Good things to know about Cars and Trucks

I'm always amazed at how little most people know about the cars and trucks they drive. They all seem to know about driving and all that. That's not what I mean. What I mean is I am always surprised how little most people know about how cars and trucks actually work. And even less know about what kind of car or truck to buy if they actually want to work on and maintain their car or truck themselves. Since I grew up in the 1950s in the middle of the Western Car Culture I learned from my father how to change a tire and drive a car by the time I was 6 years old. There was this transference from riding horses, and horses and buggys and Conestoga wagons to motorcycles, cars, trucks and even semis(the largest trucks on hiways).

So, I thought I would share what I have found helpful to know about cars and trucks over the years.

First of all, if you want to maintain a vehicle yourself you likely want something like an older VW Bug or older VW Van or Camper Van. Or you want a truck made from anytime until about the 1970s or the same for any car or truck (pretty much) made before around 1975. (Even though this varied from vehicle to vehicle. Because almost every car made after 1975 was built specifically for you not to be able to maintain it usefully or safely. This was a way for car manufacturers to make more money off of you by forcing you to maintain your car hopefully for them through your local dealer.

So, if you want to spend all your money buying doing this on new cars it is always your choice. However, if you want to save about 3/4 of your maintenance costs and repair costs or more, find a car that you can easily repair and safely repair and maintain yourself. Unfortunately, most all these cars are now very old but I think there are still some trucks (pickup trucks) here and there that are built still so you can maintain them yourselves.

Another factor here is whether you live in a suburban or country environment where people won't get mad at you for working on your car there. So this doesn't usually work in an urban or if you are living in an apartment somewhere without enough space to work on your vehicle.

Usually people have either time or money. So if you have money but not time everything I'm saying here isn't relevant to you unless you want to save money. But if you now have time but not money then this is very important to you if you still want to be able to drive a car or truck.

Obviously, the easiest and simplest engines to work on are old VW Bugs from the 50s through the 1970s or so. The same with VW Vans and Camper Vans through the 1970s or so also as long as you can still buy an Idiot repair book for your model. The good thing about all VW vans and bugs of this era is that they are all air cooled and so usually start in cold weather when nothing else will immediately. The bad thing is that if you live in a place like Arizona, Nevada or New Mexico in the summertime you absolutely, (if you don't want them to overheat and warp a valve and lose your whole engine) need to get an external oil cooler with cooling fins and put it external on the vehicle so you don't have problems in temperatures above 110 or 115 degrees Fahrenheit. But usually in the cold they are great. Also, because the engine is always over the drive wheels it is almost like having a 4 wheel drive in many cases in traction, especially in an old bug. When I was young I had a 1965 and later a 1966 bug through college and even in 1 foot of snow to 2 feet of snow I could usually keep going. If I got stuck because I'm 6 foot 4 I could lift up the front end of the bug and spin it around if I got stuck to unstick myself in most cases. Or sometimes I could bounce the rear wheels out of being stuck up to my hubs. Anyway, a bug or van by VW can go almost anywhere. But now days they are too slow for most freeways and can be dangerous if driving on a really high speed freeway like in Los Angeles or San Diego. Bugs back then could do about 75 or 80 okay after about 1964 or 1965 but earlier than that they didn't go very fast. And Vans before about 1971 or 2 were safe up to about 70 (going downhill) unless you were in a wind. (Make sure you know the red line speed for your vehicle  in all gears so you don't blow it up especially in first and high gear.)

So, before you buy a car you want to work on to maintain or repair yourself make sure you understand where to get parts for it. Some cars and trucks are common and you can just go to any junkyard and find a wrecked or junked one and pull the part that is still good off the vehicle, pay for it and then install it on your vehicle. Another thing owners of various vehicles do is to buy a wrecked or junked version of the same year and model they own and then over the next 10 years or so slowly replace parts as needed on their vehicle with the one they bought for parts.

Until I started to do much better financially starting in the early to mid 1990s I did all these things at one point or another to save money on vehicles and transportation in general. For example, my father in may of 1979 welded me a front wheel carrier that fit on my trailer hitch on my 1976 Toyota longbed truck that I had a cabover camper on to do construction work out of to live in another area I was working in. This way I could tow my 1974 Honda 250 Xl which was a Honda enduro or dualsport licensed on and off road motorcycle with knobby tires all the way from San Diego where I lived then to a job in northern California. I left my motorcycle in neutral and towed it (so the rear wheel spun on the road.  Then I rented Camper Jacks when I reached my destination and pulled off my camper at the job site and then had two vehicles (truck and motorcycle) to move around in both for business and pleasure and had a really great time building a house up in the mountains. So being innovative and really thinking things through allows one to survive hard times like the last few years. In 1980 when I remarried and bought land up in the forests of the lower Cascades in Northern California unemployment was about 10% nationwide like now. So the ideas I'm talking about in this article might help you survive these times too and still be mobile with your own vehicle(s) and not be stuck somewhere without transportation to your next job somewhere you can make a better living.