path: root/essays/wired-piece-v5.txt

There's no temperature gauge. It broke several thousand desert miles ago. But you can smell it coming, whiffs of radiator fluid slip in the draft at the front of the engine doghouse. That's when you know, it's time to stop. It doesn't happen often. The 318 likes to run hot, but climbing mountains with a 12,000 pound RV on your back will eventually make any small block engine overheat.

I start looking for a place to pull over. There's nothing. The left side of the road is a sheer cut of rock, quartzite, phyllite, limestone laid bare by dynamite. To the east as far as I can see the barren rocky foothills of the White Mountains bubble and scrape their way toward the desert floor, dust swept and brown. Dotted here and there are clumps of creosote and sagebrush, interrupted occasionally by splashes of yellow Rabbitbrush. It's a stark but beautiful landscape. Without a pullout. But it doesn't matter, we haven't seen another car in at least an hour of driving. We are on Highway 168 somewhere in Nevada between the ghost town where we camped last night, and the top of the White Mountains. So I stop right in the middle of the road. 

When the engine shuts off a silence descends. No wind. No birds. No talking. We—my wife, three children, and me—just listen to the quiet hissing of steam escaping the radiator cap, and then a gentle gurgle of coolant in the engine. It's October, but I'm glad I had the presence of mind to stop in the shade, the Nevada sun casts a harsh light on the road. After a minute my wife turns to the kids and says, "you want to walk around and see if we can find some fossils?" 

As a child of the 70s, I've spent a fair share of time at the side of the road next to broken down vehicles. This is what vehicles of those days did. The 1967 VW fastback, which managed to get me home safely from the hospital after I was born, was replaced with a 1976 mustard yellow Volkswagen Dasher that routinely overheated near Yuma, AZ on its way from my childhood home in Los Angeles to my grandparents' home in Tucson. To this day my father curses that car. There was also a 1969 Ford F-150 pickup that was reliable until you stuck a camper on its back and tried to climb over the Sierra Nevada mountains. 

I was no stranger to dealing with the sweat, the cursing, the money, and the occasional blood, required to keep old cars running. It used to be a necessity. These days it's a labor of love. There is something in the shape of these vehicles, something in the way they move, the way they were built, that is unlike anything on the road today. 

Most people don't dive in as deep as we have. In June of 2016 my wife and I bought a 1969 Dodge Travco, a motorhome that, at the time, was just shy of its 50th birthday. We bought it to make it our full time home. We were tired of the suburbs and we wanted our kids to see the United States, to have a better sense of the place they were born. I didn’t want them to read about the deserts and mountains and forests, I wanted them to be in them. And I wanted them to also know the frustration and the joy of fixing something, of continuing down the road by the sweat and effort of, if not them, then at least me.

My kids called it the bus. Which was apt. When you say motorhome most people picture something that looks nothing like our old Dodge. To call it an RV is to say a Stradivarius is a violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. I wanted one from the first time I saw a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco. It looked awesome and it had one of the most common engines of the era, which meant we could figure out how to fix it on the road. We wouldn’t need to rely on anyone else to keep us going and safe.

There aren't many Travcos left in the world, but after a few months of haunting Craigslist, in June of 2016, I found one for sale in the mountains of North Carolina, in the sleepy college town of Mars Hill. A couple who restored vintage trailers found the bus somewhere in Tennessee and tried their hand at fixing it up. For some reason, they changed their mind and sold it.

I could have picked up where they left off, but as I looked it over, I decided I wanted to gut it instead. I wanted to understand the Travco, to design and build out everything in it exactly the way we would need it. Wood, sealant, metal, fiberglass, and all the things RV interiors are made out of are static. They just sit there, which makes them relatively easy to restore. I grew up around repair and restoration. My grandfather worked for the telephone company and had a shed full of tools behind his house in Tucson. When he retired he spent his weekends buying broken things at the swap meet and his weekdays fixing them to resell the next weekend. 

In the summer it was blazing hot in Grandpa’s shed, but my cousins and I didn't notice the heat. We were too excited watching him tear things apart and put them back together again. It was miraculous to take these discarded things—phones, televisions, radios, blenders—and breathe life back into them.

