My Life as a Mechanic
October 12, 2005 --from the book A Life in Progress-Part One

I spent several years as an auto mechanic. I have always been interested in mechanical things, in how things work. And I like to make things and fix things.

I think I mentioned about the swivel idea or vision I had when I was about five, and how I was collecting baby buggy and bicycle parts. It was a bit frustrating at the time because I could not figure out how to assemble them into the incredible flying machine that I had visualized. I think that there were a few parts that fit together in certain ways, so I got some experience that way.

My father and two brothers were all more-or-less mechanically inclined so I had some opportunities as a child to learn things.

My brother Bob had the use of a wood lathe. I was intrigued with the spinning shaft. It looked ethereal. You could sort of see it, but it looked transparent, as it spun rapidly around. I stuck my finger into it to investigate further. My finger got the worse end of the deal. Bob was very concerned. I don't think he had anticipated the intensity of my curiosity. It is likely that I was banned from being around power tools until I got older.

Bob gave me a lot of my early mechanical education. He took pride in explaining how to do things with cars. I remember he showed me how to change brakes. He also showed me how to drive, when I was about seven years old. At first I would sit on his lap and he would let me steer. But he also showed me the gears, how to operate the clutch, everything about how to run an automobile.

One time we were digging topsoil along the highway. We walked some distance down the road looking for a good spot to dig. When we found one my Dad, I think it was, asked me to go back and bring the truck. I was probably eight or nine. How proud I was that I was able to do that. I think my brother Don, who is five and a half years older than me, may have been a bit jealous of my ability. But Bob had given me a lot of training.

Bob is always interested in mechanical things. I have always enjoyed it when he gives me a tour of places where he has worked, explaining all the machines to me.

Bob had a 1966 Austin car that he managed to roll over on the highway. It was damaged beyond repair, but it still ran, and I used to drive it around the field. I did minor repairs to it. Somebody told me that I should set the tappets on it so it would run smoother. I obtained a feeler gauge from somewhere. I adjusted all the tappet spacing to the thickness of the feeler gauge. Some of them I had to move really a lot. Boy, I thought, these tappets are really out of adjustment. When I completed the task the car wouldn't run at all. After consultation with Jake Hirsch, who worked at Wolfram Motors, I found that you have to rotate the motor into the correct position as you adjust each tappet. So that was an early lesson well learned.

My First Car
I bought my first car, a 1953 Ford sedan. I paid $50. I have always managed to buy things for low prices and then deal with the problems. The Ford worked, more or less. My friend Tom Starchuk informed me that the letters in Ford stand for Fix Or Repair Daily. And that was certainly the case with my Ford. I was always tinkering with the carburetor adjustment or the choke setting. The Ford ran okay, but it had a loud muffler. It's top speed was 86 miles per hour. We tried it a number of times along Carson Road.

We would put the pedal to the floor and coax it to go faster and faster until it got up to 86. Sometimes we would rock backwards and forwards in our seats to try and give it a little extra momentum.

Of course 86 is a fast enough speed, but it seemed slow to us compared to most other cars, and that was true. Its top speed of 86 also meant that it didn't have much power going up hills. But the car got me around and took my friends and me on many wonderful and questionable adventures.

Learning to Rebuild Motors
Tom Starchuk knew a lot of things that I didn't know. His uncle owned an auto body shop. He had been exposed to a lot of mechanical things. Tom wanted to rebuild the motor in his 1956 Ford. We set up a tripod and pulled the motor. I think I was the bottom man, the guy who crawls under the car and undoes the bolts holding everything together down there. It is the type of job where you always have a lot of dirt and stuff falling into your eyes. It is something like going into certain yoga postures, manipulating your body and arms to undo nuts and bolts that are in various awkward positions. You haven’t' really lived until you have spent time under a vehicle, taking out, or especially reinstalling a motor.

I didn't know what we were really doing. I was just following along with Tom. I was good at what I did and good at figuring things out, but Tom had an overall picture of what we were doing.

