Relying upon Past Experience

When I was fifteen years old, I lived with my family in Peoria, Illinois. One of the most exciting aspects of being fifteen is the prospect of driving a car when you turn sixteen. My high school had an exceptional driver's education class that included not just classroom theory, but actually driving in cars donated for that purpose by local dealerships. I managed to get through the class without destroying any of the cars, which, at the time, was surprising to me and my instructor. Sometime during that year, my father acquired a 1950 Willys Jeepster which he gave to me as a first car. I was excited, of course, and, since I didn't have my license yet, I spent hours backing it up and turning it around in our two car driveway. The poor old Jeepster had not been well cared for and I was expected to fix it up and make it more drivable. I was given a shop manual for the car and was turned loose to figure things out for myself. I wasn't told about the cracked engine block, which would eventually be the death of that car.

One of the first things I discovered about that Jeepster was that the floorboards at the front of the car were mostly rusted away. There was nothing in the manual about rusted floorboards, so I was on my own as to how to fix them. I dug up some sand paper from the garage and found a wire brush that I could attach to my dad's electric drill and started removing rust. The more I sanded and brushed, the worse the floorboards looked. It seemed like the rust was the only thing holding the car together. Once I had removed the rust down to somewhat sound bare metal, I scrounged some spray paint from friends, whatever color I could get, and painted the metal to keep the rust from returning. Now I had to figure out what to do with the foot sized holes in the floorboards. There were some scraps of galvanized sheet metal in the garage left over from some project my dad had worked on and I figured those would work just fine to cover up the holes. The scraps weren't very big so I had to piece them together to make a patch large enough for each of the holes. I attached the scraps to the floor with various sizes of sheet metal screws and then painted the whole mess with more scrounged spray paint. It wasn't an elegant solution, nor, ultimately, did it work very well, but it did keep my feet from dragging on the ground while I drove the car. I didn't quite get the floor completely sealed, though, and so whenever I drove it in the rain, water would shoot up through the floor as I splashed through the puddles on the street.

As I think back on that car and my feeble efforts at restoration, I see that I was adrift on a stormy sea with no compass and no charts. None of my very limited number of friends knew anything about automobile repair. My father knew less than I about the subject, plus, in those days, he was away on business a great deal of the time, and my mother never encouraged me to do anything but be quiet and stay out of trouble. The only thing that kept me going was that potential status I would achieve by being one of the elite few who had his own car. It turned out that hardly anyone was impressed by my old rusty car with the leaking floorboards. The car eventually died when the crack in the block got so large that the cooling system and the engine oil system began exchanging fluids at a rate which allowed neither system to function. So, with no resources, no encouragement and no support for my restoration project, I gave up. My dad sold the car. He told me he was disappointed that I hadn't taken more of an interest in fixing up the car. Later in life I learned that when one is given a project, it is always good to find out what the expected outcome is. At the time, I had no idea that my dad was trying to encourage me to learn about car repair. There needed to be a stated goal for the project and there never was. I just figured I was supposed to try to keep the thing running so I'd have something to drive and wouldn't have to borrow the family car. None of us had any idea what it would take, or how much it would cost, to restore that car, and we never did sit down and discuss the project. Of course, we rarely sat down and discussed anything except the latest instance of unacceptable behavior I had exhibited.

A hard-won piece of wisdom that I have acquired is that if you perform an action which has as it's only purpose to please someone else, you will rarely follow through and succeed in that action. So, if your sole purpose in building a car is to impress other people, don't even bother to start the project. No one will ever be as impressed as you believe they should, and you will eventually give up and have to sell it, or you will end up paying someone else to finish it. However, if you start your car project with the idea that, upon completion, it will bring you the joy and satisfaction of a job well done, and give you a sense of accomplishment, then go for it! If you consider the project a worthwhile task in and of itself, you'll most likely succeed. If you think of the whole project as a learning experience, you will approach the problems that arise as a challenge, rather than a roadblock on your journey, and you'll not be as likely to give up just because it is more difficult that you expected it to be.

I suspect that this is part of what motivated me to start my dune buggy project. I really did want to take it on as a challenge, to prove to myself that I could do it. Most of all, I wanted a dune buggy to drive. I thought it would be fun to drive around in a unique little car that I had built myself. That's why, when I saw all the rust on the floor pan after I removed all the dead leaves from the inside of the car, I was not discouraged. I had seen worse, and I knew I could repair the damage. I moved the car into the garage, got out my sandpaper and the drill with the wire brush attached and got to work.