My father had a garage full of tools as well. I was playing with hammers and tape measures from the time I could walk, graduating to model airplanes in grade school. As I got older, I started using more tools, taking more things apart and trying to put them back together. I gravitated toward working with wood, which I found more forgiving than radios and blenders. I sketched bookshelves, tables, chairs, and then built them as best I could. I managed to come out of childhood with a few carpentry skills, and more importantly and misguidedly, a belief that with the right tools, anything was fixable. 

Which was why, standing there in the hills of North Carolina, looking over the bus for about an hour, I was unfazed. There was some obvious water damage. I knew I’d have to tear out walls and replace them with new wood. And if you’ve got the walls off you might as well re-wire, re-plumb, and re-insulate. But withlooking around the interior, I could see saw what I saw when I was sketching projects—the finished result. The only thing to do was do the work to make it look the way it already looked in my head. The engine I was blissfully ignorant about. It was hard to start, but once it got running it seemed good enough to my untrained ear. I handed over the money and climbed into the cockpit.

That first drive was nerve wracking. According to the odometers of my past cars, I've driven near 250,000 miles. But driving a car is nothing like strapping yourself to a 27-foot long monstrosity in unknown condition and pointing it downhill. A prudent man would have done a test drive. A couple of hairpin turns had my palms sweating—I made a note to myself to buy my next vehicle in Kansas—but I finally managed to get her out on a four lane road where she felt more manageable. After I had been driving, tensely, for a couple of hours I pulled over at a rest area to take a break.

The engine wasn't even off before two people came running up to the bus to see it, take pictures, ask about it: What year is it? Where did you get it. Then they asked the question I would come to realize everyone who loves old cars wanted to know: what engine is in it? 

The Travco is driven by a Chrysler 318 LA, a 5.2L small-block V8 engine. The LA stands for lightweight A series engine. This is the same engine you'll find in most things Dodge made in 1969, from the Dart to the D100 truck. Larger engines like the 440 are more sought after in vintage racing circles, but the 318, as most enthusiasts call it, is the unsung hero of the muscle car era. Some people claim the cylinder bore size in my 318 is bigger than what you find in a Dart, which would give the bus's 318 more power. I've done a little research, but still can’t confirm or deny this;  that said, on the side of a long mountain climb in the desert hills of Nevada for instance, it can feel like I have the power of a Dodge Dart, with 8000 extra pounds of weight on top.

On that first drive with the Travco, when I stopped at that rest area to collect my wits, I knew next to nothing about engines. I knew that the modern ones looked complex and intimidating and involved a lot of computer chips and automation via sensors. But I'm a former computer programmer; part of what I was after, when we decided to live in a vintage RV, was less computers. 

[[break?]]

The first year with the Travco, I spent most of my free time that year completely rebuilding the interior. For the bulk of 2016 it sat in our driveway, with me inside, sweating through the southern summer, freezing through the winter. Our neighbors begin to give directions based on it: “we’re two houses after the big blue bus.” I gutted the interior down to the bare fiberglass walls. I rebuilt all the electrical, propane, and water systems before insulating it and sealing it back up. I deliberately kept everything low tech. There's only one computer chip in the bus. There's no backup cameras, no motorized awnings, no automated systems at all. I had to go out of my way to find a hot water heater with a non-electric pilot light system. I have to get out and light it by hand every time we reach camp—but the system will never fail. 

A friend of mine joked that I had become like Captain Adama from Battlestar Gallactica, who famously wouldn’t let networked computers on his ship because they introduced a vulnerability he considered unacceptable. It wasn't that he was opposed to technology, his character commands a spaceship after all, it was a particular kind of technology, perhaps even a direction of technology, that Adama opposed. In his case networked technology opened to door to murderous robots bent on destroying humanity. Our case is a little less dramatic. We just didn't want to have to have something break when we're miles from the nearest place that could fix it.

