Why You Should Buy a Really Old Vehicle

Yesterday I walked into a chain auto-parts store (there being no other options) for a cabin-air filter and set of wiper blades for our 2003 Chevy Silverado 1500. It's a truck we bought from my father-in-law's estate, and it has been lightly used, sporting just over 76K miles. We don't plan to sell it; I can do a great deal of mechanical and electronics work on it myself.

A small annoyance of my shopping trip involved the parts books in the shop; they only go back to 2004. A grumpy manager explained to me that "the companies don't care much about vehicles more than 20 years old." Well, they better.

A recent story from S&P Mobility shows that older vehicles are getting more common on our roads and in repair shops, with light vehicles 16 or more years old increasingly common.

Therein lies a problem, as used cars "will be increasingly loaded with sensors for infotainment, communications, and advanced driver assistance systems like adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning and collision avoidance. Adaptive cruise, in particular, has been on a steady upward penetration trend since 2015; it is projected to be in nearly 70 percent of model-year 2023 vehicles, according to S&P Global Mobility estimates." 

Our Chevy, like our 2006 Honda C-RV, lacks a backup camera, touch screen, or lane-departure sensors.

Good. It's harder and harder to find minimalist vehicles. Convenience and Comfort are wicked deities; they make our lives easier 95% of the time, only to leave us stranded and helpless. There must be a better way.

I don't want any of that stuff. On the other hand, I do want passenger, driver, and side-impact airbags, antilock disc brakes, and power steering. I also don't want components that require dealer-specific software. A relative's new Ford Explorer became a brick after the assisted-parking feature broke. The dealer not only quoted an outlandish price but a months-long wait for repairing this (to me) frivolous feature; one should learn to park, not let a car park for you. Luckily, a local shop agreed, if our relative purchased the $1500 Ford-specific software. The repair still proved far cheaper than the dealer's price. The Ford is back on the road.

I'd recommend that for a daily driver, you shop for a low-mile vehicle in the sweet-spot between about 2000 and 2010. These cars and trucks are out there. If you can turn a wrench, excellent. But first go to drivers' forums to ID common issues for DIYers. My wife's Volvo S60, a 2013 model, had to go to the dealer for a battery replacement! I grumbled but have a pal at the service desk who showed me the song-and-dance routine to reset the car's computer. All the dealers know I'm a self-trained gearhead, and Nan is a mechanic's daughter who bought lots of parts for Big Ed. She can tell a scam in the service department when she hears it. She since sold the Volvo, not without some lamentation, for a 2017 Mini S convertible, a very cool car but so complex that it gives me shivers. I can change the oil, filters, and rotate the tires. That's about it. We'll see what happens when the warranty expires. One option? Sell it and buy an older low-mile Volvo C70 convertible with the simpler soft-top, not the retractable hard-top.

I also found, for instance, that in 2004, GM (in their infinite lack of wisdom and abundance of greed) moved the fuel filter from under the Silverado into the tank, so a DIYer must really work hard to replace it. Mine can be changed simply and quickly, with the vehicle parked on the ground, as long as the fittings have not rusted solid. I spray-painted mine after a shop had to change the locked-shut filter for me. Now, at every DIY oil change, I fix any rust on the chassis of each car and touch up the paint there.

You can get parts for the types of vehicles I advocate driving, too. You will need to know parts numbers and specifics if the clerk at the register cannot help, which will be likely given the state of hiring at these stores.  I don't tend to recommend specific franchises, but NAPA seems to have the most knowledgeable helpers. Pity that our local NAPA is staffed by grumps! I go to one in town.

Some innovations have surprised me pleasantly. I replaced a window motor in the big Chevy truck easily and for $75. A few YouTube videos showed me how to remove the door panel and swap out the plug-and-play electronics. Once I was a staunch crank for crank-windows. Now I'm good with power. Likewise, when my dash went out on the truck, a mail-in repair shop that advertises on eBay replaced all the "stepper motors" that control the dashboard lights, speedo, and other gauges, with shipping for that same magic number of $75. The truck could still be driven while I waited for the instrument cluster to be returned. I got it back with better backlights, too, and I installed it in five minutes with simple tools.

