[Unicorns] [Princess] [Cocoa Butter]

*2019 Update: Photos referenced in this blog are lost to time. Should I find them, I will update, but in transferring from the old site to this one, things were lost and unfortunately, Nifty was among the fallen. So uh, use those imaginations.

I've recently come to the realization that I dislike cars. Originally, this level of dislike was reserved for computers (I'm a bench tech at a computer shop) and stupid people (I'm a bench tech at a computer shop). But the other night was able to grab hold of my face, and in some cases my arms, legs and lower back and scream into my frail body that I indeed should have added cars to that short list of “things Derek dislikes”. It started about 8:30 on a Tuesday morning. The air was cold and a Mazda was without “a....thingy that...connects to another thing...and pulls on this other piece..that can make it move”. I'd later learn this thingy was a broken shifter cable and that there are few curse words harsh enough for the process underwent to replace one....

After a morning of hitched rides and confused Google research, I went with Trey to try and “ghetto rig” (not racially insensitive, it means to fix something, so really its kind of polite...kinda) my car to get me fixed up for the remainder of the day. After a failed attempt and some cursing we decided to put it off until late in the evening.

At about 830 Trey gets off work to go straight into helping remedy this car situation. We moved it under a street light that put off about the same amount of light as a candle under a cloudy lamp head 50 feet in the air. It was quite unhelpful. After roughly 3 hours of work with very metal tools in very cold wind we were forced to relegate the task to another day, with proper tools and the actual part we needed.

My car just wasn't hood enough....get it?...Cause the ghetto....yea nevermind.

The part came in two days later, had we known this we might have spent considerably less time in the cold and just waited, but I'm from the McDonalds generation and only recently learned what “wait” means. After getting it out to Trey's shop after we had both worked full days at our respective jobs, it was about 8:00 at night. We were both thankful for the warmth of a shop with bright powerful lights and more tools than I knew there were names for. Seriously, we had walls of tool boxes and were working in front of a completely disassembled Jeep. It felt like the most logical time in my life to declare that I was a man and was ready to defeat the evils of car repair with my bare hands. This is not evenly remotely close to what happened.

After reading what we would later discover was an entirely unhelpful Haynes manual on replacing a shift cable we dug in.

Confident in our manliness and ready to add a couple hours to the estimated time of “5 hours completion” outlined in the manual, we began pulling off various parts or the vehicle. Slowly disassembling and placing screws in a folgers can as we went.

After only a few small plastic pieces the cursing began. Mostly from Trey at this point as I had absolutely no idea what was happening.

A sampling of slightly edited dialogue would look like this:

“[Puppies], I can't imagine they would [cute animals] just to get to the [balloons] shift cable. [Unicorns][Princess] [Cocoa butter]. Let me double check this.” This was all closed by a ritualistic, and rather disgusted, lighting of a cigarette.

It turns out, after triple checking with crappy iPhone internet, to replace a simple cable would require removing the entire front panel assembly of my car. That means, the steering wheel, cd player, heating and cooling unit and glove box would all be one piece and absolutely had to be removed to even get to the part we needed to replace. Mazda engineers may be getting a letter soon. Full of [Puppies].

This is trey triple checking the underside of the steering wheel, refusing to accept the inevitable...

*****

At this point we took a break to seek the sustenance that only coffee and Dr. Pepper can provide. It was about 10.

At around 1 am we had removed the console. Here's a manly picture:

***

I thought, at this point, maybe we would spend a couple hours taking out the broken cable and replacing it with the new shiny one. Maybe an hour of reassembly since it always goes faster putting it back together. But friends, optimism died that night. It was murdered with a 12mm socket wrench and drowned in radiator fluid, next to the Jeepster. Like a creepy, greasier version of Clue.

The array of profanity that saturated the garage that night was quite colorful. In fact, I'm decently certain there were non-sensical mumbles that carried as much venom as any Tarantino script. The frustrations stemmed from the absurd and seemingly impossibly constructed screws placed BEHIND every thing we needed to remove. Given all of 2 inches between a screw head he couldn't see and a firewall we couldn't move, there was certainly an element of despair coupled with a strong bit of confusion as to how anyone would be able to open this [rainbow] up.

The gutted beast full of hidden screws and the much more visible “screw you”s.

***

There's an interesting energy that chases exhaustion this late in the evening. Trey has at this point disconnected every wire, line, cable, hose, clamp and bolt to try and negotiate enough room to complete what should have been a pretty simple job. It's about 3:30 and we both agree that this was the low point. Drinking coffee in front of a mostly disassembled car worried that we won't even be able to fix what was wrong, much less reassemble it with all its ninja screws.

Having pulled the heating and cooling units just far enough out to allow us to pull out the old cable and subsequently rethread the new one, we stumbled upon a sleep deprived euphoria that made just about everything more fun.

It was exciting, to reach that point of reassembly. To say, “Yay! Maybe it's fixed!” is a pretty awesome feeling. Unfortunately, we couldn't test anything until we had the whole thing mostly put back together. Thus began the reassembly.

The energy we had while putting everything back together bordered on madness. It was a scramble to just get it to a point where we could see, you know, if it would turn on...after that, hopefully shift. And if the night was really kicking in our favor, maybe pass a generous safety inspection!

It's about 6 in the morning when I sit down in front a mostly reconstructed car to turn the key and discover how the universe rewards hard work.

The engine revved, the lights came on and the shift cable had appeared to be in proper form. We took her out for a spin, both hiding a little bit of shock that it actually worked.

The remaining pieces wouldn't take long so we marked the occasion with what would be the earliest and latest I've ever had beer. It was an odd breakfast food, but it felt awesome to be laughing instead of crying and scrambling to find missing pieces. Trey beat the [Dolphin] out of my car and got it back in working order again. At this point we realized the shop didn't need the fluorescents anymore as there was a decent amount of sunlight screaming into the shop.

We wrapped it all up about 9 in the morning. We cleaned up a bit, then I headed to work at about 10. Trey worked with his dad til a bit later then went to his job at the coffee shop till 11 that night.

We worked through the night on a car.

After our day jobs.

And before them.

We worked more hours in two days than some people work in a week.

And you know what?

It was awesome.

Sometimes overcoming ridiculous obstacles can be an adventure. And every guy wants that on some level. To kill a savage dragon....or you know, ninja screws in a Mazda Protege.