No one is perfect though, and the bus does include one complex, fragile system: our solar panels and batteries. I thinkAnd I believe even Adama would approve of the solar panels; they have been our primary source of power for years. But he wouldn’t not approve of the Bluetooth network the solar charge controller uses. That network is an unnecessary potential point of failure. Sure, it’s nice to be able to check our solar and battery status from my phone, but we don’t have to do that. To mitigate that vulnerability [[OK? To avoid repeating point of failure 3x]] point of failure, I installed a shunt with a hardwired gauge. Should the Bluetooth fail, or, more likely, should I lose my phone, I can just look at the gauge. Like Adama, I am not opposed to technology. I’m opposed to unnecessary technology and single points of failure.

The comedian Mitch Hedburg tells a joke about how an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. In web design this is referred to as graceful degradation. How good your technology is depends on how elegantly it handles failures. (This is a design principle I bet, and perhaps even Adama , can could get behind.) A lot of modern design has taken exactly the opposite approach. In the name of convenience, complex systems are hidden behind deceptively simple user interfaces. But no matter how simple these things might seem when you use them, the complexity behind them is inherently fragile. 

It's not easy to argue against such systems—certainly it is more convenient to flip a switch and have hot water, or to be able to check solar battery status from my phone—but the trade off in potential for catastrophic failure isn't worth the small gain in convenience, especially when the nearest repair shop might be hundreds of miles away.

Sometimes inconvenience can even beend up  as a benefit. It has a way of forcing you off autopilot and getting you paying attention. With an engine as old as the Travco’s, you need to pay attention. It's part of the cost of admission. 

[[break]]

Modern user interfaces have hidden this fact from you, but the first time you start your car every morning the engine is cold, which makes it hard tomaking it difficult to start. There are three important components in an internal combustion engine: air, fuel, and spark. The spark is a constant, but when your engine is cold it needs more fuel than air. A computer chip controls this mixture in modern cars, but in older, aspirated engines like the 318, the carburetor controls this mixture with a flap that opens and closes. In our 318 this flap is controlled by the driver via the choke cable—a steel wire attached to the carburetor flap at one end, and a knob on the dashboard at the other. Pull out the knob and the flap in the carburetor closes, limiting the air coming in, and allowing the cold engine to start up.

Manual choke is archaic. But since ours was broken when we got it, I went even more archaic. Every time I start the engine I lift up the engine cover, unscrew the air filter, and close the carburetor flap with my finger. At first this was just expedient. Fixing the choke was on my list of things to do, but finding a long enough choke cable, with a period-correct Dodge dashboard knob took years of scouring eBay. By the time I found one I was simply used to doing it myself, literally by hand. The eBay choke cable has been sitting in a storage hatch under the back bed for more than a year.  

The truth is, I like opening the engine, I like making sure everything looks right, I like watching it come to life. If something is wrong, I know right away. Once a wire came off the ignition coil and instead of wondering why the engine wasn't starting—which it wasn't—I was startled to watch electricity arcing out of the ignition coil. That's not right. But it was also very simple to fix. I found the wire and plugged it back in. The engine started right up.

Every morning before we head out on the road, I open the engine cover and spend some time studying the 318, connecting with it. It's a ritual, somewhere between making coffee and invoking the gods, a small part of my morning that's dedicated to making sure the rest of our day goes smoothly. For a long time I really was looking over the engine before every drive;  these days I am often just spending time with it.

Car enthusiasts often get this way. It might seem irrational to be attached to a particular set of nuts and bolts and cast iron, but it happens. Now, driving around the country, when I see broken down cars in someone's yard I don't see junk, I see failed relationships.

—

The bus is very much a relationship. The five of us moved in and hit the road on April 1, 2017. My wife said that if it didn't work out we’d just pass it off as a bad April Fools joke. It worked out. Though like any relationship, me and the bus have had some rocky moments.

April 2nd, less than 100 miles from home, we had our first problem. I had just finished backing into aour first campsite at Raysville campground, still in Georgia, when I smelled a strange scent, something like burnt grapefruit. I laid down in dirt and slidslide myself under the engine. A thin, warm redread liquid splashed on my forehead. Transmission fluid was leaking out of the bottom of the radiator. There are two transmission cooler cooler lines running into the bottom of the radiator where transmission fluid is cooled before being sent back to the transmission.

