A/C components and kits (the vintage BMW community is a pretty small one). There’s a line here—and jumping onto someone else’s auction in the last few hours and blatantly hawking your wares crosses it. I wrote, “I hope you can appreciate that this is a wildly inappropriate place and time to try to sell your systems. Please stop.” He didn’t. Someone else flagged his posts as non-constructive.

With an hour to go, the auction sat stalled at $22,500, and I was, frankly, scared, and I couldn’t help thinking that that’s probably what the car would’ve sold for had I done absolutely nothing to it. While most of the action with BaT auctions is usually in the last few minutes, that’s not always the case. When I listed my 49,000-mile ’73 2002 “Hampton” with BaT 18 months ago, the opposite happened: The bidding zoomed up to $20,000 in the first 30 minutes, then sat there for a week, and only inched up a little at the end, falling short of the same $30K reserve. I was terrified that history was about to repeat itself with Chris’ car.

Then I had an interesting thought—maybe, if the baby did a Hampton and sat at $22.5K, I should buy it. Hell, the baby was already at the house and already felt like part of the family. Maybe I should adopt it. As soon as I had that thought, there were interesting questions. Would BaT try and assess me a buyer’s fee even though I was technically the seller? And would my endlessly understanding wife Maire Anne banish me to sleep in the Winnebago if I bought a fourth 2002?

But then the auction began to move. It crept to within striking distance of the reserve. Bring a Trailer is very reserve-conscious. As the seller, you’re told that you can lower the reserve at any time and are shown the delta between the current high bid and the reserve, along with a button clearly labeled “LOWER RESERVE.” After all, if the reserve isn’t met, the car doesn’t sell, and BaT doesn’t get its 5 percent buyer’s fee.

But BaT is also protective of the reserve. Your BaT seller information says, “We do not recommend sharing your reserve status or amount, either publicly or privately. Our experience shows sharing it to limit bidding. So keep it secret!” I’ve always felt there are pros and cons to this. It seemed to me that there was value in telling bidders that they were damned close. So, as the auction crossed the two-minute mark, I posted a comment intended to jostle bidders without technically revealing the reserve. It worked. Read the snippet below from the bottom up.

With the reserve met, I relaxed. One of the advantages (to the seller) of BaT as opposed to eBay is that, with eBay the auction ends at a fixed time, whereas with BaT, if a new bid comes in in the last two minutes, it resets the auction timer to two minutes, thereby encouraging bidders to throw another $500 onto the table. Up it crept. The final value was $35,752, which was at the upper end of my initial $30K–$35K estimate, and really exactly the right price for the car.

So, it’s done. Chris is finalizing arrangements with the buyer. The baby will probably still be at my house for several more weeks while the seller arranges shipping.

And the best part is that, in addition to reimbursing me for my expenses and the portion of my time that I billed her for, and paying me a $500 flat fee for handling the BaT auction, Chris is making a $1500 donation to charity in the name of my late mother (the mitzvah queen), just as the other woman, who I’d helped sell her late husband’s 2002, had done in July.

Now that’s a mitzvah.

Jim, it wasn’t 60 grand, but I don’t know anything else I could’ve done to represent your baby in the best possible light, find it a good home, and help Chris’ financial future.

***

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

The post The “mitzvah” BMW 2002tii finds a new home appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A number of things have happened at Chez Hack recently. First and foremost, as I mentioned in passing a few weeks ago, I somehow wrenched my back on one of the RV trips. It wasn’t like the back injury I had 15 years ago, where I moved a 32-inch CRT television and installed a water heater in the same weekend, resulting in years of sciatica and low back pain that finally leveled out with time and physical therapy. This time I really have no idea what I did to anger the spinal gods. An X-ray showed nothing more than some normal age-related bone loss between L1 and L3, so the doctor is calling it a muscle strain. But it’s severely crimping my style.

I’ll do nothing for several days and it’ll get better, then something small like backing the Lotus into the garage and turning around to look when doing so will set it off. It’s not remotely on the level of other issues plaguing the world, but it’s severely interfering with my ability to, well, to be me. For example, I’ve sourced a replacement alternator for the Winnebago Rialta, but I’m hesitant to do the contortion necessary to crawl under the RV’s nose and install it right now. I’ll get there. Just don’t count on me for any engine swap or transmission removal tips anytime soon.

The second thing is that, after an eight-week wait, BringATrailer.com finally sent me a draft of the listing for my friend Chris’ 1972 BMW 2002tii, the second of the two “mitzvah” BMW 2002s that I’m helping to sell (her deceased husband was the original owner). I’ve written previously about the lengthy BaT process that requires you to fill out information about the car in text fields in an online form—condition, modifications, recent repairs, non-functional items, etc.—and then wait months for BaT to turn that into a description that’s so poorly written it’d cause any 8th grader to get a D on a middle school English assignment.

I, and many others, lampoon BaT for the cliché “house voice” phrases like “power is delivered to the rear wheels,” but having worked at Bentley Publishers and been part of a team that wrote repair manuals, I do understand the policy of using a bland voice that’s uniform across many writers. I also understand the legal necessity of using words and phrases such as “reportedly” and “according to the seller” to insulate BaT from liability. But the thing that drives me absolutely crazy is that BaT’s descriptions often intermingle specifics on the car that’s for sale with things that apply to all cars of this model, and often pick out elements that are trivial and elevate them inappropriately in importance, resulting in a word salad that, if you read it in an ad anywhere other than BaT, would make you think, “This seller doesn’t know anything about this car.”

For example, the draft description of the 2002tii had the following sentence in the second paragraph: “Features include a polished fuel-filler cap, bright window and beltline trim, chrome bumpers with overriders, round taillights, and pop-out rear side windows.” First, why would anyone selling a car highlight the fuel cap, polished or not? Second, the “bright window and beltline trim” was picked out of a lengthy description I’d supplied BaT on the condition of all of the brightwork on the car, but when it’s called out like this as a “feature,” it’s so out of context that it’s not even clear what’s being described. Third, all 1968–73 BMW 2002s have chrome bumpers and round taillights, and all 2002s have pop-out rear side windows. I pointed all this out to the auction writer, and the only modification he deigned to make was moving the polished fuel-filler cap to the end of the sentence. Another sentence reads, “The car is equipped with Bilstein shocks and struts, and braking is handled by front discs and rear drums.” This, again, shows the confusion between a modification (the Bilsteins) that are on this car versus the disc/drum configuration that all 2002s have. When I requested that these and other things be grouped into like paragraphs, the response was a terse quoting of BaT style and format guidelines. As I explained in a previous story, the best you can do is to write your own description and paste it in as the first comment (or comments; the comment length limit is about 850 words) when the auction goes live. By the time this piece runs, the auction will have closed, but you can see it here (the car sold for $35,752).

But I digress, as the main thing I want to talk about this week is finding a surprising cause of a hard-starting problem.

A few years ago, I wrote a detailed piece about troubleshooting a no-start condition on a carbureted car with a mechanical fuel pump. In fact, the patient was the same car—“Hampton,” my 49,000-mile 1973 BMW 2002. If there’s fuel in the float bowl, the ideal situation is that you start a carbureted car by mashing the gas pedal once or twice to have the accelerator pump squirt some raw fuel down the throat and to allow the choke to rotate closed and have the fast-idle screw settle on its place on the little cam that rotates along with the choke, then crank the engine, and vroom. Unfortunately, carbureted cars that have been sitting often have dry float bowls, and the mechanical fuel pump often has trouble priming the system and filling the bowl. In the story mentioned above, I talked about how the trinity of a dry float bowl, dry-rotted fuel lines, or a loose clamp causing the mechanical fuel pump to suck air rather than fuel, and the weakness of the diaphragm in a decades-old mechanical fuel pump are usually the cause of hard starting after sitting. Replacing the mechanical pump with an electric one eliminates the priming issue, but it also changes the look of a vintage engine compartment, something I didn’t want to do with such an original low-mileage car. I also talked about how, on Hampton, moving the fuel filter from before the fuel pump to after it made a huge difference. I thought I was done with the problem.

I was, of course, wrong.

Hampton had been in storage all summer in the warehouse in Monson, Massachusetts, on the Connecticut border where I rent space. Last week, I realized that I, who owns three BMW 2002s, had none of them here at my house to drive through this autumn (the “mitzvah” 2002tii had been occupying precious space in my garage instead), so I drove my BMW M Coupe (“the clownshoe”) out to Monson and swapped it for Hampton. Or I tried to—despite cranking it so much that I began to run the battery down, Hampton was maddeningly difficult to start. I thought this was just a float-bowl-priming issue, but surprisingly, it then repeated the hard-starting problem when stopped at a liquor store on the way home (I spent an hour chatting with a guy who admired the car), and it did so again the following morning. So, the primary cause obviously wasn’t a dry float bowl. Something else was clearly still amiss.

Every carburetor I’m aware of has an idle jet, and some carbureted cars have a little idle cut-off solenoid to stop the flow of fuel to the idle jet and help prevent run-on (dieseling) after the ignition is shut off. The solenoid is typically a housing about 1.5 inches long and about as thick as your pinkie that has a little plunger that retracts when the solenoid is fed 12 volts. When the ignition is shut off, voltage is cut to the solenoid, and the plunger returns to its rested extended position and prevents fuel from flowing through the idle jet. A few years ago, I was at the BMW “Vintage at Saratoga” in upstate New York and helped a guy troubleshoot a hard-start problem on a 2002. The car would start if you held the throttle partially open, but it would die immediately if you took your foot off the gas. I could hear its idle cut-off solenoid click when I connected and disconnected the wire, so it appeared to be working. I also pulled the solenoid out and inspected the idle jet to make sure it wasn’t plugged. All appeared fine, but symptomatically the solenoid still seemed to be the most likely suspect. The fellow reported that after he got home, he replaced the solenoid with a new part and the problem went away.

So, with that in mind, I looked at Hampton’s idle cut-off solenoid. As I did with the fellow’s car in Saratoga, I turned on the ignition and disconnected and reconnected the wire to the solenoid and verified that I heard it click. I then unscrewed the solenoid from the carb, reconnected the wire, touched the casing of the solenoid to the body of the car to ground it, and verified that the plunger extended. Lastly, I pulled out the idle jet and verified that it wasn’t clogged. I put it all back together. It made no difference; the engine was still very difficult to coax into ignition.

Like many cars of this era, Hampton has a partially de-smogged engine, with a Weber carburetor and some (but not all) of the myriad of vacuum-control solenoids and deceleration dashpots disabled. The idle cutoff solenoid was wired directly to the hot side of the ignition coil by a previous mechanic. This is a common way to get ignition-on power to engine compartment components such as this, but it’s generally not a good idea, as you’d hate for the wiring of an accessory to interfere in any way with the coil voltage. So, rather than replace the cut-off solenoid with another one, I ordered an idle jet holder that eliminates the solenoid entirely.

When it arrived, I pulled the idle jet from the solenoid, slid it into the end of the holder, screwed it into the carb, and made sure the connector that had been powering the solenoid wasn’t grounding anywhere. I got into the car, pumped the gas pedal once, and turned the key.

The car started instantly. I checked it again the next three mornings and got the same result.

Well then!

I can’t really say whether the problem was with the solenoid itself, with its electrical connection, or with the connection somehow interfering with the coil, but sometimes you just need to take the win.

So, if your car has an idle cut-off solenoid, and if it experiences hard-starting problems, put it on your list of things to check. Check twice if you’re in Saratoga. Or Monson. Or in my garage. Or in the parking lot of the liquor store.

***

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

The post Finally solving a hard-starting problem appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Just two weeks ago I wrote about my little VW Eurovan-based Winnebago Rialta RV, saying that owning an older RV means having all the problems of an old car combined with those of an old house. In that piece, I wrote, “The Rialta forum on Facebook is full of posts from people saying, ‘We just bought our Rialta, we were so excited, we flew out to pick it up and drove it home, and all these things went wrong.’ I’m always surprised that people are surprised at this, as most of these RV-dies problems fall into the first five of “The Big Seven” things most likely to strand any older car that I’ve written about for years—they’re usually fuel delivery issues, ignition issues, cooling system issues, charging system issues, or belts.”

So, funny story.

My wife, Maire Anne, and I were taking a little two-day trip in the Rialta up to a campground on Boston’s north shore to celebrate our 38th anniversary. I’d just completed a good round of work on it to repair the issues that reared their heads on our last trip—replacing the leaky toilet, getting the shower drain pump to work, and coaxing the central locking system back into functionality. During the hour-long drive, we talked about how, while I felt pretty good about these short trips, if we were going to consider taking the rig on a big western road trip, it really needed a systematic push on the first five of “The Big Seven.” Last year, I wrote about how I’d replaced the failing coil pack, and had bought a new OEM fuel pump and a voltage regulator, but how the issue of slipping quality of new parts these days made me circumspect about replacing good working parts, so having the new parts in the cabinet as spares felt like the right thing to do for now. It’s a tough call. The fuel pump, for example, is inside the gas tank, and access requires unbolting the driver’s seat and pulling up the rug and pieces of the shifter surround—not exactly an easy roadside repair, but also something I’m hesitant to do at home when there’s nothing apparently wrong with it.

We had a lovely day at Plum Island, a 12-mile-long barrier beach that’s right across a narrow inlet from where we got married in 1984. We then headed to the Salisbury State Reservation campground for the first of our two nights.

Unfortunately, it was 90+ degrees out, and the campground had zero shade. I drew the window blinds, connected the Rialta to shore power, and turned on the roof-mounted air conditioner, but it was fighting a losing battle against the sun, and Maire Anne and I were sweating and uncomfortable. I started the engine and turned on the Rialta’s generally excellent cabin-and-coach vehicle A/C system, and the interior began to cool off.

But when I looked at the cigarette-lighter voltmeter (I rarely drive farther than the grocery store these days without a cigarette-lighter voltmeter plugged in), it was reporting only 11.5 volts. As I’ve written many times, a battery’s resting voltage is 12.6 volts, and when the alternator is charging the battery, it should increase 1–1.5 volts, or about 13.5–14.2 volts. If it doesn’t—if it stays at 12.6 volts with the engine running—it means that the alternator isn’t charging the battery, which means that the vehicle will die. If it’s substantially lower than 12.6 volts, like the 11.5 volts I was reading, it means that the electrical load—in this case from the air-conditioning fans—will drain the battery even quicker.

I actually wasn’t terribly alarmed. The alternator in the Rialta has been a little weak since I bought the rig five years ago, and sometimes it won’t charge until the engine RPM comes up. As I described in my piece a few months back, about how having an alternator die is a “soft failure,” most cars built after the mid-1970s have an integral but replaceable voltage regulator that contains the brushes, and often the problem is simply that the brushes are worn down—and if that’s the case, replacing the pack will usually make the alternator spring back to life. (That’s what I did when the alternator in my 2003 BMW E39 530i died back in July). So, when I noticed this behavior in the just-purchased Rialta five years ago, I bought a voltage regulator to have with me, just in case. Two years ago, before Maire Anne and I began using the RV for summer fun, I resolved to install the regulator, assuming it was the same two-screw job as in an old BMW. I found that, not unlike the BMW E39, the regulator is behind a cover on the back of the alternator, but owing to clearance issues, there’s no way to get the cover off without removing the alternator from the car, and since the problem didn’t appear to be acute … well, you understand.

So yeah, I who prattles on and on about the necessities of performing prophylactic maintenance on a vintage car, and how you’re an idiot if you head off on a road trip with a known problem, had been doing that with the alternator for five years. I just had become used to it because the problem hadn’t gotten any worse.

To deal with the heat, Maire Anne made the excellent suggestion that we simply head down to the beach, where it was likely to be a lot cooler. So, we disconnected from shore power and began driving the maybe 200 yards to the beach.

That’s when the alternator warning light came on and stayed on. Even with the A/C off, the cigarette-lighter voltmeter showed a little under 12.6 volts, and the voltage did not increase as I revved the engine.

OK, now I’m alarmed.

Of course, out of all the places where this could happen, this was a pretty nice one. We were staying overnight in a campground a stone’s throw from the beach, and we were only perhaps an hour from home, as long as we missed rush hour. Still, a dead alternator is guaranteed to cause the battery to run down at some point, so everything in our mini-vacation grounded to a halt while I looked on my phone at the weather forecast and considered what to do.

I was blessed by being able to troubleshoot at the edge of a beach parking lot overlooking where the Merrimac River empties into the Atlantic. The sun was out, and the cool ocean breeze was heavenly. Maire Anne snapped the photo at the top when I donned my Tyvec suit to crawl under the Rialta and check if a wire or connector had pulled off the alternator (it hadn’t). You can laugh at my fashion-forward mashup of Tyvec and Tevas sandals, but given that I was skootching under the car on sandy hot asphalt, the Tyvec was as welcome as a rubber glove during an oil change.

When the alternator died in the BMW E39 two months ago—and by utter coincidence, that was just a few miles from where we now were—I was in a highway rest area. The E39 is a newer, more luxurious, control-module-laden car that has a reputation for wigging out when battery voltage gets low. So, with that car, I decided that the odds of making it home through rush-hour traffic, before the car died somewhere far less safe, weren’t great and called for a tow.

However, the Rialta is a different beast. In the first place, all the RV accoutrements notwithstanding, it’s an older, simpler vehicle that’s likely to drain the battery slower than the E39 (as long as it’s driven during the daytime with the wipers and the air conditioning off) and likely to be more tolerant of low battery voltage. But much more significant is the fact that, like any RV, it has two big coach batteries that power the RV systems, and there are ways to tie them to the vehicle battery, creating triple the battery capacity and thus, in theory, triple the amount of time before the vehicle coasts to the side of the road.

Many RVs, including the Rialta, use the alternator to charge both the vehicle battery (the one that cranks the engine over) and the coach batteries while driving. But when you’re at the campground and plugged into shore power, an integrated on-board battery charger charges the coach batteries but not the vehicle battery. In addition, if the vehicle battery runs down, there’s an “aux battery” switch on the dashboard that you can use to essentially self-jumpstart the vehicle battery with the coach batteries.

All of these machinations are accomplished by an isolation solenoid in the coach battery compartment. This is basically just a beefy relay, big enough to handle the hundreds of amps of peak current that may flow through it when you use the “aux start” switch and crank the starter motor. Like any relay, it has the low-current electromagnet part and the high-current switched part. The small terminals are for the low-current electromagnet. Connect one of them to ground and feed the other one 12V, and it energizes the internal electromagnet, which slides the solenoid, which closes the switch and connects the two large terminals together. So, when the “aux start” button is pressed, it sends 12V to the small terminal and ties the vehicle battery and the coach batteries together. When 12V is absent, the batteries remain separate.

I’d replaced the isolation solenoid last year, so I knew where it was and had a good idea how it worked. When I hit the “aux start” switch, I could hear the solenoid click, and when I put my multimeter across the vehicle battery and Maire Anne held in the switch, I could see the voltage come up slightly as the vehicle battery was reinforced by the two coach batteries.

But what surprised me was that I didn’t, in fact, need to do anything to tie the coach and vehicle batteries together while driving—when the engine was running, the solenoid was already in the clicked-on position. I realized that this was likely due to the fact that it’s this solenoid that lets the alternator charge all the batteries as you’re headed down the road. The fact that the alternator wasn’t charging anything didn’t matter; the batteries were still tied together as long as the ignition was on. I did, though, need to jumper the solenoid into the “on” position in order to get the Rialta’s on-board battery charger to charge the vehicle battery overnight.

Having figured all that out, I relaxed a bit, and that evening, Maire Anne and I had an absolutely first-rate night-before-our-38th-anniversary meal at Sea Glass, a very nice restaurant right on Salisbury Beach with floor-to-ceiling windows. We drove the mile back to the campground, reconnected to shore power, jumpered the solenoid, verified that all three batteries were getting charged, and called it a night.

That evening, it rained, so in the morning we waited a bit for the skies to clear to remove any possibility we’d have to turn on the headlights and wipers, then made the hour-drive home without incident. The voltmeter never dropped below 12.4 volts. As we were driving under sunny skies, it occurred to me that, in addition to the three batteries being tied together, the solar panel I’d installed on the roof to be certain that the RV’s refrigerator stays cold while we’re at the beach was feeding juice to all three batteries. In other words, as long as there wasn’t a big electrical load from wipers and fans, I could probably have driven the RV hundreds of miles with the dead alternator. So, it probably wasn’t necessary to cut our trip short. But still, I would’ve hated to be wrong.