Once we got the motor out we took it apart. Tom said he wanted to rebuild it and he purchased piston rings, bearings, gaskets, and other parts. I remember we sat around his parents' kitchen table installing the rings onto the pistons. It was all new to me, but was really not that difficult.

I became somewhat of an expert at rebuilding motors. I bought some books that explained the process, and even more importantly the theory of how a gasoline engine works. I came to know more than Tom about some things to do with motors, because of my reading.

We took the motor out of my 1952 Mercury pickup. I was going to rebuild it. But on my own I never got around to it, and probably didn't have the money to buy parts. At some point a different motor was put into it.

Tom has continued working on cars over the years. He seems to know just about everything about them. Along with his brothers and friends, he does a lot of things with cars. Tom's wife does upholstery, so they can pretty much redo a whole car from scratch.

With the confidence Tom helped me to achieve, I didn't hesitate to try to repair any possible thing that might go wrong with a vehicle. I rebuilt the odd motor here and there.

I was always changing transmissions and rear ends. We would scrounge parts from various places. I had all kinds of vehicles with all kinds of problems. I remember my 1951 Chevy pickup had two rods connected to the transmission. To shift gears you would have to reach down through the floor and manipulate the rods. This meant ducking your head down below the dash for a few seconds while you were driving, so the shifting had to be carefully coordinated with what was going on outside on the roadway, especially at higher speeds.

It seems like too many adventures to remember now. It is getting to be a long time ago, approaching forty years.

Repairing Cars In California
I moved to California in 1977. In the beginning I did all kinds of odd jobs. It seemed like I could do anything. At least I would try anything. My friend David Carr got me started in my career as a mechanic in Encinitas. David was the kind of guy who was always getting people started in things. He was very innovative and unique in his approach to things.

David's Carr's car was giving him problems. Was it a Lincoln Continental.? I think so. It was a great big car, the way cars used to be in those days. Well this was about 1980. David wanted me to rebuild his motor, so I did it. I think I rigged up some kind of a tripod and pulled the motor, then rebuilt it.

I don't recall how many days or weeks it took. the process is always an adventure. It definitely puts you through a lot of things. I remember one problem: After I had the car all back together I added water to the radiator -- and added -- and added. It sure seemed to be taking a lot of water. I chanced to check the dipstick for the oil and found that the crankcase was full of water. I had left out a seal or gasket of some kind. So I disassembled everything, dried it out, and reassembled it.

Other than that the car ran well. David was very proud of it. He is like that. He enjoys simple triumphs. We drove into a gas station and David told them of how I had rebuilt his motor. The gas station manager hired me to be his mechanic. I worked there for a while, then went off on my own.

By that time I lived in a large building and had plenty of room to work on cars. I had a whole parking lot and a tree to hook a hoist onto for pulling motors. I rebuilt several motors there, some of them quite successfully, and others not so.

I didn't do a lick of advertising. All my customers came by word of mouth. And I had more to do than I could keep up with. People told me that they were looking for an honest mechanic, and I guess they considered me to be one. But also my prices were very good, and I worked with people. I got to the point of using a sliding price range for my estimations. I would give the customer a range between lowest possible price and highest. That way if the job turned out to be really difficult and took a lot of hours I was covered. But if everything went well I would charge the lowest price and the customer was happy.

Another technique I developed was to try to spot problem customers ahead of time, and to discourage them one way or another, usually with high prices, or by saying it would be quite a while until I could get around to doing it. I had gotten burnt a few times with difficult customers, so I found a way to solve the problem--spot them ahead of time and don't work on their vehicle, or as little as possible anyway.
Most customers were very understanding, and would work to accommodate the difficulties I encountered with their vehicles.

I used to think sometimes that a big part of my job as a mechanic was dealing with the customer psychologically. That was almost the larger part of the repair job. Sometimes the car problems were very minor or related to the way the customer was driving. It was a lot of fun dealing with the people and seemed to require a lot of patience.

I would try to get people to learn to do simple repairs on their own cars. Ingrid was excellent in this regard. She learned how to change the oil on her van, crawling under the vehicle with a wrench and pan to catch the oil. She also helped me to do the prep work to paint her Honda. She wasn't afraid of hard work.