I didn't know exactly how to fix it, but I knew enough about engines to know that this wasn't too serious. As long as Iat I kept the fluid level topped off, it wouldn’tshouldn’t be too much of a problem. I didn't want to disrupt our new life on the road by taking the bus in for repairs on our third day out. Instead I added a transmission fluid refill to my morning ritual. of starting the engine. 

In the first three weeks, I went through a lot of transmission fluid those first three weeks. I topped it off every morning before we hit the road and every time we stopped for gas. Treating symptoms works for a while, but inevitably the underlying cause gets worse. We made it down to the South Carolina coast, and then swung south, through the windswept marshes of the Georgia coast, and then we headed inland, across the swampy pine flats of south Georgia and into the Florida panhandle.

Part of the reason I put off dealing with the leak is that we were heading tostaying at a friend'sfriends beach house on St. Georgia Island. But then the day we arrivedwe were due to arrive the leak got worse. I pulled into the driveway with barely any transmission fluid left, even though and I had just filled the reservoir two hours before. We unpacked for a week out of the bus and I made spent an hour on the phone searching for a mechanic willing to work on such and old, huge vehicle, and finally and after a few days, . I found one whothat was game. AA few days later, . and a few days later, with my wallet a bit lighter, we had the problem was solved. 

So we got back in the bus and We continued on our way, tracing a route along the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast, west through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, right into New Orleans where people cheered the bus from the sidewalks as weI drove through town. For those two months the bus ran perfectly. But as After New Orleans though, as we headed into the June heat of Texas, the temperature gauge began to climb. And climb. All the way into the red. We took to driving in the early mornings, which helped, but I knew something needed to be done. 

We stopped to visit relatives in Dallas and had the radiator re-cored. That, which would eliminated ite the radiator as the source of the problem. Not an hour outside of Dallas though the temperature gauge shot right back up to the red. We stopped at another repair shoip. They replaced the water pump and thermostat, more possible causes of running hot. We headed out of town early again, before it got too hot. That worked. Until it got hot. And then, the temperature gauge climbed again. 

Our thermostat problemThat, andcombined with the brutal West Texas hea,t was getting to us. I punted. In tktk where?We got a hotel for the night and I called my uncle. He listened to me for a while,bit and then told me to go get a temperature gun and take readings around the engine when it was running. That night, I I ran out that night and paid way too much for a temperaturefor temperature gun at a local hardware store and we hit the road again early the next morning. EI stopped every half hour, I stopped, and got out and took temp readings on the top and bottom of the engine. Everything was well within the operating parameters. WeI drove on into the mid day heat and watched the temperature gauge climb again. But the readings from the gun never changed. I called my uncle back. If I were you he said, I'd pull out that temperature sensor and chuck it out in the desert somewhere." I hung up feelingthinking that the main problem with the bus was me. I didn't even know how to find the problems, let alone fix them. 

[[we need to see you following his advice then, because reader isn’t clear if he’s joking or not. And, we now need to know something about your uncle, so we can sense the relationship/his help, more clearly. Maybe something like:

My uncle, though, did. He was a [[TKTK what/who is he/what does he do? ]] [[Also is he your mom’s brother or your Dad’s? A little tiny bit of bio//and show him to us? What does he look like?] So I took his advice. ]
I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong, and I unhooked the temperature gauge from the sensor. And everything was fine. I was happy to realize there was nothing wrong;  so it wouldn't stress me out, but I wasn't happy thinking about the thousands1000s of dollars I'd spent trying to fix what turned out to be faulty $15 sensor. How did my uncle know what to do without even being there? How did I learn to do that? The learning curve felt insurmountably steep. I resigned myself to learning the hard way: by bashing my head against the problem until I gave up and turned to someone with more experience.