We and the RV are now back home. Removing the alternator doesn’t look too difficult, though access is poor, as it often is in a snub-nosed van with a short hood and much of the engine angled beneath the body of the car. Videos point to needing to remove the electric cooling fans on the radiator to gain enough clearance to lift the alternator out. Bosch rebuilt alternators have a pretty spotty reputation, so I think I’ll inspect this one, and if the bearings are quiet, try replacing the voltage regulator—as I did with the BMW E39—and see how it does. And yes, having this happen may just nudge me toward installing that brand-new fuel pump that’s been sitting in the cabinet.

The real question is, why did two alternators on two cars die within two months within two miles of the confluence of the Merrimac River and the Atlantic Ocean? Is there some “Merrimac Triangle” effect, some esoteric mix of old industrial pollution hitting salt water that causes charging systems to shred? If I find out, I’ll let you know.

***

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

The post Dead alternator. Again. This time in the RV appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Let me begin by saying that, since Hagerty doesn’t offer insurance for RVs, I’m appreciative that they let me continue to write about my adventures in our little 1996 Winnebago Rialta (which is a Volkswagen Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body on the back—basically a pumped-up Westfalia-style camper but with a real bed, a toilet, and a small shower). Since I began writing these occasional pieces when we bought the Rialta five years ago, whether it’s general observations on owning a small RV, or installing solar panels, or talking about the unspoken underbelly of RV ownership (dumping the tanks), the response has been wonderful, even if some of the comments are sometimes, “Well, my wife and I were thinking about buying a motorhome until we read your piece.”

Hey, if I can’t be a shining example, at least I can be a clear warning.

Here’s why I think these pieces dovetail so well with my others about vintage car ownership and keeping my daily drivers running: I’ve long said that I don’t know how anyone affords a used car, much less a vintage car, much less a boutique oddball vintage car like a Lotus Europa, if they have to pay someone else to work on it every time it needs attention or something breaks. It’s like that with a well-used RV, only it’s worse. Think about it. You’re taking all of the foibles of an old car and adding onto them the quirks of an old house that’s been shaken by driving it down the road. You’re literally dragging around something with a toilet, sink, shower, refrigerator, and stove, and in order for you to have a good, comfortable RV experience and not go running for the nearest hotel room, you’re relying on all of them to work. And that doesn’t include the second-level comforts of a hotel room’s air conditioning, heat, 120-volt appliances, and television. It’s actually a pretty tall order.

As I wrote in that first general observations article five years ago, it used to be that if you wanted a small (21-ish-foot), used, affordable RV that didn’t get single-digit gas mileage and that you could park easily, your choices were the Rialta or its predecessor, the Winnebago LeSharo; one of the many varieties of the Toyota mini-motorhome built on the old Hilux chassis; or the weird and rare Vixen—and not much else. Nowadays, there are seemingly endless motorhome conversions based on the Sprinter, Ram ProMaster, and Ford Transit vans, but these haven’t been around long enough to fall into the $5K–$10K range into which I throw money like old ladies feeding pigeons. And, to be clear, Rialtas are still very popular vehicles with a dedicated following, plus a well-cared-for late Rialta with the VR6 motor is more like a $25K–$35K vehicle—less if they’ve been sitting and have an unclear history. I was fortunate to find our early underpowered five-cylinder Rialta five years ago for under $4000, but it was and still is needy and a bit rough.

The Rialta forum on Facebook is full of posts from people saying, “We just bought our Rialta, we were so excited, we flew out to pick it up and drove it home, and all these things went wrong.” I’m always surprised that people are surprised at this, as most of these RV-dies problems fall into the first five of “The Big Seven” things most likely to strand any older car that I’ve written about for years—the issues are usually related to fuel delivery, ignition, cooling system, charging system, or belts (or they’re the Rialta-specific transmission and rear wheel bearing problems). I have ours pretty well sorted out in these areas, though if I were going to do a long road trip in it, I’d replace every part of the cooling system, even though it all looks fine.

It’s when you’ve arrived at your destination that the “recreational” part of “RV” ownership comes into play, and you find out that something in the living quarters isn’t working. A few weeks ago I descried MacGyvering the fresh-water pump when a corroded switch in the outdoor hand-washing station prevented the pump from being turned on inside the RV.

During last week’s three-day stay in Provincetown, we dealt with multiple problems. The first was that the power door locks failed. This was something of an accident waiting to happen, as the wires to the side door lock run through a little flexible metal conduit intended to keep them from pinching or abrading, and one end of the conduit keeps popping out of the vehicle’s body and exposing the wires. I never got around to fixing it. So, when I looked and found a broken and frayed wire in the side door jam, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. What was surprising was that, once I spliced the two ends together, I still didn’t have working power door locks anywhere in the rig.

I thought, no problem—a fuse probably blew when the broken wire touched ground. Unfortunately, motorhomes can be funny about things that are on the dividing line between the stock part of the original vehicle and the RV conversion. I searched on my phone and learned that, depending on the year, there might be an extra row of fuses beneath the first, but mine didn’t have it. If a fuse had popped, I couldn’t find it. (I eventually located it when I got home.)

Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal—you’d simply lock the side door with the key—but the keyed side lock has never worked. So, if there’s no central locking, it requires you to lock the side door from the inside, then walk forward, carefully maneuver between the two front seats, and exit via one of the front doors. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal either, but I’d somehow wrenched my back during the trip, and I found this maneuver to be quite painful, so I needed to ask my wife, Maire Anne, to do it.

The next problem was a one-two plumbing punch. The Rialta has what’s known as a wet bath, which is a shower that occupies the same physical space as the toilet. These are only used in the smallest RVs and campers, but it’s a well-known configuration in small boats where space is limited. The Rialta’s implementation is a bit unusual because it utilizes a sliding stall and a removable piece of floor. You need to slide the stall out to have enough room to close the door when you use the toilet. In addition, if you lift up a section of the floor, it exposes the drain pan where you can stand and shower.

We almost never use the shower, as the Rialta’s gray water tank is so small that we’d need to dump it daily if we did. Instead, we use the showers at the campgrounds. They’re less private, but they have a lot more space and hot water. Regardless, the shower drain location forced by the wet-bath configuration creates a problem.

As you can see from the above photo, the shower drain is in a recess in the rear right of the pan. For the five years we’ve owned the RV, there’s been a minor freshwater leak that causes water to accumulate in the drain recess. Since the fresh-water hookup for campground water comes in through the wall behind the shower, I always assumed the leak was coming from there. For years, when there was enough water there to be concerned about, I’d simply turn on the shower drain pump and have it suck the water from there into the gray water tank.

The problem is that, because of the shared pan, even if you don’t use the shower, a lot of dirt and grit winds up in that drain, and it shockingly doesn’t have a filter there—the filter is instead a screen on the inlet of the shower pump, which is accessible via a hole cut in the platform holding one of the twin mattresses.

So that’s background for my explaining that, when my wife and I were ready to leave the campground in the RV and drive down to the beach, we noticed that the rug was wet. I pulled floor section up and found that the entire shower pan was filled with water, and any driving was making it slosh over onto the rug. I thought, no problem—I’ll just hit the switch and run the shower drain pump. I could hear the pump run, but unfortunately it had no effect.

So, what’s the move here? With my aching back, I didn’t want to go through the contortions of having to pull off the mattress and check the filter through the access hole.

Then I remembered that this same thing had happened shortly after we’d bought the RV, and since necessity’s the mother of invention, I’d discovered that a remarkably effective way to drain the shallow pan is by using a plastic bag. Maire Anne is endlessly good-natured and helpful in these matters, so I pressed her into plastic bag bailing service. In a few minutes we had it dry enough to prevent sloshing while driving.

When I got home and my back had recovered enough to bend again, I looked at both the source of the leak and the drain problem. It turned out the leak was coming not from the RV’s fresh-water inlet like I’d thought, but from the toilet’s input valve. I discovered that it would also leak if I was turning on the RV’s fresh-water pump (the thing that wouldn’t work during the last trip) to pump water from the internal tank, but as the pressure was lower and the pump was only switched on when we needed to use it, it would leak slower than when connected to external water. I did some reading and learned that the toilet’s input valve is replaceable, but you have to remove the toilet to change it, and other things on the 26-year-old toilet are likely to go, and the smart move is to replace the whole thing. So a new toilet is on order.

That left the shower drain to be repaired. Drain problems resulting from both clogs and vacuum leaks are common. Just like with a fuel pump in a car, if there’s a split in a hose or a bad seal, it’ll suck air instead of fuel. As I said, five years ago I tangled with this same problem. At that time, I discovered that someone had assembled the filter screen without an o-ring, and finding a right-sized o-ring fixed the vacuum leak and made the shower pump work. This time I checked the filter and found that the o-ring was intact, but the screen had a lot of gunk on it. I cleaned it, but the pump still didn’t move water.

The method here is to do pretty much what I described in this piece about troubleshooting a mechanical fuel pump in a car—determine whether the problem is in the pump or in the lines connecting it to what it’s trying to suck. The plumbing in many RVs uses NPSM (National Standard Pipe Straight Mechanical) fittings with a conical sealing washer. I ordered a 90-degree NPSM to PEX adapter and clamped a hose to it, then unscrewed the filter from the pump, put the adapter in its place, stuck the other end of the hose in a bucket of water, and turned on the pump. The pump ran, but to my surprise, it moved no water.

Before assuming that the pump had gone bad, I remembered that while these pumps are supposedly self-priming, sometimes they need to be primed—to have water filling the pump cavity and the hose to get them going. I poured water into the hose, stuck the other end into the bucket, and hit the switch again. This time it worked like a charm.

I then began to reinstall the filter and noticed that the conical washer at the inlet was misaligned and gashed. I miraculously found the bag of conical washers I’d ordered five years ago in a drawer in the RV (how often does that happen?), replaced the gashed washer, put the test hose on the inlet side of the filter, and primed it. Again, success.

The only thing left was to try it again with the actual drain line. Rather than pull all that dirty water through the pump’s filter, I sucked it all out of the recess with a shop vac, blew the line clear with compressed air, reconnected it, and primed it with a thin section of garden hose with the end cut off so I could snake it down the drain line. Bingo.

So, did it not work because of the gashed conical washer, the dirty pump screen, or because the line needed to be primed—or some combination? Don’t know, don’t care. It works perfectly now. I installed a little screen over the drain recess so dirt should now get caught there first—much easier to clean than the one under the mattress. And I put that priming garden hose in one of the RV’s cabinets just in case it happens again while on the road.

There were a few other non-essential but satisfying mods prior to this trip as well. I removed the original non-functional microwave, opened it up to fix it, found both a broken wire and a big mouse nest, and replaced it with a brand-new certified mouse-free microwave. Finding one that fit the space close enough to look like it belongs there was challenging, as was installing it so it won’t slide out, but now we can zap the leftovers from the restaurant, and I can heat up my coffee when I don’t drink it quickly enough.

I mounted a little ducted exhaust fan behind the refrigerator so the heat on the condenser doesn’t build up in the small space behind it. I installed a 24-inch TV/DVD that runs off both 120 VAC and 12V DC so it can be used with and without shore power and mounted it on a retractable swivel mount so I can swing it out of the way when it’s not in use.

And, since I had it already, I installed an old Cambridge Soundworks system with two satellite speakers and a small, powered subwoofer that also runs off both 120 VAC and 12V DC. This way we can get good sound out of the television, as well as connect our phones when we’re either stopped or driving (the in-dash CD player doesn’t have an aux port or a Bluetooth connection). Most satisfying … until the 120 VAC went out due to a tripped ground fault interrupter that I couldn’t find until after we got home, and the sound system hummed like the low note on a pipe organ due to some sort of 12V DC ground loop.

Really, the point of all of this is that you, or you and your spouse, either roll with this stuff or you don’t. Personally, sitting either inside or outside an RV at a campsite reading a book isn’t really my thing, so I love having little self-contained problems to solve. If that’s not your speed, pony up the hundred large for a new RV or try to play the new-enough-that-it-won’t-break game. If you don’t have that kind of coin, stay in hotels instead.

***

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

The post The never-ending needs of an old RV appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Between the 60 or so BMWs, six Vanagons, six Suburbans, and various and sundry family cars, about 100 vehicles have come into my possession (and usually left) since I got my driver’s license in the mid-1970s. I’ve written stories about the best and worst of the bunch, but I thought I’d simply enumerate the first six, as after that, it becomes something of a blur.

The first six weren’t great—in fact, several were bloody awful—but they were all memorable.

1969 Plymouth Satellite

This was my mother’s car. These B-bodied Chryslers with the slotted front grilles were best known in their two-door, 383-cubic-inch Roadrunner form, but ours was the sensible four-door with the stalwart 318 engine. Though the Satellite was classified as “mid-sized,” it was enormous by modern standards, sort of like a bigger pumped-up Dodge Dart with a V-8. With its four doors and front bench seat, it seemed to swallow an endless number of adolescents; I remember my mother driving me and 10 of my friends home after a junior high school dance (ah, those were the days when you could ignore seat belts and not feel like a criminal). Everyone in my family has a special place in their heart for this car. It was the first car my mother bought by herself after my father passed away, and she took particular pride in having negotiated a better deal than a family friend who independently sought to grease the skids on her behalf. It took the family on innumerable trips back and forth between our old haunts on Long Island and our new digs in western Massachusetts. And it was the car that my sister and I both learned to drive on. Sadly, images of the car only exist in our memories.

1974 Fiat 128 Sedan

When the Satellite’s 100,000 miles qualified it for membership in the repair-of-the-week club, it began rusting away, and the first Arab oil embargo caused fuel prices to spike, the trifecta of events caused my mother to sell it and buy a white 1974 Fiat 128 two-door sedan. I begged her to buy a BMW 2002 instead, as I’d seriously imprinted on one owned by a college student who lived with us for one summer a few years prior, but the cost difference was too big. Although Fiat was front-wheel drive instead of RWD like the 2002, it was a similar size and weight, and it had a four-speed stick. My mother, who drove the family’s ’63 three-on-the-tree Fairlane before the Satellite, picked up the stick immediately, and taught me. The Satellite may have been the car I learned to drive on, but the Fiat 128 was the family car when I got my license. I treated it as if it was a BMW 2002, which is to say that I pretended I was Nikki Lauda and beat the crap out of it. It was a fun, nimble little car, even if it did live up to its “Fix It Again Tony” reputation. These 128 two-door sedans, particularly in the U.S.-spec big-bumpered configuration, definitely aren’t one of Fiat’s set-your-heart-aflutter designs, but I enjoyed ours after I got my license. Like the Satellite, I can’t find a single family photo of the car.

1970 Triumph GT6+

As I wrote several years back, the first car I owned outright was a 1970 Triumph GT6+, the car that taught me that everything bad you’ve ever heard about British cars is true—the electrical problems, the rust, the metal fatigue, all of it. And, to make it worse, the GT6 had a dual affliction. First, the car was basically a Spitfire with a hatchback and a de-stroked six-cylinder TR6 motor, so everything behind the engine would break from the additional torque. Second, the weight distribution and the rear suspension design resulted in handling characteristics that would make the car swap ends on a moist road if you so much as coughed. But it was girl-magnet cute and could eat a BMW 2002’s lunch in second gear, so I loved it, even though it ran perhaps half the time during the 2.5 years I owned it. The repair costs ate me alive while I was a poor college student, and the car rusted while I watched, so I sold it while it still had some value. The secret is out that GT6s look like little E-Type Jaguars, so the days of being able to find solid cars for short money are pretty much gone, but I still reflexively type “GT6” into Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Who knows? There may come a day when my Lotus Europa doesn’t give me enough pain and I seek to relive those glorious times when shifting and nailing the gas posed the real risk of creating expensive metallic banging sounds and stranding you until the tow truck arrived.

1963 Rambler Classic

After I sold the GT6, I was without a car for my last two years of college. Then my best friend and housemate got married, I was the best man at his wedding, his parents bought him and his wife a new VW Rabbit, and as a groom-to-best-man gift, he sold me his and his fiancé’s current car—a 1963 Rambler Classic 660—for a dollar. I still have the bill of sale. Note that this wasn’t the weird frumpy-looking Rambler American. The Rambler Classic and its upmarket sibling the Ambassador were a fresh new design that won Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award for 1963, and ’63 Classics / Ambassadors are unique in their one-year-only electric razor-style front grille. The 660 trim level was pretty basic—straight six, power nothing—but after the drama of the Triumph GT6, I warmed to the Rambler. When my then-girlfriend’s job at Harvard moved to the University of Texas in Austin and we planned to move there, I struggled with whether or not to take the Rambler, but it relieved me of the decision by overheating on a final drive out to Amherst. I left it by the side of the road, something I’ve always felt badly about. I keep my eye out for a fully loaded Ambassador with two-tone paint, V-8, factory air, and power everything.

1971 Volkswagen Bus / 1969 Westfalia Camper

When I was still living in Amherst in 1981, attending graduate school at UMass, my then-girlfriend Maire Anne, who had since graduated and moved to Cambridge, surprised me by driving up in a ’71 Volkswagen bus. I thought, how cool is this? My hot girlfriend just bought the car synonymous with all the most sensational parts of the ’60s. Although it was definitely her car, not mine, the bout with owning the Triumph had left me mechanically inclined, and when we moved in together, it was my responsibility to keep the bus running. This responsibility was severely tested when we piled into the bus (which, of course, like any lifelong New England Volkswagen, had no heat due to the rotted-out heater boxes) and left on New Year’s Day 1982 for her new job in Austin. Unfortunately, the bus’s New England provenance caught up with it, and one day, while I was working on it, the floor jack went through the frame rail. I was able to find a ’69 Westfalia camper with a near-perfect body but a blown engine, so I did the Frankstein-like transplant in the driveway of our little rented duplex in Austin. The resurrected Westfalia camper came with us when we returned to Boston in ’84 and was Maire Anne’s daily driver until our first child was born in 1988, so the bus (well, the engine in two different buses) was with us for seven years. Whenever we see an old air-cooled bus, the pull we feel isn’t simply cannabis-soaked nostalgia; we logged some serious miles in those two that were joined at the crankshaft. The herd of Vanagons that followed were my attempt to forestall the inevitable future of white-bread conventional minivans, and they were OK, but they’re nothing we get weepy about. However, the fact that the little RV we own is a Winnebago Rialta, which is a Volkswagen Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body on the back—sort of like a pumped-up next-generation Westfalia camper—is far from accidental.

1971 BMW 2002

Moving to Austin and getting my first real software engineering job enabled me to scratch that itch that began when that college student who owned the BMW 2002 lived with us that summer. So in 1982, I bought the cheapest, rattiest 2002 that I could find, a ’71 that was equal parts orange paint, rust, and bondo. It was this car that established the pattern of buy ’em cheap, fix ’em, and sell ’em when you find something better. Forty years and 40 2002s later, the pattern is still repeating. But this was ground zero. I currently own three 2002s, including another one I bought before leaving Austin, but some of the memories I have of that first 2002, including rebuilding its transmission and taking it for its first drive with a crunch-free gearbox and brand-new Pirelli P3s (while the stereo cranked out The Ghost In You by the Psychedelic Furs over the just-installed ADS 200 speakers), are unrivaled.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that those first few cars are special. It doesn’t necessarily mean we regret selling them, or that we’d buy them back if we had the chance. It’s the memories, not the cars, that are irreplaceable.

***

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

The post The first 6 cars I enjoyed from behind the wheel appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Back in the spring, when I was transitioning between my old rented garage spaces in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, and my newly-found warehouse space about an hour away in Monson, I briefly brought all the cars home, stuffed the rust-prone ones into the garage, and left the others covered in the driveway for a few weeks. At one point, I needed to do work on one of the outside cars, so I brought it into the garage, which necessitated moving my 1974 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special outside.

Even though the Lotus is a fiberglass-bodied car, the idea of those Lucas electrical components sitting in the rain gave me the willies, so I bought a semi-custom cover for the car. I wrote piece about it, in which I explained that covering a car outdoors is never going to hold a candle to storing it indoors. I even showed some photos of cars I’ve owned, where long-term outdoor storage under a cover or tarp damaged the paint by rubbing or simply by prolonged contact. Sometimes, however, circumstances force our hand, and we just do the best we can.

The Lotus-gets-kicked-outside situation repeated itself in early August. The driver’s-side window on my 1999 BMW M Coupe had been problematic for some time, and it finally quit working entirely with the window (of course) halfway down. And, after a long dry spell in Boston, rain was (of course) forecast for that evening, so the car needed to come into the garage. Rather than assume the problem was the window regulator and then buying one and hoping I was right, I wanted to pull things apart and properly diagnose the cause of the failure before purchasing anything. This meant that the M Coupe would be in the garage for more than a quick sleepover, which also meant that one of the three keep-dry cars would be outside more than just overnight. The logical choice was, again, the fiberglass-bodied Lotus.

