Where did you lot learn about cars?

In news: snipped-for-privacy@news.teranews.com, The Blue Max decided to enlighten our sheltered souls with a rant as follows

I had no formal instruction on what to do, I just picked it up.

I don't know if this is how most people learn what they do about cars, but the way I found best was patience...Whenever my cars broke down, I used to sit there and try and work out what had happened. Go through the basics, ask someone who knew more than me to fix it, then watch and learn how it's done.

It's amazing how many things sound a lot harder than they actually are.

As for a radiator top hose... it's the hose that goes to the top of the radiator.. as opposed to the bottom hose, which is located lower down..

I started off with a Meccano set, graduated to taking bikes apart - and sometimes getting them back together - then motorbikes, then cars. The first car engine I took apart was an Austin seven - made one good one out of it and a secondhand one from a scrappy. It's good to start with something simple - unlike today's cars. I've never had any formal training, but would love to do a welding course.

Meccano, yes. Down on the farm with ancient heavy-duty stuff. Old radios, yes. Bicycles, including 3-wheelers and sailing versions. Austin

10s with crash gearboxes. Ferguson tractors doing wheelies in 3rd gear full [hand] throttle. Welding???? Oh dear. I bought a single-phase arc welder and made some awful shit. Otherwise, poverty is a great teacher. When that SU fuel pump in the Rover P4's arse fails again, you learn where you left the hammer to give it a jolly good smack! Ha ha from the colonies.

The Blue Max ( snipped-for-privacy@Jasta1.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

Always interested in cars, bought my first 2cv at 15, stripped it down, and rebuilt it before I went to Uni. Bent it, rebuilt it, abused it, rebuilt it, bent it, rebuilt it....

I did do a basic car maintenance evening class while I was still at school, but that was about it. Add in a fair bit of hanging around a mate's garage...

Oh, boy.... You have a *lot* to learn.... Mechanicals are the easy bit - look at the kind of YTS muppet that most dealers employ as "mechanics". Decent welding and painting is sheer artistry - the kind of skill that takes YEARS of experience to get *really* good at - and even then, many people just end up with pigeon poo welding and paint covered in runs and orange peel.

It went something like this "Dad, I need a car" "Well son here's a workshop manual, a corner of the barn and two Morris Minors - make one!"

and I never looked back, well OK when the rear bumper fell off I looked back and realised that glassfibre and resin was no match for a nut and bolt :-)

Just doing it seemed to work and taking an interest when other people were fixing cars. That and countless hours making tea and watching in workshops - I always liked to take stuff apart and put it back together slightly better (in my opinion) and sometimes it even worked!

I like to understand what's going on and Classics or more specifically most things pre-1970 ish without too much electrickery involved seem to be understandable to me. It's funny really coz I love computers, internet, networking, databases and stuff but electrics - sheesh I am hopeless.

Yes, I also used to hang out in my local jobbing garage from a very young age - no H&S regs in those days. Or parents obsessed with possible child abuse.

Like you, I went to college, got a degree, then I went into teaching (fool that I am!). BUt... on the way I had to repair the cars I travelled to college in. I used magazines for info in those pre-computer days, and advice from people my dad knew.

The workshop manuals for most cars are enough for an intelligent person with adequate tools to do most jobs. I rebuilt about four engines as a student.

Even so, with all that experience, it took me two days to get the cylinder head off my Merc 230. And when it came to swapping the (underfloor) engine of a Toyota Previa I admit to enlisting the help of a mechanic friend!

I learned some welding as a factory apprentice before the degree, but I taught myself MIG with advice from this group; I like to think I do it quite well now. I taught myself bodywork as a student and my last neighbour advised me on spraypainting, though I do a fair job anyway.

But I've never had any formal training in car restorations.

Ah..that's the reason why then. A good dose of poverty which means you inevitably end up buying an old banger that you have to maintain yourself works wonders for learning the basics of car maintenance and repair.

I suspect alot of people on here who are not formally trained mechanics have at one time lived on a shoestring.

...

I know what I know from driving bangers. (And I don't know a lot, which is no reflection on the reliability of some of the cars I've had.)

Certainly true in my case. Having plenty of space to keep old cars and a local quarry to dump the dead ones in also helped. I recently counted out how many cars I've ever owned and what they all cost (to buy not run). Subtracting the current four, I'd spent a total of 1700 pounds on

36 cars! That's since about 1981.

Read lots. Got stuck in. Started simple and out of necessity as a student on a Honda 125 SOHC single. Couldn't afford servicing so DIY was the order of the day. If it didn't work or was slightly out of tune it was pretty obvious which plug, carb, points or tappet needed attention.

As bikes have naff all tin work and all my experience is in CNC machining and computers I don't have skills in fixing rusty sheetmetal. With a 13 year old 200SX (teenaged hooligan), it looks like I am due a learning experience. The same bodyshell on import from Japan is around £3.5K for a '91 and over £10K for a '98. The price of a '91 is about 3 times the going rate for a UK one but they don't use road salt and have very strict testing. The later one does have a bigger engine and 36bhp more but at £10K it's more than the total purchase price of 5 bikes (all of which I still have) and 5 cars (only 2).

