This page written circa 28 February, 1999.
To the left you see a picture of Tony and your humble author with the one
that did not get away: We are holding the head off the engine of the
car that is behind us, and whose head gasket inconveniently failed
last week.
Inconvenient such a thing always is. This time it was
especially so: Not only does a head removal cost thousands of
dollars (Wolf quoted about $2000), but it happened just as Andrew and
Deborah arrived for two weeks stay---grunt!
I am seriously indebted to Tony for his invaluable partnership in
the job of repair. About $200 later, including $65 in the 14 head bolts alone,
she is back together.
The exercise brought back a lot of memories.
The first time I took the head off a car was in about 1980,
and it was Andrew's Passat. The job was a stinker, as the gasket was
viciously stuck to the block, and we were working in the car park behind
216 Pyrmont Bridge Road. The sunlight faded on the Sunday, and as
Andrew needed the car for work, we had to give up and send it to the
mechanic.
Andrew and I had a lot of mechanical adventures. A year or so later,
we repaired the same Passat's drive shaft. I was reminded of this event
by finding the peculiar tool required for the CVJs of Passats....
(We won that time.) We had some wonderful maxims devised in that time.
SNIDIME is something that happens to one often in car work,
we discovered: "System Normal: It's Dripping In My Eye".
We got snidimed, and oddly enough I kind of enjoyed those times.
Working on a car was something like cooking.
We saw a movie about that time, I think it was "Werner Herzog
Eats His Shoe", a film of the filmmaker doing just that,
in fullfillment of a wager. We adapted a phrase from the film to
read "A man should not go so long without working on a car".
It is painful in some ways (grazed knuckles, grease under the nails,
lost time), but you get a lot of satisfaction from solving the
problem and working with your hands to achieve something.
I was actually a bit sorry that Andrew seems no longer to relish
such "boy stuff", as D called it.
Tony, like others of my friends, had a great advantage over me in things
mechanical: they had fathers who posessed skills and tools, and from
whom they could learn not simply how to do such miracles, but that
they are doable. Believeing that takes time. At the age of 21
I had virtually no experience with engines or metalwork or woodwork.
I had not been able to learn by watching anyone, by osmotically
collecting the idea that problems are soluble with a smattering of
know-how and the knowledge that they are soluble.
I remember when I started dating Carolyne, her (then 8 year old?)
son Martin was (reportedly) astonished by simple things: If a light
switch failed, I got tools and fixed or replaced it. If the car
stopped, I worked out why and repaired it. She told me that
he was "staggered to discover that such things could be done"
or words to that effect.
I want Amelia to be able to watch me and to have the power.
Amelia, you will probably never want to fix a car, to make a train
set work, to get slotcars to run faster, to rebuild the operating system
of a PC, to fix a lightswitch,
to assemble furniture, etc., but it is very important (to your own
self esteem) that you prove to yourself that you can do that sort
of thing.
I imagine it was sensible for Andrew not to dive into dismantling
the Benz... after all, he came for a holiday, to see Santa Rosa,
and to be with friends, not to fix cars. The weather has stunk,
and we have been overloaded with cars and work and baby.
I guess that when I see Amelia, in a month or two, she will not want
to fly planes or visit train shops. Nevertheless, this sort of visit
is for me a chance to "commune" with the person, not see the sights
or drink the wines, and I reckon that one of the best ways to
do that is to embark on a project.
My idea of a good time is to get close to someone, and it does not
matter all that much if it is drinking on the balcony and hardly talking
at all, or exchanging cracks about grazed knuckles and oil drips from
under a broken car.
I can't resist telling one last tale.
Tony's brother and my friend Peter are on a management course of some sort,
along with a few engineers, amongst others.
They get divided into groups, and John and Peter are in one group
together. One of the people running the course comes into the room
and dumps a model car kit on the table. "I'll be back in 10 minutes",
she says, "will you put this together while I am away".
So they open up the kit, and they put the car together, no problem.
She comes back, looks at the car in obvious dismay.
"My next point", comes the comment, "was to say how it is impossible to
do a job without instructions... how did you do that?!?". Comes
a reply to the effect of "Who needs instructions for anything that easy?".