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Spinning My Tires   is one man's view of the world of cars. Random thoughts, ideas and comments pop up here, all of them related to owning, driving and restoring cars. I've been doing this car thing as long as I can remember, and have enjoyed a great many car-related experiences, some of which I hope to share with you here. And I always have an opinion one way or another. Enjoy.

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Additional Spinning My Tires editorials can be found on the Archives page.

8/9/04

Gremlins 

• Cheap
• Fast
• Correct

 Pick two.

This is an old adage that my father frequently mentions regarding my projects. As a hobbyist doing the work myself, I’ve found that I can occasionally have all three, sometimes achieve two, but usually I’m content with just one: Correct.

Of course, Correct is the hardest gremlin of all to satisfy. And don’t think that Cheap and Fast don’t show up every time I open the garage door, begging to be my dates instead of beloved Correct. The other day I was working on a replacement panel for the Buick’s inner fender, slowly hammering the steel into shape with a mallet and shot bag, just like they did hundreds of years ago. Fast jumped up on my shoulder and told me that the rippled panel I had was “good enough” to go into such a hidden area. “After all,” Fast said, “Who’s going to look under there?”

Correct, being the strongest of the three gremlins in my garage (though Cheap seems to have found a very powerful ally in Julia), quickly chased Fast away. But I could see ol’ Cheap giving a pep-talk to his buddy, Fast, in the corner by the Century’s open trunk, talking about patching the floor and getting the car up on the rotisserie. These two are never far away when you work on old cars for fun.

In the 25 or so years that I’ve been tinkering with cars, I’ve learned some hard lessons about the way these gremlins work, and I thought I’d share some of them:


#1: It’s always easier to do the job right the first time than to do it wrong and be forced to try again. It’s also considerably cheaper.

I’d like to illustrate this with an example: In 1987, I bought a rebuilt engine for my 1976 Cadillac Eldorado convertible. I scoured the phone book asking about pricing--who was cheapest? Ultimately, I found a rebuilt unit for just under $1000, a lot of money to a high-school student, but a sum I could pretty much cover with my summer job. And it was far less than some of the other shops were asking: up to $3000 in some cases for a fully-installed motor with a warranty.

What did I get for my hard-earned $1000? A long-block on a wooden skid sitting on a shipping dock. No installation, no oil pan nor valve covers nor intake manifold nor oil pump nor water pump nor carburetor nor exhaust manifolds nor anything else that I needed to get the motor off the dock and into the Eldo’s engine bay where it would actually power the car. First problem: picking up the motor. Solution: rented truck. Cost: $50.

I finally found a guy willing to install the motor who said he’d simply use the parts off of my original engine. That was another $600, most of it up front (hey, I was 17 years old, gimmie a break!), still cheaper than the shop that would have sold me the engine and installed it, too. Rent another truck, haul engine to installer’s shop. Another $50. I’m still money ahead.

Then the installer said I needed some new parts. My original water pump and oil pump were shot according to his inspection. So I bought rebuilt units. Probably another $100 or so. Then there was the alternator, which I also upgraded because of the “as long as I’m in there” rule. No problem, I’m still under the other guys’ prices, though I’m getting dangerously close running out of money. The installer promised me he’d have it done in a week, maybe ten days.

So I waited. Two weeks became four. Four weeks became two months, and phone calls stopped being returned. Stops to the shop found the door closed and locked. I was worried, and for good reason: the guy just skipped town; no forwarding address, no phone number, nothing. Gone. Eventually I got the landlord to open the place up where I collected the remains of my Eldorado, its old engine and the new engine, which was thankfully unmolested save for a coat of really bad blue spray paint (any of this sound familiar to you, Dad?). And Rick? I'm still looking for you...

I had to find another installer. And have the Eldo flat-bedded over to his shop. Then rent another truck to haul the engine and miscellaneous parts over there, too. Oh, yeah, an engine hoist so my friend Brian and I could get the 500-pound engine (actually both of them, because there was a core charge on the long-block) into the truck.

The new guys worked fast, but found that a lot of my old parts were junk. Cracked exhaust manifolds (replacements found at a junk yard for under $10, thankfully), a bad carburetor (throttle shafts had stripped out their bushings) and a broken bell housing where the starter attaches, “probably from some hack prying at it with a crowbar,” the 2^nd installer said. Buy a new carb ($225—those Rochesters aren’t cheap!) and have the bell housing welded. Car is finished on-time. Cost: another $920. Total cost of the engine swap: about $3500 when all was said and done. Once I started thinking about it, I realized that I’d actually managed to defeat all three gremlins with this project!

