You Must Have a Reason to Make a Project Worthwhile

From Road & Track

From the August 1992 issue of Road & Track

Hanging from its cherrypicker, the engine and transmission were almost out of the MGB, suspended from a chain in that nose-up attitude that always re­ minds me of a U-boat surfacing to rescue (or possibly shell) survivors from its latest torpedo run. That analogy, in its tone of latent danger, is probably not altogether strained. There's something about a 500-lb. drivetrain dangling four feet in the air that always makes me work a little faster. Perhaps it's know­ing that the chain on my engine hoist was originally purchased to secure a 10-speed Raleigh Record to campus lamp­ posts when I was a student, back in the era when Bill Clinton was not exactly inhaling marijuana.

At any rate, the engine was almost out, except for one snag. There's always one snag. The driveshaft flange was caught on something, and now I was under the car, rolling around and trying to push it out of the tunnel.

As it came free, the engine lurched forward, tilted upward slightly and re­leased a small shower of coolant mixed with oil from various orifices on the engine block. Most of this swamp water and sludge ran along the bottom of the transmission and down my sleeve, settling in a cold pool at the spot where my elbow touched the floor. Some of it simply splashed onto my glasses.

I lay under the car motionless for a moment, staring (as best I could) at the floorpan, which was about three inches from my face, and said to myself quietly "Why am I doing this? Why didn't I buy a nice new Miata, so I could wear white turtlenecks and spend my time driving to ski resorts?" Or words to that effect.

Reasonable questions.

I pulled the engine all the way out, lowered it safely to the floor, cleaned my hands with Goop, opened a Guinness from the mini refrigerator under my workbench and sat down to stare at the old green "B."

Just as the unexamined life is not worth living, I've always felt that the un­examined dirt-ball project is not worth doing. You must have a reason behind all this fun, some sort of dream or vision to sustain the effort. Why (I tried to recall) was I restoring the MGB?

Ah, yes. After a few minutes of reflection it all came back to me. Highway 421.

Beautiful road. My friend Pat Donnelly and I discovered it last year while driving a Ford Explorer from Wisconsin to North Carolina for the Winston 600 at Charlotte. We picked it up at the Kentucky border, on the Ohio River near Madison, Indiana, and followed it all the way. Several hundred miles of up and downhill curves through some of the most beautiful green country in America, across the Blue Ridge and down to the edge of the eastern coastal plain.

"I'd like to make this trip in my MGB," I told Pat. "Go with Barb on a summer vacation. Take this same road to Charlotte, then head up the Blue Ridge to Washington, D.C. Visit the Smithsonian and Gettysburg and all those places we haven't seen since we were kids. The MG would be the perfect car for the trip. If it had decent tires. And maybe functioning brakes and rebuilt suspension . . . and an overdrive gearbox and an engine with freeze plugs that didn't leak . . . "

So the hook was set. The car and the appropriate journey had suddenly fused into a single Big Idea. I knew when I got home I'd be forced to restore the MG, held hostage by plans for a trip and sustained by the simplistic mental snapshot of my green car on those ideal sports-car roads.

Since then, I've balked at the project a couple of times, nearly overwhelmed by the typical number of small parts that have to be degreased, sanded, painted, replated or replaced, but the work goes on. The MGB is a relatively simple car, so the quicksand pit never gets much deeper than your actual height, give or take a couple of inches. At the moment, I have every confidence (?) it will be done in time for an East Coast trip this coming August.

And so it has always been. While contemplating the MGB last night, it occurred to me that every project I've ever completed has been driven by a similar, underlying vision–the simple dream of a particular road, a geographical setting or an arrival at some event or gathering. Yet in the end, the car, motorcycle, airplane, bicycle or whatever takes over and becomes the bearer of the dream, a sort of mechanistic St. Christopher that carries the whole plan across the river on its shoulders. Eventually, the plan and the vehicle seem to weld together, and you can't remember which came first.

It doesn't matter. The important thing is, this combination strikes every year, like clockwork. Or flu.

Five years ago, for instance, it arrived in the guise of an airplane. Barb and I spent one year fixing up a 1945 Piper Cub so we could spend six weeks of summer touring the U.S. All those late nights in the hangar were helped along by the prospect of flying low and slow over midwestern farm land, looking down on red barns and green cornfields through the open door of the airplane. When that picture finally came to life, it was worth all the work. And as a pleas­ant side effect, the airplane was reason­ably airworthy. Or was the journey a side effect of the airplane project? I can't remember any more. The two are inseparable.

Other summers it's been Sprites, Westfield 11s, old motorcycles or Formula Fords. Every year seems to produce some kind of weird, time-consuming, bent, rusted or grease-covered project, and it's generally the pressure of an upcoming trip-or a race-that forces me to get it done. Probably be­cause there's nothing quite like the threat of driving in competition or traveling a great distance from home to concentrate the mind and help focus on the matter at hand.

For instance, it's much easier to go through the greasy job of repacking your wheel bearings if you can picture those bearing races spinning like crazy out in the middle of nowhere, 1000 miles from your garage. (Nevada in midsummer is always a good place to picture bearings at work.)

Likewise, the assembly of stub axles and steering arms assumes a higher status if you can imagine these parts sup­porting your car on a flat-out dip through the kink at Elkhart Lake or en­during the endless g-loads of Willow Springs' Turn 9. In fact, any mechanical task that prevents you and your car from catapulting over the Armco-or searching for Whitworth tools in Elko-tends to be more absorbing than an ordinary, run-of-the-mill car repair.

Life is simpler, of course, if you can avoid mixing your racing and travel projects. Last year, I accidentally spent the entire winter on the leisurely restoration of an older motorcycle, a 1984 BMW R100RS, so Barb and I could take it on a summer road trip to British Columbia and down through the Rockies.

Unfortunately, this BMW reconstruction caused me to ignore my small­ time racing program until it was almost too late. So I spent two months of the summer rebuilding a Lotus Seven almost around the clock to get it ready for Monterey, and I'm still trying to catch up on my sleep, a year later.

But, in this case, the old Vision Thing came to the rescue again. During those many late, incoherent nights, it helped a lot to imagine the car accelerating downhill through the Corkscrew at Laguna Seca, sunlight filtering through the live oaks on the hillside. It also helped to picture the wheels not falling off at the exit of the downhill sweeper. In the end, we made it to Laguna, the sun shone on the Corkscrew, the wheels didn't fall off and the car is now in one movable piece. Another successful case of progress through hallucination.

This past winter I got myself caught up in another logjam of ideas, a small conflict between two projected road trips, that both sounded pretty good. It was a struggle between that East Coast tour with the MGB and a long-suppressed desire to ride a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide FLHS across the West, camping on the way. The Great American Desert versus the Blue Ridge. After a short stand­ off, however, the MGB won this battle, mainly because (a) I already have one in my garage, (b) new Electra Glides cost about $12,000 and (c) it's too late to rebuild the sort of old one I could afford.

So it looks as if the Harley trip out West will have to wait. But there's always next year. Or the year after.

We'll get there eventually. We have to. I have a feeling Monument Valley is waiting for us, and I can already picture the road.