Thread: How young did you start, and did it result in obsession?

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Originally Posted by REGs

Hey Don,

I was just ball busting on the 1933 .... that'd make you as old as ..... dirt!!! Did they even have round wheels back then??

Paul

Actually, I remember fondly the day a caveman down the hill from me invented DIRT.

Don

I don't think I have an obsession for cars so much as one for tinkering with stuff, the bigger and noisier, the better. I don't know where I got it from, either; my dad was not at all mechanically inclined, and my grandads were inclined only so far as necessity dictated. I first did something creative with a wrench and other tools when I was somewhere around six or seven, copied the "big kids" roller skate scooters by my self, and caught he77 for messing up that pair of skates. Got my first bike that year, too, and immediately started messing with it, figuring out just how the coaster brake worked, and what made bearings tick. A while later, my dad got a new power mower, the reel kind, and I promptly took the engine of of it and fit it to my "little red wagon"; caught it in spades for that one, and had to fix the mower, to boot. I had to get my mechanical jones satisfied at the well of other kids and their dads, if they were so inclined; in high school, since I couldn't afford my own car, I worked on other guy's cars - for free. I never have built a true hot rod; all of my "toys" have been more in the muscle car class, or in years after I quit drag racin and sold my Chevelle, 4x4 trucks. My '59 Chevy has been the one constant, and it has been well used in pursuits other than as a rod. Along the way, much of the money I saved up for automotive oriented projects got diverted to other stuff, and I just kept on dreamin'. And so it goes, even now. I still "tinker" as my Bride calls it, but for the most part, it is stuff that is more pressing than rebuilding the '59 for the third time. Not to mention, that if I lay down on a creeper, I may just take a nap, instead of making hay, and it will take me a lot longer to get down, and back up.

I think this was the major impact on my life at the age of 6, although not the original because mine was worn out from looking at it so much, found this one at a swap meet about 40 years ago in Lodi Calif. Circa 1951 hot rod trend book #102

I can still remember my first magazine.... a 1958 issue of Hot Rod. I think it had Winternationals coverage. :-)

I ended up with a collection of a few thousand. I even found some used early mags back to '46! I sold them all off (except couple a couple hundred "faves") about 5 years ago.