Two years ago I moved from Detroit to Los Angeles, and along for the ride were four cars — two driven the 2,300 miles, the other two towed. The truth was, all four were projects in need of significant work, and I was excited to wrench on them somewhere warm, finally. Los Angeles, I figured, would be where I’d get all my projects done quickly and efficiently. But oh boy was I wrong.
On the face of it, Los Angeles seems like an amazing place to wrench on cars, and in some ways, it has been. I can wrench pretty much 24/7 thanks to excellent weather, and the junkyards are full of rust-free gold that I can dismantle in no-time. Do you know how many Michigan-junkyard Jeep Cherokees I had to crawl under to find a decent neutral safety switch that would come off without breaking due to rust? Trick question: After about 20, I gave up.
Seriously, look at how miserable the conditions were when I removed this rear axle off a Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ 5.9:
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And after yanking that horribly rusty axle, I had to use electrolysis to get all the crust off:
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Now look at what junkyard life is like in California:
Beyond the junkyards being filled with rust-free gold, a number of parts companies are based out of California; sometimes I can actually just drive to them. When I fix my brother’s 1966 Mustang’s suspension, my plan is to just head up the street to Mustangs, etc., literally four miles from my workplace in Van Nuys. When I finally get to fixing my Nash Metropolitan, I just have to drive 12 miles and I’m at the Metropolitan Pit Stop.
So the weather is amazing and the parts availability is out of this world. That’s all you need, right? You need to have decent weather in which to fix your stuff, and you need parts. Sounds perfect.
Not really.
No, what I have learned is that the single biggest factor in determining how much time one can devote to a car project is proximity to that car.
Obviously, I don’t really have an apples-to-apples comparison since I was a writer in Michigan and I’m an EIC (technically a COO) in LA, so in theory I have less time on my hands. But it’s not like I was half-assing my job in Michigan — I was writing a ton. And yet, I still got my projects done.
The reason isn’t solely that I had a less demanding job, it’s that my cars were close by. This allowed me to use even small amounts of downtime to fix things. If I was waiting for a video to upload, I could run outside and pop off a carburetor. If I wanted to take a little lunch break, I’d just run outside and weld a piece of 1/8″ steel plate to fill the hole in my Jeep XJ unibody rail.
Look at all this wrenching I was able to do
Yes, I spent many, many hours repairing cars in sub-zero temperatures, but at least I wrenched. I could do it, even if just five or ten minutes at a time. I rebuilt my Jeep J10’s manual transmission, turned a Postal Jeep from a stationary pile of rust into a reliable and mobile pile of rust, I refreshed a Jeep 4.0 engine, I replaced a Honda Accord’s timing belt, I swapped multiple Jeep 4.0 cylinder heads, I replaced multiple axles, I welded a bunch of floors and frames and I could go on and on. In Michigan, I was a wrenching machine, and things got done quickly.
Here in LA, I’ve got great parts availability (though the junkyards are kinda expensive), the weather means I can wrench all the time, the rust-free cars here are dirt cheap, and honestly, the driving is better once you do get your projects finished. But getting things done here has taken me so much longer than in Michigan, and it really comes down to proximity to my vehicles. This, to me, is the #1 factor — right along with project management (i.e. writing a list of steps, parts needed, etc.) — in determining how quickly I can get a project done.
I, like many Angelinos, live in a place that house only a couple of cars — maybe a few more on the street, though that’s also far from an ideal place to wrench. I live between 20 minutes and 90 minutes from my car collection — one way. So if I’m at home and I have a spare five minutes, I can’t just hop out to the garage/driveway and zip off an exhaust manifold. I’ve go to plan things out, and if I forget tools/parts at home, that’s it — that day of wrenching is over.
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This is the challenge of wrenching in a city like LA, where there are lots of people, and houses with garages and huge driveways aren’t exactly cheap. Yes, you can find really inexpensive, rust-free cars and good parts, but to actually put those parts onto those cars is really challenging unless you can live near those vehicles.
I haven’t even mentioned emissions restrictions in LA, which make getting post-1975 carbureted cars on the road legally an absolute nightmare. This is a big challenge, of course, for my 1985 Jeep J10, and there are the taxes and gas prices and on and on — but more than anything, my biggest wrenching issue is making sure my projects are close to where I live so I can just pop out and get things done on small step at a time.