I'm looking forward to reading Matthew Crawford's Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. I met Matt and had a few interesting chats with him when he lived in Richmond. I love his book Shop Class as Soulcraft. He argues passionately for us being doers with skills, not consumers who press a "pay now" button. Like me, he favors old, if inconvenient and less comfortable, rides. You, your sense of purpose, and your wallet might, too.

There are other kooks like me or Matt out there: we might own a handful of cheap used vehicles; if one breaks, we use another while we fix the other one. It beats a car payment and you can do most work with jacks, stands, or ramps. So much can be done with the hood open and nothing else. Maybe we need a new automotive deity: Self-Reliance?

Grandfather's Hammer and Keeping Old Things in Service

Some of you may know the Grandfather's Axe paradox. I encountered it a few years ago. The paradox asks us that if every part of an item is replaced one by one, in the end, is it still the same item? I heard it stated as "this is my grandfather's axe. Since he used it it has had two new handles and one new axe head."

So is it the same axe? The empirical, scientific answer is "no." Every molecule of the original item has been replaced, even if it looks identical.  I'm a Humanist, so I'm going to sail off in a different direction.

The paradox stretches back to ancient Greece, where it was called The Ship of Theseus. I really enjoy logical paradoxes, if you cannot already tell. I am not going to give you my philosophical opinion, right away, but I will talk about an item that evades the paradox because it is pretty much the same as when my grandfather used it.

He was a junk-dealer by trade, an immigrant from Hatay in what is now the southeastern corner of Turkey. Arriving in Richmond in 1911, in time he acquired an old truck and combed the countryside for scrap metal, old broken tools, furniture, or anything that might have some intrinsic value. Somewhere along the way, he found an old claw hammer, or at least the head of one. He fixed it to a length of metal pipe and used a giant nail to hold the head to the new handle.

I found that hammer when cleaning out his basement in Richmond, a couple of months after his passing in 1982. It went into an old tool box I still have in my barn, but the hammer recently re-appeared in my shop, when I found myself in need of something for driving masonry nails in the cinder-block wall for hanging tools, old tin signs, and other bric-a-brac. The old hammer works like a charm.

For years, every time I saw it, my Type-A, rationalist side would say "that old hammer needs a proper hickory handle," but somehow I never quite got around to it. I'm happy about that now. I'm slightly less Type A (and probably less rational) after a dozen years in the country, since farmwork requires a certain amount of clutter and temporary disorder when, say, the garden is bursting with food as it is right now.

We live in a time of fast food, fast fashion, disposable electronics. No thank you. My anti-consumerist, Humanist side wants to stake a claim to keeping old things that work well around as long as possible, even if, especially if like The Ship of Theseus, every single part has been replaced at least once. I recently put new front wheels on an old Woods belly mower that my late father-in-law slung under a 1951 John Deere M tractor he purchased new. In the years that I've been custodian of the machine, I restored and repainted it, replaced the seat, swapped out a new wire harness and battery, put in an electronic ignition. I bought a new mesh inner panel for the grille, a gas cap, and lots more.

Is it the same tractor? Mostly, yes, and it does exactly what my father-in-law did with it. When I'm gone, a grandchild or great-grandchild will get Grandpa's tractor, and one of my nieces or nephews who has a taste for DIY work will get my grandfather's hammer. Perhaps the paradox becomes meaningless if the object's purpose remains the same, and that object gets passed from generation to generation. I hope they don't just use the John Deere for parades or the hammer as garage-art.

It will help if I can get someone to form a bond with the tractor or the hammer, telling the story once a younger person shows interest. Luckily, the interest is there for lots of things that have been family heirlooms, but most of those objects I've handed on have not been tools. To merely hang the hammer on a wall (as I did the mower's old wheels, one of them still quite usable) seems to break a chain.

I don't have a fancy philosophical name for this but "the thingness of things" has been my go-to. I feel the material presence of my forebearers when I get on that tractor, hammer a nail, use a biscuit-cutter that belonged to my late mother-in-law. My favorite skillets are cheap and thin Taiwanese-made ones my mom got me at a Roses store in the summer of 1982, when I was returning to college and an apartment for my final year. I use those pans daily now and think of my mom, gone nearly two decades.