Two months later, near the end of a summer spent in cool pine forests in the Rrocky Mmountains, we decided to attempt a 10,000 foot pass near Ridgway Colorado. We'd previously managed to get to 9,600 feet before, and tk pass was not a steep climb as Rocky Mountain passes go. I thought we could do it. We started early, but we didn't get more than a mile out of town before I smelled that familiar grapefruit smell of transmission fluid. I pulled over and crawled under the bus —and saw the only to see the same transmission cooler line leaking again. 

We turned around, and limped back to Ridgway, and I. I found a side street to park on, in front of a mechanic's shop as it turned out. I got under the bus againto see what I could. This time I knew what I was looking for, and sure enough, once I got the nut off the flare was not just cracked but missing a whole chunk. The transimission cooler lines are fitted enoughenugh that I couldn't just cut them off, put in a new flare and reattach them. They were too short for that, and even if I could have made it work they would have been nearly touching the exhaust, which would heat them far more that the transmission cooler ever cooled them.

I was forced to reach out for help, get helppunt again. I called around for a shop that had big enough bays to work on the bus andus and eventually found one in nearby Montrose, TK miles away. I put the existing line back on as best I could and limped back to the Ridgway State Park campground [[right?]the campground, and we started. That night we repacking, ed and gathering uploaded what we needneeded for a few days of tent camping in a rental car. 

That evening, I was sitting outside the laundry room in the campgroundat Ridgway State Park, watching the famous golden light of the Rockies play across the Cimmarron Range, when a fellow camper came to do his laundry. HeAfter he stuffed his laundry in the machine, and we started talking. TheEventually the conversation came around to the bus, as most conversations I have in campgrounds do. After he asked about thewhich engine was in it, he took a different tack than most people. He asked me something no one else ever had, something that caught me off guard. Something thatand has haunted me ever since: . He said, "Ddo you turn your own wrenches?" I saidtold him I did as much as I could, but that sometimes I had to get professional help. "You have to turn your own wrenches," he said shaking his head. "You can't have a vehicle like that if you don't turn your own wrenches." 

This I realized that night, this is an absolute truth. You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both. We spent a couple weeks in a tent while the mechanics in Montrose tried to find new transmission cooler lines for the bus. Eventually they did and we were on our way again, but not for long. A couple weeks later, coming down western Utah, bound for Zion National Park, I stopped for gas and guess what I saw pooling under the bus? You can't have a vehicle like this if you don't turn your own wrenches. You'll go crazy or broke or both.

It was a Sunday in Utah. We tried to find a mechanic, but nothingthere was no one open. Nothing happens on a Sunday in Utah. SoIn the end we just pulled over on a back street, across from a mechanic's shop that was closed. I crawled under the bus and started poking around. This time the leak was from the back of the transmission line rather than the front. I unscrewed it and sure enough, the flare was cracked. I knew what to do, but I didn't have theto tools and the hardware stores weren't open. 

I climbed out from under and sat down on the Travco’s step, wiping the grease from my hands. My wife had just asked was just asking me what we were going to do, when the rolling metal door of the shop across the street rattledstreet, rattled and then flew opencame flying up and open with a clang. A man about my age came walking over and asked if I needed help. I told him my problem. It turned out it was his shop. He didn't work Sundays, but he was therestill at the shop working on his own projects. Together we pulled off the transmission line, and took it inside, and cut off the cracked flare, and re-flared it. Then heWe put it back on and he showed me where the lastprevious mechanic had gone wrong. He'd overtightened the TKTKit and cracked the metal. We tightened it. Gently. The mechanic wouldn't take any money. Help someone else out someday, he told me.

This is, in part, of what I love about living in the bus, part of why we keep doing it five years later. We—because we haven't stopped needing to fix things. In the course of writing this article I had to rebuild the vacuum booster that powers our brakes system, replace two belts, change the spark plugs, and half a dozen other projects. The bus will never not need fixing. But mythe relationship has changed. I no longer look at the engine in awe and mystery. I know what all the parts do now. I don't know everything that can go wrong, and I don't always know what to do when it does, but I have the thing I've come to prize the most—the relationship with my our fellow shade tree mechanics and car enthusiasts. They are what keeps me doing this. It’sIt isn't just me turning my own wrenches, it's everyone who turns their own wrenches. 

