Life is better with friends. With people. And the same is generally true of wrenching. I’m a clumsy person with little mechanical sympathy and I have a difficult time interpreting visual instructions. When I wrench alone it’s always an extra fun experience as I’m frequently having to stop, reassess, and then start over.
I do my best to mitigate this by, for instance, removing a swaybar and keeping it in the same plane so that when I have to put the bushings back on and reinstall it I don’t try to install it upside down (which I’ve done).
It’s much easier to do this with a friend because I can ask them my favorite question: Does this look right to you?
This went to hilarious extremes last week when I finally took my E39, Clive, out of winter storage (a few days before a massive snowstorm) to fix the heater and generally assess what needs to get looked over and what I can keep ignoring for a little longer. Our friend and occasional contributor Joel lives not too far away and has a large garage that can be heated if necessary, so I brought Clive there.
Joel’s a huge gear nerd who usually has the right tools and always has the right enthusiasm for projects. I don’t always love the process in the way that Joel does so it’s nice to have him there both as a guide and as a cheerleader. Last week he went way above and beyond.
Other than needing a new battery and some oil topoffs, the E39 hasn’t needed much to operate, even though I haven’t driven it too much as I’ve been meaning to do more work to it before it becomes a true daily. The one thing that sidelined it for the winter is that the blower motor stopped working. I asked a buddy at FCP Euro and he was immediately like: it’s the blower motor resistor/final stage unit. Apparently, it’s always the FSU.
I ordered the part and then got busy and forgot about it for a few months. Then I wanted the car back and decided to watch a few videos and it seemed fairly easy.
It was way easier than I thought. Joel and I removed the trim pieces, disconnected the battery, and removed the screw holding it in. Joel thought I might need some pliers to get it out and so I went into my toolbox and asked him
“The little flat ones or needle nose?”
“Hold on,” he said.
So I held on.
“Ok, it’s in.”
“What?”
It turns out that this was at least the third FSU to go into the car and so the stock unit, which the videos suggest can be a little tough to remove, was long gone and the aftermarket FSU literally just came right out while I was looking for the right tool. I spent more time reconnecting the battery than he did swapping the part.
The nice thing is that this gave me time to start taking leaves out of the engine bay, which I did by dropping them on his garage floor. Joel is the Felix to my Oscar, so he quietly got his shop-vac and started cleaning up those little pieces before helping me touch up the engine bay.
Friendship!
Who do you wrench with? A parent? A spouse?
If my legs are sticking out from under a car there’s a good chance a lil dog or two is gonna try to find a comfortable way to nap on them.
“Murphy! You’re not helping. Can you push those crimp connectors closer to me?
Elaine! Crimp connectors please?
No? Too comfy on my lap already?
You two dummies.”
Oh right. I guess there’s a reason they don’t call them Chore-kies.
I wrench with people who know when to use “whom”. Though they’d also not end a sentence with a preposition.
So I wrench by myself, if you can’t tell.
Paraphrasing the Gospel according to Cher:
“We All Wrench Alone”
I am lucky enough to be living with a great gal, who not only tolerates my shenanigans, but also helps in the garage.
The poor Andrea helps me deal with maintenance, the Datsun resto and, more importantly, my crankiness when the stress overwhelms me.
Life is good!
My oldest brother, usually. It has become a sort of bonding thing that, due to the age gap and large family, we didn’t really get growing up. He has a MkVII GTi, and I have a 1.4T Dart, so we also like to point out the various reasons that fascism loses wars (IYKYK). There are many, from the 29mm socket needed to remove my oil filter bowl, to the special tool required to change his rotors. Many lessons learned, several beers consumed, and memories formed. And always a trip to the local parts store. Always.
ANYONE WHO WILL HELP FOR THE LOVE OF PARSH SEND HELP
…
(Usually Chuck since my garbage car sons live at his house.)
I still haven’t forgiven my daughter for effortlessly threading a tensioner pulley bolt my friend and I tried for hours to thread. Like Lewin’s thing with the crankshaft pulley bolts – there was no where to back out and line up *to* even with bare hands. Or bear hands, apparently, since the mini-mech managed it just fine.
Unless I really really need another set of hands and feet I do everything alone. If my daughter lived with me I’m sure we’d do more together.
I used to have a friend that was nearby and we’d visit each other’s garages to hang out and wrench. I moved about 30 miles away, so I wrench by myself these days.
Sometimes, my wife will come out and hang out in a lawn chair, which is pretty awesome. She’s an engineer, so her suggestions are usually ones I should pay attention to and more often than not, take.
Over time my husband has gone from trying to help (guaranteed extra 30 minutes at least to reassemble whatever unnecessary shit he took apart) to just occasionally sticking his head into the garage to make sure I’m not dead under the car.
On my own stuff l mostly wrench solo. Is this because I am a miserable old bastard who cannot stand others or because I find working alone and problem-solving to be delightfully meditative? Even I do not know and strongly suspect both to be true.
I do a lot of assisting others on stuff that is outside their comfort zone or in need of extra hands for a few friends who I trust to not make it a battle.
I have one friend, in particular, who is the go-to for cross country pick ups and on-road repairs because years of stupidity have proven we can work together on minimal sleep with minimal arguing.
Mostly solo here too, but it was a great joy to pull the engine and replace the clutch in my dad’s MGA with him, my brother-in law, and my son. There’s something special about 3 generations working on a car together, even if we had to do it twice over the course of 3 days due to an incorrectly designed pressure plate that was rubbing/taking off metal inside the bell housing!