So look around the shop and house at old things your ancestors used to make life simpler: a rolling pin, a favorite casserole dish, the old Buick sedan that grandpa loved so much. Look at the well-made furniture that is not modern chic but still perfectly useful.

Could you still use those things? Why not?

Avoiding "Learned Helplessness": Yes, You Can Do It

I'm back from holidays and going about my chores as much as the sultry, even murderous, summer permits. Yet when in Canada, I didn't take much of a break, helping my cousin's husband fix deck-boards, replace the screen on a door, and weed-whack their lake camp's herb garden. My sister, who shares our mother's love of gardening, wondered how I can "do it all" on our farm where the tasks are endless.

First, I have a wonderful partner who has skills that compliment my own. Second, neither of us follow sports or watch TV beyond, at best, an hour weekly. Third, we don't stay glued to phones. Time opens up like a Spanish fan if you ignore those chronological vampires.

Those factors didn't really impress my Sis, who said "okay okay, no sports or TV. But how did  you learn to fix things and make things?" 

That stumped me. I fumbled for an answer, noting that when something interests me, such as how to properly run a circular saw like the one we used on the deck, I get obsessive in learning every single detail from print and Web sources. Nota Bene: beware YouTube advice-gurus. Watch a BUNCH or videos first to get a consensus. I mentioned by belief that while self-sufficiency proves impossible, Emersonian self-reliance should be our goal. I've written about it here before.

Gradually, however, I realized that my OCD personality and life philosophy are only part of the answer: at a certain point, I decided to never succumb to what plagues too many of my students, a "learned helplessness." You can Google that term, but to me it has meant that folks facing a problem turn to others right away instead of trying to solve it on their own.

Here I am thinking less of emotional or medical problems and more of the daily routine that can suck up so much of our time: cutting the lawn, servicing that lawn-mower, changing a car's wiper blades, rotating the tires yourself. 

Granted, they may bore you. They may be tedious. You might rather do other things. But being a cheapskate, I began to tally up how much of my green money would be going to "some guy" for each of these tasks. Imagine how much you'd save if you went out to eat only a few times a month and bought fewer prepared meals, and instead learned to cook from scratch. Try it for a week, with simple recipes, and keep track of how much you spend on good groceries versus a typical restaurant meal.

There are some chores I won't do: the chimney cleaner was at the house today and for $195, our stove and flue got a clean bill of health for the next heating season.

No, I don't want to be on a hot metal roof in 100+ heat. But then I also didn't want to give the guy who put a new windshield in my wife's pickup another $70 for new wiper blades "on special." My scowl and words about the shop's no-brand blades' price as compared to the Bosch I install ended that discussion.

You can change wiper blades in two minutes, and most of these skills listed earlier are within the reach of a typical human with enough flexibility and stamina; an elderly neighbor used to rotate his tires in the driveway without a lift such as the one I use. Conversely, many of my students have never changed a single tire. They "call some guy," presuming that guy will be around.  My nephew John's kids, on the other hand, are tractorpunks: John made them learn to drive a manual transmission car and change a tire as part of "adulting." He's my hero.

Sometimes it only takes a mentor to urge you to DIY. In Iceland, we had a flat on our camper van, and after setting the jack in volcanic soil hard as packed gravel, I found that the wimpy tire-change wrench would not budge the overly tight lugs. I caved. I called some guy. Specifically, I phoned the camper office and a friendly Scandinavian who runs the place said "oh just jump up and down on the wrench." And like that, I changed my tire.

So the next time your mower needs the blade sharpened, or an oil change, or the car's cabin air-filter is due for replacement (read that schedule in the owner's manual!) why not watch a few YouTube videos and give it a go?  You will feel more in control of the small things. That TikTok video of some parasite influencer can wait. That glamorous cipher will not make you less helpless or live a second longer. Again, start small. Eventually you might be changing the car's oil, rotating the tires, or installing a microwave yourself. You can do these things. Yes you can. Give our consumerist culture of learned helplessness the middle finger.

I should have changed my cabin air-filter sooner. I think they hid Jimmy Hoffa in there.