Now, while my exposure to what are euphemistically labeled motorheads admittedly is somewhat limited at this point in the game, I am gathering more and more evidence to support the conclusion that most people who own these vehicles are neither knowledgeable nor motivated enough to perform the maintenance on their cars themselves. These people simply like owning them. This is a fascinating concept to me.

Certainly, some motorheads like to restore classic vehicles; some love it. However, I met a young man today at my bi-monthly classic meet who owns a ’92 Wagoneer; beautiful car, classic, bold, masculine styling. I remember them from when I was a boy. He recently had a tune up, as well as the valve cover gaskets and the oil pan gasket replaced by his classic motor shop. My readers should understand here that there are no items on the engine that are easier and more foolproof for the owner to perform or replace himself. Yet he paid exorbitant shop prices for someone else to do it for him.

No one sensible would fault anyone else for not knowing how to do something, whatever that something might be. This is what learning is for. Yet, to this Wagoneer owner, the satisfaction lies not in the learning, but only in ownership; in bathing her, in polishing and detailing, in the accolades, the questions, the answers; in the awe of his attentive listeners as he parades his vast acquired knowledge of the history of the Jeep. I suppose that’s fine for him, if that is what makes him happy.

For me, however, I personally could not afford to own Charlotte if I had to pay someone to maintain her for me, even more so to restore her. That $1200 I paid to Larry to rebuild the head was my financial, psychological, and philosophical limit of having someone else work on my truck in my stead, and that was only because I’m not set up for that kind of work. Larry owns machinery I would not dream of owning, and has fifty years of stored knowledge I cannot equal, especially at this stage in my life. He performed only the machine work. I put her back together.

Working on the truck is a challenge for me. I also find it satisfying to accomplish a repair, general maintenance, or restoration of a vehicle. To me, it’s reassuring that the work is now done correctly, that I have reinforced or improved my mechanical knowledge and understanding, that I have saved what usually is a significant amount of money in the process. Said another way, I do not like someone else working on my vehicles. I am thrifty, I want to do it myself, I like to learn, and I like to figure things out on my own.

At this point, the to-do list on Charlotte is dwindling. I have still to replace the kingpins in each front wheel; only one side shows movement, but I will do both. I also have to paint the interior with Chevrolet brown/silver from my Chevy supplier (already have it), reupholster the seat, replace the passenger rolling door glass (already have it), at the same time renewing all related rubber gaskets and glides (have them), and install a headliner.

Eventually, I have to run a fused wire from the heater blower to the switch, but I hardly need that. This engine produces so much heat that, even though I have the water supply from the engine turned off, the cab gets plenty warm already. She also could use a new exhaust system at some point, but there’s no hurry.

Finally, Charlotte’s radio sits on a friend’s bench awaiting rebuild. Now, if I could be assured that this radio would play 1952 stations, with the sensible music that was popular then, the incentive might be there to prioritize the rebuild. Until that assurance arrives or I simply run out of other things to do on the truck, the radio will sit on that bench awaiting acquisition of a single oval speaker that, now that Radio Shack has gone out of business, seems to be eluding me. I’m not sure I want to get into replacing diodes and all that, so I may just buy an original block-off plate on ebay to cover the hole in the dash and be done with it.

Someone said to me recently, “You’re almost finished with her. What will you do then, get another one”? That is the first time I considered that I am almost finished restoring her. His remark caught me a little off guard. She has been a lot of work, that’s for certain. She will never be perfect, no show truck, by any means, but a nice-looking, safe, and reliable driver.

I’m attached to the old girl now, so I have no plans to sell her. Still, all things considered, with most of these trucks today going for between $15,000 and $25,000, some even $30,000 to $40,000, and I’ve seen them as high as $60,000, it turns out she also was dirt cheap.

The winter offered us this year was fairly mild. With a stretch of unusually-warm days arriving in March, I was suddenly met with a new project, a sort of emergency. Out driving Charlotte one day, I noticed the clutch starting to slip. I knew this was not my fault since I am quite careful with a clutch. I confirmed the problem during a test drive on another day. So, it was settled, a clutch job had just become the next project.

Over the next week, I collected the parts from my Chevy supplier, clutch plate, pressure plate, throw-out bearing, pilot bearing, gasket kit, checking with Larry about refinishing the flywheel. Awaiting the parts, I busied myself reading the shop manual about the procedure. It looked a simple-enough job. As the last of the parts arrived, I could be found already covered with grease, set about removing the transmission.

Now, as I mentioned, by the shop manual, this procedure should not have taken long, no more than a couple of hours. However, this shop manual was written, as are probably all manuals of this nature, operating under the presumption that the machinery the mechanic is working on was assembled correctly prior to the event.

Instead of those couple of hours, it took me, in fact, two days to remove the transmission. The only way I finally got it out is by dropping the rear end out of the truck so the transmission could clear the driveshaft. It turns out that this last one-half inch the transmission case needed to clear the universal joint was governed by that pesky law of physics stating that two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. To resolve the suspense building within my readers, let me make a longer story a little shorter by jumping to the reason for that inconvenient one half inch governed by that same law of physics.

After finally getting the transmission out, then removing the clutch components one by one, did I learn that someone had installed the clutch plate the wrong end around. Consequently, the “neck” of the clutch plate, which is supposed to face toward the engine, was now facing the transmission.

Installed forward-facing, the neck is not a factor, allowing the input shaft from the transmission to slide effortlessly out. With the neck now facing the transmission, the input shaft could not clear both the neck and the universal joint. By dropping the rear end, I succeeded making barely enough room to finally wrestle the transmission out.

All the while, I could be heard muttering with increasing intensity that the men who wrote the shop manual must never have worked on one of these trucks. However, as I finally discovered, these guys write their text operating under the assumption that the truck I am working on was put together correctly prior to this event. In the perfect world in which the writers of my manual existed, yes, the job should have taken no more than a couple of hours, the transmission sliding effortless out.

Also, with the clutch placed the wrong end around, the clutch springs, which are designed to dampen any grabbing of the friction plate as it is squeezed between the flywheel and the pressure plate, were now positioned tight against the flywheel bolts. When the engine was first started, this must have made quite a racket, springs hard against bolt heads, whirling metal shearing helpless metal, bolt heads ground down half their thickness. Since this mess was set in motion long before I acquired the old girl, I was not around to witness all that commotion.

With no room to maneuver, became the next logical question, how did whoever it was get all these mechanicals back together and fitted back into the truck in the first place? The answer to that question is that all this mess was accomplished when the engine was removed and replaced during that partial rebuild somewhere during the 1990’s. Both the engine and the transmission were reinstalled as a unit, so there was no requirement to clear the driveshaft.

As a result, as is usually the case, it now became up to me to undo the mess in whatever creative way possible, then to make it right. This may have been the force at work motivating a friend long ago to declare when introducing me to someone else, “This is Doren, the restorer of lost causes.”

Off I whisked my flywheel for refacing at Larry’s shop. It turns out that the ring gear was so torn up, it needed replacing, so, again, to make things right, that had to be accomplished, for additional cost, of course. Hey, there is no sense in expending all this energy and cost to do the job, then only halfway. People have already been employing that philosophy with this truck for most of its life, and I am forced to live in the aftermath. If we are going to do this job, then let’s do it right. Otherwise, don’t bother to own the truck.