So I pulled the car out of the garage, parked it in the driveway, and slid the cover on. As I wrote previously, because the cover is semi-custom and not custom, it’s not a snug fit, but the elastics tucked the front and back of the cover under the nose and tail nicely, so I was confident it would stay in place in the rain and wind.

It’s been a hot dry summer here in Boston, with stretches when the temperatures tickled the 100-degree mark. Despite the inconvenient timing of the failure of the window mechanism on the M Coupe, the rain was, in fact, welcomed. I didn’t really give a moment’s thought to the stew that could be cooked under the lid of a car cover, with old paint, high heat, and moisture. Why would I? This was what I bought the cover for. Why wouldn’t I put it on the car?

The cover went onto the Lotus on a Thursday night. It rained that evening. The cover sat on the car, in near-100-degree temperatures, on Friday and Saturday. We’re talking two days.

On Sunday morning, I went outside to pull the cover off, and I remember seeing that a fair amount of water had pooled on the Europa’s flat “bread fan” deck lid. I thought that that meant that the waterproof cover was doing its job.

Imagine my surprise and horror when I removed it and found this:

And this:

My first reaction was one of cognitive disconnect—I literally didn’t understand what I was seeing. Had something leaked onto the car? My wife has tomato pots on the garage roof, and the car was in the driveway near the garage door. With all the rain, had one of the pots leaked dirt that got blown onto the cover and minerals or fertilizer or something leeched through it? Would the discoloration just wipe off? Unfortunately, none of that was the case. Whatever it was, it wasn’t residue.

Then I wondered if somehow paint had stuck to the underside of the cover and peeled off. I partially unrolled the cover, looked at the cloth lining, and found that it was paint-free.

Slowly, the picture formed. The Lotus’ paint itself was discolored. Badly. Permanently.

What the hell?

Not being sure what else to do, I left the car in the hot sun for the rest of the day, hoping that maybe the discoloration would bake off. As the paint heated up, a small amount of the cloudiness of the damage seemed to lift, but if anything, it just made it look worse, as the edges of the affected areas became more defined.

It appeared that what had happened was that some of the standing water on the flat horizontal surfaces of the deck lid and hood had soaked through the cover. The cover trapped the water against the old dry porous paint, and the high heat had done something akin to boiling it in place, creating the discoloration.

I was livid. While I like cars with patina, it should be akin to the lines on my 64-year-old face, not a fat ugly scar from having done something stupid. My Europa is a survivor. It was stored in a container from 1979 to the early 2010s, then was purchased by a fellow who used it as a conversation piece in the lobby of his European car repair shop. I bought it, dead and sight-unseen, in 2013, and had it trucked here from Chicago. When it arrived, I found that it was rougher than it looked in the photos—it looked like a cover or a tarp had worn the paint off sections of the hood, deck lid, door tops, and the corners and edges of the car—but it had a great original vibe to it. I rolled it into my garage and yanked out the drivetrain in one feverish weekend, but then six years elapsed before I got the engine back in. During that time, the car sat uncovered in my garage, boxes were eventually piled on top of it (I know—stupid, right?), and dust, grit, and grime killed much of the shine. But still, the car’s vibe was unmistakably that of an intact survivor. I’m well aware that the “rat rod” look—intentionally building cars that look distressed, often with clear-coated “relic’d” finishes sitting atop $2000 wheels—is a thing, but it’s not my thing. The idea that I’d caused this step-change in the car’s appearance because I covered the car outdoors was heartbreaking.

Before I go further, let me state very clearly that I don’t blame the specific brand or model of cover for what happened. I think it could have happened with any cover and that it was a product of the old cracked dry porous paint, the trapped moisture, and the high heat.

I posted photos of the damage to my Facebook page with the explicit admonition “Please don’t use that worn-out adage ‘That’ll buff out,’ as there’s not enough paint on this car to buff.” The comments poured in. They ranged from “Just repaint the car” (don’t you love how easily people throw around money that isn’t theirs?) to recommendations that I use rubbing alcohol to draw out the moisture in the paint, to a musing from a high school friend of mine about whether household cleaners might work. I rolled my eyes at that one and thought, “That’s dumb.”

One of the issues in a situation like this is that you’re faced with taking a car that already has a high level of wear and patina, and it’s nearly impossible to repair a damaged area so it looks more or less like it did before. In addition to the paint damage, the Lotus’ deck lid has several large cracks in it, so I suppose it might be tempting to find a shop that could repair and repaint just that one easily removable panel. That, of course, would make it stand out like a sore thumb against the rest of the survivor body. That didn’t strike me as a good solution unless I wanted to slide all the way down the slippery slope of body restoration, and that would not be cheap.

I stared at and poked and prodded the damaged panels for an hour, trying to wrap my head around what, if anything, could be done about it. Intellectually I thought that, going forward, the discoloration could be part of the car’s story, but emotionally, my reaction was, “Yeah, a stupid part of its story, and it was my stupidity,” even though throwing a cover over a car before it sits in the rain is hardly, on its face, a stupid action.

But then I discovered that the yellow discoloration on the deck lid had an almost chalky consistency to it that I could scrape through with my fingernail. And there appeared to be dark paint beneath it. Despite my “don’t tell me to buff it out” admonition, I began to wonder if I could do exactly that—use some sort of abrasive to remove the damaged paint and expose the good stuff underneath.

Now, I am not someone who engages in “paint correction.” Even the term rubs me the wrong way (pun intended). I don’t go to concourses or obsess about scratches or swirl marks on my cars. I wash the pretty and shiny ones when they’re dirty, but basically leave it at that. I think that I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve waxed a car. However, I do own a Porter Cable random orbital polisher I bought a while back to revive badly oxidized paint on a black BMW 2002 that I’d bought. I dug it out of a bin in the garage, found an old bottle of Meguiar’s all-in-one compound, and was prepared to give it a whirl when I found that the foam pads for the polisher were filthy. I washed them, and while I was waiting for them to dry, I hand-rubbed the Meguiar’s on one of the Lotus’ yellow spots using a microfiber towel. It had very little effect. I ran down to the local AutoZone, threw seven bucks at a bottle of Turtle Wax Heavy Duty compound, and tried hand-rubbing that. It began to cut through the yellow chalk, but when I tried using it on a foam pad on the orbital polisher, the effect was minimal. A rotary polisher might have done a better job, but I don’t own one.

Then, for some reason, I remembered my high school friend’s question about whether some household cleaning product might be effective—the one I’d filed away as “dumb.” I mean, I have been known to use oven cleaner to remove decades of caked-on grime from a transmission. My mind suddenly hyper-linked from oven cleaner to Mr. Muscle to the Mr. Clean to the “Mr. Clean Magic Eraser” product my wife has raved about for years. The Magic Eraser is basically a sponge that exudes abrasive melamine foam, and I have to admit that when I’ve used it, I’ve been very impressed. I did a quick online search for “using Magic Eraser on car paint.” The short answer appeared to be “Don’t, unless you’re using it to remove some paint that wound up on the bumper because you clipped your white mailbox post turning into your driveway.” The longer answer was that while it will probably remove whatever inadvertently transferred paint or tar or tire tread scuff you’re trying to get off, it’ll probably scratch the hell out of the paint, and you’ll need to polish out the scratches afterward.

Having little to lose, though, is great motivation. I wetted a Magic Eraser and had at some of the yellow chalky sections of the deck lid.

Wow.

I was elated. I thought that, with a few hours and some elbow grease, this damage will be just a memory.

It was, of course, more complicated than that. In the first place, the Magic Eraser, like any abrasive, removes paint, and with the dry fragile nature of the paint on the Lotus, I had to be very careful not to rub through to the fiberglass. Second, the area that you rub is always bigger than the damaged area, and rubbing changes the look of the paint, so, like sanding superficial rust spots, you take a small, damaged section, and by fixing it wind up making it bigger. Third, as the Magic Eraser worked its melamine foam into the chalky yellow coating, it turned it into a yellow liquid, and as you can see in the photo above, that yellow liquid found its way into the cracked paint. I did have some luck in using rubbing alcohol on a folded paper towel to draw the yellow out and soak it up. In places this worked so well that I switched from the Magic Eraser to using only rubbing alcohol, but like the Eraser, the rubbing alcohol changed the color of the paint, and at times removed paint surprisingly quickly.

Still, in a few hours, I’d removed nearly all of the yellow chalk from the deck lid and knocked the appearance of the circular artifacts on the roof way back. I then tried a pass with the orbital polisher in the hopes that it would make the paint look more uniform. While it did impart a bit of shine, it didn’t really take enough paint off to make the treated and untreated areas look the same. I ordered some well-reviewed Sonax MaxCut heavy cutting compound as well as a new pad for the polisher, but there’s so little paint left on the trunk lid that I’m a little afraid to use it.

Still, I took this:

And turned it into this:

After “the cover incident,” when I looked at the Lotus, I felt like a stake had been driven through my chest. Now, the slightly shiny/slightly blotchy appearance of the roof and deck lid are more or less in harmony with the car as a whole. I may play around with the polisher a bit more—I may even try to put some shine on the rest of the car—but bottom line, I can live with it. Hell, it’s more than that; I rescued it from both of us having to live with the ignominy of the scars caused by covering it. There may come a winter when I feel that I have so little to do that I go down the rabbit hole of pulling the fiberglass body off the frame and sending it out for refinishing, but for now, this is all it needs to be.

Whew!

Now, every time I see a car under a cover in a driveway, I feel like stopping, knocking on the door, grabbing the owner by the shoulders, shaking him or her, and saying “What are you doing? Do you know what happened to my Lotus in just two days under a car cover?”

***

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

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The post How covering my Lotus in the heat and rain ruined its paint appeared first on Hagerty Media.

A few weeks ago, when writing about helping a woman sell her husband’s BMW 2002tii, I mentioned replacing the clutch hydraulics because the brake fluid reservoir, which also feeds the clutch, was half-drained, and that halfway point is exactly where the pipe to the clutch master cylinder is. When I examined the clutch slave cylinder, it was clearly leaking. The area under the master cylinder was moist as well.

It was the fifth clutch hydraulic replacement I’ve done the past few years. Clutch hydraulic failure used to be relatively uncommon. Perhaps you’d replace a slave cylinder once in the lifetime of a daily driver—the clutch master cylinder, never. But now, as these early 1970s cars are 50 years old, problems with clutch hydraulics have become so common that I added them onto my list of “The Big Seven” things likely to strand a vintage car on a road trip.

Replacing the 2002tii’s clutch hydraulics while it was parked a few feet from my Lotus Europa—which has a cable clutch instead of a hydraulic one—made me think about the clutch family tree.

My first exposure to a clutch happened in an unusual way. In the late 1960s, I was still a kid living on Long Island. Sting Ray-style bicycles were all the rage, and some of the tough kids in junior high school were motorizing them by taking a lawnmower engine, mounting it on a tilting platform in the middle of the bike’s frame, and attaching a wooden dowel to the output shaft. By tilting the platform and letting the dowel rest against the rear tire, they could take the bike from stationary to moving. It was, of course, incredibly dangerous—the now-motorized bikes still had just the rear coaster brake to slow them—but I still recall seeing that spinning dowel, a kid tilting the platform, the sight and the smell of the little puff of smoke when the wood bit into the rubber, and the bike taking off. It was another eight years before I became a car-crazed teenager, but I knew what a clutch was. I might not yet have been able to name the individual parts, but the concept of needing to couple and uncouple the spinning thing that’s producing the power from the wheels was indelibly etched on my brain. Of course, after the clutch fork and throwout bearing sleeve on my Triumph GT6 both broke, I could name all the pieces very well, interspersed with a good deal of blue language.

Manual automotive clutches are, of course, a bit more sophisticated than a spinning wooden dowel mashed against the tire. Nearly all of them work by having a clutch plate with a machined-flat surface and a clutch disc made with sacrificial friction material like what’s on brake pads. The clutch plate is the face of an assembly that’s bolted to the flywheel. The assembly also contains a set of sprung “fingers” that moves the plate backward when the fingers are depressed. The clutch disc, which has splines in the middle through which the transmission input shaft passes, is sandwiched between the machined surfaces of the clutch plate and the flywheel. If nothing is pressing against the clutch fingers to release the pressure of the plate against the disc, the rotary motion of the spinning flywheel is transferred to the clutch disc, which in turn spins the transmission input shaft, thus spinning whatever gear is selected to transfer power to the rear wheels. Note that this means that the default state of the clutch is “engaged.” Disengaging it requires separating the discs, which in turn requires the clutch fingers to be pressed in.

The disengagement of the clutch—the separation of the plate from the disc—occurs when the clutch release mechanism pushes against the plate’s fingers. This is almost always accomplished with a throw-out bearing, a sleeve, and a release lever, also called a clutch fork. The throw-out bearing is like a donut with a ball bearing race assembly with a flat face on one side. The bearing allows the flat side to be pressed against the spinning clutch fingers. The sleeve is a cylinder that the transmission input shaft passes through and the throwout bearing slides on. The lever is attached to the sides of the throwout bearing. When the lever is pushed, it slides the throwout bearing along the sleeve until the flat bearing face contacts the spinning clutch fingers. The pressure from the lever causes the flat bearing surface to push against the fingers on the plate. This draws the plate backward, relieving the pressure on the disc, thus disengaging the clutch.

But I’ve left out one key detail: What is between the clutch pedal and the release lever that causes the action of your left foot to move the lever? Well, that is the whole point of this article.

For over 40 years, most automobile clutches have been hydraulic. Depressing the clutch pedal moves a rod which presses against a piston inside the clutch master cylinder. This creates pressure in the clutch hydraulic fluid, which is sent through a connecting hose to the clutch slave cylinder. In the slave, the reverse happens—the pressure in the fluid moves a piston inside the slave, which moves a rod that’s pressing against the clutch release lever. It’s just like the car’s brakes, only instead of squeezing brake pads against rotors, it’s pushing a lever that separates the clutch plates.

But before there were hydraulic clutch linkages, some form of direct mechanical linkage was employed. Some cars used a set of ball-in-socket linkage rods somewhere in size between an accelerator linkage and a set of tie rods and steering arms. Stepping on the clutch pedal typically pulled a rod, which caused another rod to rotate, which pushed a third rod that was connected to the clutch release lever. This sort of arrangement made sense on front-engine cars where the distance from the pedal bucket to the transmission was relatively short.

Just to pick one American car as an example, I believe that C1 through C3 Corvettes all used mechanical clutch linkages that look fairly similar to the one from the early BMW 2002, and that it wasn’t until the C4 Corvette in 1984 that the clutches went hydraulic.

The main advantage of rod-based mechanical clutch linkages is reliability. Yes, the ball-and-socket or Heim joint linkages wear, but they’ll generally give you a lot of warning before they fail completely, not unlike a sloppy gearshift lever. The downside is that, as the clutch wears down and the linkage components develop play, the system required adjustment.

The other common type of mechanical clutch linkage is a cable. Cables made perfect sense in rear-engine cars, where the length of a rod-based linkage would likely introduce play as well as have clearance problems. Air-cooled Volkswagens famously had cable clutches, as did Porsche 911s up through 1988. Clutch cables were simple, inexpensive, and could be changed fairly quickly, which was a good thing because they inevitably broke, and did so at the worst possible time.

When my wife and I owned VW buses, we always had a spare clutch cable with us, but that didn’t prevent me from having to occasionally start the car in gear and run red lights in order to get home. While mastering the ability to start a car with no clutch in gear, let it cough and lurch its way forward as if you did it by accident, and feeding just enough gas to get it running, is a life-skill that every car nut should have (and for mad extra credit, you can try to teach yourself how to shift without the clutch by matching engine and transmission RPMs), it’s not something that makes for a relaxing outing. It once happened to us when we were out for dinner in downtown Austin, Texas, and we had to wait for the two cars that were parallel-parked in front of us to move before I felt like I had sufficient running room for the in-gear start.

Sudden failure isn’t the only downside of cable clutches. Because the cable stretches, periodic adjustment is necessary. And it wasn’t only rear-engine cars that had cable clutches. Many cars had them, and for a surprisingly long time—Mustangs had cable clutches all the way up through 2004. I don’t think any new car sold in the United States still has a cable clutch, but some econoboxes sold in other markets reportedly still have them, and they’re still common on motorcycles.

The big advantage of hydraulic linkages is that they’re self-adjusting—the clutch linkage itself doesn’t require adjustment as the clutch wears. And they give a very uniform pedal feel, even if it’s perhaps not as visceral as a mechanical clutch.

As I think about it, the trade-offs between cable and hydraulic clutches are somewhat analogous to the argument about points versus electronic triggering. Like points, cable clutches are not terribly difficult to replace by the side of the road, if necessary, but it sometimes is necessary, so you carry a spare. Like electronic triggering modules, hydraulic clutches eliminate the need for adjustment. Roadside replacement of clutch hydraulics, though, isn’t something I’d want to do. When the clutch master cylinder in the BMW 2002tii that I wrote the book about (Ran When Parked) died at the gas station—which was literally at the entrance ramp to the highway as I was about to begin the 1000-mile trip home—I cough-started it and nursed my way back to a friend’s pole barn where I had a floor jack, stands, and a cement floor.

There are enthusiasts who feel that a mechanical clutch linkage, particularly a non-cable rod-based one, gives you better clutch feel in the same way that non-power steering gives you better road feel. But in general, despite my railing against the increasingly common failure of 50-year-old master and slave cylinders, I think the advantages of hydraulic clutches outweigh the downsides. And I’m not the only one—If you read up on old cars with rod or cable-based mechanical clutches, you find kits to convert them to a hydraulic clutch. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cable-based retrofit kit to de-hydraulic your clutch linkage.

So be at peace with your hydraulic clutch linkage. Just replace it at the first sign of leakage or trouble.

***

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

The post Clutch performance and the advantage of hydraulics appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Like any good car nut, I have a framed iconic car poster in my garage. It shows Hans Stuck driving a BMW 3.0CSL at the Nürburgring in 1974. All four wheels are airborne. It’s an awesome shot—a glorious blur of fat tires, flared fenders, air dams, BMW Motorsport-colored livery, and side scoops. You can just feel the passion and the speed.

The 3.0CSL was one of those 1970s “homologation specials.” That is, the model was a version of the regular E9 coupe (the 2800 CS and 3.0CS/CSi) manufactured specifically so BMW could race it in the European Touring Car series. A thousand cars needed to be built and sold as street vehicles in order to pass muster with the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) and be raced.

Wait, so BMW built a thousand of the flying cars?

No. Not even close.

And the flying car is what they call a “Batmobile?”

Well, sort of, but not really.

I’m going to straighten this out. It’s really pretty simple, and I’m astonished it’s not better-explained in the dozens of 3.0CSL articles I’ve read.

Here’s the deal. There were street CSL and racing CSLs. Most of the street CSLs look pretty much like the standard 3.0CS. Only the last 167 were “Batmobiles” with the cool aerodynamic package. The racing CSLs built by the factory, like the flying car in the photo, are different beasts entirely. Yes, some of them have the Batmobile’s wings, but they also have much more. I mean, they’re race cars. And authentic ones are far rarer than either the regular CSLs or the Batmobiles and are now worth an ungodly amount of money, so if you see one driving around, or at a show that isn’t at the level of Amelia Island—I mean The Amelia—odds are that it’s a tribute car as opposed to the real thing.

There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Here are the details.

Let me start by saying that I’m not a motorsport guy. I’m really not terribly interested in the racing history of any car, even this one. You can read about it elsewhere. However, the 3.0CSL was a seminal vehicle for BMW, as even though it wasn’t badged as an “M” car, it was the car that birthed BMW’s Motorsport division, which then went on to build—and race—some of the company’s most iconic vehicles, such as the E30 M3. The 3.0CSL is also the first BMW to carry the famous red-blue-violet colors. We’ll get back to that when I talk about the race cars.