--

[[SG, seems like we want to actually go to the fact that you, at this point, knew that the engine didn’t need fixing, but cooling. I’d skip the link to that community, OR, make it more explicit that you and them would know, this  isn’t a thing that can be fixed. So here are two suggestions:

Sitting at the side of the road in Nevada, TK YEARS in with the Travco, I knew that though, that community feels far away. It wouldn't do me much good even it was here though. The engine overheating isn't really a thing that can be fixed. It's what happens when a small engine tries to climb a big hill. OldWhether its fixing it, or just deal with it's limitations, old cars will teach you so much, including patience.

Even within the community of repair enthusiasts we get some strange looks when we say we actually live in a 1969 RV. It makes me smile a little, sitting out here in the middle of the Nevada desert foothills, waiting for the engine to cool enough to keep plodding up the hill. 

I go for a walk up the road, to see what's beyond the next curve. Maybe the road crests a ridge and drops into a cool, lush valley with a river running through it. The bend doesn't seem to end though., I keep walking but can never more than the next few hundred yards. I give up and head back to the bus. My wife and kids are back from their explorations, ready to go. The engine has cooled some, so we clamor in and decidedecided to make another push up the mountains. ButThe problem is that now we're starting from zero. On this kind of incline, starting from a full stop I give us a mile before we overheat again. (I won’t know exactly, will never know of course because the odometer is broken). , but we don't get far. But we get on down the road. After about TKTK minutes [[because we already used “a mile”]]what I'd guess is a mile I spy a pull out. I haven't smelled radiator fluid yet, but I decided to take advantage of the ability to pull off the roadpull out. 

My wife and I discuss turning back. There's a strange college back in the valley behind us called Deep Springs. They have a sign out front that says no phone and not to bother them, but something tells me they'd be okay with the buswith bus. We could get a fresh start in the morning. It's been a long day of driving and the kids are tired and hot. 

Then we hearhere anthat unmistakable sound that always makes me smile. A loud engine, probably a Harley Davidson, is rumbling up the hill. In a few minutes the bike appearsis too us and the rider pulls over. He askschecks to see if we're okay.  I tell him we are. We go through the usual talk about the bus. Then, but he tells us we're only about a mile from the top. 

That changes everything. Suddenly we're not quite so tired. The prospect of making it over the mountains feels possible again. We thank the rider and he continues on his wayup. We decide to give the engine some more timeanother bit to cool before we try again. 

As we wait, I think aboutI am thinking about a conversation I had with some construction workers earlier in the day. We had stopped at the top of athe first pass forand had a snack. A road work crew we’d passed coming up the mountain pulled over nearbyinto the same turnout we were in. I hadtook askedthe opportunity to ask them about the next pass, the one we're sitting on now. They saidseemed to think we’d be fine, though one of them mentioned,them did say, "there's one part we call the narrows, it’s only one lane through there." I stared at him for a minute. "Seriously?" “Seriously.” “Don’t tell my wife that.”

NowThis conversation comes back to me now and I mention thisit, as casually as I can, to my wife. She does not seem thrilled, but we agree to try for the top. It's a long mile, we never get above twenty miles an hour, but after half an hour, we make it to the topafterabout half an hour later we are at the top. aA spectacular view of the Owens Valley in California opens up below. I can see the Sierra Nevada mountains rising up out the hazy valley. We are at the top. I have just a second to enjoy it before we passgo flying past a sign that says, "Caution, One Lane Road Ahead."

The narrows come up so fast we don't really have time to even plan for it. We're just in it. ThankfullyFortunately, nothing comesis coming the other way., but toit is very much a one lane road. To this day I have no idea what happens if you meet another car coming the opposite way, especially if its one of the empty hay trucks that drive the rest of highway 168 at about 70 miles an hour. 

