Mechanical Aptitude
“Just hold that wire,” insisted
my oldest brother Erik. “Nothing will happen, I promise.”
He and my other
brother, Werner, were working on an old Sachs engine our dad had brought home
for them. Dad wanted them to learn
something practical.
“Why should
I hold it?”
“We need
you to hold it so the engine will start.”
“Are you going
to shock me?” I asked.
Their faces were creased with sincerity – masks of good
intent. “Honest. We would never do that
to you, would we Werner?”
“Never.”
“Just hold the wire so we can get
this thing to work.”
“But I’ll get shocked…”
“Not if you hold the end of the
wire tightly.”
“Really?”
“It just can’t happen.”
“Not at all,” agreed Werner.
“Oh,
alright.” I held the wire for them while
Werner knelt and braced the big engine between his legs, staining his tan corduroy
pants with engine grease. Erik balanced himself and kicked down on a big
kick-start lever with a mighty tromp. A huge blast of electricity jolted
through me. I leapt back and hit the wall. Erik and Werner burst out laughing,
“You idiot!” Erik shouted, “Don’t you know better than to hold a spark plug
wire?”
My aptitude
for mechanical things always seemed worse when my brothers were around. Like
when Werner pointed out that my bicycle wheels didn’t spin very easily. We had our bicycles upside down doing the maintenance
my dad insisted was important for our maturity and development.
“Spin it
and see,” he said. I spun the front wheel and after a few turns it
stopped.
“Now spin mine.” I did and it
spun like a top, on and on and on. “You have to loosen the bearings in the
wheel hub.” He pointed out the slim little nuts in there and left me to
it.
“Why’s your
wheel wobbling like that?” Erik asked a few days later. I was loaded with thirty copies of the Toronto
Star for my paper route. The front wheel had been turning freely ever since the
adjustment. Maybe too freely.
“Werner
showed me how to loosen it.”
“And you believed him?” Erik demanded. “You’ve
got to tighten those,” he said, pointing to those nasty thin nuts I had spent
an hour on. They were losing their
six-sided shape every time I wrenched them with the old adjustable wrench. I unloaded
the bike, flipped it over, made the adjustment in the growing darkness and took
off to deliver the papers. By the time I got back home there was a suspicious
grinding sound coming from the wheel hub.
“You listened
to Erik? No wonder you screwed it up,” observed Werner, “better do the back
wheel now. Even them up.”
By the end
of the week Dad was really mad about me needing two new bicycle wheels. All
that remained of the ball bearings were some bits of steely gravel. The bearing
cups were full of cracks and unusable.
Things were
always breaking down at our house. My
dad, who had plenty of mechanical aptitude was kept pretty busy, fixing stuff.
Like the night Werner
cannon-balled onto our big old bed dozens of times and the thing began its
death rattle. Already one end was
sagging.
“Werner
you’re wrecking the bed!”
“So?” He dived
onto it again and it rattled more dramatically.
“It’s fun,” he pointed out. The low corner got even lower. He got off,
took a run at it and cannon-balled into it again. The bed shook like a wet dog.
Another run.
This time a belly flop.
“You’re wrecking
it, stop! Dad’ll kill you!” Werner ignored me and dived onto it
again. The lower half collapsed onto the
ground and the footboard crashed, leaving deep gouges in the wooden floor.
“Oops!”
grinned Werner. We tried to fix it with
a wrench but couldn’t. Needless to say I didn’t get to sleep well that night in
a bed that was 18 inches lower on the end, like a ship sinking by the stern.
Did I say we were always wrecking
stuff? It’s true. Either that or chasing each other around the house with something
sharp. I’m not sure if mom and dad ever
realized why I wanted to go out with them wherever they went, but it was safer
than staying at home.
For a long time I avoided working
on my bicycle and mechanical things in general. Instead I devoted time to
things like practicing shooting things
with my slingshot or learning archery.
If they’d had a rifleman’s badge at scouts I would have tried for that. Just for self defense of course.
Dad bought us a Meccano set with
all the little steel brackets and flanges and nuts and bolts, telling us, with
some pride, how he had made Meccano displays of windmills and such for the toy
shop where he grew up in the old country.
“Let’s see vat you can make, boyss,”
he said. My brothers made simple little
racing cars with moving wheels. He was disappointed: they should have been made
to steer or had a differential. I made a gallows with a little steel Meccano man
hanging from it by his neck. It had no
moving parts whatsoever. He shook his head in disgust and said something in
Dutch about my mechanical aptitude.
Fast forward about fifteen years.
I was in University and needed a car. I bought
a 1967 Volkswagen station wagon for $400. It was reliable, free of rust and had
been fastidiously maintained by a philosophy grad student who found truth in
things like working on his car. My dad
would have liked a son like him. The car was great and I drove it for two years
before my lack of mechanical aptitude confronted me. The car needed an engine
job and I didn’t have money to pay a mechanic.
Erik, who was visiting from out
west, was reading on my couch.
“Hey Erik, how about helping me fix
this engine?”
“Do it yourself. You got two
hands,” he said and turned a page in his magazine. A day later he tossed a book
on my table: How to Fix Your Volkswagen,
For the Compleat Idiot, by John Muir. “Read that,” he instructed. “It’s all
you need to know.”
It had every kind of repair for
every kind of VW ever built. From the Beetle to the Microbus and the station
wagon model I had. It was illustrated with clear drawings of only what you
needed to see, and the intro chapter, about people with no mechanical experience whatsoever, gave me confidence. The book
was even ring-bound to stay open to any page. I discovered the book also had a running
philosophical commentary about all sorts of other things in life.
So I bought some tools and spent
the better part of a weekend methodically removing and dismantling my VW
engine. I labeled everything, read over every paragraph several times and worried
every minute. When I had reassembled everything and put the engine back in
there was great apprehension.
“Turn the key,” I told myself,
but I was afraid of what might happen. A voice in my head was saying; “hold
this wire”. I walked around the parking
lot. I smoked a cigarette. I stared at
the car from a distance and hummed a little tune. The key was waiting, dangling
in the ignition.
Had I crossed some plug
wires?
Had I wrecked the duel carburetors
or not attached the gas lines properly? Would
this little car erupt into a fire-bomb and immolate my human remains as a
sacrifice to technology?
Finally I turned the key and
there was a pleasant grumble as the four little cylinders fired up. The engine
idled happily.
I was ecstatic like a new father.
I had created life.
Over the years I worked on many
Volkswagens and helped my friends fix theirs
as well. Werner had the same station-wagon model I did. We collaborated
on dreaming up unusual paint jobs – he did a desert camouflage, and later a tree
frog design. I painted my car plaid. First it was a Barclay tartan – just to
create the painful visual assault of yellow on black and white – on a car. It gave me a headache just to look at it. Later I changed it to a more sedate Black
Watch tartan. Foot-wide stripes of blue
and green on a black background.
One weekend I was helping Werner wire
some speakers into the back of his car. While he fiddled with the fuses I ran a
secret wire from his distributor cap to the speaker wire.
“You better show me where you
want that wire to run,” I called.
“Under the trim,” he said.
“I can’t get it in there.”
“It’s simple. Just stuff it under.”
“I don’t want to wreck it. You’d
better do it.” With a deep sigh Werner
extricated himself from under the dashboard and came back to where I held the
speaker wire. He stuffed the wire under.
I waited until he began attaching it to the screws on the speaker.
“Hey Werner,” I said.
“What?” he grunted.
“Hold that wire,” I said and turned
the ignition key. The audible snap of the high-voltage spark was almost as
satisfying as the shocked look on his face.
It took a while to learn
mechanical aptitude but it was worth it.