The Street Cars

The “L” in CSL stands for “leichtbau” (light construction). To make a homologation car out of the E9, Alpina took a 3.0CS and lightened it for BMW (yes, Alpina built the first prototype CSL). Then it incorporated lighter bolt-on items and eliminated others. An aluminum hood, trunk lid, and door skins and a plastic rear bumper were fitted on a body shell built with thinner metal. Perspex (plastic) was substituted for the glass rear windshield and rear side windows (it’s actually Lexan, but most folks refer to it as Perspex), and a thinner front windshield, thinner carpets, and light Scheel racing seats were used. Hand-crank windows replaced the electric ones in the front, and the rear side windows became fixed. The front bumper, the hood torsion spring and release latch mechanism, the power steering, sound insulation, undercoating, and the trunk-mounted tool kit were deleted. Even the trunk lock was removed. Collectively, this saved about 440 pounds on CSLs that had all these “comfort” items removed. In addition to the missing front bumper, the car’s obvious visual identifying cues were the distinctive stripes with the text “3.0CSL” over the fender, the chrome fender lips to accommodate the wider 14×7 finned Alpina wheels, and the Cobra-style hood pins. Interior-wise, if the car lost some amenities, its elegant vibe was maintained by the striking combination of the E9’s standard wood dashboard, the Scheel seats, the distinctive CSL-specific Petri three-spoke steering wheel with its holes of decreasing radii on the spokes, and a black headliner.

And yes, since Karmann manufactured the CSL’s bodies as they did the regular E9, all this lightening means that they took an E9 coupe, which is a legendary rust bucket, and made it even more rust-prone.

From there, it starts to get complicated, as you can slice the street-going CSL pie by engine size, by induction (carbureted or injected), by left or right-hand drive, by level of amenities, and by aerodynamics. It makes the most sense if you step through it sequentially.

BMW liked Alpina’s prototype and began producing them. The first batch of 169 CSLs began rolling out in late 1971. They were all left-hand drive, powered by the same 2985-cc, 180-horsepower, carbureted, in-line, six-cylinder, 12-valve M30 engine that the standard 3.0CS had, fed by the same pair of down-draft progressive Zeniths. These early CSLs are sometimes referred to as pre-production prototypes, though how much of that is marketing pablum from folks trying to sell them is unclear. I mean, 169 is a fair number of “prototypes.” I’ve also seen them referred to as “ultra-lightweights,” as very, very few of the later cars had the Perspex rear windows when new. I’m told that most CSL aficionados just call them “carb cars.”

The next batch comprising the bulk of the thousand cars required for homologation began in September 1972. A total of 429 left-hand-drive cars and 500 right-hand-drive cars were built. The engine size was increased slightly to 3003 cc to allow the cars to race in the over-three-liter category. The induction system was changed from carburetors to Bosch D-Jetronic, the early electronic injection system that was being used in the non-lightweight 3.0CSi. Horsepower was increased to 200. To distinguish them from the earlier carbureted CSL, the injected cars are sometimes referred to in the literature as the CSiL, though the badge on the back still says “3.0CSL.”

Within the Series 2 cars, there’s the issue of the so-called “Stadtpacket” or “city package,” also sometimes referred to as the “town package.” This was a BMW option package specified for all of the RHD cars brought into Great Britain by the importer. The idea was that some customers might not be thrilled with spending all that money for something fragile and Spartan, so the package restored many of the things that were done to lighten the car. Most but not all of the city package cars had the standard non-CSL steel trunk lid and door skins. Metal front and rear bumpers were put back on, as was power steering, power windows, thick carpets, sound insulation, undercoating, an interior hood release instead of the hood pins, the tool kit on the underside of the trunk lid, and a trunk lock. This cut the weight savings down from 440 pounds to closer to 250. Most articles talk about the city package as only applying to the 500 RHD cars, but one of the foremost CSL collectors in the country tells me that a majority of the 429 LHD cars were either city package cars or had some of the comfort items installed when new, and that as few as 20 of the Series 2 cars were full lightweights like the Series 1 cars.

A small number of LHD cars were ordered with the city package as well. The external tip-offs to the city package’s L-ness were reduced to the CSL stripes, the chrome fender arch trim, the Alpina wheels, and the Scheel seats. And, of course, the badge on the trunk.

When I saw car in the photo below at the Vintage last spring in Asheville, North Carolina, it had me fooled. The black CSL stripes and chrome fender lips had been removed for an inexpensive repaint. It wasn’t until I stuck my head inside, saw the right-hand drive configuration, the Scheel seats, and the black headliner, that I blurted out “OMG, this is a city-package CSL!” Turns out the tandem bike on the roof wasn’t just for show. The owner runs a bicycle business. He said he loves driving the car—he drove it down from Indiana—but felt bad that he didn’t have the money to restore it. “Don’t you dare,” I said, “make any apologies about this car because someone else thinks you need to spend $150K that you don’t have to turn it into what they think it should be. It’s massively cool just the way it is. It’s the coolest E9 here. It’s probably the coolest BMW here, period.” I think I made his day.

Next and smallest in number were the famous “Batmobiles,” the cars that many people think of when you say “3.0CSL.” These are the ones with the iconic massive trunk wing, the “hoop” spoiler at the top of the rear windshield, and the front fender windsplits. The oft-told story is that the trunk wing was so big that it contravened German road laws, so if the car was being sold in Germany or shipped to another country where it was illegal, the wing was shipped in the trunk, and the dealer or owner had to install it. Further, the wing was large enough that the downforce generated proved to be problematic for the lightweight aluminum trunk lid, so Batmobile’s have steel trunk lids.

All Batmobiles were left-hand drive and had an injected engine whose displacement was increased to 3.2 liters (3153 cc, 206 hp). Two small batches were built. They’re sometimes referred to as Series 1 and Series 2 Batmobiles, which of course is instantly confusing with the Series 1 and 2 nomenclature that’s applied to all CSLs. The first batch—110 cars—was produced 7/73 through 10/73, with the cars available only in Polaris (silver) and Chamonix (white). The second batch of 57 cars, produced from 1/74 to 10/75, were available in all of the BMW factory colors, and reportedly could be ordered with a la carte options such as electric rear windows and air conditioning. In addition, most of the final-batch Batmobiles had a third supporting fin in the center of the trunk wing. So, if you see a winged CSL in a zingy color like Golf (yellow) or Taiga (metallic green), you can act smart and say, “If that’s original, it must be a Series 2 Batmobile.”

I’m uncertain when the thin, red-blue-violet Motorsport-colored side stripes crept in. I don’t believe I’ve seen them on non-Batmobile CSLs. Since I’ve seen both Batmobile batches with both black and Motorsport stripes, I assume they were an option.

These three sets of cars—the 169 carbureted LHD, 2985-cc first series, the 929 injected LHD and RHD 3003-cc second series (most of the RHD cars having the city package), and the 167 3.2-liter injected Batmobiles (first and second batch)—comprise the CSL road cars. They’re all real CSLs.

Now, having laid out the CSL road car taxonomy, don’t take any of what I say as canon. Bring a Trailer auctions are full of comments from folks with enough knowledge to be dangerous, saying things like, “Your city package car shouldn’t have aluminum panels” or “Your second-batch Batmobile should have a third vertical fin on the wing,” only to have the real experts point out that the cars were all low-production and hand-built, and not every parts change fell along published boundaries.

For all the CSL’s hype, the cars are mechanically very similar to the stock 3.0CS and CSi. Other than being equipped with shorter springs and gas-pressure Bilsteins when new, and having increased front and rear negative camber specifications, there’s not much difference.

As with many classic cars, there’s a certain degree of trim augmentation that’s gone on. It’s not unusual to see standard non-lightweight E9s (2800CS, 3.0CS/CSi) wearing CSL chrome fender trim. And reproductions of the Batmobile aerodynamic package have made it easy for both heavyweight and lightweight E9s to sport the spoilers and run around as Batmobiles. Personally, I see nothing wrong with “tribute cars” so long as, when asked, you say “it’s a regular 3.0CS but I bolted on the chrome fender lips and the Batmobile stuff.” Of course, with rising CSL values, it’s now swinging the other way—the importance of originality catches up with the desire for bling, and Bring a Trailer listings sometimes detail the removal of a non-original Batmobile package on a correctly-restored first or second-series CSL.

The Race Cars

The race cars are a whole different subject. They’re, well, race cars. The interiors are gutted. The wood dash is gone. There’s a roll cage, a fire extinguisher, and a ton of buttons. And there’s livery (paint and graphics of the sponsor). Lots and lots of livery. This is important, because it dramatically affects what you’re seeing when you see the cars.

My understanding is that there were 21 factory race cars built to participate in FIA European Touring Car Group 2, Group 4, and Group 5 action. (There were also street CSLs that were turned into race cars by privateers, but that’s another story.) The Group 2 cars such as the one in the famous poster above originally had a massaged version of the standard 12-valve M30 engine, and fender flares to accommodate the wider race rubber. As you move from Group 2 to 4 to 5, the engine, fender flares, brake ducts, and front air dam all become more outrageous.

The “flying car” in the poster was black with Motorsport stripes, but most of BMW’s CSL race cars were white. The photo below shows a white Group 2 racing CSL. You can see what appear to be the stock Batmobile trunk and roof air dams, as well as moderate-sized fender flares. But the Motorsport-colored stripes are much more than just the thin side strips on the street CSLs. Instead, they completely dominate the look of the white cars. To many, this, not the street Batmobile, is what comes to mind when they imagine a 3.0CSL.

The Group 2 cars, however, look tame compared with the Group 4 and Group 5 cars with their massive, boxed fender flares and brake ducts. I’m rapidly wandering out of my depth here, but I believe that the Group 4 and 5 cars used the ultra-rare 24-valve 3.5-liter BMW M49 race engine outfitted with Kugelfischer mechanical injection and individual throttle bodies. At times, these 3.5CSLs literally breathed (well, spat) fire out the side-mounted exhausts. Visually, the two groups can be differentiated by the rear wing and the front air dam. The Group 4 cars are wearing the Batmobile trunk wing, but the wings and dams on the Group 5 cars extend further in front and in back.

With the Group 2, 4, and 5 race cars shown, we now have the basis to look at the famed art cars, since, to many non-car people, those are what come to mind when you say “BMW 3.0CSL.” By comparing the pics, you can see that the colorful Calder art car (which I also have a poster of in my garage) has Group 4 bodywork, as it has big fender flares with deep brake ducts, but the front air dam is modest, and the rear air dam looks like that on the Batmobile.

In contrast, you can see that the graph-paper-like Stella art car’s bodywork, with its snowplow-like front air dam and pushing-a-pram rear wing, is Group 5.

With that tutorial complete, I’ll leave you with this. What is it?

This photo shows the power of that Motorsport livery on white paint—it draws the eye away from the details. Your right brain says “race car,” but do you see fender flares? Do you see brake ducts? Do you see outrageous aerodynamics? No. This is a 3.0CS turned into CSL race car tribute, with a CSL front air dam, Batmobile roof hoop, the rear bumper taken off, and a clever wrap with the Motorsport livery printed on it. Pretty cool.

So, which one is a CSL? All of them (well, more correctly, all of them with original lightweight bodies). Which one is the iconic CSL? That’s up to you. As far as teaching the larger automotive world, learning to say “3.0CSL street car” and “CSL race car” is half the battle. It may be overly pedantic to insert “3.0CSL street Batmobile” between them, but if everyone did it, it would clear up a lot of confusion.

I’ll leave you with one final tidbit: You know the flying car—Hans Stuck on the Nürburgring—and the Calder art car? Do you know what they have in common (in addition to my having posters of them in my garage)?

They’re the same car. VIN 2275992. Now that’s passion.

***

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

The post What, exactly, is a BMW 3.0CSL? appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Back in May, I received two emails that were so similar I initially thought they were duplicates. Both were from men who told me about a woman friend of theirs whose 2002-owning husband had passed away, and they each asked if I could help the woman sell the car. And both, by sheer coincidence, were on the Massachusetts north shore—one in Amesbury, the other in Newburyport, perhaps six miles apart on opposite sides of the Merrimac River.

As I followed up on the emails, corresponded with the women, and teased out the details, I learned the similarities and differences between the two situations. Pam, the woman in Amesbury, had her husband Robert’s ’76 2002. He’d owned the car 35 years. From the photos she sent me, it looked mint outside and inside. She said she didn’t need me to take possession of the car and broker the sale, but she welcomed any help and advice I could give. Chris, the woman in Newburyport, had her husband Jim’s 1972 2002tii. He was the original owner of the car. She was interested in having me handle the entire sale. Chris had a folder of receipts that Jim had kept since the car was new, so the 2002tii’s history was well documented. Pam never found such a folder. But folder or no, neither woman knew much about the car in their possession. To be clear, this isn’t a value judgement. I mean, don’t ask me to tell you anything about my wife’s quilts or what plants are in her garden.

Helping the two women sell their late husband’s prized 2002s seemed a natural. In the language of my ancestors, a “mitzvah” is a good deed. My mother, who passed away three summers ago, instilled in me the habit of doing such things. Since the towns where they live are so close, I blocked out a Friday and drove up to meet both women and look at both cars.

If you know anything about BMW 2002s, you probably know that they divide up primarily into 1968–73 “roundies,” with round taillights and small chrome bumpers, and 1974–76 “squaries,” with square taillights and giant tugboat-like bumpers hastily installed on American-bound cars to comply with the newly instituted 5-mph bumper standards. They also divide up into carbureted 2002s and the mechanically fuel-injected 2002tiis that were sold in the U.S. in 1972–74. So a ’72 2002tii and a ’76 2002 are two very different cars. On paper, the ’72 round taillight 2002tii is a far more valuable car than its carbureted big-bumpered ’76 counterpart. However, things on paper are rarely what they are in real life.

I saw Chris’ car—the original-owner ’72 2002tii—first. Her friend Michael, the guy who’d initially emailed me, said that Chris had told him that as her husband, Jim, was nearing the end, he’d told her, “Don’t sell the baby [his nickname for the car] for less than 60 thousand dollars.” While tiis have topped $60K several times on Bring a Trailer, that’s a number for a mint survivor or one that’s perfectly restored. Michael told me, “I’ve seen the car. It’s not a 60-thousand-dollar car. I don’t know if it would do well on BaT.”

When Chris opened up the garage door and I first saw Jim’s tii, I thought it was just lovely. The paint was a beautiful Fjord blue, which—along with the chrome trim—was in excellent condition, and the interior was original with unripped seats. Apart from an out-of-fashion set of bottlecap alloy wheels from a 1980s BMW E30 3 Series, the car looked neat, prim, and perky. I wondered where Michael’s concerns were coming from.

Then I opened the hood and saw what he meant. Instead of the engine compartment being the same Fjord blue as the rest of the car, it had been painted with a black gravel-guard coating. When I crawled under the car, I found more of it. And there was a different black waxy Ziebart-like coating inside the trunk. Further, the welds where a new nose had been attached had a non-factory look to them. In fairness, as Colin Comer commented in the July-August issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine, we might sneer “What were they thinking?” when we look at it now, but this kind of less-than-factory-perfect rust remediation work was commonplace in the 1980s and ’90s, particularly on cars that were not terribly valuable.

Unfortunately, I saw more things that capped the car’s value. It had a replacement engine; the original seized numbers-matching engine was lying forlornly off to the side of the garage. The car was wearing a “snorkel nose” (a nose originally made for a carbureted 2002, with a round inlet for its air cleaner hose, not used on an injected tii). There were several howling errors in the under-hood fuel hose routing and battery cabling. And the interior’s original feel was marred by the absence of the piece of rug for the driver’s footwell. In its place was a section of black indoor-outdoor carpeting.

Since Chris was interested in having me represent the car for her, we drove it to a park where I could photograph it. It generally ran and drove well, but the brake pedal travel was alarmingly long—an indication that the rear drum brakes were wildly out of adjustment and likely badly worn. And, when I looked under the hood a second time, I noticed that the brake reservoir was half-empty, down to the line that feeds the clutch master cylinder—a sure tell-tale that the clutch hydraulics were leaking. In addition, the car’s right-side front and rear directionals weren’t working, and inspection had expired. I took a cursory set of photographs and gave Chris a punch list that included having the directionals repaired, getting the car inspected, having the brakes and the clutch hydraulics fixed, and coordinating with her friend Michael to take the car somewhere it could be put up on a lift and the undercarriage thoroughly photographed.

I’ve heard Wayne Carini say that much of his time is spent explaining to families why grandpa’s ’55 Chevy isn’t worth the $150K they saw one sell for at Barrett-Jackson. I had a candid chat with Chris, explaining how, although the car is virtually rust free, the combination of the black gravel guard, non-original welds, “snorkel nose,” and non-numbers-matching engine were likely to cap the value of the car well below Jim’s $60,000 wish, but that we’ll do the best we can. She handed me the thick folder of receipts, and said she’d speak with Jim’s regular mechanic about getting the punch list done.

I then headed across the river to Amesbury to see Pam’s ’76 2002. Unlike the tii, it dramatically exceeded my expectations. It was quite simply the nicest-looking big-bumpered 2002 I’d ever seen, with a cool combination of a stock exterior and a hot-rod engine. The Malaga (burgundy) paint was gorgeous. The interior was gorgeous. The engine compartment was gorgeous and showed a blingy motor with dual side-draft Weber 40DCOE carbs. A quick crawl under the car revealed that everything was painted or powder coated. When I drove it, it went like a bat out of hell.

There were two minor issues. The first was that, when I drove the car, there was a metallic ringing from under the hood. I could also hear it as the engine idled, though it was quieter. It took me a while to isolate it, but the source turned out to be that the two halves of the alternator pulley were coming apart, and it wasn’t as simple as a loose nut at the end of the shaft. If it was my car, I’d pull the alternator, remove the pulley, and see exactly what it was that was failing, but I advised Pam that any repair shop could simply replace the rebuilt Bosch alternator with another one with the same part number. The other problem was that, like Chris’ car, the inspection sticker had expired, and the turn signals weren’t working. However, unlike Chris’ car in which only the right directionals weren’t working, neither side worked in Pam’s car. This usually points to the hazard switch, which is a trivial replacement. She said she’d get the two things done and then we’d talk again.

About a week later, I re-engaged both owners. Pam had gotten the beautiful Malaga ’76 fixed and inspected. I offered to float it for sale on my Facebook page for no cost if she took a decent set of photos. I advised waiting for a clear sunny day to make the paint pop, then taking the car out to someplace scenic, like a field, and shooting it. It took a few iterations back and forth, but eventually she sent me a set of both new pics as well as scans of the car during restoration. She also sent me a recent valuation from a local appraisal shop. I was puzzled that they quoted NADA values (which typically poorly represent real classic car values), but other than that, the appraisal was very detailed. It valued the car at $31K. I asked Pam if that’s what she wanted to sell the car for. She said yes.

I wrote up a description of the car and put it and the pics up on my Facebook page. It generated intense interest. Several members of the local Nor’East 02ers group chimed in that they knew the car and its owner and vouched for the quality of the restoration. However, the consensus opinion of several folks I trust was that, at $31K, the car was substantially underpriced and would bring far more on Bring a Trailer. One fellow, well-known in BMW 2002 circles for home-restoring 2002s, said, “That’s a $45K car all day long.”

This put me in a funny situation. I don’t appraise cars. I tell folks to look on eBay and BaT for what similar cars sell for (and to be absolutely mercilessly honest regarding whether their car is actually “similar” condition-wise). I wasn’t representing the car for Pam, so I had no direct fiducial responsibility, but I also felt that I had to convey this information to her. I advised her to put the car on BaT. She was less than thrilled when I explained about the long lead times and having to answer questions that she didn’t know the answers to (as I said, unlike Chris, she had not found a folder of receipts for the car).

Pam said, “Could we just split the difference? Try to get $38K for it?”

So that’s what I did. I re-floated it on my page with the corrected price. Within a day, a Facebook friend contacted me, saying that someone came to look at his Malaga ’76 200 and it wasn’t nice enough for him, but this car probably was. Seller and buyer talked, the buyer called me (since I had actually seen and driven the car), and the deal was done. Pam is just waiting for the truck to take the car to its new owner.

She asked me what I wanted for my efforts. I explained that this was a mitzvah, and I didn’t want any money, but if she wanted, she could make a donation to Planned Parenthood, because my mother, whose consummate kindness I channel whenever I do something like this, would’ve really liked that.

And so that’s what happened. She donated $1000 in the name of “Rob Siegel and his mother.” If that’s not a well-sold car, I don’t know what is.

Selling “the baby,” the ’72 2002tii, turned out to be far more involved. Chris reported that she was unable to get it repaired because the guy who used to work on it for her husband had thrown out his back. I don’t really fix cars for other people, but after thinking about it carefully, I decided that I was the best person to deal with the car’s triple-layered set of needs (inspection issues, general mechanical issues, and making it the best version of itself). So, home it came. I thought about driving it the 55 miles, but the folder of service records revealed that the tires had been purchased in 2004. Plus, with those leaking clutch hydraulics, the clutch could go out at any moment. I rented a U-Haul auto transport and towed it.

