This story by Hagerty CEO McKeel Hagerty first appeared in the US in the July/August 2024 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine, which celebrated the do-it-yourself ethos of our hobby.
Reading through the recent round of do-it-yourself stories is satisfying for me because I grew up in a family where you did things with your hands. Maybe you did, too. Car people often share this trait.
My great-grandfather could do just about anything – build a stone fireplace, perform plumbing and electrical work, wrench on cars. My father was the same way. An inveterate tinkerer, fixer, and first-rate shade-tree car mechanic, he always had a restoration project in progress. When my sisters and I were looking for him, we always knew where to find him – in the garage, among his tools, elbow-deep in a project. He and I once pieced together a rusty, torn-apart 1967 Porsche 911 S that became my first car. It’s one of my favourite memories.
When I grew up, I was surrounded by people who engaged things in the world head-on. When something broke, you didn’t chuck it – you tried to fix it. Sometimes you could, sometimes you couldn’t. Either way, we learned by doing, and as a result, I grew up unafraid to tear into kitchen appliances or, say, my grandma’s record player. (Sorry, grandma.) I developed a curiosity about the world and how things work via the experiences I had with tools in my hands. To this day, when I look at a building, a car, or just
about any mechanical device, I think about how it was built and the decisions the builders made, and why.
That’s a valuable mindset to have, but one that’s dwindled over the past few generations. Why, I don’t know. Maybe it was the demise of shop class in public schools. Maybe devices, cars included, simply became too complex to work on yourself. Maybe appliances became so inexpensive it wasn’t worth the trouble of repairing them. Or maybe life just moves faster now than it used to and there’s no time left, really, to fix and tinker.
Whatever the case, David M. Kelley, an eminent engineer and designer who co-founded the design firm IDEO and the incredible Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (known as the d.school) at Stanford University in California, once told me that there is a potential downside to being a step removed from hands-on work. We end up knowing less about our physical world. We lack agency – which I define as a sense of presence, control, and curiosity in our own lives. We outsource tasks to others, but we miss out on learning how to do things ourselves, meaning our library of skills doesn’t grow as fast as it does for others. How many people do you know, for instance, who don’t know how to change a tyre, fix a lawn mower, or change a furnace filter?
The good news: If you or someone you love didn’t grow up in a hands-on world, as I did, and want to learn, it’s easy. Just find yourself a broken toaster and jump on in! Then keep on going. Learning is always about doing, even when it comes to cars. Want to be a shade-tree car mechanic someday? Get yourself a project car that you can make a bunch of glorious mistakes on. And consult YouTube University frequently. It’s a great resource. Above all, remember to have fun. There is joy in doing.
Which reminds me of a story. I was at an eminent car show once talking to a collector who mentioned that her grandchildren were smart, wonderful youngsters who didn’t have much experience with tools yet. She said to me, “So, do you know what I did? I went over to one of the vendors here at the show and I bought two broken-down motorised scooters. And their summer project is going to be to get these two things fixed and running!”
I’ll bet those kids loved it. That is my kind of grandma.
Cool
Sadly your article about is all too true, very few people want to get their hands dirty or tinker. God bless the tinkerer and give us more time!
All true, and, yes, YouTube is a university; but it glues people to a smartphone ever more habitually, which is where they are lost. Grandma should have bought them a Chevy, and grandpa taught them to wrench.
I have always been a tinkerer. My mum went crazy when she found me about 7 or 8 in the living room with her vacuum cleaner in pieces on the floor. Or the family radio. Or my bicycle. Or the mower.
I’ve owned 49 motorcycles and restored many of them, I’ve owned some lovely cars – Porsches – Subarus – Peugeot 205 GTI’s – race cars and bikes – and worked on them all.
But now I have a problem, I’ve lived in my current home for twenty years but now in these days of people working from home I have a neighbour who moans about me being in my garage. There’s black looks in the driveway and comments heard over the fence. They had 18 months of building work, they have football big match parties and they have a very barky dog but it is me that’s the bad guy for for using a power tool or a compressor.
What to do.
I was an apprentice engineer, back in the early 70s, when Lambrettas were still the thing to own. I was offered one by a wiley com0atriot for silly money, so I accepted his invite to collect it the following Saturday. When I turned up expecting a complete running machine for zero expense, I was given a sharp life lesson. “The frame is over there, behind the dustbin. The engine is in my dad’s garage – it’s in bits. All the other parts, seat, panels, wheels are in the back of the shed”. I handed over my fiver, and not wishing to lose face, declared that I’d be back later with a wheelbarrow to collect it, which I duly did. I bought a workshop manual during the week and set to rebuilding this machine. Less than two months later, and with the purchase of a few missing items from the local dealership, it was a complete scooter once more. I’ve never looked back, either from the lesson in gullibility nor the use of spanners, having rebuilt many engines and repairing our own cars as and when necessary. And I still love it !
Don’t overlook the fact that it also became a necessity for many of us. I couldn’t afford to put my first cars into a garage for repairs/servicing and therefore had to spend weekends finding out how to fix things in order to get the car back on the road for Monday mornings to use to get to work! Same with household repairs, could not afford plumbers, electricians, etc, even if you could find one available,, so learned to do everything from books, in the days before internet. Ended up building my own house and restoring my own car.
Totally. And the mad dash to the car parts store on a Sunday morning to get bits to get it fixed. So many winter nights laying on freezing concrete in Dads garage….
Sadly we live in a world nowadays where finance rules everything and ‘mend and make do’ is virtually forbidden. Motoring is at the forefront of this enforced programme and is yet another way to extract from the public and control them in order to benefit the minority.
I did a lambretta rebuild much the same as Andy did. Tinkerer for life as I am. When I was offered a 1965 lambretta for £50 how could I not buy it ! Bought unseen . When I went to collect it I found the last owner had died 20 years previously leaving the scooter sat on a dirt floor garage. At the same time the local stream burst it’s banks directing a side stream into the garage. The scooter had sunk under its own weight into the muddy floor and stayed there ror the 20 years. That was a massive rebuild but the before and after photos are a testament to top level tinkering.