Car Trouble

This morning, I was driving my daughter to school and I noticed that my clock wasn't working in the car.  Oh well, probably popped a fuse.  I decided to turn the radio on to check the time.  No radio.  Hmm, things are getting interesting.  TWO blown fuses?  What are the chances?  Weird.  Seconds later, it starts to drizzle.  I hit the wipers.  Nothing.  I started to panic.  We're running a bit late for school, and now I know I'm going to be late for work...especially if I can't get these stinking wipers to work.  I dropped Charlie off at school and circled back home instead of heading to the office.   Perhaps it was a simple fix.  I pulled into the garage and left it running while I did a quick Google search.  It turns out that I'm not the first victim of this odd happening.  Fortunately, there's almost always some other people who are kind enough to share their similar experiences and solutions.  It was simple - jiggle the key.  I gave it a shake, I felt the ignition click, and the clock, radio, and wipers came to life like a scene from Christine.  I should probably replace my ignition.  No problem.  My mechanic adventures aren't always this simple, but I almost always meet them with ambition.

My dad was a genius.  He was one of the smartest men I've ever met.  I'm sure his being confined physically to a wheelchair for 30 years helped him develop and adapt some incredible skills, but he was really smart too.  He also loved cars.  He told us stories of him working in Pappy's (his dad's) dirt track pit crew.  I can still remember the dreamy look in his eyes whenever he'd talk about the cars he'd owned or wished he'd owned. He sure knew a lot about cars.

By dave_7 - originally posted to Flickr as Ford Ranchero

We moved to California in '86 in a 1974(ish) Ford Ranchero with a 351 Cleveland V8 that GROWLED.  I remember it was a Cleveland because he and his buddies must have had a million drunken debates over the 351 Windsor v. Cleveland.  He was proud of that car, and I think even more proud of the motor.  Sometime in the early 90's, he decided to transplant that motor into a full-size van to make it easier for him to travel in his chair.  I'm sure it wasn't always fun catching bugs in his teeth in the back of the Ranchero.  I remember the project taking place out in a pasture somewhere in Mississippi.  At times, the project seemed to be mostly just a party.  There was a lot of beer and a lot of shenanigans...some yelling too.  I remember someone spraying ether (starting fluid) on her hand and lighting it on fire.  She danced around for a second, hooting and hollering in excitement, then quickly dashed her hand into a cooler of water to extinguish it.  Stuff like this happened a lot.  The project slowed down and the partying sped up.  At some point, I think his buddies abandoned the project before finishing it.  I'm not sure what happened.  Maybe there were hard feelings.  Maybe my dad ran out of beer money.  Whatever the case, we had a motor in a van that didn't run.  My dad said it was up to us to get her running.

Once, I mustered up the courage to replace the
timing chain on my '94 Saab

This is where my knowledge of cars was born.  He was the brains, and I was his hands.  Try to imagine talking someone through an oil change for the first time over the phone.  Really think about it.  How would you describe the drain plug?  More importantly, how could you be sure that the other person was working on the right part?  My dad couldn't see what I could see, he could only describe things and hope that we were on the same page.  There was some trial and error for sure.
Fortunately, his pals did most of the heavy lifting. I was 11 or 12 and maybe 70 pounds soaking wet.  I'd have enough trouble getting the battery installed.  Oh man, the battery.  My dad had a favorite wrench.  It was a deep-offset boxed-end wrench, 1/2" on one end and 9/16" on the other.  My dad referred to it as "the half and nine".  It was pretty long; long enough to span both terminals on a battery.  Ask me how I know that!  Well, I was trying to loosen the ground cable and there was an incident.  The nut was pretty tight (for my puny arms), so I gave her all I had.  I was standing up on the driver-side tire, literally leaning into it when it broke loose.  My momentum kept the wrench rotating until it slammed down on top of the positive terminal.  BAM!  There was a flash of light and a splash of hot metal as the wrench arced, and within seconds it was glowing red.  My dad was screaming "Get it off!  Get it off!  Quick!".  Couldn't he see it was red hot?  Of course he couldn't.  I didn't have anything to grab the wrench with, so I grabbed a piece of wood that was on the ground and began jamming it into the wrench to dislodge it.  It had literally melted into the battery terminal.  Smoke was pouring off of the battery as it prepared to explode.  I finally managed to break the wrench free before things got more serious.  My dad then explained to me how dangerous things had gotten, and that it could have been really bad.  Ignorance is bliss, right?  This was the first of many mishaps in the adventures of Dave and Dave.