When I was loading the related parts into the back of the truck, I saw a box in Chris’ garage containing the original hubcaps. “Any chance you have the steel wheels that these caps attach to?” I asked. “Not unless they’re in the basement” she said. We had a look, and there they were. In addition to the general trend of folks wanting original wheels on vintage cars like they want original radios in the dash, round taillight 2002tiis had unique wheels. Other roundie 2002s had 4 1/2-inch-wide wheels, but roundie tiis had 5-inch-wide wheels to clear the bigger brake calipers.

Beginning in 1974, all 2002s had 5-inch wheels, but they’re a different slotted design with little center caps, not solid steelies with big hubcaps. Thus, the 5-inch tii wheels with the big hubcaps were only used for two years and have become quite valuable. Since the bottlecap alloys needed new tires anyway, I convinced Chris to let me resurrect the steel wheels.

I traced the non-functional right-side directionals to the turn signal stalk itself. Despite my having a box of 11 vintage BMW directional stalks, I didn’t have one exactly like this one. So I carefully pulled it apart. When doing so, it’s a question whether the pot-metal tabs will break before the 50-year-old Bakelite plastic does. I cleaned the electrical contacts, bent the one for the right directional slightly outward to increase pressure, tested it, put it back together, and got the car inspected.

The clutch slave cylinder was clearly leaking. Since one of my “Big Seven” things likely to strand a vintage car is clutch hydraulics, I replaced the clutch master cylinder too, as well as the hose connecting them.

Addressing the long brake pedal travel resulted in a trip straight down the slippery slope. The culprit was the left forward brake shoe, which had worn unevenly due to a seized adjuster. I had to pull the shoes off both sides, free up the adjusters with heat and wax, then install new shoes, drums, and wheel cylinders.

Obtaining the missing rug piece was a saga in itself. I pulsed every used BMW parts vendor I know and came up empty. In desperation, I made a direct plea not only on my Facebook page, but on five vintage BMW or 2002-specific pages. That shook one loose. Its color and wear closely match the original rug.

The fuel hose routing and battery and cable situation wasn’t difficult to correct, but I didn’t expect them to be related. Because the 2002tii has a bigger brake booster than the stock 2002, it requires a smaller battery—a little Group 26R. Someone had fitted a slightly larger Group 22 battery, but it didn’t have reversed terminals, so non-stock battery cables were used. They’d sourced them from AutoZone, and they looked terrible. Further, the larger battery interfered with the mounting of the fuel filter on a little bracket on the left side of the radiator, so the bracket had been deleted, the filter was moved, and the fuel hoses were lengthened by a laughable amount. I corrected all this. I found a used filter bracket on eBay. Original 2002 positive battery cables are NLA, but a 320i cable is very similar. The engine compartment still won’t win any awards, but at least the Bring a Trailer peanut gallery won’t point and howl at it quite as loudly.

Dealing with the wheels was very satisfying. I gave them a pressure wash, a scrub with a Scotch Brite pad, a coat of paint, and had them shod with new Kumho 185/70R13 tires. The car now looks like the well-cared-for one-owner car that it actually is.

There were many other small things I did, too numerous to mention, to improve either the functionality, reliability, drivability, or originality of the car. I then redid all the photography, shot the obligatory walk-through and drive videos as well as an undercarriage video, and submitted the car to Bring a Trailer. They accepted it on July 12, so I expect the auction to go live soon, if it hasn’t already.

The economics of this weren’t as simple as the no-charge mitzvah for Pam’s car. This was waaaaay more work than just floating a car on my Facebook page. “The baby” has been at my house, occupying precious garage space, for six weeks. I easily put 40 hours of direct wrenching time into it. I charged Chris for only about a third of those hours, at a lower hourly rate than any 2002 specialist on the planet, and that doesn’t count the innumerable hours poring over the folder of receipts and building a coherent story of the original-owner car. For brokering the car on BaT, I charged her a flat $500, so I don’t have incentive to misrepresent the car. And I told her that, if the bill seems too low, she can donate money to charity as Pam did.

I’m waiting for things to play out with Bring a Trailer (the process is a lengthy one), but I feel really good about donating my time and my 2002 knowledge to help these two women. Both were very grateful. I’m not one who believes that people are smiling down from heaven, but I think my mother and both 2002 owners would be pleased. Jim’s baby won’t bring $60K, but I’ve treated the original-owner car with the reverence that it deserves, and don’t know what else I could’ve done to help bring it as close to his target value as possible.

***

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

The post Good deeds come in twos, and sometimes so do BMWs appeared first on Hagerty Media.

There are 13 cars here at the Siegel homestead. Well, scratch that; there are eight cars here at the house, and another five stored in a warehouse on the Massachusetts-Connecticut border. But if you remove the Winnebago Rialta RV, the sort-of-formerly-mouse-infested truck, my daily-driver 2003 BMW 530i stick sport, and my wife’s 2014 Honda Fit Sport, you’re left with the nine cars on my Hagerty policy. You know. The fun cars.

Obviously, I own and store these cars because I love them, but they’re not like children. I don’t love them all equally. How I feel about them ebbs and flows with the years and seasons, and sometimes even the weeks and days. I thought I’d take a little snapshot of who’s on the back burner and who’s hot. Here’s my list, from No. 9 to No. 1.

1975 BMW 2002 (“Bertha”)

Bertha is the ’75 2002 I bought in Austin in 1984 just before Maire Anne and I returned to Boston to get married. We actually have a photo of the car covered in shaving cream and trailing cans at our wedding. At the time, I actually wanted a big-bumpered square-taillight 2002 to survive the demolition derby that is Boston traffic and parking. I daily-drove it until it was clear that the New England winters would kill it, then began garaging it and transforming it into a hot rod. I sold it to my friend Alex in 1988. It got stolen and recovered twice, but it was damaged. Alex rolled it into his neighbor’s garage where it sat for 26 years. I repeatedly tried to buy it back. Four years ago, Alex relented and sold me the car, but it was in far worse condition than I remembered. I chronicled its revival in my book Resurrecting Bertha. It still has its go-fast components—the hot engine with the dual Weber 40DCOEs and the 300-degree cam and the Koni sport suspension—and the car’s unabashedly snotty patina makes me smile, but after I road-tripped the car the 2100 miles to The Vintage in Asheville, North Carolina, and back in 2019, it hasn’t seen much use. Although there’s only one car I drove off from my wedding in, if I had to make space and move a car along, right now that would be Bertha.

1999 BMW M Coupe (“the clownshoe”)

I’ve owned the ’99 M Coupe (or, as it’s sometimes pedantically called in order to distinguish it from other two-door BMW M cars, the Z3 M Coupe) since 2008. I bought it when I still had my engineering job and the income that went along with it. Mine is a ’99, so it has the 240-hp S52 engine from the E36 M3. The M Coupes that fetch big money on Bring a Trailer are low-mileage examples of the 2001 and 2002 ’shoes with the 315-hp S54 mill from the E46 M3. Plus, mine is silver with a solid black interior, which looks pale next to the zingier color combinations. Added up—driver quality S52 car in the most common color combination—and it falls into the low end of M Coupe resale values. It’s completely unlike my older vintage cars, it’s as fast as I need a car to be, and I love the look of its planted rear end, but I don’t drive it much. And it’s got the quirk that its stiff, heavily bolstered seats cause me a lot of back pain if I’m in them for more than 45 minutes, and they’re so narrow that using Tempur-Pedic back and butt pillows is awkward. I’ve flirted several times with selling it, but each time I’m terrified that the car will do what my ’82 911SC did and zoom up in value right after it’s gone. It was fun, though, shooting the video with Magnus Walker in it.

1973 BMW Bavaria (“Fat Bastard”)

I’ve previously fingered the Bavaria—the big four-door predecessor of the BMW 7 Series—as the car in my not-really-a-collection that I’m continually surprised by when I pull the cover off and drive it. The completely original interior, the snarl of the big M30 inline six, and the fact that it doesn’t carry the high value of its E9 coupe sister make it a great car to have a low-stress road-trip experience in, tool around in, or park downtown if I need to. However, when I lost my storage spaces in Fitchburg last year, I more than toyed with selling the Bav—I actually contacted a good friend who’d previously given me the “if you ever want to sell it” secret handshake. I named a price, he thought it was fair, but after thinking about it, he couldn’t make the money and the space work, so the car was spared the axe.

1974 Lotus Europa Twin Cam Special (“Lolita”)

I love my little Lotus Europa TCS so much that it just ain’t right. I bought it in 2013 knowing that it had been sitting since 1979 and had a seized engine. It was a long slog rebuilding the engine and getting the car up and running, but it began to terrorize my neighborhood in the spring of 2019. There’s something absolutely addictive about this primitive, buzzy little go-cart. Unfortunately, getting the car to handle like it should has proven to be very challenging. I built some adjustable rear links to be able to dial in the rear camber. I now need to do the same for the front. As we’re now into the heat of summer, and as the car’s ventilation is poor, it’s just been sitting in the back of the garage. And that’s OK. She knows I’ll get back to her. And I know she’ll be there.

1973 BMW 2002 (“Hampton”)

I have an odd relationship with the 49,000-mile, original-owner 1973 2002 I bought a few years back in Bridgehampton, Long Island. Initially the pretty little survivor car seemed too nice for me. I cleaned it up, sorted it out, put it on Bring a Trailer, and it did not meet its reasonable reserve, as these days, even with an unrestored survivor, buyers expect a detailed engine compartment and a dry-ice-blasted undercarriage. I put the car away in storage so we both could think. But when I took it back out, I realized that it’s not having sold was a blessing and that I was fortunate to still have it. Compared with my other 2002s, bone-stock Hampton is a bit slow, but the car’s originality and vibe have won me over. I’ll cycle it out of storage and bring it back home in a few weeks and peck away at the next layer of the onion of preservation.

1979 BMW Euro 635CSi (“Sharkie”)

BMW built the E24 635CSi and related cars from 1977 through ’89—a rather remarkable 12-year production run. However, that longevity is something of a trick, as the cars were based on two different models of the 5 Series, with the earlier cars based on the E12, the later ones the E28. The European cars lacked the big diving-board bumpers that the U.S.-spec cars had. These two characteristics combine to give the early Euro cars like my ’79 635CSi a very particular look. I freaking love it. Talk about parking a car and then turning around to look at it as you’re walking away. This car has presence in spades. The downside of the E24 is that, even with the small Euro bumpers, it’s big. It’s certainly not nimble like a 2002. It’s not a car I look forward to jumping into for stress-busting drives, or even just to run down to Trader Joe’s in and buy cereal on a Sunday morning. But take it on a road trip and it’s in its element. I flirted with selling the car a few years back, but every time I looked at it in the driveway, it was just too cool to banish. I took it on my first post-pandemic road trip in the fall of 2021. It behaved so majestically that I even forgave it for blowing a coolant hose on I-78. And yes, I named the most intimidating car I own like a three-year-old would name a plush toy.

1972 BMW 2002tii (“Louie”)

Louie is the Ran When Parked car, the 10-years-dead one I bought sight-unseen in Louisville in early 2017. I drove down there with a rented SUV filled with tools and parts, nursed Louis back to heath in a friend’s pole barn, then road-tripped him home. It’s also the car that suffered a cracked head on the road, which I fixed with J-B Weld and made it home. The car has had multiple road trips since, including a recent 3100-mile round trip to Mid-America 02Fest. Hampton is by any measure a nicer, prettier car, but Louie and I have bonded in ways that make it a lifer. It’s starting to show a fair amount of rust up under the nose, but that only makes me more likely to not be shy about using it. Plus, I retrofitted air conditioning into it last summer, so it’s way cool.

1973 BMW 3.0CSi (“Renee”)

I’ve owned my precious E9 coupe since 1986. It is a part of me, and I’m part of it. There’s zero question that it’ll be the last car on the premises when I’ve shuffled off that mortal ignition coil and my family is disposing of what passes as my “estate.” I had the car color changed from its original Polaris (silver) to Signal Red (which isn’t even a BMW color) when I had the outer body restoration done in 1988, and it’s no longer wearing its original engine or interior, so it’s never going to be worth what flawless E9s go for on Bring a Trailer, but I love this car all day long, every day. E9s are legendary rust buckets, so I’ve been shy the past few years about road-tripping it, but I took it to The Vintage in Asheville and back this past May. If this list wasn’t “My favorite car this week,” the winner would be Renee every single time.

1999 BMW Z3 (“Zelda”)

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that I like my ratty little Z3 more than the 3.0CSi or any of the other cars. I’m just saying that there are days or weeks when dropping the top and driving the little bugger seems to cure much of what ails me in ways that no other car I own even comes close.

Convertibles are wonderful things. They’re like rolling Xanax. The whole-body relaxation response from dropping the top and having all that sun and air hit you is amazing, and you can get that prescription in almost an infinite number of forms. If you go for vintage British metal, I understand. If you like American land barges, good on you. If your answer is a first-generation Miata, do it. If you’re a Porsche person and you think Boxster, you do you. As a BMW guy who fishes at the muddy end of the used-car pond, the Z3 is a natural. They’re cheap. They’re tiny. They’re tight. They’re tossable. Even the smallest in-line six (mine, badged as a “Z3 2.3,” is actually a 2.5), is 170 horses, with lots of rev and grunt. If I went only by the car’s external styling, I freely admit I wouldn’t love it, but it’s the total experience of driving it that makes it the shiznit. Yes, convertibles are hot in the summer, but I’ve settled into this little routine where I’ll drive the Z3 to the post office, or to the hardware store when they open at 7 a.m. and pick up some needed fastener, just to catch all that sun and air at the best part of the day, then do it again at dusk. In many ways, I like the Z3 more than the M Coupe, its overly aggressive big brother. It’s a simpler kind of joy.

I have an interesting history with this particular car. I bought it in 2013, owned it for six years, ran out of space for it, sold it to a friend neighbor, and then her son crashed it into a median strip. I bought it back and fixed it so it wouldn’t get totaled. It still needs the front bumper cover replaced, but the fact that it’s running around whole and delivering such joy is almost a miracle.

So, yeah, this week, my least-valuable car—my little, ratty, plain-Jane Z3 2.3, saved from being parted out—is my favorite. And that in and of itself is a beautiful thing.

***

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

The post My favorite car—this week, anyway appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I did a lot of work this spring on our little Winnebago Rialta RV, which is a Volkswagen Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body on the back. Most of the work was targeted at addressing the two unforgivable things Winnebago did in the conversion—not up-rating the rear wheel bearings or the transaxle for the extra weight from the RV conversion.

I finished installing a set of heavy-duty rear wheel-bearings, which slippery-sloped its way into rebuilding the rear brakes and replacing the air springs. I also installed a transmission cooler and a temperature gauge to reduce and monitor transaxle temperature. Although I’m still hesitant to take the little five-cylinder, 110-horsepower rig on a long western road trip with big hill climbs, I certainly now feel more secure tooling around New England in it.

And, in a purely appearance-related purchase, I spent a hundred bucks and bought a used set of proper Volkswagen Eurovan hubcaps, as the generic $50 Amazon hubcaps I tried looked absolutely horrible on it.

My wife Maire Anne found us a spot for a few nights at the campground in Wompatuck State Park hear Hull, Massachusetts, the peninsula that bounds the southern side of Boston Harbor. The 40-minute drive down from Newton was the perfect short shakedown for the RV. I brought my small travel toolbox, but not the full-on road-trip attack setup. Everything worked flawlessly.

Until we arrived.

As I’ve written before, a small RV like the Rialta straddles the line between camper and motorhome (technically, an RV has a bathroom and a black water tank, but a camper doesn’t), and part of owning one is finding out where you self-identify on the spectrum of camper owners versus RV owners. Dovetailing with that is the overlap between campgrounds and RV campgrounds. A “campground” may have nothing at the campsites except an unpaved spot to park your vehicle and pitch your tent. If instead of a tent, you want to pop up the top of your old-school VW Westfalia camper or unfold the wings of your little Coleman pop-up trailer, that’s fine.

Or the campsites may have additional services. There may be electricity (120 volts a/c, which may present itself as a standard electrical outlet or an RV-specific 20-amp or 40-amp plug). Even if you’re simply tenting, an electrical outlet is great for running the coffee maker or the laptop. The gray area really begins when campsites have a water spigot. Granted, VW Westfalia campers and many Coleman pop-ups have water tanks and a small sink, but the combination of electricity and water really caters to RVs. When you fully cross the line to RV campgrounds, each site is usually large enough to hold a full-sized Class A (bus-style) RV and has a cement or asphalt pad on which to park it, and the site may also have a dump port so you can connect a hose to the black water tank and leave it there instead of having to drive the rig to a centralized dump station to empty the tank.

With that background, the campsite Maire Anne had booked at Wompatuck had electricity but no water. That was fine. The Rialta has a 20-gallon freshwater tank, a 13-gallon black water tank, and a 9-gallon grey water tank. Together, they work well for a few days of toilet flushing and hand washing. Showering, though, is another issue. The shower in the Rialta is a “wet bath” co-located with the toilet like some small boats have. And the hot water tank holds only four gallons. The tiny size of the shower and hot water tank, and the modest size of the grey water tank means that we almost never use the shower; we instead rely on the showers in the campground facilities with their larger size and nearly endless supply of hot water. So the main effect of the campsite not having water was that we’d need to turn on the RV’s electric water pump whenever we needed to use the water instead of relying on the built-in water pressure from a hose hooked up to a spigot. Normally, this isn’t a problem, but it figured centrally in what unfolded.

When we arrived at the campsite, I connected the power cable to the electrical box to verify that the site’s electricity was working. I then opened up the bathroom door and found that a fair bunch of dirt had shaken loose and fallen down from the ceiling vent fan during the drive. I went to moisten a paper towel to wipe it off. This meant hitting the switch to turn on the water pump. But to my surprise, when I hit the switch, I heard nothing, and the indicator light for the pump wasn’t illuminated.

Hmmmm.

I’d replaced the head on this water pump a few years back. It was a bit of a pain, as it’s under one of the twin bed mattresses and is only reachable through a little hatch about the size of a paperback book. Of course, it was possible the pump itself had gone bad.

My next thought was a fuse. However, while the vehicle (the “cab”) part of the RV has the usual two-dozen fuses, the “coach” part has only a few breakers, and the one for the water pump wasn’t tripped.

OK, so, not a fuse or a breaker. The next step is to check voltage at the pump and at the switch.

And then it dawned on me: Since this was such a short trip, I’d left my electrical troubleshooting box—the one with the multimeter, the length of lamp cord, the crimping tool, the connectors, and the electrical tape—at home. Damn.

Now, there are two basic ways to troubleshoot a basic something-doesn’t-work electrical problem. Some professional technicians rely on wiring diagrams. That’s great if you have that skill, but despite my having written an automotive electrical book I hate wiring diagrams and find that most of the time they’re not necessary. It’s generally pretty rare that something is a “wiring problem.” Other than on high-flex connections to hatches and doors, the odds of wires breaking somewhere in the middle are pretty slim. The problem is nearly always in one of the components or its connections. So, without a multimeter to measure voltage, the first thing I wanted to do was wire the pump directly to the battery and see if it turned on.

Then I realized—no electrical troubleshooting box, no length of two-conductor lamp cord.

Hmmmm a second time.

I alerted Maire Anne to all this and said that we might need to make a run to a hardware or automotive store. But then I thought… no. It’s four in the afternoon. We have no time pressures. I should be able to MacGyver this. Hell, I don’t even need to invoke MacGyver—I should be able to Hack this.

I’ve had the need for wire to jury-rig things many times over the decades. Usually the go-to source is the wire connecting the speakers to the in-dash stereo, but these things in the Rialta were not easily reachable. I hunted around in the back cabinets and found a 10-ft extension cord. I took my Swiss Army knife, chopped the plugs off, and separated and stripped the ends of the wires.

I pulled everything off the left-side twin bed, dragged it onto the other bed, and flipped over the board connecting the two beds that also hides the access hatch for the pump. Then, with wire in hand, I connected one end to the + and – terminals of one of the coach batteries, and carefully touched the other ends of the wires to the pump’s terminals.

The pump immediately whirred to life and pressurized the water system.

This was actually good enough to use the water system—flush the toilet, wash hands, etc—because the system remains pressurized for a while. But not for hours, and I couldn’t leave the mattress off and the inspection hatch exposed to start the pump each time we needed it. If I had female spade connectors, I could crimp them to the ends of the wire, affix them to the pump, put the mattress back in place, run the former extension cord across the floor, and touch the wires to the battery whenever I needed to pressurize the system, but I didn’t. A trip to AutoZone would’ve solved the problem, but I wanted to continue on my self-reliant path.

