Jenga!
Proving you have stones 101: Race on ice and snow
‘Remember’ what I said about not caring so much about if it’s worth doing, only about if it can be done? Case in point:
Porsche GT3 RS, Mitsubishi EVO 9, WRF450, YZF1000 R1 - Video from Dailymotion.
This is the perfect way to get the engine you don’t want out of the car you don’t want… Wait, why are we doing this again? Oh yeah, we don’t want this car or this engine, we do want Youtube fame.
Volkswagen Golf Engine Chained to a Tree! – Car Videos on StreetFire.
Wheel speed sensor removal tool?
120,000 Miles worth of rust and road grime holding an ABS sensor in place? No problem. Since we know those wheels speed sensors take a beating as well as an orchid could, we can just air hammer it out. It’ll be fine.
Your Wrenching Buddy
You have one, everyone does. Most have a few guys that might show up at the garage on a Saturday. I’m talking about the one guy who will be there almost all the time. You may not even touch the tools once, and just watch TV and shoot some pool. They don’t last forever, I’m on my fourth I think, but you will always have one. If not, you probably aren’t really a gearhead.
You think the same broken parts are funny. You marvel at similar fuel-to-violence converting machines. If you require stiches, he will direct your significant other to the emergency room he took you to, as long as you didn’t bleed on the carpet in his car. You might wrench at his garage, he might wrench at yours, neither would complain about the space the other takes up in his garage. You very carefully put your buddy’s tools back where they were catalogued without being asked. You go to cars shows together, the bar, the parts store, and the local burger joint.
Your wrenching buddy has your back. I once told my good friend Ray about trouble I was having with my girlfriend hanging around with another guy. He asked me where we were going to find him, like with shovels. He was serious. To this day that guy and my ex have no idea how much peril he was in during the time I considered Ray’s offer. I used to wrench on my motorcycles at Ray’s house. I ate dinner there once or twice a week. We drank a lot and he had a pool table. We’d talk trash about each other’s significant others. Went off-roading in the woods behind his place with our trucks or his ATVs, and once with a certain murderous KTM dirt bike. I was treated like one of his family, by his family. I rode his Dyna to his December funeral at the request of his mother, leading the rest of our friends and his son (who had just started riding.) I have the honor of remembering him say the words “I consider you the best friend I have in the world right now.”
My current wrenching buddy is my brother. We rent a small garage to store and work on our fourteen bikes. A few of our friends bikes come and go also. We are there together once a week or so, offering advise and a spare hand. This is important, an indispensible resource for every grease monkey who picks up a wrench. A second set of eyes, two brains better than one, a spare hand, pick your cliché. Give him grief, but try not to piss him off too much, he may be hard to replace.
Where are you wasting you money?
You’re in the local chain parts store for car wax and tire black, looking around in the isle of chrome and other things you don’t need, holding a basket like it’s an Easter egg hunt. You see something that not only fits your ride, but is only $12. It’s a fully adjustable TV cable bracket, made of the finest chrome-plated 22ga Chinese steel. It mounts semi-securely under one of the carburetor mounting bolts. Your kick down cable has been at a scary, going to get stuck at wide open throttle look to it since you installed that taller intake a while back, and there’s no way your drum rear brakes could possibly hold back the fury of your 302. It would be negligent not to buy this, you could hit a buss full of nuns one day if you don’t take action. Your reasoning is defendable to the wife, so it’s ok for it to be on the receipt.
You are also a fool. There’s a perfectly good factory bracket installed on your car. When it became insufficient, you bent it slightly and it *kind of* works. There have to be five or six companies making OE quality brackets, in a variety of finishes. They aren’t in the chrome-and-you-don’t-need-it isle across town though, and you would have to order it from a performance supplier. I know we’ve all been caught by a surprise when trying to get something done that we thought was a simple modification. Settling for the cheap and easy way out when you don’t have to is going to ruin that project.
There isn’t a standard set of rules for what you should or should not do when modifying a project car. There’s only common sense and experience. If you lack one of those, you should ask your wrenching buddy who hopefully has the other. If the wrenching buddy doesn’t have the other, you both would be better served if one of you asked for help. Insert drinking game tie breaker here if you like.
I’ll give you a hint: If a bracket for an adjustable kick down cable has it’s own adjustment, it’s not adjustable because you need more adjustment. It’s because it doesn’t have an application on the back of the package. One size fits none.
