I love when people have such a deep knowledge of something that they can write an essay as unique and thoughtful as this. It reminds me of Kitchen Confidential, Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman!, or any rant about British politics by David Mitchell.
The fact this essay works for someone with limited domain knowledge and someone with lots is a testament to the quality of writing.
I get that door handles and lock cylinders are often made of easily-broken pot metal, but most owner communities have figured out solutions, or just live a little and recognize that a locksmith can easily get you into almost any vintage car if necessary.
The starting problems mean your engine is poorly tuned/maintained, battery issues are bad wiring or undiagnosed parasitic drain (or just buy a battery maintainer, dude), and thinking "my first gear syncro is worn or my shift linkage isn't properly adjusted, I should mash the shit out of it" are purely owner error / strongly counter-indicate "I know a ton about cars."
This is also a humor article.
> Norman Garrett was the Concept Engineer for the original Miata back in his days at Mazda’s Southern California Design Studio. He currently teaches automotive engineering classes at UNC-C’s Motorsports Engineering Department in Charlotte, North Carolina and curates his small collection of dysfunctional automobiles and motorcycles.
I imagine some of this was written tongue-in-cheek: the problems are probably not as bad as described, and/or the problems are things that have been wrong with the car at some point, but have mostly been fixed, and he's writing about it as if all the problems exist at once for entertainment value.
Or it's all true as it is, and that's just life, because people don't always have 100 spare hours to fix all the problems present on a car of that age. Maybe you do (how lucky for you!), but it's a bit uncharitable to throw shade at someone else.
Edit. Also not being afraid to remove any and all panels required to access something also helps tremendously. So If you own an Audi be prepared to remove the front clip of the car. Google Audi service position for the hairy details.
But I think hobbyist vintage wrenching shares a lot with software feature design: you could do anything, but the real objective is to maximize fun-per-time-spent. Otherwise, you're working another full time job as a professional mechanic for your cars.
And besides, there's something elegant about getting a rat rod to work. :-)
It's a cheap vintage car that isn't worth spending any real money on. I could pour $40,000 into getting into concours shape, but it would only add 2-3 grand worth of value. Instead I drive and enjoy it.
It's leaking oil from the oil cooler thermostat, the gearbox and started a while ago leaking from the transmission break. Oh, and the rear diff pinion is leaking, too. The 3.5 l V8, basically a Buick 215 allumium small block running on dual carbs, needs some gentle treatment before firing up. It usually does, a slight carb rebuild and calibrating really helped. The gearbox is more suited to a tractor and has all of four gears. The rear windows don't work and the upper tailgate doesn't close on its lock but uses two outside locks on each side.
It is rust free so, noise levels are acceptable below 110 km/h and she's a beast off road. Yes, I drive her in the intended environment, regularly.
I have hopes to get her finally done in the next 1, 2 years. And I love this rolling restauration thing. Only was close to selling her once, until I figured out I reassembled the choke wrong and drove fuel consumption up to 30 l per 100 km.
Norman Garrett was the Concept Engineer for the original Miata back in his days at Mazda’s Southern California Design Studio. He currently teaches automotive engineering classes at UNC-C’s Motorsports Engineering Department in Charlotte, North Carolina and curates his small collection of dysfunctional automobiles and motorcycles.
I'm fairly certain that he knows how to 'fix stuff'
Double declutching is a lost art, it seems.
It involved moving the shifter into neutral, revving the engine still in neutral, and clutching and shifting into the gear when the RPMs were "right". Skilled double-declutchers could shift nearly as quickly as ordinary drivers with syncromesh.
Common in older cars when I was young, in the proterozoic.
I was about to write more or less the same thing. I can barely drive and never owned a car, but this article was beautiful.
I can't find the original, but the copy there is exactly what I remembered.
The BMW car forum is good, bimmerforums.com. Pelicanpart forum is good. BMW/Porsche GrassrootMotorsports is good. General racing, falls back to bmw/porsche/corvette/mazda Miata.net is fantastic. Corvette forums are great, but I can't recall them now. Subaru Forum is fantastic, humour though is needed. NASIOC.com priuschat is great, though it goes quite different from above forums. Tesla forums are good, but I can't recall any off the top of my hand. And then landcruiser ones, wrangler/jeep ones, etc.