Pappy, Dad, and I - A few years after we got the van running

The second incident I can remember was also the first time we got that old Cleveland fired up.  After a long and arduous battle with the wiring harness (which was brutally complicated), we got things hooked up enough to turn over the motor.  He had me hook up the throttle cable.  My memory is a bit foggy on this part, but I think he wanted the throttle closed, but what I thought was "closed" was actually open.  We gave the carb a shot of starting flud.  I got in, pumped the pedal a few times, and looked for the nod from my dad to turn the ignition.  He wheeled up in front of the van and leaned in as close as he could, I assume to listen and watch for anything that might go wrong.  (By this point, we had fried a lot of wiring as a result of other minor mishaps.  Wiring took forever to troubleshoot, so maybe he was trying to spot any smoke to make it easier to find later.)  Either way, he was as close as he could possibly be to this engine compartment.  He gave me the nod and hollered "Fire that mother up!".  I did, and she roared to life!  It was glorious and deafening.  Something wasn't right.  It's too loud.  My foot wasn't touching the pedal, but the throttle was WIDE OPEN.  Oops.  Still, it was a win.  I celebrated the resurrection of this monster for a second or two, then I remembered my dad.  Holy crap, his head was practically IN the engine compartment.  I looked through the windshield and I could only see a pair of arms flailing frantically.  I quickly turned the key off.  Nope.  She's still running at full throttle.  Oh man, it must be the wiring again.  I got out of the van and ran out to my dad.  He was stuck.  His wheelchair had somehow gotten hooked on the bumper.  He was shouting something and I was shouting back.  We couldn't hear anything but the motor.  I finally pieced together that he was saying something about the battery.  Disconnect the battery.  I did.  The madness ended.

I looked at my dad with a smile to see if he was happy.  He just looked drained and half-terrified.  He then explained to me just how lucky we were that he didn't get plowed over the second the motor started.  At the time, I knew that you couldn't start a vehicle when it was in Park, and the shifter on the column was pointing to "P".  He calmly explained to me that we hadn't hooked the shifter linkage up, and that we really had no idea what gear the transmission was in.  We had also just wired up enough "stuff" to get it started.  The alternator, for example, didn't exist yet.  There were no safety features to prevent the van from starting in gear.  Wow.  I'm not sure if that really could have happened, but he was convinced that we were lucky.

Our van wasn't quite this bad

Soon after that, we managed to get her on the road.  Let's go back to that oil change example.  Now try to imagine the amount of knowledge, creativity, and communication skills my dad needed to talk me through getting that old van, motor, and drivetrain together.  Like I said, my dad was smart.
Over the next several years, my dad and I worked on that van a lot.  He tried to teach me everything he knew, but there was too much knowledge and not enough time.  Most importantly, he gave me the confidence that I could fix just about anything.  He always referred to it as "intestinal fortitude".

I've since applied that confidence and knowledge to fix a lot of things, big and small.  I also remember him telling me that I could one day make enough money to pay someone to fix my car.  He'd typically bring that up when I was really tired of working on the van, or at times when we were screaming at each other out of frustration.  He had to know those memories would be powerful motivation for me later in life.  Today, I fix things on my own as much as I can.  Sometimes I do it because it saves us money.  Most of the time I do it just because I can, and it makes me feel closer to my dad - if even for just a few hours.  I pray that I have the patience and make the time to teach my children what my dad taught me, and that it might be even a fraction of the gift to them as it has been to me.  I also have this experience to reflect back on whenever I am facing a project or challenge that I think is too big to overcome.  I never thought we'd get that motor running.  We did, and life is better today because of it.