How to end a tire in 2 minutes or less:
Preparation: Install, then wear out a tire. Pick a venue where the activity will be acceptable. Haul your junk to said venue. Bring friends or relatives, or both, to record the process for later review.
1. Get the go ahead from venue organizers.
2. Follow directions as to where it is appropriate and relatively safe to end your tire.
3. Check for people who may not be smart enough to stay away from an eminent danger of flying debris.
4. Accelerate the tire(s) to a high rate of speed while in a stationary position. (Smoke may occur, this is normal and desirable.)
5. Avoid molten tire debris until you hear a pop, then decelerate what remains of the tire as quickly as possible. This will prevent damage to other components.
Optional: Make funny remark about needing an inspection sticker at this point.
6. Post the recording to Youtube for others to enjoy.
I just remembered something -
I am a gearhead. I spend more money on parts and vehicles than I do on food, by far. I don’t care if it’s worth doing, I want to prove it can be done. Loud and pissed is, by default, better than modest and precise. I own, on average, a dozen cars every decade of driving. As far as I am concerned there is no excuse for the Prius and I feel I should be apologized to when I am forced to drive one. Gasoline doesn’t have to be cheap, I predict in the future it will be available as a luxury item, like caviar. Most people will never understand anything I am interested in – I feel sorry for them.
I was brought up on cheap American iron cars. I love them. Their interiors have a certain smell after baking in a sunny junkyard for a few years, some combination of plastic out-gassing and cigarettes maybe. The parts from one car fit all the adjacent cars in the section somehow, like a happy miracle. Shaft-mount radios seem to fit just a little better than single-din “standardized”units. Every wheel used to be one of 3 bolt patterns, “offset” used to be “back-spacing.” Engines used to face forward and I used to be happy spending all of my $200 paycheck at the local pick-a-part and NAPA.
They’re almost gone now, like the dinosaurs. It’s unbelievable that I would spend four grand on craigslist on a car that used to be $200 in the Sunday paper. Everything is wrong-wheel drive and nothing has a throttle cable anymore. I miss the vague steering, the bench seat thicker than a mattress you have to finance. It didn’t matter that GM was selling the same car to us under five different marquis, it made a wider variety of parts cheaper and more plentiful. It made the clone of your favorite car you couldn’t afford possible. Everyone’s unimpressive car could be an impressive car in sheep’s clothing. Every curve of super-mass-produced sheet metal was exciting to someone, on some level.
Then the 90s came. I will never forgive the shameful behavior the domestic brands displayed during this remission into the dark ages. They are not the only ones to blame, enthusiasts took blasphemy to new, unheard-of heights. A yellow on purple Fury with zebra-stripe interior and bug scoop on family TV. That was disgusting. The domestic manufacturers had some excuse, they were attempting to keep pace with cheap asian imports that had no focus on performance for the most part. They had a technology revolution left over from the early 80s that they still couldn’t get ahead of, and more infrastructure to support than they could handle whilst being competitive with $6000 cars.
I recently got a tattoo. I had been talking about how badass it would be to have the firing order of a small block Chevy across my scarred knuckles for years I guess, so I got a special gift for Christmas this year. It turns out someone listened to me and bought my tattoo, I just had to make the appointment. I went and got inked for the first time on new years’ eve. It became an unexpected prod to do something when I realized exactly how many people didn’t know what this sequence of numbers meant, I got asked thirty times in one day at work. I am a professional mechanic, this was unimaginable. Nobody recognized the firing order cast into intake manifolds of the engine that could have caused one hundred million people to pick up a wrench.
Awestruck by the possibility that people don’t know anything about the industry that made America after WW2, I started typing this. I can’t show everyone the way to the glory of my kind of machine made of iron, coal and limestone, but I can point out that it’s slipping away to fellow gearheads. Maybe people will stop to think about a fond memory of driving to get donuts on Sunday mornings with grandpa in his Olds. Maybe Delta 98s will cost a grand more tomorrow, I don’t know. There’s plenty of things to hold on to, I’d like to think these are worthy of it.
From Urban Dictionary:
Gearhead [geer-hed] Noun
A person who is into all things motorized. This can be cars, motorcycles, machines, planes, or boats, but specifically relating to the engine and power delivery. Knowing how to weld and machine metal are also traits of a gearhead.
Example Sentence
Dude, she’s such a gearhead. Go show her that old lathe and tools in your grandfather’s garage and she’ll be in heaven.