I am able to do this when I’m at work here at Galpin, where my cars are stored (something I’m super grateful to be able to do), so it’s not all bad. But I don’t like keeping my tools unlocked, so I always bring those home; and finding time during work to wrench is just not the same as living near my project cars. It’s certainly not the same as having a garage, where I could store tools and keep warm in the winter and maybe cool in the hot summer. Hopefully that changes soon; even if it doesn’t, I’m just grateful to have a place to store my cars, and though I won’t be able to wrench during commercial breaks, it just means that when I do set aside time to wrench in the work parking lot, I have to be more diligent about making sure I bring all my tools, and I have to more efficiently utilize that time. Because time, in LA, is really the resource that I’ve found runs out faster than I could possibly have imagined.
Anyway, about three years ago, I wrote the article “As Someone Who Loves Cars, I’m Struggling To Decide If I Want To Move From Detroit To LA,” and in it I asserted:
Wrenching on junkers on the side of the road in LA sounds, honestly, no worse than fixing crap-cans in 20 below weather here in Michigan, but still not great.
I’d say that, especially in the summer in Van Nuys, wrenching in a parking lot is right on par with wrenching in 20-below weather, though being able to pop into your house to access your well-organized tools and to boil up some hot cocoa was clutch. So it’s a bit of a challenge, wrenching on cars in LA, but I’m sure I’ll be a bit more organized in my approach, and I’ll maximize what I get done when I make that 20-minute drove from my place. I have someone interested in buying my 1954 Willys, so I’m frantically trying to get that machine running and driving; this time a year, the weather (aside from the smoke) has been nice, so popping in a new mechanical fuel pump and fuel tank was actually a pleasant fix. I did have to do this over a period of days, since I had to buy fuel hose, and since I had left a part at home.
Maybe I’ll get used to slower wrenching here in SoCal, or maybe I’ll just step my game up.
I recommend a set of high quality electric tools to make the most of your limited wrenching time. It’s amazing how much faster things get done with a battery ratchet and impact gun. And even a simple electric screwdriver (not power drill)
I get it my boat’s been half taken apart for 2 years because it’s 10 mi away…
I feel ya… I am inbetween two homes–one that is big enough but not in the right place and the other than I’m renoing (and hoping to expand) and is in the right place. Eventually we will rent or sell the other one but right now it has most of my stuff. They are 35 minutes apart (or up to an hour during rush). This is painful for the same reasons–I am constantly shuttling tools and materials back and forth and many, many times I’ve discovered I was missing the right tool, or bolt/nut, or part or whatever and it’s become so frustrating that I’m just done for the night when that happens.
Locking tool box at work (or as another suggested, bolted to the bed of a pickup). RV in the parking lot? I’m sure Mercedes has suggestions, and you already have the Aztek! These are all very solvable problems, if you make them a priority.
He needs a cargo van with tool boxes inside.
Hmm I hear that Autopian just purchased a clapped out NYC taxi cab. Get that on the road, throw in some locking tool boxes in the back and then he can shuttle people on the commute to and from work and home.
Autopian needs to rent a small warehouse type building where wrenching can occur. I suggest it also has a few folding cots for those long nights.
It took you too long to get to the real reason: time
As we get older, we gain more money, and lose more time. It’s why a lot of older wrenchers just pay others to do it for them.
Your distance issue is not a distance issue, but rather a time issue. Just so you know, which you already do, it doesn’t get any better unless you become rich and can start to pay for time.
Exactly right. My friends have a great shop for all their motorcycles but it’s 25 minutes away. My garage is 10 feet away. I get a huge amount done by working 20-25min almost every morning.
Need a tool in Galpin? Call ENHRN and ask her to drop it over. Might work once because you’re newly weds. My wife would, not unreasonably, tell me to go f*** myself.
Which points to another challenge. Spending time with ENHRN is a bigger priority than wrenching on a crap can. I had way more hobbies and time before the spouse and offspring. I don’t regret for a second the time refocus, but there’s a lot that gets deprioritized once the family thing comes along.
Right here with you. I have a decent garage that I can do basic maintenance on my cars and now that I have a 2 year old, the desire to spend my spare time out there than with him is drastically reduced. Now once he gets a little older and gets out there with me? Then its game on!