Of course, a year later, that inexpensive long-block suffered a bad valve lifter (which had apparently not been replaced during said rebuild) which broke a rocker arm, tweeted a valve on a piston and bent a pushrod. All three gremlins laughed hysterically for days, though I did finally realize that going into an engine isn't such a big deal and started doing it all myself.

 
#2: The job is its own reward.

Correct taught me this a long time ago. If you’re doing work for yourself, for your own project, and as part of your hobby, what is your incentive to rush the job? Just to get it done? Why? What's the rush?

Seriously—why? If you can make the part perfect by spending a little more time on it, why wouldn’t you? I don’t know, but I’m as guilty as the next guy of settling for “good enough” for no good enough reason. And there’s really no good enough reason for settling for good enough, especially not when you are doing something for yourself.

I know I’ve talked about my restoration philosophy here many times, the adjunct that says every single part on the Century should be as good as the day it was brand-new. It has sometimes been hard to stick to that, but I don’t know why it should be. I don’t particularly get bored by the projects, nor is there any rush to get the car done because there are still so many things to do. I’m in no hurry to get to those other things because A) I can’t afford them yet or B) there isn’t any room for that particular project.

If you catch yourself thinking like this, try to track the thought back to its roots. I have, and have found that it sprouts from nothingness, from human nature rather than rational decision. Despite this, it can be powerful. Defeat it by remembering that a job well done is one of which you will always be proud, even if nobody ever sees it. The peace of mind that it brings is also quite satisfying. Correct will always reward you, unlike Fast and Cheap, who do nothing but create mischief.

  
#3: No, you really can’t do all the work yourself and get what you want cheap.

Even if the job is its own reward, some projects just aren’t worth saving. If you do it for the love, that’s great; you’ll have a lot of fun with it and learn things along the way (that’s Correct talking to you there). But if you think you can have a grade-A car and save a bunch of money by buying a clunker and restoring it yourself, well, that’s Cheap talking to you, and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Ignore him as best you can.

Another example: Jeff, a work acquaintance of mine, has always wanted an old Mustang convertible, but could never find a way to put one in his garage, mostly because of the up-front cost. He was a little handy with a wrench (changed his own oil, did brake jobs, things like that), but not an expert by any stretch. Then he found a very clean ’67 coupe that came with a wasted convertible parts car for free. The owner was asking less than $3000 for the pair. You can see where this is going already, can’t you?

Jeff's plan was to chop the top off the coupe and transfer all the convertible hardware to it. And he got about that far: chopping the top off with a Sawzall. He’d failed to take into account all the things that make a convertible unique, things like body gussets, weather stripping, window glass, windshield header reinforcements, fasteners, hardware, wiring, pumps, lines, seats, the list goes on and on. He said that with the original convertible as a guide, he didn’t think it would be difficult to make the conversion and he’d “seen a guy on the Internet who had done such a conversion.” “OK,” I said. “It’s your money.”

Today both cars are sitting in his back yard under blue tarps and some gardening supplies, probably never to be seen again. He’s got a lot of new parts like a new top, window glass, wheels and even an original Pony interior from yet another donor car, so he was planning to get it done someday. But now he’s got a lot of money tied up in it, money he’ll never see again because all he really has is a clapped-out convertible and a formerly nice coupe with its roof cut off. He’s probably $10-12,000 deep into the project with nothing to show. There's talk of selling the stuff on Ebay, but as a package, it's pretty worthless. He'd be better off parting it all out now, but he doesn't want to hear that; it would be like admitting failure, and who likes to do that?

He likely could have purchased an acceptable driver convertible for that money, albeit a six-cylinder model. Still, it would have been what he wanted and he could fix it up as time and money permitted. Instead, he thought he’d save some money by taking something that wasn’t meant to be what he wanted and force it into that mold. Ultimately it was going to break him, both mentally and financially. It’s pretty hard to save a buck on the front end of a restoration by buying poor base stock. Buy the best you can find and afford and go from there. The Correct gremlin will only get you so far before his brothers turn you over and eat you alive if you try to make money in this hobby.

Be careful out there—those three gremlins can get to you no matter how vigilant you are. At times they can be quite helpful, particularly Correct, but most of the time their only goal is to knock you off track and get you to compromise your standards. If you can, listen to your heart instead—it’ll never steer you wrong.

See you next month!