So I unscrewed the panel that the water pump switch was on.

Without a multimeter, I couldn’t directly measure if voltage was coming into the switch, but by turning the switch on, connecting and disconnecting the connectors, and looking carefully for the tiny spark of electrical contact, I concluded it wasn’t. So I took my troubleshooting wire and touched the lead from the positive terminal of the battery to the switch terminal I assumed went to the water pump. It fired up immediately.

Hmmmm a third time.

This actually was a solution that was workable for the rest of the short stay—I could simply leave the panel down and touch the wire to the back of the switch to pressurize the water system. But it made me wonder. Unless the switch was bad—and it didn’t seem like it was—my “component theory” of electrical troubleshooting was on thin ice unless there was another component I was missing.

And then I remembered. There’s a small external washing station behind a panel on the left side of the rig. The idea is that it can be used for washing hands or rinsing sand off feet, but the hand-held wand broke off years ago and I never bothered to replace it. But the moment I thought about it, I remembered that the year after I bought the Rialta, after it sat over the winter, I had this same problem with the water pump not turning on, and I found that there was a second water pump switch at the external hand-washing station. Voltage to the internal switch apparently passes through the external switch. Back then, a few on-off flicks of the external switch were enough to clean off whatever corrosion was on the internal contacts and pass voltage through to the internal switch. This year, unfortunately, dozens of on-off oscillations didn’t cause things to spring to life.

So I pulled the external switch out. As it turned out, this wasn’t easy, because the whole thing was a corroded mess. I had to pry the connector off the back with a screwdriver. But with it off, simple trial and error revealed which pair of terminals I had to jumper in order to pass voltage to the inside switch. Everything was now working perfectly. I wrapped the jumper wire and the connector it was stuck into in duct tape to secure it.

And, with that, I had restored functionality to the RV’s water system. Without a multimeter. Without wire. Without connectors. I felt like Doctor Who when he defeated the Daleks with nothing but a cell phone. Maire Anne, who’d been quietly reading for the hour or so it took me to pull this off, was impressed. “I don’t often get to watch you work, or hear you mumble through your deductive process.”

It may actually have been my favorite part of our little two-day trip. As I’ve said over and over, I can’t fix this increasingly broken world, but it’s precisely because of that that it feels so good when I can fix my little corner of it.

But more importantly, those Eurovan hubcaps look bangin’, right?

***

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

The post MacGyvering the freshwater pump in the RV appeared first on Hagerty Media.

It was probably 25 years ago. I was driving my gorgeous red 1973 BMW 3.0CSi southbound on Route 3 toward Weymouth, Massachusetts, to look at a Suburban—the first in a long line of ’Burbs I used to take the family on an extended beach vacation. I wouldn’t call Route 3 a curvy road, but there are a few sweeping bends in it. I was in the left lane, traveling with a good head of steam during a break in Friday Cape Cod traffic when I came around one of those bends to find a fender in the middle of my lane.

My response to seeing it was probably similar to your response to reading it—disbelief. But eventually my brain made the turn from “that’s not supposed to be there” to “WHOA, DUDE, YOU NEED TO DO SOMETHING RIGHT FREAKING NOW!”

I stood on the brakes and quickly checked to see if there was room on my right to change lanes. There was. I cut right but clipped the fender with my left front wheel. It instantly sliced the tire open. I nearly lost control of the car. It did a big ugly slide in one direction. I corrected it. The car slid the other way. I corrected it again. I somehow managed to get the car to the shoulder without hitting anyone. I then sat in the car and hyperventilated for a minute and tried to stop my hands from shaking.

Eventually, when I stopped trembling, I got out of the car and looked at the left front corner. Miraculously, there was no sheet metal damaged, but the tire was gashed wide open. I had a spare in the trunk, as well as the car’s original jack and lug wrench. These days, I’d never even consider using one of those rickety original jacks that sits in a notch in a rust-prone rocker panel, particularly on a car this valuable, but both I and the car were younger. However, it had been instilled in me never to change a tire on a highway unless you have absolutely no alternative—that it’s always better and safer to limp your way in the breakdown lane to the exit and change it somewhere where cars aren’t flying past you at 70 mph. So I tried to make a low-speed whubba-whubba-whubba limp to the next exit.

Thing is, have you ever actually tried to limp a car along on a flat tire? I never had until then. You can’t. It doesn’t work. It’s one thing if a tire has a slow leak, but if it’s dead flat due to a catastrophic failure like a sidewall impact, the tire rapidly becomes a flappy rubbery mess that resists rotating and does nothing to protect the wheel. In my case, in less than a quarter of a mile, the tire was literally smoldering. I pulled over as far as I could in the breakdown lane and swapped on the spare as quickly as I could.

In addition to giving me newfound knowledge that you can’t simply drive on a flat tire, the episode made me hyper-aware of the possibility that a trip can be interrupted suddenly and quite rudely by objects in the road. Anyone who’s road-tripped a car has seen stuff either flying off cars or already on the highway.

If you search YouTube for “object in road,” you’ll see a surprising number of videos, including this one, credited to The New York Post, from which the cover photo of this piece was captured, and this jarring compilation. It’s easy to chuckle at the videos showing interstate traffic stopping for ducks, or errant wheels rolling down a highway, but it’s no laughing matter. AAA reports that road debris was found to be a factor in more than 200,000 police-reported crashes over a three-year span. These crashes led to approximately 39,000 injuries and 500 deaths.

Fortunately, these days, due to the wonders of the phone app Waze, you’re often alerted to the presence of road debris with the laconic audio statement “object in road ahead.” Like any alert, though, it’s easy to become inured to its presence and not take it seriously. However, while the overwhelming majority of “object in road ahead” alerts are due to small dead animals and pieces of shredded truck tires, every once in a while the warning can avert major damage.

About four years ago, I was driving my 1979 Euro 635CSi down to Southeast Sharkfest in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when Waze issued its gentle “object on road ahead” warning. Most of the route to Chattanooga is on I-81, one of the most heavily-trucked routes in the country, so I assumed this was probably yet another chunk of a truck tire. Still, I went into Terminator Mode, my eyes methodically scanning left and right.

And then I saw it. Well, I didn’t see it, at least not initially. I saw the effect it had on flowing traffic, with cars parting left and right like the Red Sea. I squeezed right, and as I approached it, couldn’t believe my eyes.

It was a ladder. A big one. It was taking up almost two of the four lanes.

I recalled Littlefinger, the Machiavellian character in A Game of Thrones, who said “chaos is a ladder,” and thought, dude, you don’t know the half of it.

***

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

The post Look out! Object in road ahead appeared first on Hagerty Media.

I write again and again about “The Big Seven” things likely to strand a car (ignition, fuel delivery, cooling system, charging system, belts, clutch hydraulics, and ball joints, and yes, thing #0 is a flat tire). Although I mean it primarily with respect to road-tripping vintage cars, “The Big Seven” applies accurately to modern daily drivers as well, as long as you understand that, instead of actual ignition failures, you have failures of the crankshaft position sensor that the ignition relies on.

It’s instructive to divide things into “hard failures” and “soft failures.” Hard failures include a set of ignition points where the nylon block has snapped off, a dead fuel pump, a shredded belt, a bad clutch cylinder, and a broken ball joint. You’re not going anywhere until you replace the broken part. Soft failures could include cooling system and charging system problems. For example, if the engine temperature is creeping up in hot weather but the car isn’t leaking coolant, you can baby it by driving at low speeds for short stretches in order to get farther down the road and somewhere safe to look at it.

But the softest soft failure of all applies to charging system problems. How serious is it when that battery light comes on? How far can you drive? What happens if you ignore it?

A car’s charging system consists of the alternator or generator, the voltage regulator (which can be external to the alternator or bolted to the back of it), the battery, and the wiring connecting them. The resting voltage of a fully charged battery (what you’d see if you measured across the battery terminals with the engine off using a multimeter set to measure DC voltage) is 12.6 volts. When the engine is running and the alternator is charging the battery, the voltage should increase by about 1 to 1.5 volts, so you should see what’s usually quoted as 13.5 to 14.2 volts. On vintage cars, the alternator is often anemic, so with the engine running, you may only see 13 volts, especially if the headlights and fans are on. Still, it should be a step above the 12.6V resting voltage. Conversely, modern cars with their digital engine management systems may sometimes run their alternators up into the 14.5- to 15-volt range. But the point is that the voltage should be higher with the engine running than it is with the engine off.

So, what happens when the charging system malfunctions? Sometimes nothing, at least not at first. It depends on the reason the system has stopped charging. If the belt broke, or the alternator’s bearings seized, those are hard failures, and any other component that’s also driven by the belt is no longer spinning, and that’s a problem. On a vintage car, a “fan belt” typically drives the alternator and the water pump (and, with it, the water pump-mounted cooling fan), so a seized alternator or broken belt will cause the engine temperature to head into the red, and fast, and this is a much more serious problem than the lack of charging.

In a modern car with a “serpentine belt,” the same belt is used to run most of the engine accessories, including the power steering pump, so if the belt isn’t doing its job, in addition to it beginning to run hot, the vehicle will suddenly be difficult to steer.

Let’s assume that the alternator or regulator has an electrical problem, not a mechanical one. You’re driving, and suddenly the battery light comes on. Initially, there’s no other symptom. If you have a multimeter, or one of those $8 cigarette-lighter voltmeter plug-ins (which I highly recommend), the odds are overwhelming that you’ll see that, with the engine running, the voltage reading is 12.6 volts or less.

This is the instant necessary diagnostic for a charging system problem. If the battery isn’t getting 13.5 to 14.2 volts or thereabouts with the engine running, the charging system is not charging the battery, and the car will die.

When?

Well, that’s a good question. It depends on the era of the car and how well-charged the battery is. In a vintage (say, pre-1975) carbureted car, the electrical system is very simple. If you’re driving in daylight under clear skies (so no headlights on, and no wipers, fans, or other electric motors), really all the battery needs to do is keep the ignition coil firing the spark plugs and occasionally tickle the brake lights and turn signals. That’s it. The load isn’t more than a couple of amps of current. If your battery is in good condition, you can probably drive hundreds of miles that way. When the car dies (and it eventually will), if you can’t diagnose and repair the charging system failure, you can drop in another fully charged battery and keep going. If you have a trunk-mounted battery, you can even daisy-chain two batteries together with well-secured jumper cables to increase capacity. As soft failures go, it’s downright squishy.

If, on the other hand, you have a modern car—and by “modern,” I mean roughly post-OBD-II, with an electronic control unit (ECU) and multiple control modules—the car isn’t nearly as forgiving of running without a working alternator. Those control modules need to see a stable voltage. As the voltage drops, strange things begin happening. The car may act like it’s possessed. All the dashboard indicator lights may come on and off. The car may begin bucking instead of driving and accelerating smoothly. When this happens, you probably have only minutes before it croaks altogether. When you coast to the side of the road and try to restart the car, the odds are strong that you’ll turn the key and hear either the weak rrrrrr of a starter motor without enough juice to crank the engine over, or nothing at all.

Whether it’s a modern or a vintage car, if a non-functional charging system has drained the battery, what you can’t do is jump-start the car and expect to keep driving. Sure, jump-starting will spin the starter motor, and as long as the jumper cables are connected, your car will be leeching amperage from the battery supplying the jump, so it should start and run, but if the cause of the dead battery is that the battery isn’t being charged, jumping it won’t fix that, and I guarantee you the car will die again, probably within a mile or two. This is why you or someone else has to verify that the voltage with the engine running is higher than the resting voltage. If you call for roadside assistance and they don’t check this and instead merrily send you on your way, it can be dangerous.

The above is exactly what happened to my wife about 10 years ago. She took my 1999 BMW E39 528i sportwagon up to New Hampshire to go hiking with friends. On the drive back, the alternator died, and the 4000-pound vehicle eventually gave up the ghost. She wrestled it to the side of the road and called AAA. The AAA guy didn’t know enough to check the battery voltage—he just jump-started the car. She got another mile down the road, then it died again. Fortunately, she was somewhere safe. This time she had it towed to a repair shop.

So, the “soft failure” of a dead alternator is kind of a funny thing. Putting the battery light on the dashboard in context, if you see the oil pressure light come on while you’re driving, it means stop right now or your engine is going to make catastrophic and expensive sounds. If you see the temperature creeping toward the red, it means stop now if you want to prevent a warped or cracked head. If you see the “Check Engine Light” on but the car is running fine, it means when it’s safe and convenient, have a repair shop plug in a code reader to see what emissions-related event has triggered the light. In terms of urgency, the battery light is somewhere between the Check Engine Light and a rising temperature gauge. Depending on the age of the car and the electrical load, you may have 15 minutes or six hours until the car dies.

With that background, let me tell you this week’s dead alternator story. I was out on a mission of mercy, having a look at two early 1970s BMW 2002s—coincidentally both owned by women whose husbands had passed away, both looking for advice on selling the car, and both up on the north Massachusetts shore. After the second errand, I was heading home in my 2003 BMW E39 530i when I heard a little chirp and saw that the alternator light was on. I pulled into the right lane, prepared to stop if I saw the temperature climb, but the needle stayed right in the middle of the gauge. I was happy to see there was a rest area a few miles down the road. I pulled in.

The engine compartments in modern cars are tight, with components shielded from view, but I could see that the car’s serpentine belt was intact and still spinning all components, including the alternator. I had a multimeter with me, so, with the engine running, I put it across the terminals of the trunk-mounted battery.

It read just 12.2 volts. With the voltage that low, it was likely that the alternator had quit charging the battery before the dashboard light came on.

Damn.

It was a little after 5 p.m. I looked at the mapping application on my phone. I was 50 miles from home and headed into rush hour. I had some tools with me, but no alternator or regulator.

On vintage cars, when the battery light comes on, after checking the belt, the next thing to check are the connections to the alternator. It’s often as simple as a 50-year-old wire that broke off the main connection to the battery. If the car has an external voltage regulator, any of the wires connecting it to the alternator can have a broken connector at either end. Modern cars, however, usually have one thick battery cable and a single, molded, snap-on plug for the other connectors, and these are unlikely to be the cause.

I found some shade and thought about it carefully. My choices were these:

• I could make a run for it. But with rush hour ahead, the drive could take as long as two hours. With only 12.2 volts of battery charge, this was a poor bet. And the idea of leaving the safety of the rest area to take the car back up on the interstate where it was likely to die didn’t sit well with me.
• I could wait out rush hour, then make a run for it. That, however, would have me driving with my lights on, which would be certain to reduce battery life.
• I could drive to the nearest big box auto parts store (e.g., AutoZone), buy another battery, and double them up in the trunk with jumper cables. I thought about this, but batteries ain’t cheap these days, and the E39 takes a honking big battery that’s sure to be at least $180. And if I drove into nighttime, that still didn’t guarantee me safe arrival home.
• I could try to buy an alternator and replace it in the parking lot. If I was driving one of my vintage cars, this would be a slam dunk, as the alternator is easily accessible at the top of the engine compartment and can be removed in 10 minutes with two 13mm wrenches. However, in a modern car, the alternator is typically buried and is run off the serpentine belt. Even the act of releasing the tension on the belt is non-trivial. Last summer I’d replaced this car’s radiator, water pump, belt, and pulleys, and it was like one of those interlocking Chinese ring-and-rope puzzles requiring a special tool to remove the fan and viscous clutch, then sliding the fan shroud up and out of the way, which in turn required unhooking a bunch of plastic clips that attached hoses to the bottom of the shroud. I had some tools with me, but only a small fraction of what was in my garage. Plus, if a big box parts store had an alternator for the car, it would likely be a Bosch rebuild, and these have a terrible reputation.
• I could see if I could find a replacement voltage regulator and install it in the parking lot. In my late 1970s and ’80s cars, whose alternators have an internal voltage regulator, it’s usually the regulator that goes bad (the brushes wear down), and they can be easily replaced with the alternator in the car by unscrewing two Phillips-head screws. However, this was not a repair I’d done on the E39 before. I looked on my phone and learned that the regulator is behind a cover on the back of the alternator, and while replacing it is easier than replacing the alternator, it’s not trivial.
• I could have the car towed to the nearest repair shop. This is what my wife did 10 years ago with the E39 wagon. The bill for the alternator replacement was $600, and they used a Bosch rebuild. Ick.
• I could have the car towed home. I’d certainly have to pay for part of the tow, but then I could do the repair in my own garage and could have control over what parts went in it.

A tow home it is. Ain’t it great being 64 and feeling like you’ve got nothing to prove to anyone?

I called AAA and was quoted a three-hour wait. So I called Hagerty. I verified that I could use my Drivers Club towing benefit on a daily driver that was not on my Hagerty policy. Unfortunately, my benefit only included 20 miles of free towing, and the additional 30 would be a cost of $183. I wasn’t thrilled about it and thought briefly about making a run for it to at least get closer and thus bring the bill down, but I paid it, a tow truck was there in about an hour, and I was home about an hour after that.

(Incidentally, I posted this whole episode in near real time to social media. Three people with E39s responded with what happened to them when their alternator fried. One said he made a run for it. The battery lasted 25 minutes at night. Two others bought fresh batteries, dropped them in, and ran during the daytime with as small an electrical load as possible. One lasted two hours, the other nearly three. So, I likely could’ve made it with another battery. The cost would’ve been about the same.)

The next morning, I dove in. The alternator on an E39 isn’t really that deeply hidden; remove the airbox and there it is. Unbolting the power steering reservoir and swinging it to one side improves access.

Rather than defaulting to replacing the alternator, I thought I’d try removing and inspecting the regulator. If the brushes were badly worn, I’d buy a regulator, but if they looked OK, the alternator was likely at fault and would need to come out.

I watched a video on removing the alternator’s rear cover. It gave me the general gist of it, but the nut sizes didn’t match what was on my car, and the video made no mention of the fact that one of the nuts is covered by a little snap-on piece that, to me, was indistinguishable from the plastic cover. Just resolving this took me nearly an hour. However, it did alert me to the fact that one of the fasteners holding on the cover was a Phillips-head screw in a deep recess, and owing to restricted clearance, the best way to reach it was with a Phillips nut driver turned by a wrench.

In total, in my well-equipped garage, it took me more than two hours to get the cover off the back of the alternator. Once it was off, it exposed the regulator, though it was difficult to tell where the regulator left off and other black plastic on the alternator’s rear began. The Phillips-head screws holding on the regulator were incredibly tight, and one of them began to strip. It nearly caused me to abandon the “just the regulator” approach and order a new alternator when I gave it one final push-the-Phillips-bit-in-as-hard-as-you-can-while-turning try, and it broke loose. Out came the regulator, allowing me to see the smoking gun of badly and unevenly worn brushes.

Unfortunately, when I looked at the slip rings the brushes ride on, I could see that the forward one had a visible groove worn in it.

Still, with a new Bosch alternator costing nearly $300 and a Bosch regulator only about $40, I thought I’d give it a try. I ordered the regulator. You can see how badly worn the old brushes really were.

There was just one issue. I wanted to give the copper slip rings a little cleaning by running a Scotch Brite pad over them, and to do that I needed to spin the alternator. I was hesitant to do it by running the engine, as I imagined the Scotch Brite pad catching and getting sucked into the alternator, so I needed to turn the alternator by hand, which meant releasing the tension on the serpentine belt, the thing I didn’t want to mess with unless I had to. Fortunately, I figured out that, rather than removing the fan and shroud and going in from the front, I could position a little breaker bar with the required 8mm Allen head bit on it and go in from the side. With the belt unhooked from the alternator, I could spin it—a necessary task to check for play and rumbling in the bearing.

The new regulator went on, I buttoned things back up, and tested the voltage … 14.0 volts. Yeah, baby.

Since this car has 200,000 miles on it, and since the alternator appears to be original, and since one of the slip rings is grooved, replacing the alternator is probably the smarter thing to do from a preventive maintenance standpoint than just replacing the regulator. However, as I’ve written, with the questionable quality of even new name-brand parts these days, I’m hesitant to take something that’s working and replace it with something that may not be as good. But now that I know the side-access-to-the-belt-tensioner-bolt trick, I may source an inexpensive used alternator and throw it in the trunk as a spare, as I now know that I could change it on the road if I had to.

So, there you have it. If you’re 10 minutes from home and the alternator light comes on, and the thing is still spinning, you can probably make it. But as I keep saying, there is a 100 percent probability that the car will die, and you really don’t want that to happen in an uncontrolled fashion. Choose wisely.