I feel this on the deepest of levels. I recently moved back to where my van is parked, after three years living an hour from its parking spot. In the past three weeks I’ve gotten so much more done on the van than in the previous three years.
Something I learned working on cars and tractors and the like up in the Central Valley, where it gets much hotter than it does in LA, is the value of a heavy duty plant spraying mister bottle.
That wrench wrench you put down just a couple minutes ago that’s now 150°? Squirt some water on it..
If I were doing that now, one of those little folding shade things like vendors at farmers markets use would be at the top of my shopping list.
And didn’t you just buy a pick up truck? Get one of those toolboxes that goes behind the cab and make sure that it is deep enough to touch the bed of the truck, and drill a bunch of holes through the bottom of the toolbox and through the bed and bolt it to the bed. Use three-quarter inch carriage bolts with the heads on the underneath and the nuts in the box.
If you can find an old diamond plate steel box get that because shiny aluminum stuff attracts the wrong kind of people that have tools that can go through shiny aluminum stuff.
Smart!
Your new look tells me you will park a 25′ travel trailer in the corner of the Galpin lot, run water & electric to it, and move in. Your wife wont object because that dope chain says you have a temper.
I bet you could get a house in Tehachapi with plenty of land for cheap.
🙂
Or Palmdale/Lancaster. Then he’d be convenient to Willow Springs and El Mirage. And they’re probably begging for residents in California City.
Lord, yes, this is true. I’ve got one garage space at home, two that are two blocks down the street, and two that are about two miles away. Having wrenching space at home radically improves my ability to get shit done, and is absolutely essential to me. I live in Chicago, so while it’s not as hard as in LA, it’s not the easiest. The garage two blocks down the street is better than I expected.
Only a problem if you’re nuts enough to have a “collection”… I’ve got a small space with a small garage, but plenty enough to work on the one project car I have without a commute. For a brief period of time I had more cars than space and it drove me nuts. I dumped a couple of them and never looked back.
David, you really went to a junkyard for a neutral safety switch? – something that is low cost and readily available and much more likely to last the lifetime of your truck than the junkyard replacement. The junkyard is where you go to get parts that are expensive and not otherwise available – or parts with lots of components – like your fully-dressed axle. More than once I have gone to the junkyard for cosmetic screws and usually the counter guy just says come back and pay me next time when you buy something real.
That was for Project Swiss Cheese, a true budget build. I think I paid like $2800 all in for that Moab-worthy beast.
I once stored projects across the Valley from where I lived and yes they were pretty-much dead for that time, along with my car budget being spent on the rent. Eventually you get into a one-million-dollar house and yard so you can work on your 1K shitbox at home.
Don’t forget married now, no longer able to leave a mess in the yard and the CARB seemingly constantly pushing for laws banning right to work on your own car.
If you want to wrench on the stuff you used to in the way you used to, you might have to relocate to Vegas with Birdsong.
Hopefully he gets an air conditioned garage (swamp cooler) otherwise summer vegas wrenching is a sweaty affair.
He should do Pahrump, no emissions testing and cheap land. I don’t think E(NHRN) would like it though.
Is it possible to store some tools and have parts sent to the Galpin office you use?
Spend half an hour or so while at the office for work and get some movement on the projects!
I had a similar issue years ago before I moved out of Dubbo and built the shed. It was over 20min out to the farm and my main toolbox/hoist/engine crane/etc. However, with the house in Dubbo I was fortunate to have a double-car garage.
Due to my constant need to be prepared, every one of our cars has a basic toolkit in the boot so I could still get things done at home.
I rebuilt my ute ‘Lenny’ during the 2020 lockdowns. I was able to take mum’s groceries out to the farm and pick up parts on the way as they were essential businesses. The shed is over 50m from the house so we stayed distanced.
I brought parts home that needed cleaning, painting or fiddling with like the carburetor, this is where I really got into ultrasonic cleaners!
It takes a lot more forethought over having everything at home but you can still make great progress this way.
So many words yet none of them truly addressed what has actually happened. You have grown up, gathered a social life, gotten married, you have a job with larger responsibilities.
None of these things are problems, they are just things that take up your most precious finite resource, time. You choose what you do at all times of the day, and unless you can make part of your job wrenching again, you will continue to choose what you currently enjoy doing in your spare time. There is no shame in that, people change, they develop new interests and hobbies.
