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Comment by theluketaylor | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, I know a ton about cars and actually own a german sports car of roughly this vintage and this rings incredibly true (and also hilarious). My car can't be locked due to fear of it never opening again, starting the engine requires a delicate balance of the right amount of throttle and prayers the battery has enough charge, and selecting first is a preposterous mixture of a delicate ballet and sledgehammering it home.

The fact this essay works for someone with limited domain knowledge and someone with lots is a testament to the quality of writing.

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Easily my favorite essay of the year. Unique, informative and casual in the way sitting around a table listening to an engaging guest tell tales and the visualization works immediately. Count me among the fans of this piece and author.

> selecting first is a preposterous mixture of a delicate ballet and sledgehammering it home.

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_clutch_(technique)

You can do a similar thing in motorcycles by rev-matching, this way you don't even need to pull the clutch to switch gears.

In fact in my old manual I got so good at matching revs I could just not use the clutch at all except moving from stand still

I certainly have to double clutch to go down into first since it doesn't have a syncro, but that's a pretty rare need. Even selecting first from neutral while stationary is a challenge.

When I was 14, a family friend from church decided he needed help around his sizable property. He figured the easiest approach would be to teach me to operate his machinery and come over on weekends to work with him. He got brush cleared and I learned to operate, among other things, a farm tractor from the 1950s. I learned the combination of finesse, force, swearing, and prayer needed to shift such a beast. When I started driving my first car, an old Buick Century with an automatic, it almost felt like cheating.

On the actual flip side, there are plenty of people who properly maintain vintage sports cars instead of just talking about how much they know about them.

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."

Hahaha, even on old muscle cars with good parts availability, and only 4 moving parts in the first place, something is virtually always broken. Keeping a german car of this era functioning is a sisyphean task.

Never fully broken, never fully repaired.

I think a faculty at a Motorsports Engineering School probably knows how to maintain vintage sports cars. Just because they own the car does not mean they need to maintain it.

This is also a humor article.

I think this guy's bona-fides are pretty solid, though:

> 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.

I agree. I imagine a lot of this is hyperbole rooted in truth. As I have gotten older and had more of an interest in doing my own wrenching I realize half the battle is having the right tools for the job. In most cases that means a good way to lift your vehicle (would love a real lift in my garage) and the appropriate tools to remove or reinstall various items in the car. Having this can mean the difference between a nightmare or relatively easy job. Of course all bets are off if you live where they salt roads in the winter.

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.

And having a second, drivable car. ;)

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. :-)

The locks are stupidly expensive, like $1000 a door. I'd rather just not lock it. The starting issues are due to the carb needing a rebuild. It's on my list, but there are bigger fish to fry. The battery is due to it being a former race car with a tiny, super light battery. It's only designed to crank the engine a few times before it's dead to save weight. 1st gear in non-syncro, so it's for sure not that. It's likely the linkage, but that's a big job and won't be worth doing for a few years along with a few other things at the same time.

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.

Good to see there other vintage cars, dare I say, lovers out there that see things that way. Mine is a 1982 Range Rover, bought like almost 4 years ago before people started to ask absurd prices for those.

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.

Regarding the door locks, I live in a part of a city where some owners of older cars keep their doors unlocked so thieves won't break a window getting in.

From the end of the 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'm fairly certain that he knows how to 'fix stuff'

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