***

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

The post The “soft failure” of a dead alternator appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Last fall, I wrote about bilateral repairs on my little Winnebago Rialta (which is a Volkswagen Eurovan with a Winnebago camper body on the back), both of which required special tools.

The first repair was replacement of the upper ball joints in the front suspension. The tool that’s required to remove them is very specific, not something you can rent/buy/return at the local O’Reilly’s. Fortunately, due to the wonders of Chinese manufacturing that we alternately love and hate, I found the tool on Amazon for $80. And, as with many bilateral repairs, the upper ball joints had what I’ve come to call the “two-sided advantage.” That is, I walked up the learning curve doing the repair on the first side, so doing the second side took less than half the time.

This was, however, not the case on the other repair. One of two unforgivable sins on the Rialta is that Winnebago didn’t uprate the rear wheel bearings for the RV’s 7000-pound weight (the other sin, by the way, is the lack of uprating of the transaxle; I’ll get into that next week), so eventually, the rear wheel bearings fail. Such was the case with mine. Last summer, the left one began rumbling, so I bought a pair of the proper German up-rated wheel bearings. The bearing puller set needed for this repair is a rentable item, but the job was so tough on my 63-year-old body that, when I finally got the new wheel bearing pressed in, I felt like the little RV had run me over. And the last thing I wanted to do was to subject my torso to the beating necessary to do the other side, which was not rumbling. So, I didn’t do it. However, knowing that the RV would be sitting in my driveway through the fall, winter, and spring, I backed it in so that the right rear wheel was sitting next to the garage’s side roll-up door, facilitating bringing tools to the repair location whenever I had the stomach to tackle it.

The other thing that intersects with this is the issue of rear brakes. My Rialta is an early one, a ’95, which means that, like the VW Eurovan it’s built from, it still has drums on the rear. I’ve never found the brakes on this rig to be confidence inspiring. I gave it a new set of proper front rotors and pads last summer, but it didn’t change the brake performance much. While I had the rear drum off to do the wheel bearing, I thought about freshening up the rear brakes, but there wasn’t really anything obviously wrong with them—the shoes still had meat on them, and the drums weren’t scored—so I left them alone. Besides, if I did the brakes on one side, I’d need to do them on the other, and to do so in a fashion more timely than whenever I got around to it.

So, with that backstory illuminated, this spring, after I returned from two big road trips, I began to address the Rialta’s right rear wheel bearing. I carefully jacked up the RV, which is something that requires care to do safely on an asphalt driveway. I lifted the right rear corner and set it on a truck jack stand and supported the vehicle redundantly with the floor jack still in place.

Among the reasons I dislike working on drum brakes is that the drum is often stuck. Sometimes there’s corrosion on the center hub; sometimes there’s a ridge on the edge where the brake shoes get hung up. This drum, fortunately, had threaded holes where you can screw in a pair of bolts and use them to press the drum off, but try as I might, the drum kept snagging the forward shoe, and I couldn’t move the adjuster to back it off. When I finally got the drum off, my elation was short-lived, as I saw that, when it came off, it took the forward brake shoe’s lining with it.

You have to appreciate the irony here. Last fall, when I had the left rear drum off, I elected to not do a while-you’re-in-there and replace the shoes. Now, on the right side, not only did I have no choice, but when I was done putting this side back together, I’d have to revisit the left side. This wasn’t the “two-sided advantage.” It was more like the “three-sided thumb in the eye.” Grrrrr.

I left the garage, went inside, sat at the laptop, and researched rear brake parts. Because, mechanically, most of the Rialta is a VW Eurovan, things like brake parts are plentiful. I triangulated between FCP Euro, Rockauto, and Amazon, ordering everything—drums, shoes, wheel cylinders, even a new set of springs and clips. And, since I’d slid down the slippery slope of while-you’re-in-there, I wandered into Rialta-specific territory and also ordered a new set of rear air springs (air bags), as the ones in the rig never held pressure, and as, with the wheel off, it’d never be easier to replace them (well, at least the right one) than right now.

While waiting for the parts, I continued replacing the wheel bearing. This time, I didn’t need to rent a bearing puller set because last winter I had the good fortune of finding an OTC Hub Grappler set for a great price being sold by a gentleman who was closing his home repair shop.

When I replaced the left wheel bearing last fall, I used a slide hammer to pull the hub and stub axle out of the bearing, which nearly caused a repetitive motion injury in my right bicep, but it had the advantage that I didn’t need to pull the brake shoes off. In contrast, the Hub Grappler’s removal jig needs to sit flush against the inside of the rear brake assembly, but since I had to remove the old shoes and springs anyway, it didn’t matter. While disassembling the rear brakes, I noticed that, while most rear drums have one or two springs, these have six, including two that sit behind the shoes, pulling them toward the backing plate. I carefully photographed all of them.

When the new parts came and I began reassembly, the Byzantine collection of springs made things challenging. I relied heavily on the photos I took. The spring which pulled together the bottoms of the shoes was very difficult to reinstall. But when it was done, I could only smile at the collection of new brake parts that I knew I wouldn’t have to look at again for a long time, possibly ever.

But this euphoria abruptly ended, because when I loosened the bleed valve on the newly installed wheel cylinder with a little 7mm wrench, it snapped right off. I think what happened was that while I was installing and tightening the brake line, the edge of the flare-nut wrench I was using leaned against the bleed valve and cracked it.

In my books and columns, I’ve written a lot about removing stuck fasteners, and one of the things I say is that if you have a set of EZ Outs—those reverse-threaded drill-bit-like things that can supposedly be used to remove snapped-off or stripped fasteners—just go to the toolbox, fish them out, and throw them in the garbage, because if a bolt was seized hard enough to snap, the odds of you drilling a hole in it and successfully unscrewing it with an EZ Out are indistinguishable from zero. What’s much more likely to happen is that you snap either the drill bit or the EZ Out in the hole, and then you’re genuinely boned. However, this wasn’t a rusty old fastener—this was a brand-new bleed valve on a brand-new wheel cylinder, and it already had a hole in the center. If ever an EZ Out was going to work, it was here. Unfortunately, for reasons unclear, three different EZ Outs could not maintain enough of a bite on the snapped-off bleed valve to unscrew it, despite my tapping one of them securely in place with a hammer.

When you snap off a bleed valve, sometimes you can get by by loosening the brake line where it goes into the wheel cylinder or caliper and bleeding it there. I tried that, but the brake pedal still felt spongy.

I was not happy. I did not want to pull the whole thing back apart to replace the wheel cylinder, nor to take the time waiting for a new one to arrive.

Then I realized two things. First, I already had another new wheel cylinder—the one I’d ordered for the other side. Second, I didn’t know whether it was, in fact, necessary to pull the shoes and all their little attendant springs completely off. I looked at it and thought, “I wonder …”

Sure enough, I found that, by removing only the top spring and pulling the ends of the shoes out of the slots in the wheel cylinder’s pistons, I could remove the damaged one and install the replacement. It took me only about 10 minutes. I put a replacement wheel cylinder for the other side on order.

That left only the air spring. These are little rubber bags about the size of a soda can. They attach at the top and bottom, and they have a feed for an air inflation line. The original parts Winnebago used are no longer made, but Rialta forums list a couple of drop-in replacements, including the Firestone W02-358-7046, about $110 a pair. Removal was surprisingly challenging, as there’s almost no clearance to undo the bolt at the top, yet you need to remove it and the bracket at the bottom and then slide the bag with the air line still attached out of the top bracket.

When I opened up the box with the replacement springs, I swore the vendor had sent me the wrong parts, as the bags were far shorter than the one I’d removed. Then I looked at the bags carefully and surmised that the bottom was folded inside. I connected the air line and shot 20psi into it, and sure enough, the bottom popped out and the bag inflated to the anticipated length.

So, the right rear wheel—the side whose bearing was not rumbling—is all buttoned up. I’ve swung the RV around in the driveway to get to the left side—the side that, had I been smarter, I would’ve done all this on last fall when I replaced the rumbling wheel bearing. As soon as rear wheel cylinder #3 arrives, I’ll have at it. Fortunately, I think that, this time, the “two-sided” advantage will work in my favor. As long as I don’t snap anything else off.

***

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

The post Getting around to the second half of a bilateral repair appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Six years ago, when technological goodies developed from research on self-driving cars—things like automatic braking, blind spot detection, and lane-keeping assist—were finding their way into passenger vehicles, I wrote an article about the double-edged sword of such technology. That is, on the one hand, we as vintage car owners and drivers love our old analog machines, and at times even brag about the absence of electronic nannies. But on the other hand, I’m painfully aware that, as I approach the Beatles-esque age of 64, my desire to drive for more than an hour at night and my ability to safely do so are both at an all-time low, and the number of times I’ve recently come close to lane-changing into someone who is driving my blind spot is alarming.

Last month, I felt these conflicting streams merge as I was completing the second of two consecutive 750-mile driving days home after attending a BMW 2002 event in Arkansas. When end-of-day rain hit in Connecticut, even though I was only two hours from home, if the car had a “Take me home, Jeeves” button on the dashboard, or even some benign auto safety feature, I would’ve mashed that puppy harder than the response button to the Jeopardy answer “He set up a factory in Ireland to build a gullwing car, then got charged with cocaine trafficking.” (Come on, you know it … Who is John Z. DeLorean?)

Over the years, I’ve mentioned this to a few friends, usually accompanied by a prognostication like “Whenever my wife and I get around to replacing our daily drivers, we’ll probably get one with these modern active safety features.” A surprising number of folks have said something like “Be careful what you wish for. My wife has lane assist in her car, and it drives me crazy.” Other than an anti-lock braking system (ABS), none of my cars are new enough to have “nannies.” OK, the ’99 BMW M Coupe does have disable-able stability control. But these days I don’t push the car hard enough to either make it light up or to delude myself into thinking I’m better than it and disable it.

With that as a backdrop, let me tell you the Eric Carle-like story of The Very Annoying Rental Car.

The week before I did the 3100-mile round-trip drive to Arkansas, my wife and I went to New Mexico to visit our middle son. We flew to Albuquerque and got a rental car for the one-hour-ish drive up to Santa Fe. I’d reserved a car with National, which does the “choose any car in the aisle” thing. Even when gas prices are low, I usually eschew the big SUVs and the trucks and opt for something of small to moderate size, as unless I’m hauling something or planning on driving offroad, I don’t need either the space or the all-wheel drive, and I certainly don’t need the feeling that I’m sitting four feet above the pavement in order to feel safe. Add to that five-dollar-a-gallon gas, and I’m happy to make a beeline to the smallest most fuel-efficient vehicle in the National aisle.

At the Albuquerque airport, this happened to be a late-model Toyota Corolla, sort of the Applebee’s of cars. You know what it’s going to be. It isn’t going to disgust you or blow you away. And, in fairness to the Corolla, they do have a good history of dashboard controls so simple that any grandmother can jump in one and figure out how to drive it, work the lights, turn on the heat, etc. (says the guy who thinks he’s still 18 but is now more than old enough to be a grandfather).

So, it’s 11:30 at night, I’m tired from a long day of travel, and it’s not over because there’s still about an hour’s drive to Santa Fe. This puts the drive on the outer edge of my envelope of comfort, but I’m not really concerned about it from a safety standpoint. What really wipes me out when night driving is stressful situations like cities with lots of lights, traffic, and rain. This drive is almost entirely interstate. The traffic at this hour is negligible. And the skies are clear. Regarding the car, I’m thinking that, as a mainstream Toyota product, the active safety features I’d written about six years ago have probably flowed down into even this lowly econobox, and considering the lateness of the hour, I’m thinking this is a good thing.

I fire up the Corolla, make sure the automatic lights are on, pull out onto I-25, and head north. I’m quickly reminded of the elevation changes between Albuquerque and Santa Fe and engage the cruise control to keep the car at speed on the hill climbs.

Almost immediately I feel the steering wheel fighting me. Then I realize it’s the lane-assist feature. It apparently engaged when I turned on the cruise control. And it’s horrible. It feels like the front wheels are alternately toe-ing in and out and yanking the car around, in spite of my doing a perfectly reasonable job of driving between the lane markings. I turn the cruise control off to disable the lane-assist. When I find myself slowing to 60 up a hill, I turn the cruise back on. The lane assist is still horrible. I turn it back off.

And there was another odd problem—the auto-dimming headlights. Both the manual and auto positions on the light stalk override the high beams if it senses there’s another car, either on my side of the highway or coming at me, anywhere in sight. Normally, this would’ve been just a minor annoyance—I don’t routinely blind other drivers by leaving the high beams on—but the low beams on the Corolla have such a hard illumination cut-off distance that there’s virtually no light out past 50 feet. And when the car overrode me, the only way to keep the high beams on was to set the lighting to manual, pull the stalk toward me as if to flash, and hold it in while steering. This wasn’t something I really wanted to do while interstate driving.

When the road was dead straight and empty, I took a moment, played with the controls, and figured out how to adjust the sensitivity of the lane-assist. All three settings were awful. I eventually figured out how to disable the lane assist while leaving the cruise control on.

That left only the problem of the auto-dimming headlights. I could not figure out how to override them. And when we arrived at the destination in Santa Fe—our son’s in-laws’ house on a gravel road—there was something about the roughness of the road and / or the reflectivity of the gravel that tripped the high beam sensor and would not allow me to turn the high beams on, even though there was no other car within sight. I had to pull in the high beam stalk and hold it there to find the driveway of the house.

The following day, I looked up the auto-dimming issue online (easier than reading the manual), and learned that the Corolla, like apparently every other late-model Toyota, has Automatic High Beams (AHB), enabled by pushing the stalk forward and actuating a push button above your left knee, and presumably disabled the same way—not exactly my memory of “any grandmother can jump in a Corolla and drive it.” The gravel road issue apparently is a known limitation, as the official Toyota video explaining its use specifically says that the system may not work in certain circumstances including roads that are rough, unpaved, dirt, or gravel. I was surprised that I didn’t see a hail of posts regarding the low beam bulbs being so highly optimized not to cause discomfort to other drivers that they were nearly useless at night.

On the return drive to Albuquerque at o-dark-thirty a week later, I was able to manually toggle the high beams on and off. I still, however, elected to keep the lane-assist disabled, as the feeling that I was constantly fighting it for control drove me crazy.

So I’m not a big fan of the rented Corolla. I did, however, enjoy the fact that the little fuel-efficient car only used a single tank of gas on the trip.

None of this necessarily sways me one way or the other regarding whether our next car will have these active safety features. Hell, by the time we buy another car, odds are that, like ABS and air bags, all five-year-old used cars will have them. I will, however, be certain to test them out to see if they drive me crazy.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll just stick to driving in the daytime. And staying in the right lane. Or, if I’m in a hurry, the left.

***

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

The post The Very Annoying Rental Car appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Today let’s talk about steering wheels. There’s no part of your car that you’re more in touch with. In addition to providing the literal hands-on input required to maneuver the car, the steering wheel is a crucial piece of interior decoration. It can seamlessly blend in period-correct fashion, or it can be an accent piece akin to a faucet in a designer kitchen.

Not unlike original radios that many of us, as 18-year-olds, threw into the garbage so we could slide in a stereo cassette deck and crank Dark Side of the Moon, many vintage steering wheels—particularly the large ones—were jettisoned in service of snappier-feeling steering. This is definitely the case in the vintage BMW world, where I spend so much time. Early 1970s 2002s, Bavarias, and 3.0CS E9 coupes had what are commonly referred to as “bus wheels” that are nearly 17 inches across. I’m as guilty as others of swapping them for smaller wheels back in the day, but as time has passed, I now recognize what an integral part of the interior look and feel of the interior they are. On a car like a 2002 that doesn’t have power steering, the big wheel makes it way easier to parallel park, a fact that I appreciate as I’ve gotten older and lost a certain amount of upper body strength. Plus, on a long highway drive, you can rest your hands on the bottom of the wheel.

If you do, however, want to replace a steering wheel, I thought I’d run through the basics.

In terms of mechanical connection, the wheel usually attaches to the steering column via a big nut and a lock washer. The top of the column is typically splined (slotted), so any replacement steering wheel must have the same spline pattern in its center hole. If the wheel has a circular horn button in the middle, just pry it up to reveal the nut. If the horn buttons are on the spokes and there’s a pad in the center instead, it usually pries up as well.

There also needs to be a mechanism to cancel the turn signal when the steering wheel is returned to center after a turn. This is usually done with a metal bracket that trips the little cancellation lever that protrudes from the directional stalk. If the bracket is a sleeve that slides over the top of the steering column, then swapping the steering wheel won’t affect it, but if instead the bracket is an integral part of the steering wheel, something will need to replace it or else the turn signals won’t cancel.

Electrically, steering wheels in vintage cars are trivial. Unlike in a modern car, they don’t have a “clock spring” needed to make the airbag, the radio volume and station buttons, and the cruise control work. All they have is a single connection for the horn. In order to make it so the horn wire doesn’t get wound up when you turn the wheel, vintage steering wheels typically have a little spring-loaded metal plunger on the back that makes electrical contact with the circular track on the top of the steering column.

On some cars, though, the positions of these two components are reversed, with the circular contact track on the back of the steering wheel, and the spring-loaded plunger on the steering column.

In either case, the way a horn typically works is that a relay—a remote electrical switch—is used, and pressing the horn button completes the electrical path of the low-current switch portion of the relay to ground, allowing it to pass through the plunger and the circular track and reach the grounded steering column, activating the relay and making the horn honk.

So, if you want to swap steering wheels, and if your car has the little spring-loaded plunger on the column, you need a wheel that has the circular contact track on the back. Conversely, if the contact track is on the column, you need a wheel with the plunger on the back. This particular bit of strangeness even strikes within a manufacturer family—the bus wheel in a BMW 2002 has the circular contact track on the steering column, but the nearly identical-looking bus wheels on the Bavaria and the 3.0CS E9 coupes have the contract track on the back of the wheel.

For all of the above reasons, the way that many aftermarket steering wheel manufacturers configure their wheels is that the wheel itself is universal and bolts to a hub that’s basically an adapter to the steering column, handling both the spline interface as well as the horn contact issue.

For example, if you have a vintage BMW and want to replace the big 16.5-inch bus wheel with a smaller, sportier Momo wheel, you could try to find a wheel you like that already has the correct hub on it, or you could select the exact wheel diameter you want, the rim thickness, the style of the spokes in the middle, and the finish of those spokes, and then buy a hub with either a circular horn contact ring or a plunger on it, made to adapt a Momo wheel and its standard 6×70-mm bolt pattern to your car. A quick online perusal shows that Momo hubs cost about a hundred dollars.

Lastly, I personally think it would be a sin against The Great Automotive Creator if you removed one of those beautiful early 1960s American steering wheels that is color-coded to the interior and has one of those gorgeous angular wing-like 120-degree horn rims and replaced it with a little chain steering wheel with a knob on it. But there’s no accounting for taste. And replacement steering wheels work best when they compliment a car’s interior as opposed to looking completely alien to it. For example, in my opinion, if a car doesn’t have a wood dash or other wood interior trim, then a wood steering wheel simply looks out of place.

With all that said, I have to admit that what inspired me to write this is I just replaced the steering wheel in the ’73 BMW 3.0CSi E9 coupe I’ve owned for 36 years. The car has had a small (350mm) Momo-like vintage Fusina wheel for as long as I can remember, though I’m unclear how it wound up in the car. I’ve never really liked it. It seemed too small and too thick for the character of the car (it’s a touring car, not an autocross car), and its blackness was, well, boring. But I’d already replaced the original big flat seats with sporty Recaros, and the Fusina did kind of match their character. Yet when I happened into a used original E9 bus wheel and swapped it in, the size differential was so vast that I couldn’t get used to it.

But Carter, the 1976 BMW 2002 I bought last month, came with an interesting Momo steering wheel. At 380mm (15 inches), it was a good intermediate size, it was thinner than the Fusina wheel, and had brushed aluminum center spokes that matched nothing in the 2002 but I immediately thought they would complement the brushed aluminum trim that’s below the E9’s wood dashboard.

The problem was the horn ring issue—as I said, in the 2002, the horn contact ring is on the steering column, but in the E9 coupe, it needs to be on the steering wheel. At first, I thought I could swap the steering wheels on the hubs, but the bolt circles were different sizes. I could’ve ordered the correct Momo E9 hub, but by carefully drilling and tapping two holes, I found that I could transfer the circular contact ring from the Fusina’s hub to the Momo’s.

