“BOOM!”
Dagny and Atlas scampered off in fear, and John and I staggered around for a brief moment with ringing ears and wide eyes.
“Well. It started,” John said in his gruffly understated fashion with a lit cigarillo dangling from his lips.
I’d never had a car backfire. It was positively concussive. After a few minutes, Dagny had curiously ventured back to the idling Jeep, but Atlas was nowhere to be found.
Since the car arrived home a few days ago, I had spent the bulk of the time trying to educate myself about. . .everything. For example (and be kind, because this is going to be embarrassing), what the hell does a carburetor look like and where is it and what does it do? Where is the transmission fluid dipstick? Where is the fuel filter? What is a distributor? For that matter, what is _______?
Some people grow up working on cars, tractors or lawnmower engines with their dad or uncle or neighbor. Not me. Some people are raised with grease under their fingernails and have dismantled and rebuilt their first engine by puberty. Not me.
It’s not like I was raised by effete metropolitan intellectuals that hired the poor working class folk in town to perform any manner of physical labor, we just didn’t do that type of stuff. We built forts, we played baseball, we got in fights, we dug holes, we filled holes. . .we just didn’t really do mechanical stuff. (As is made clear by the fact that I refer to working on cars, engines, motors, etc., as mechanical. . .stuff).
So that’s a long way of saying, this has all been new to me, and frankly, I feel a bit sheepish about acknowledging how little I know in this arena. Some people delete their search history to keep their spouse from accidentally stumbling upon their anime foot fetish porn (I presume that’s a thing). I have deleted my search history so that, in the event of my untimely death, it is not known that my last communication with the digital world was a Google search asking, “what is a carburetor?”, “pictures with labels of an engine,” and “what is a differential?” The last thing I need is to be looking down on my funeral only to observe my friends and relatives whispering in hushed tones, “God. Too bad about Joe. Good guy. Strange? Yeah. A bit grating? Sure. But on balance, a pretty decent guy. Did you hear he didn’t know what a limited-slip differential was? I KNOW right?!” I don’t need that kind of embarrassment in the afterlife.
I feel like I’ve got a pretty good idea what I’m doing here. . .
Fortunately, I have had a few resources at my disposal. First, and most indispensably, my neighbor John. For those who have never met my neighbor, he is a retired Boeing engineer with a passion for rebuilding classic cars, smoking cigars around flammable fluids, and for eye-boring a hole into your soul if you go down the driveway any faster than the placarded 10 mph. He comes off a bit brusque upon first (and subsequent) encounters, but he’s truly a wonderful neighbor and has been incredibly polite in dealing with my auto-ignorance.
Secondly, I have the internets. It’s like an endless universe of my neighbor John. I have found videos, tutorials, photo montages, fan-fiction, and entire forums dedicated to Grand Wagoneer restoration. Team Grand Wagoneer has been particularly useful as a sourcing depot for all manners of Grand Wagoneer parts. This restoration video.This forum thread. The International Full-Size Jeep Association. This website selling restored Grand Wagoneers. (I told you it was a burgeoning collectors item but you did not believe me, did you?? Would you spend $60k on a restored Grand Wagoneer? No, you wouldn’t because that would be stupid and you, by the transitive property of equality, would also be stupid.)
Lastly, the Haynes Repair Manual for the Jeep Grand Wagoneer has been priceless (fact check- not priceless. $36 with free shipping). It gives in-depth instructions on the repair and maintenance of nearly every possible system of the vehicle. Not having this repair manual would make things difficult. It would be like my first sexual encounter. . .a lot of closing my eyes and hoping for the best without any real idea what I was doing. So, for the sake of that metaphor, this Haynes Repair Manual is like the Penthouse Magazine that you buried in the woods when you were 13. It tells you (with pictures) where to put what, what tools you need for the job, how to properly grease the driveshaft, how hard to torque the nuts, and how to keep from getting differential fluid everywhere. (The innuendos are really endless, so go ahead and create your own on your own time. I have a schedule to keep). The point is, it has already proven invaluable and made something otherwise overwhelming seem actually possible.
My preliminary course of action was as follows: First, I would clean the engine compartment. Years of neglect had left the space under the hood caked in dirt, grease and God knows what else. In order to better understand what everything was and the degree to which it was working, I needed to strip away that grime. You know when you hear about the police finding a morbidly obese person who had been bed ridden for several years and was sitting in a pool of his own sweat and filth with the odd chicken bone or pepperoni slice hidden in between folds of back fat? That’s what this engine cavity looked like. I felt like I imagine a dentist feels every single day at their job. “Open wide please. . . OH DEAR GOD! What have you done? It smells like hot garbage and kim chi. Don’t TELL me you floss ‘almost every day’. I’m not an idiot”.
Secondly, I needed to address the aforementioned issue with the rear end. The chunking and grinding needed to be resolved immediately before this big-booty beast would be road-ready.
And lastly, on account of the BOOM!, I needed to replace the muffler which I had completely blown out and which was now resting comfortably on the ground. That’s a self-inflicted wound. . .Imma go ahead and own that one.
Once those few items were checked off the list, I’d be able to start determining the source of the very mild oil drip, why it takes about 20 pumps of the accelerator to get enough gas into the carburetor to ignite and which of the interior projects I’d tackle first.
After a few messy hours cleaning the engine, I pulled the car into the garage, made my way to the auto parts store to buy a floor jack and a couple jack stands (on account of not wanting to die underneath two tons of metal), and set out to find out why any turns in the Jeep felt like getting rear ended and sounded like dropping a fistful of screws into a Kitchen Aid (Try it. Seriously. Don’t ask your spouse. Just do it. That’s what it sounds like).
Pandora’s box. . .you’re next.
And. . .as it turns out, that’s long enough to warrant its own post, so stay tuned. Now the real fun starts.
Expense Log:
- Grand Wagoneer- $6500
- Haynes Repair Manual $36
- Jack Stands- $65
- 2-ton floor jack- $60
- Engine degreaser, shop rags and oil pan- $23