The more less hobby a car is, the decrease in quality in forum posts, not that a corolla is a bad car per se, or even a camry/accord. It's just, different folks for different hobbies.
Spend a week on there, and you'll learn the lingo (it's universal throughout cars, especially per car generation/period, 70's/80's/90's,etc)
Then you also have other motorsports too, motorcycles and even planes, which share the same sentiment. Pilot chat/bicker is very similar. ;)
Mixing DOT-5 brake fluid with DOT-3/4 is always a fun one. Folklore is that it will poison children and kill puppies. Reality is that they are, by law, compatible and mixing won't do anything more than create a fluid with unknown boiling points, but this is true of mixing any two brake fluids (and it is true DOT-5 is not compatible with ABS brake systems, but that's a separate point).
Pretty much anything to do with turbos is another fun one, as many folks have no idea how turbos work but have lots of opinions on tuning them.
Anyway, the point is that the comradery is great on these forums, they're a lot of fun, and you can find good info, but don't take any info on them as gospel.
> Norman Garrett was the Concept Engineer for the original Miata back in his days at Mazda’s Southern California Design Studio
The author could be bullshitting (he's not) but how would anyone who's not driven vehicles that are decades beyond their design life know?
Not to say one can't be hoodwinked from time to time, naturally, but for me it's not the "facts" that ring true. It's the joy and humor and love that is hard to fake.
But if you're not writing speculative fiction, what would be the point? It's probably harder than writing about something you know!
True, but what /really/ makes the humor in this article, when one has the domain knowledge to understand the technical details, is that every single technical humor bit is true and accurate, and brings back similar memories of similar ballets with similar vehicles from years ago.
Ergo, I think what throwaway0a5e said above has a lot of merit, even if I wouldn't have stated it in in such absolutest terms:
> Depth of knowledge is impossible to assess for anyone that doesn't have similar depth in the same subject matter.
I think you just need to have driven a car from that era to understand this post and believe it -- the car doesn't neccessarily need to be that old. I had a '77 Civic in 1982 and it had many of these same "features" as his Porsche - any key (or screwdriver) could open the door or turn the ignition, it had a manual choke lever installed because the automatic choke didn't work, there was an art to pumping the gas pedal before starting in cold weather (there was a fine line between being able to start and flooding it), there was no clutch interlock (or it was broken) to prevent starting the car in gear, and a bunch of other quirks similar to his.
And it was only 5 years old.
edit: And the oil use! I'd forgotten about that until reading his post, I used to carry a few jugs of oil in the trunk since the car was using almost a quart per fillup, and many gas stations kept a display case of oil out by the pumps so you could easily buy a quart if you needed it. My current 7 year old car doesn't use any noticeable amount of oil between ~8000 mile oil changes.
Yes, indeed. My first car when I turned 16 was a well beaten 1971 Cadillac that had it's share of rust and the like. The author's description of the gas pedal ballet for starting his 914 reminded me of a similar situation with that old Cadillac. For a cold start, all was normal, pump once to set choke and start.
But, for a warm start, one had to hold the pedal down /just the right amount off idle/ or else it would not start up for most attempts. And of course for a semi-warm start there was a decision process of "is it cold enough to need the choke, or warm enough to only need the "slightly off idle" setting". One got a "feel" for just what to do after a bit of time with it and it became no-big-deal, but for anyone new, the whole ballet would have been a very frustrating experience.
When it finally was retired and I upgraded to a car with a fuel injected engine, and no need to touch the gas pedal for any start, hot, cold or warm, a whole era of "being in tune with the car" disappeared.
The article is presented as a letter to a car thief, a preposterous proposition right up front. It is not presented as a repair guide or an "evaluate whether a 914 is worth buying" guide, so it's really only of interest for entertainment and nostalgia purposes.
There's literally zero chance I'll ever be in a conversation with someone and say aloud "Oh, Porsche owners call this Neverland," and have to worry about someone interrupting me with, "BS, I belong to a Porsche club and have never heard this nickname."
By trusting someone who has. Either trust a specific person or believe there is someone in the crowd who would say something.