The Soul of an Old Machine
Here’s a fundamental truth about Twitter: a bird can’t tweet with a worm in its beak. Sure enough, the busier I get, the less time I have to drop what I”m doing (even for 30 seconds) and send updates to my microblog. But I still think Twitter is cool and I try hard to view peeps from my tweeps daily.
The Twitter home page just morphed into something different the other day (if you’re logged in, you’ll have to log out to see it). Now they seem to be acknowledging that it’ll be more commercial, more about searching, and less about you and me and Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice and Omar updating each other all the time on our personal trivia. Good. That couldn’t last. Anybody with enough time to be that connected isn’t being very productive.
Loyal helper Schmudley shoulders the hose.
The distractions that have whittled away at my microblogging time have been things in the physical world, like a valve job and more rust repair work on my impossibly corroded ‘88 Dodge Raider; fixing a couple of old Saabs; frequent bicycle rides; house and yard maintenance; and most recently, digging out my son’s 21-year-old bike and prepping it for my niece’s 5-year-old daughter.
How does the deep satisfaction I get from solving mechanical problems compare with learning about social media and building Web sites? Well, there’s one thing I don’t much like: the dirty hands, the small cuts and scrapes, the dust and fumes I breathe… so it’s nice to get away from it and spend some clean days at the computer.
But…
Assembly tasks are manifold and exhausting.
After decades of bouncing back and forth between the computer and the garage, I’ve concluded that atoms are just fundamentally cooler than electrons. For me, there few things more enjoyable than fixing an old machine. What a miracle that a pile of steel and aluminum, rubber and glass, plastic and cloth can be combined to result in something as animated and involving as a car (or a motorcycle, or a bicycle). What a shame to see such a machine in disrepair. Especially when it’s only something like one little rust hole or one burned valve or a single frayed cable that stands in the way of returning to full utility.
You might suspect that one of my favorite books would be Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and you’d be right. Robert M. Pirsig nailed the aesthetic beauty of the machine and its care. His relationship with his old Honda was vastly more satisfying than his friend’s uneasy standoff with an expensive new BMW. Why? Because he understood the machine and maintained it and saw the beauty in that.
As the decades have passed, I’ve returned again and again to the pleasure of repairing things. When a well-designed machine is working as designed, it’s just a little miracle. The passage of time has also given me an affinity for older things because, well, now I’m one of them. Maybe the fascination with newness wears off when you yourself are no longer new.
Wrenching, welding… it’s a great hobby, but a hard, hard way to make a living. That’s why my days of actually earning a living as a mechanic are all in my distant, teenage and twenty-something past. I wasn’t happy when the pressure was on to do a high volume of work merely adequately. I wanted to spend more time on each job, doing it the way I’d want my own to be done. 
When working on my own stuff, I get to spend as long as necessary on each job, and I get to do it my way. For example, I was able to hand make an oversized exhaust stud from a bolt when I discovered a stripped stud after torquing on the head after it came back from Reardon’s machine
What a stud...
shop. Cost in materials: zero. Cost in labor: maybe half a day of my personal time. Quality of repair? Better than new. But I didn’t have to remove the head and I didn’t have to buy a $30 thread insert repair kit. A small victory that lifted the soul.
So the ‘88 Raider with terminal frame rust now has a healthy 120 psi in all four cylinders and it idles smoothly again and I might even take it off-road some day. The yearly battle against its severe chassis rust to get it to pass PA inspection down at McCarthy Tire next month will be won with another patch welded on the frame and another pound of bondo on the body, preserving the souls of two old critters for at least one more year.
.