People would often come by just to watch or to talk. It was sometimes a distraction but mostly I was able to keep working. There were some problems that were difficult for me to figure out. Sometimes I would work on a problem day after day trying to resolve it.

As cars started to come out with computer chips, it became more difficult to trouble-shoot them. On older vehicles I would sometimes bypass the computerized electrical system and wire things up the old-fashioned way.

On Elizabeth Liefold's car, which was inexplicably draining its battery every day, I hooked up a master switch on the dashboard, that she would turn off every time she got out of her car.

Quite recently I bypassed Margareta's computerized brake and signal light system, putting in a new switch on the brake pedal and running new wires directly to the lights. That solved her problem that had been unsolvable by any repair place she took the car to. For a period, while the job was in process, Margareta had a brake-light switch next to her on the seat that she had to activate by hand, every time she pressed the brake pedal. But that was better than no brake lights at all.

One interesting thing about being a mechanic was the necessary psychological attitude. Because I was lifting a lot of heavy parts all the time (such as transmissions and motors) I required a very aggressive, very macho approach. There was no way I could be wimpy or hesitant about anything. I had to be forceful, undeterred, all conquering.

Sometimes customers would be wimpy and my attitude seemed gruff compared to theirs. I used a kind of gentle gruff manner, because while they were wincing and agonizing I was the one who had to press ahead and solve the problem for them.

I recall one time when a customer had brought their car to me and was discussing the problem with a friend. They were going on about the difficulty of the problem with the car and what might have to be done to remedy it, the possible expense, the possibility that the car would have to be replaced, or whatever.

Meanwhile I was somewhat unobtrusively trouble-shooting the problem and doing what needed to be done to fix it. It probably only took me about ten minutes.

Having convinced themselves of the seriousness of the problem with the car, the customer and friend now tried to explain it to me. Interrupting them after a short time I told them that I had already repaired the problem. It took me a while to convince them that it was fixed, because, wrapped up in their discussion, they had not even noticed that I was working on it. In a way they seemed almost disappointed because they thought they had figured out that it was a very serious problem that would require extensive work.

Like I used to always say, a lot of the car problems had to do with the customer's personal psychology, their karma maybe.

No recountal of my car repair days would be complete without reference to Ron Shane and his conniving, crafty exploits. He brought his car in one day and I did a bunch of work under the chassis. I don't remember what it was--muffler, drive shaft, not sure. So Ron came with Carol, his wife, paid me for the job, and drove off. Successful end of story. Not quite!

In a short time Ron came driving back. "Something's wrong", he said. "It's making a strange noise. Could you have left a part off or something? It doesn't seem right. I didn’t want to bother you but Carol said we can't pay you if you didn't do the job right. I know you tried to fix it and everything but, well, I wouldn't want to lose my wife over this."

By this time I had flattened my body against the ground, and was already under the car. "What could it possibly be?" was going through my mind. "I tightened this bolt and that one. I put that part on, and that one. Everything seemed to be okay. I know I must have done something wrong, but what could it be?

When I was completely under the car, and it's not easy to squeeze under those small cars, Ron lowered his head down to look underneath with a big smile and called out gleefully, "Got cha!"

Arghh!. I got out from under that car very fast and chased him down the street, with him laughing uproariously. Carol thought it was funny too, but she maintained a certain amount of decorum so I couldn't tell if she was in on the scheme or not. The nerve of the guy, saying he wouldn't want to lose his wife over it. And I fell for it. Oh, well. In the two decades since then I have been looking for every opportunity to get Ron back somehow. Maybe he thinks I have forgotten it. But that is what I am waiting for, for him to be off his guard. Because some day, when he least expects it... Well, just let me say that eternity is a long time, but sometime -- I will find a way to pay him back.

My career as a mechanic eventually came to an end. It ended gradually, and I still do a little car work, once in a great while it seems now. I put new brakes on my van earlier in the year. I still do a lot of tinkering and inventing, but not the wholesale car repair I used to do.