The moment I installed the wheel in the 3.0CSi, I saw that the brushed aluminum not only complemented the trim below the dash, but also the aluminum shift surround and the silver centers of the knobs. And as soon as I drove the car, I was won over by the new wheel’s slightly larger diameter and thinner grip. I love it.

The neat thing about swapping steering wheels is that you can easily swap them back. They’re almost like shoes or sportscoats or hats. Which wheel do you feel like today? Just remember that, if the wheel has never been off the car, that nut and lock washer (and possibly Locktite as well) are going to be very tight. You might not be able to hold the wheel tightly enough to break the nut off, and relying on the steering column lock (if the car has one) can damage it. If you have an impact wrench, it’s a great way to zip the nut off without damaging anything.

So, if the urge grabs you, try grabbing a different steering wheel. Just be sure to put the old one on the shelf where you stashed the original radio. You do still have that, right?

***

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

The post Steering you in the right direction appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Last month, just before I headed out on the big 3123-mile road trip to MidAmerica 02Fest, a 1976 BMW 2002 fell into my lap. “Carter,” so-named because of the vintage 1976 presidential campaign sticker on its rear bumper, had a waif left-out-in-the-rain look to it, covered with dirt and with water on the back floor from having sat outside for nine months. But it was remarkably solid, started easily with a fresh battery and a blast of starting fluid, and was offered to me for such a good price that I bought it without a test-drive.

When I drove the car the eight miles home, however, a litany of problems announced themselves loudly. There was engine clatter on anything but low-rpm even throttle that was so loud I was worried the car might have a bad rod bearing, and there was banging from both the front and rear suspension. I made it home wondering to what extent my steal of a purchase was about to be a big stinking albatross around my neck, and I spent the next few days wrapping my head and my hands around this unplanned interloper. After all, this was in addition to the 13 other cars and the three other 2002s.

The surprises on the drive home notwithstanding, I really do love this initial “getting to know you” part of vintage car ownership. From the cars-as-members-of-the-opposite-sex standpoint, it’s a period full of mystery and excitement. The relationship is new. It could be anything. You might fall in love for the long term, or just have a brief fling before you part ways. (Wait … “Carter?” Never mind.)

But over and above any anthropomorphization, I’ve long felt that the first few weeks of ownership of a needy car is where you make the biggest strides, and as a backyard mechanic, I find this incredibly satisfying. Think of it like this: Unless you do bodywork and paint, you’re unlikely to easily make gross changes in the external appearance of a car. And if it needs major drivetrain work, you’re unlikely to be able to knock that off quickly or inexpensively. But get it running right, fix a few rattles and clunks, clean it, and make it drivable, and you’ve transformed it into something it wasn’t. A lot of what I do involves trying to let cars be the best possible version of what it is that they want to be, rather than spending tens of thousands of dollars trying to turn them into something they’re not.

I attacked the thunk from Carter’s rear end first. One of the nice things about these post-1974 cars with bridge-abutment bumpers is that you can stand on the bumpers and bounce the car up and down without risking damage to either the bumper or the body panels. I easily isolated the banging to worn-out rubber bushings at the tops of the rear shocks. I had some new unused spares in the garage (they come with new shocks, and I typically don’t bother to change them if there’s nothing wrong with the existing ones). While compressing and expanding the still-installed rear shocks, I could tell that they were ancient, soft, and weak, but both the rear bushing replacement and the rear shock replacement are so easy that I didn’t have an attack of while-you’re-in-there-itis. The goal was simply to make the car bang less on uneven pavement.

The noise from the front suspension was a bit more challenging. Not to diagnose—it was very clear that the banging was coming from the bushings (often called “hats”) at the tops of the McPherson struts—but to stay on the track of simply quieting the car down without sliding down the slippery slope of a suspension rebuild. To remove the strut tower bushings, the front springs need to be compressed, and to do that, it’s usually necessary to remove the entire strut assembly from the car and lay it on the garage floor. I say “usually” because, with the right spring compressor, you can sometimes squeeze the springs enough in place to get the hats off, and I have the right spring compressor, but on this car, for a number of reasons, it was quicker and easier to pull the strut assemblies. When I pulled the right bushing, I could see a glaring wear groove the top of the spring perch, caused by a missing spacer between it and the underside of the bearing. The right bearing itself was booged up as well. The left one appeared fine, but its strut was noisy as well. Replacing both hats with new parts eliminated the banging.

To drive the car at reasonable speeds, the next thing it needed was tires, as the fate-tempting I did driving it the eight miles to my house on the 12-year-old cracked and dry-rotted rubber was not something I wanted to repeat (in my defense, I limped it home at 25–30 mph). I threw on a spare set of 2002 wheels with fresh rubber on them. A few runs around the block, followed by a few exits on the highway, revealed that, at least suspension noise-wise, I’d peeled off that layer of the onion. The car was almost pleasant to drive.

Except for the clattering from the engine compartment. In the first piece I wrote after I bought the car, I noted that much of the clatter “was traceable to an unsecured battery clamp and a loose smog pump. With those tightened down, hunting with a mechanic’s stethoscope revealed only a bit of timing chain clatter.” That turned out to be a hopeful but incorrect garage diagnosis. When I actually began driving the car, I could unfortunately still hear a deep knocking rasp at a variety of load conditions. I continued to try to localize it in the garage—when stationary, I could only recreate it by revving the engine up and down—but even using the mechanic’s stethoscope, sounds like this can be notoriously difficult to pinpoint. It seemed to be coming from the timing chain case in the front of the engine, but I could also hear it clear as day by placing the stethoscope probe on the valve cover as well as the oil pan.

I reasoned that the rasp-knock could be coming from four places—the valve train (meaning a loose pad or sleeve on a rocker arm), the timing chain assembly, the chain that runs the oil pump, or a rod bearing. I inspected the valve train and didn’t find anything amiss. Likewise, I checked the timing chain as thoroughly as I could—I verified that the chain itself wasn’t obviously slack due to wear and that the oil-fed tensioner piston was working, and snaked an inspection camera down to see that the chain guide rail wasn’t obviously cracked or that the tensioner arm didn’t have grooves cut in it—but to really see what’s going on, you need to remove both the upper and lower timing covers, and the lower cover is a pain to get off, requiring removal of the crank pulley.

The other two culprits—the oil pump chain and the rod bearings—are fairly easy to inspect, simply requiring the oil pan to be dropped. There are a lot of little 10mm bolts holding the pan on, but other than that, it’s easy. Folks talk online about having to lift the engine up to get clearance to drop the pan, but I’ve found that you can usually lower the front of the pan enough to access the oil pump, remove it, and then slide the pan out. About 10 years ago, I had a ’72 BMW 2002 whose engine sounded like a chainsaw. When I dropped its pan, I found that the oil pump chain was incredibly slack, and that several of the rod bearings were worn down to the copper. Shimming the oil pump to tighten the chain and replacing the rod bearings quieted that car down.

So, into Carter’s oil pan I went.

The pan slid right out without requiring me to jack up the engine or remove the oil pump first. But I was surprised by the fact that some of the hard-to-reach oil pan bolts were only on finger-tight, and that the oil pan gasket was separated into several pieces that were held in place with a never-drying adhesive. In other words, someone had been in and out of here quickly. Sort of like what I was trying to do now. Danger, Will Robinson!

A quick check of the oil pump chain revealed that it was quite slack (the video can be seen here). I dug around in my box of engine parts and found an envelope of spare pump shims from the last time I had to do this.

With the pan off and the oil pump removed, it would never be easier to drop the rod end caps and examine the rod bearings. Many 2002 owners report that it’s the #3 rod bearing that shows the most wear, so I dropped #3 end cap. I saw wear but nothing alarming—that is, no wear into the copper or deep scratch marks. I almost left it at that, but out of caution I dropped the others.

Oh boy.

Rod #2 had a partially spun bearing.

Let me back up a step. If you’ve never pulled the bottom end of an engine apart, when you hear “bearing,” you might think of a ball bearing assembly. That’s not what’s used here. On just about every engine, both the rotation of the crankshaft in the block and the rotation of the connecting rods on the crankshaft use a pair of crescent-shaped bearing shells. They’re typically three lays of metal—a steel back, a copper or copper-lead intermediate layer, and a soft “Babbitt” outer layer. The crankshaft’s running surfaces, or “journals,” run inside the bearing shells on a very thin layer of oil that’s fed through the crank. For the connecting rod bearings, one shell is positioned in the curved end of the rod; the other is in the “end cap” that attaches to the rod via nuts on the rod end bolts (it’s the same on the crank main bearings except that the upper half of the shell is in the block itself). The curved rod end, the end cap, and the bearing shells are all sized to fit a crankshaft journal of a certain size with a clearance of a few thousandths of an inch. The bearing shells each have a tab that slides into a notch in either the rod or its end cap to position it in place. It’s a time-tested, inexpensive, reliable way for the crankshaft to spin in the block and move the rods up and down.

That is, until something goes wrong. Dirt and metal particulates carried by the oil can scratch the bearings and the journal surfaces. Excessive heat and crankshaft flex from over-revving the engine can also cause bearing wear. If a rod bearing seizes, it can cause the connecting rod to break, creating a cascade of noisy expensive failure.

With that in mind, when the term “spun rod bearing” is used, it means that the little tabs that are supposed to hold the bearing shells in the rod and the end cap aren’t doing their jobs—they’ve broken and the two bearing shells are instead spinning in place. If this is because the bearing shells have seized on the crankshaft journal, that constitutes a catastrophic failure, requiring the crankshaft to be removed and reground or replaced. So, finding a spun rod bearing is considerably worse than simply finding that the bearing shells are scratched or worn into the copper.

In Carter’s case, there was fortunately no evidence that the bearing shells had seized on the crankshaft. I was able to easily pull them off. Further, even though the tabs had broken off both of the shells, there was no evidence that the shells had been spinning inside the rod end—there were no spin marks on the rod end surfaces or the backs of the bearing shells, or any heat discoloration. So, I guess I’d call it a partially spun bearing.

I actually had an unused set of rod bearings in the garage. The idea of throwing them in, checking clearance with Plastigage (a tiny plastic tube, like very thin spaghetti, that you lay on the bearing surface, squish under torque, and then check its deformed width), and buttoning the thing up was very appealing. After all, part of my purchase of Carter was predicated on the idea that I’d swap the engine for a more powerful one at some point anyway, just not right now.

So, with the car unexpectedly occupying precious garage space (hell, it was on my lift), I installed the new upper bearing shell, laid a piece of Plastigage on the new lower bearing shell in the end cap, torqued it down to the required 41 ft-lbs, took it back off, and examined it.

The Plastigage hadn’t squished a bit.

Ruh-roh.

My initial thought was that the partially spun bearing had in fact damaged the rod end and elongated it. But then I looked carefully at the damaged bearing shells that I’d removed and saw that they had the number “0.5” on the back, likely indicating that they were 0.5mm thicker bearings for a reground crank. I measured the rod journal with a caliper, looked up the spec online, and sure enough, it had been reground 0.5mm smaller. I checked a second one to be certain.

Even though the factory manual lists the original rod bearings and three regrind sizes (-.25mm, 0.5mm, and -.75mm), it’s pretty unusual for these cranks to need to be reground, so something bad must’ve happened to this one. Further, since it was clear that this oil pan had been removed and reinstalled, it was possible that this had happened before in the not-too-distant past. Still, I had nothing to lose by sourcing a set of 0.5mm undersized rod bearings, installing them, and hoping for the best.

Unfortunately, when I checked my usual vendors, I found that only one of them carried 0.25mm undersized bearings, and none of them had the 0.5mm bearings. Such things are not unusual with vintage cars—options that are listed in the factory manual are no longer available from the manufacturer or the aftermarket.

Fortunately, eBay saved my bacon—one vendor in Texas had five sets of new old stock (NOS) Glyco 0.5mm rod bearings for the 2002’s M10 engine. Cost: $21, shipped. Click. Buy. Happy dance.

In a perfect world, I’d pull out the #2 connecting rod and have a machinist carefully measure the end for roundness and recondition it if necessary, but that requires pulling the head. Of course, it’s also probably wise to have a machinist carefully examine the crankshaft to see why this is happening. But pulling the rod and piston requires yanking the head, and pulling the crank requires yanking the transmission, so at that point you’re removing the engine and rebuilding it, and for an engine that’s likely going to be replaced anyway, I’m just not going to do that.

I won’t know until next week how well the .5mm bearings fit, or if they eliminate the raspy knocking noise that caused me to pull the oil pan off in the first place. But the result has to be better than running with worn-out rod bearings.

I’ll let you know what happens.

***

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

The post Spun Bearing: Two words that bring everything to halt appeared first on Hagerty Media.

John writes: I have three Jaguars insured through Hagerty—two XKRs (2006 and 2011) and one 2006 XJ8. I am looking for an OBD scanner that will give basic, easy-to-decipher code readings at a relatively low price. I am not mechanically inclined, and I’m tired of getting wrong advice from bad or unscrupulous mechanics.

Rob answers: There are three things to understand about scan tools. The first: There’s a distinction between generic OBD-II code readers and brand-specific scan tools. Any $20 generic OBD-II code reader will read the standardized OBD-II emissions-related codes that cause the Check Engine Light (CEL) to come on and tell you if a coil is misfiring or an oxygen sensor is out of range. However, the fact that the OBD-II/CEL system is standardized across all post-1996 cars means that an inexpensive code reader can only read the generic codes and thus can’t read Jaguar-specific codes. To do that, you need a Jaguar-specific scan tool.

Second, even with a Jaguar-specific scan tool, there’s a distinction between one that reads the Jaguar-specific control modules for the engine, transmission, airbag, ABS, suspension, parking sensor, and other systems, versus a tool that actually performs service functions on those systems. For example, finding and clearing a fault with the air suspension or the ABS is different from recalibrating the suspension or cycling the ABS for brake bleeding. The more you spend, the more of these service-type functions you get.

Third, the use of a scan tool is almost always coupled with hands-on repair. That is, a scanner may report an error code and give you the capability of clearing it, but if you or a repair shop haven’t corrected the underlying fault, the code will come right back. In addition, even with a b rand-specific scan tool that has an easy-to-understand user interface, some amount of brand-specific repair knowledge is often needed to translate the message into action. “Bad left rear wheel speed sensor” is pretty clear, but a “minor evaporative leak” could be coming from many small hoses, and it usually takes an experienced technician to figure out exactly which one it is.

That said, the Land Rover/Jaguar scan tools from iCarSoft and Foxwell both appear to be popular in the Jaguar world. The iCarSoft LR v1.0 ($190), will read and clear trouble codes and perform an oil service maintenance reset. The Foxwell NT630 ($150) will also perform the service functions of steering angle calibration and ABS bleeding. For $260, the iCarSoft LR v2.0 adds Electronic Throttle Control (ETC) and Battery Management System (BMS) reset.

Andy Hoffman writes: Can I ask for clarification on the article “Winter is Coming” from the November/December issue? First, the article recommends putting the car on jack stands to avoid flat-spotting the tires. I always thought that would expose the [shock absorber] shaft to the elements and possibly cause corrosion, thus ruining the shock. I pull my cars onto pieces of rigid foam insulation, which contours (somewhat) to the tire and reduces the flat spot. What do you think? Second, the article recommends disconnecting the negative terminal of the battery to eliminate parasitic drain. Is that for cars with negative ground? If so, is the advice to disconnect the ground wire (to be clear, for those with positive ground)? Can you elaborate?

Rob answers: To prevent flat-spotted tires, parking on foam may be better than parking on cement, but Tire Rack concurs with my advice that the ideal solution is putting all four wheels up. Regarding the exposed-shock/strut-shaft issue, unless you’re in a salty/high-humidity environment, I wouldn’t be overly concerned. Many shocks and struts have bellows that cover the shaft, but if they don’t, some amount of the shaft is exposed anyway, even if the car is sitting on the ground.

Regarding which battery terminal to disconnect to eliminate the parasitic drain, the reason for disconnecting the negative is that most cars have negative ground. Therefore, if you accidentally touch the wrench to the body of the car when you’re undoing the negative terminal, you won’t create a spectacular short to ground and burn your hand. You are correct that, for this reason, on a car with positive ground, you should disconnect the positive terminal.

The post Diagnostic Dilemma: Not all scan tools are alike appeared first on Hagerty Media.

Last week, I wrote about preparing for The Big Road Trip—3000-ish miles from suburban Boston to MidAmerica 02Fest in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. I laid out my basic preparation philosophy of fixing the problems you know about, performing preventive maintenance on “The Big Seven” things likely to strand a vintage car (ignition, fuel delivery, cooling, charging, belts, clutch hydraulics, ball joints) and carrying enough spare parts and tools that you won’t feel like an idiot if something common breaks. I thought I’d let you know how it went.

The Drive

My wonderful, tolerant, passion-enabling wife doesn’t accompany me on these long-haul road trips, as her idea of hell is endless hours in a fragrant, loud old car. Really, it’s less the fragrant old car part than the endless hours part—“the forced march,” as she calls it, is not at all to her liking. Her preferred pace is the stop-and-smell-the-quilt-shops kind of road trip. I get it, but on a trip like this (1500 miles each way, broken into two 750-mile days), those miles don’t drive themselves. You have to pound them out.

Fuel, rest room, and oil-checking breaks are unlikely to be less than 15 minutes. Take four of those and it adds an hour—longer if it’s more than four (it always is) or if you need to take an actual breather or fix something. Do the math and you’ll see that, if you’re 63 years old like me who runs out of consciousness when he runs out of daylight, the goal is to be rolling into the parking lot of the hotel no later than sunset, you’re eating breakfast at dawn, hitting the road at sunup, and basically driving every waking daylight hour. Most of the time, that works for me—I love these little cars, I love road-tripping them, and I love the alone time for my brain to do the percolation thing it doesn’t get to do at home. But if I hit traffic or weather or have to stop and fix something and the drive continues after dark, it definitely ratchets back the “livin’ the dream” part.

The Caravan

As I described last week, my days of lone-wolf road trips are largely over. There are undeniable advantages in running with a pack. Even ignoring the social aspects, from a purely practical self-enlightened standpoint, there’s safety in numbers in terms of mechanical breakdowns and the ability to have someone run to the nearest Autozone for duct tape and 10-mm bolts. Maybe someone even has them in their trunk.

But pack size and makeup are crucial. Every May, I run with a regular four-person caravan to the event “The Vintage” in Asheville, North Carolina. We’re very compatible in terms of:

• Speed—We typically drive just a notch faster than traffic flow, which usually puts us in the 75–80 zone where 2002s shine.
• Passing—We keep right except to pass, only pass on the right when someone is an unforgivable left lane hog, and never weave through traffic as if we have some God-given right to carry more speed than the traffic volume will naturally allow.
• Lunch—We eat while rolling in our cars; sit-down lunches just take too long when you have pavement to pound and miles to go before you sleep.
• Hotels—We agree on something midway between a Marriot and no-tell motel).

On this trip, however, it was just me and one of these caravan members, my friend Bob Sawtelle.

There’s a tendency on the part of caravan drivers of the same cars to want to keep the pack together, but on anything other than an empty road, you just can’t keep more than a handful of consecutive cars together without interfering with traffic flow. A line of vintage cars already attracts a lot of attention, and I want it to be the good kind; I really hate the idea of my joy translating into someone else’s rage if it looks like we’re lane-hogging for photo ops. So, four or fewer is a good caravan size, and two was great. It was small enough to be as nimble as a 15-year-old gymnast on a balance beam. And, as it happened, Bob and I were both driving green BMW 2002s. His was a newer (1976) car with big bumpers and square taillights. Mine was a 1972 pre-facelift car with the classic round taillights and small bumpers. The sight of the two perky little green cars, just different enough from each other to look like Barbie and her little sister Skipper, got us so many thumbs-ups on the drive that it almost qualified as fuel.

Road-wise, we took I-90 out of Boston to I-84 and stayed on it all the way into Scranton, Pennsylvania. This is a nice route that bypasses all of the old roads north of New York City and provides a lovely drive through Pennsylvania. Then it’s I-81 to I-80, at which point my memory of the last time I made this trek eight years ago proved startingly accurate—folks on I-80 know how to use the “go pedal.” There’s a time and a place for speed, and the way I look at it, if you’re not going to haul tuchus when you’re driving your treasured vintage road car, the traffic is light, the weather is flawless, Waze is clear, and the trucks are running at 80 mph, when are you going to do it? We spent hours with the 2002 engines doing what they were designed to do—zinging along at over 4000 rpm, where the molecules feel like they’re all vibrating together. We followed I-76 to I-71 and overnighted at the halfway point in Columbus, Ohio.