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Unless you've lived someplace that experiences a deep winter freeze, you can’t fully appreciate the joy that is springtime automotive recommissioning. During the months of being cooped up indoors, barely seeing sunlight during the workweek, with your fun car in hibernation in your garage or maybe at some storage facility nearby, you make a list—mental or actual—of all the maintenance you’re going to do once the thaw begins. You start planning, accumulating parts, stocking up on consumables.
Once it starts to get above freezing you creep out to the garage for short stints, preparing. It gets a little warmer and you change the fluids or maybe execute a more ambitious upgrade. Then spring rains come and wash the last of the salt off the roads, and it’s finally time to venture out.
Spring maintenance marks the start of our driving season. It’s work, but also a reward for dealing with months of roads unsuitable for anything you want to keep from the clutches of cancerous rust. Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves to keep from going insane during the winter months.
Of course, the present pandemic turns all that on its head. Here in Detroit, we managed to get in Autorama last year—our harbinger of spring—before mass gatherings were effectively banned. Others weren’t so lucky; Cleveland’s Piston-Powered event was canceled after cars had already begun the move-in process. Car shows, both new and classic, were canceled. So were races. Huge swaths of the population were being ordered to shelter in place.
If coronavirus wasn’t an existential threat, it turned into something of an existentialist one—especially for those of us fortunate enough to be able to continue our employment remotely. Routines both daily and seasonal were utterly disrupted, and our usual avenues of distraction and escapism were closed off. In a long-term battle against an enemy we can’t even see, we were told that the best thing we could do is to stay in and do nothing at all. This may be necessary, but it goes against our very human nature as doers.
Fortunately, it turns out that people who choose to take on the challenges of a project car are, whether we realize it or not, masters of devising and defining our own purpose. And in that light I’m using spring maintenance as the antidote to the dark clouds of doom. If you have a place to work and something that needs doing, I’d advise you to do the same.
In my case, I’m going to bring my 1988 Jeep Grand Wagoneer back to life. It’s been sitting in my driveway for a while now, as the growing fluid stains beneath it attest. It’s sitting on cracked, rotting tires unsuitable for road use wrapped around corroding black steelies. Once a fairly clean Western truck, it’s got its fair share of rust problems (I used it as a year-round driver back when I was in college, and the road salt did its thing). There’s a phantom drain on the electrical system. It’s filthy.
Basically, it’s a huge woodgrained mental burden that I’m reminded of every time I look out my back window. Though I said more or less the same thing last year, this is probably my last shot at turning this truck around before I have to admit defeat. It runs pretty well, but if I can’t address the rust problems, I’d be better off selling it to someone who will take care of it.
The turnaround starts this spring. After doing some small-scale experimentation with Fluid Film rust inhibitor, I bought 2 gallons of the stuff and I’m going to use it on the Jeep’s (miraculously solid) underbody with a cheapo Harbor Freight sprayer. I’m going to change all the fluids and give it a deep cleaning. And to get it back on the road, I’m installing a set of new American Racing wheels and BFGoodrich All-Terrain T/A KO2 tires (let it never be said that decades of off-road race sponsorship doesn’t create new customers).
The way I see it, coronavirus can’t get me if I’m underneath my truck, and the endless, inevitable frustration served up by a neglected, old Jeep will distract me from whatever is going on in the wider world. And if I can drive out of this pandemic on a new set of tires, carburetor perfectly tuned, rust somewhat impeded, I’ll have created a sense of accomplishment where there was previously only uncertainty and fear. If you have the facilities to do so, I urge you get out there and get working, too. Surely there’s something you’ve been putting off.
It might seem a little foolish given everything else that’s going on, but it’s times like these when even basic tasks like an oil change are especially important. They’re mental maintenance, as well. Truthfully, they always have been.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go find my work gloves.
