Something eminently satisfying about winter maintenance. During the driving
season, irritants pop up, ignored whenever possible during the joy of it all.
But winter...that's when they get sorted.
The needle that fell off the speedometer last spring? Fixed.
The dim yellow lights that illuminated the speedo and tach, replaced by amazing
LED's.
The clutch that slipped. Replaced.
The soft clutch pedal, replaced with a much less used pressure plate...it'll
change the whole feel of driving, I'm thinking.
Then there's the usual oil change, greasing, wheel-bearing packing, fluif
topoffs.
I know people can love these cars and enjoy driving them without ever doing
their own work, and that's as good as anything else. But for me, personally,
there's something amazing about squeezing an extra two spurts of grease into a
zerk that you had no idea was quite so dry as all that. And testing the
instrument panel when you've transitioned from filament to LED, and seeing it
shine brighter than ever, brighter white than I even thought possible.
Watching the guy at Quantum Mechanics fish a broken tooth out of my
transmission. Draining the oil and putting a fresh WIX filter and new oil in
while not seeing any metal shavings around the magnet in the drain plug.
I joke about engineers and English majors here. But in these moments, I know
why you do what you do. Or at least a bit of it. And I find it gratifying.
In fact, if it weren't complicated, I might do it too.
Now, with luck, I won't have any irritating bugs this coming driving season so
I don't have so much to fix next winter!
Terry Smith, '59 TR3A
New Hampshire
** triumphs@autox.team.net **
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