It has been years since I wrenched. It was my dad or a gearhead like me that would try to fix. One time I helped a person wrench on their beater, they were desperate to come to me.
The cat, always the cat, she is a very experienced traction engine mechanic. So much so that on occasion she invites her cat friends round and shows then all the warm bits to curl up on. One evening there were four!
Does she knock the item you need on the floor to make it easier to get?
It is an area of expertise that she mastered at an early age, working on smaller machines, now she unerringly sits on the thing I need to pick up next.
Mostly solo. My 1972 Super Beetle was supposed to be a father/son project and we did a few things, oil changes, new seat upholstery, headlights, stuff like that. But by the time I was 13 it had evolved into my project, and I’ve done almost everything on that car, and my other cars since. Although my dad and I have done a fair bit of wrenching on other cars over the years, mostly swapping out track rotors and pads when we both tracked our daily drivers. These days we have a track built S2000, but he pays a shop to perform maintenance and upgrades. And he helped me drop the engine out of the Beetle when it was time for a rebuild.
I once helped an old coworker pull the engine from a 1966(?) Mustang that was almost entirely made of rust. We had to pull the transmission out with it because they were locked together and nothing we tried could separate them. It was in such bad shape that at one point I just grabbed the core support and shoved it out of the way, a Sawzall helped finish the job. It was actually fun working with someone else on their car, but alas, none of my friends are the kind of people to work on cars, so it’s just me these days.
I prefer to work by myself. But that is true of most projects. However my 4 year old likes to “help” with projects, at least until he gets bored and then goes to dig in the garden. This mostly ends up with me going “Scott, stay away from that, it is sharp/dirty/dangerous” or “Buddy, where did you put the tool/part you just had?” My 7 year old loves to figure out how things work but for whatever reason has zero interest in working on cars.
Occasionally I will help a friend but I mostly like to wrench alone. When I am with someone I try to maximize the time. Alone I can go off on a tangent to make a new part, polish something that no one will ever see, or just sit in the car, enjoy a cold beer, and ponder.
I do it by myself, my dad used to help but at 97 he isn’t too mobile, and my best dog is no more, he would sit in the car or lay under it just watching me the whole time.
Mostly flying solo, although we try to get together for build weekends every once in a while. Schedules seldom work out. There is always a little unplanned wrenching at Gambler 500 events however and the entire tribe pitches in.
I’ll wrench with anyone willing and available, albeit for a large chunk of my friends this just means them sitting there for moral support after calling me because “my is making a noise can you look at it?” I’ll never complain about saving my friends money, especially in a college town where almost every mechanic is overpriced at best, and maliciously shady at worst.
Last weekend was a pair of buddies, a box of Busch lite, and a lot of stuck spark plugs and sharp edges on an M6 Grand Coupe. The job was a pain, but the company was good, the car was fast, and the beer was cold.
Will work for Beer is good motivator.
So your car had end-stage final stage unit disease (ESFUSD)?
Oh, right. there’s a question to answer.
Nobody. Earlier it would have been my dad, but I’ve had mostly functional cars for most of the past 30 years and I really couldn’t do much of anything when something needed to be done. The last thing I tried to do was replace a window regulator in my Mazda 3, and after I finished it would still hang up going down, and my parents went to assisted living not long afterwards. Before that it was recharging the air conditioner, and my dad was shocked that I could do it myself after watching a YouTube video at the tender age of 52. This is self-deprecation and also true.
My brother’s around, but he’s the kind of guy who always seems exasperated with people, so I don’t ask. My friends don’t wrench at all, as far as I know, and I don’t feel comfortable contacting them for any reason, wrench or non-wrench.
I’m just here for the “culture” part of “car culture”, for the most part. I try to avoid contributing anything at all useful, and while I don’t like to brag, I think I’ve fulfilled that brief very. very well
I wrench with my dad. He’s in his 60’s and I’m in my 30’s so I’m old enough to appreciate that our time is limited and weirdly we both like swearing at stuck bolts, getting covered in brake fluid, and taking way too many trips to the auto parts store, so I try to do these things with him as much as possible.
It doesn’t hurt that he has every hand tool known to mankind. We just need a lift now…
Got a good group of local friends. We try to meet up whenever anyone is doing a serious project.
Keep turning over the idea of “one weekend a month” where we just descend en masse on someone’s place and work on one of their shitboxes until its done. Hasn’t happened yet, but sooner or later we’ll get our shit together.
My new gf has expressed an interest in helping me when I’m wrenching, and has helped when she has been able. Its nice having someone care about my passions
Nowadays? Just me in the shop, tinkering away. I find it relaxing most of the time.
When I was a yute? With friends, of course. We had formed a loose co-op (so to speak) of people who had varying levels of wrenching skill: if one person needed help, the group pitched in and the helpee would buy food and/or beverages later. (This was in an Air Force dormitory, so we all lived right there.) We also would help friends of people in the co-op, with the same food/bev arrangement.
The big difference between then and now, though, is that then we were working on our daily drivers so there was a certain level of urgency. If I’m futzing around in the shop on a weekend, I can stop working and leave whatever it is in place until I can get to it again; I’m grateful for that.
My friend & I rewired a TR6 in a storage unit (no heat or electricity) in the dark, laughing like the idiots we were (still are…) Every task is better with a friend. Misery loves company, after all.
For the first 20-ish years of an E39’s life, sure, it’s always the FSU. After that…sometimes it’s the blower. Which is buried deep inside the dash, so the whole thing has to come apart.
I did it all by my dang self.
OHHH NOOO….