-- Peter Hill Spamtrap reply domain as per NNTP-Posting-Host in header Can of worms - what every fisherman wants. Can of worms - what every PC owner gets!

Once upon a time, pretty well all makers sold workshop manuals - not to be confused with the Haynes rubbish - which gave chapter and verse on all aspects of stripping and rebuilding the mechanics. You seem interested in Stags: the genuine manual is still available for these and is easy to follow.

One way to get started would be to buy a common engine secondhand - something not too heavy or big - that you could strip and overhaul. I'd recommend a BMC A Series - it's a very basic engine and you should be able to get a worn one for pennies. Get the appropriate w/s manual, and set about re-building it to good as new, and you should be able to sell it on for maybe a small profit (if you ignore your labour). Same with a gearbox

- simply taking it apart will tell you far more about how it works than a week of reading.

Certainly true for me but OTOH the new cars I bought every couple years for awhile there helped make me broke so I worked on them myself, including when I started buying older cars I liked - my first such was a big Healey some 25yrs ago. Doing engine work on that convinved me that I enjoyed cars more when someone else did the hard stuff.

The truism is, having always loved cars, that falling into collecting was a natural extension. No new cars for 25yrs, buy a repo beater every few years and use the money saved to find another joy. This year, it's a '56 Imperial Southhampton.

-- "The web has got me caught. I'd rather have the blues than what I've got."

"The Blue Max" realised it was Wed, 12 May

2004 22:43:37 GMT and decided it was time to write:

What do you really love about classics? The way they look and drive? If that's all you love about them and you're not prepared to take your love any further than that, you'll never learn about what makes them tick. Only if you also love them for the way they are put together, for their mechanical idiosyncracies, for the challenges they offer when they break down, then you have a basis to learn.

I started with a basic interest in mechanical things and a father who taught me a lot and always let me use his tools. From about the age of five, I've taken things apart and attempted to put them back together again. After 35 years, I've become quite good at that. In addition, I've read everything I could get my hands on and I still do. I count workshop manuals as the most worthwhile literature there is and look at the internet as a terrific classroom.

Finding the knowledge is not difficult, you just need the interest to absorb it all. If you're not interested, you'll never learn.

Sounds like you've had it too easy. Have you ever had any reason, other than personal interest, to maintain a car yourself? That's when you have the chance to learn, mainly from your mistakes.

It's not a matter of where, but how: by just doing it, making (lots of) mistakes, gleaning the art from others, reading everything available, listening to more knowledgeable and experienced people than yourself, bluffing and getting away with it.

I'm afraid you've got it all wrong. Welding and painting take skill and years of practice to fully master. Mechanical stuff is easy: you just use your brain (and perhaps a workshop manual) to find out how it works or is supposed to work, then you fix it. Really, there's not much more to it.

That is how I started. I bought my first car from a neighbour, and paid him at the rate of a pound a week, because that is all I could afford. If it broke and I couldn't fix it, it stayed broke.

I found that a manual, a good memory of what it looked like as I was taking it apart, and a check that there were no bits left over at the end, achieved most things. For the rest, buying a pint for a mechanic in exchange for good advice and/or trade prices on spare parts got me through.

The other tip is never to skimp on the routine servicing. Things last an awful lot longer if they are greased/oiled/adjusted when necessary. And if they do need repairing, they sometimes come apart more easily too.

Jim

Don't quite agree with that. We all have different innate talents. Like most other posters I learnt the hard way, keeping old bangers on the road with no money. Used to spend most weekends with a mate patching things up - but it soon developed into "Johnno does engines, Geoff does bodies".

I became quite good at painting, although not so good at welding (more pudden used in those days!). But I am mechanically dyslexic - give me the correct replacement part, the workshop manual and all the right tools, and I will still find a way to assemble it incorrectly. I'm OK on theory, but hopeless in practice, which is why when I finally committed to a complete rebuild on my E a few years ago I entrusted most of the work to a specialist. I knew how I wanted the job done, but was aware that I did not have the ability to do it myself. Some 40k miles later I am still sure I made the right decision.

Geoff MacK

All started as a kid watching my mechanic dad working on the old car - eventually lent a hand with an engine rebuild on our 1980 Escort - then just developed from there - always tried to have interesting older cars which I could tinker with myself.

Both aspects take skills that need to be learned, anyone can learn to swing a spanner, the skill is knowing what you have to do to make (for example) a rattling engine or malfunctioning brakes work correctly again, some people can can't put the two together though - and that applies to both people within the motor trade and the DIY home mechanic.

What 'some' people don't understand is that a grounding in the theory is needed to really understand, not just an ability to follow a workshop manual.

BTW, the OP asked were people learnt about how cars work etc., well for me it started out in much the way outlined by 'Yippee' and Dave Plowman (regarding stripping and rebuilding old engines etc.), that then progressed into a time served aprentership in the mechanical side of the motor trade. Some years later I diverted into the crash repair / restoration side when the mechanical side had just become 'menu servicing' and component fitting rather than true repairs - any fool or monkey can fit a 'new' Dynamo or Alternator etc., there is no job satisfaction in doing so though....

When I was a student I could do a head gasket on a Marina (1275 A-series) in 45 minutes!