Coming down the steep grade mountain we is easier than coming up, but we do still stop to rest the brakes a few times. We have a vacuum brake system that works extremely well, but long continuous down grades of 6-8 percent do require taking breaks. After TK hours, A few hours later though we pull into a campground outside of Bishop, California. It's empty this time of year and the road in is full of ruts that have the bus lurching and creaking around. About TK how far along, we hearTherew's a loud clang at one point and mMy wife and I look at each other. I, but I keep going and pull into the first campsite, and s. I shut off the engine for the final time with a sense of deep relief.

–

tk broken axle story and fixing the bus with my uncle.

[[will pick up the rest/work through the rest in morning]]

Which wasisThat's part of why we were at the side of the road that day in Nevada. We were on our way to visit my uncle. I didn't know it yet that day, but he would end up saving us just a couple of days later. He would keep the bus going when it almost broke completely, in an irreparable way. But more than that, he would show me how to turn my own wrenches. He helped me rebuild my carburetor and exhaust system;, and he showed me that there was no mystery to it. It's all just nuts and bolts he would saytell me every time I got frustrated. It’sRemember it's all just nuts and bolts. 

[[Scott, here’s a suggested tightened up version (I kept your full original below). It felt like we could be stronger if shorter, tighter:]]

Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. It's the problem solving that happens in your head. That’s a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still early on this journey, but it is infectious when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.

It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. And there’s my uncle, who knows more about engines than I ever will.

The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self-reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to the spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is a very hierarchical one, which means those of us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.




Original:

Nuts and bolts aren't where most of the work is though. Most of the work I do in keeping this engine running happens in my head. A mechanic isn't someone who blindly turns wrenches, anyone can do that. A mechanic, professional or otherwise, is someone who can listen to an engine and figure out, based on experience, which nuts and bolts need turning. It's the problem solving that happens in your head that separates those who can fix an engine from those who cannot. This is a skill that takes years, even decades to develop. I am still very early on this journey, but it is infectious and exhilarating when you hold something unknown in your head and step through the system until you come up with a hypothesis about what might be wrong. This takes me many miles of driving, many miles of thinking.

It also takes asking many questions of many people. I've been fortunate to have my uncle who knows more about engines than I ever will to help me out, but there have been plenty of others as well. I've met Travco salesmen who knew the original designer, mechanics who've worked on Travcos in the past, and dozens of people who knew the 318 engine inside and out. All of it put together and you have perhaps the most important part of repairing anything: the community.

The community of people repairing things is an interesting group, perched on an interesting dichotomy. We are, by and large, a group of people who prize self-reliance. Whether that self-reliance grows out of economic necessity, pure enjoyment, or some other factor, it is essential to the spirit of repair. At the same time, the community is a very hierarchical one, which means those of us near the bottom of the hierarchy must rely on and must learn from those above us, which isn't very self-reliant, but I think this is a big part of what makes this an interesting and dynamic community. Self-reliance alone tends to make you isolated and either conceited (if you're good, or think you are) or intimidated (if you know you're not very good). The only way out of these predicaments is to connect with other people who know more than you. In the first case they'll quickly put you in your place, in the second, they'll lift you up to where they are.






things I’ve cut:


[[TKTk like:]] But it wasn't the look that got me. [[Then something like]] I felt that it was important to be able to repair our home, on the road, TKTK keep me and my family safe. [[then]]


 violin. The Travco is not an RV; it’s a 27 foot long fiberglass container of beauty and joy. It’s bright 1960s turquoise and white with sweeping curves and rounded windows. It is bold in a sea of beige modern RVs. It hails from a very different era, one when the Right to Repair was the Need to Repair, and when the need to repair was an unspoken, accepted part of using technology. 

The labor of maintenance is the price of admission to the world of old vehicles, that's all. If you love the design, the aesthetics, the limits, of thosethe vehicles of that era then you don’t hesitate to pay feepricethe admission. 


--

The Travco was cool enough that it was once featured in Playboy magazine. Johnny Cash had one. So did James Dean and John Wayne. I wanted one from the first time I sawran across a picture of one back in 2016. From that moment on my wife and I knew we were getting a Dodge Travco.