Before I moved out of home, I was an avid gamer. When I moved out and into a house with four other people, my gaming stopped almost instantly because it was replaced with doing things with the people I lived with.
Perhaps another way to look at it is, ENHRN loves you for who you are NOW, not for who you were when you could wrench 24/7 and live in a quagmire of car parts and grease.
Very well said! Growing up can seem tough, but it’s just really changes that happen all the time. Now that I have a shop, separate from my garage, I’m taking on bigger projects. I love it!
Agreed. I used to spend all of my time and energy on cars and bicycles, then I stopped being single. Now there’s more stuff to spread my time across.
“You can do anything, but you can’t do everything”
The reality of no longer being a bachelor in your 20’s hits us all hard.
Just wait until kid(s) come along. They’re like a little black hole sucking up all free time from which no second can escape.
Oh yeah, I’m well on from the days of living in share houses now. Now I share the house with two small children and my partner. Spare time is vanishingly small.
You know I would have thought this was hyperbole, then I had a kid.
You’re not wrong in the slightest.
Still, I wouldn’t trade my little mini-me for the world.
“to access your well-organized tools”
Nothing I’ve read about your place in Michigan, not any of the many pictures I’ve seen, support your assertion that you’ve ever had “well-organized tools.”
More than two years later and a full clean out of my shed and we still can’t find the first battery clamp DT bought for Project Cactus!
LOL!
To be fair, I also cannot find the first set of door hinge pins I bought for my Buick Apollo. I had ordered them ahead of time, and had a bunch of friends over to work on the thing and start putting it back together, and they were totally MIA. Luckily O’Rielly’s had them in stock!
That was also two years ago, and they still haven’t surfaced.
Laurence knows the truth, and it ain’t pretty.
I don’t think anyone believes your tool truth is pretty, but we love you anyways.
Well if you weren’t married you could maybe spend more Aztec life parked amongst the “projects” armed with tools. (-;
I wanted to say the same thing. Living in the car you are fixing (or another car parked next to it) takes care of the distance pretty well. It is not a recipe for marital bliss, though.
It’s hard to work on your project cars when you’re busy defending the Aztek from an invasion of feral cats though.
I grew up on an old farm. Wrenching in the barn wasn’t too bad in the winter as you could shut the door and keep the worst of the cold out and if it was really bad, give yourself a carbon monoxide high from the kerosene torpedo heater. In the summer it was better as the majority of the first floor of the bard was below grade and actually kept it somewhat cool. The big plus was that all of the tools were in the barn, so aside from dropping that cursed 10mm socket somewhere you couldn’t reach, you had everything you needed there including the welder and the oxyacetylene rig.
Maybe it should be made clear that the -20 deg and “below zero” statements littered throughout the article are hyperbole. I mean, SE MI is not exactly Antarctica. Most of the winter so far, prior to this week, has had highs in the +30s with almost no snow. And then there are the other 9 months of the year where it rarely gets above the md-80s. It’s really not that bad, I swear!
My wife is from Toledo and I’m from Minneapolis. Every time I’ve visited the in-laws I’m reminded of how much warmer it is than Minnesota. There are a lot of below 0 days in Minnesota.
IMHO the truth lies somewhere between, there was a good dump of snow in Decermber it melted and was obviously forgotten, that was last year. 20 degrees Fahrenheit is a cold winter day, maybe a warm one in Montana. It is all relative when you live somethere, California is the largest consumer of heated motorcycle grips.
The Motor City might appear to offer lake moderated magic in a World of worsening climate change. The new resort, check out what Michigan has to offer. (-:
https://www.michigan.org/
Honestly, today miiiight just barely be the first time all winter that you couldn’t easily still see grass. Can still see some poking through… my in-laws near DC have had more snow than us this winter.
Centigrade.
I’m glad I can fit a car in my garage now. As a suburban parent I’ve had houses with 2 car garages and driveways for decades, but this month was the first time in 20 years I could actually park a car in my garage. While Central Oregon is not as bitter cold as Detroit I’m glad I can be in a warm place out of the wind.
I’ll second the need for a dedicated Autopian bay and tools at Galpin so David and the other LA area people have space and tools
Instead of wrenching where you live, live where you wrench.
Yes, time to move back into the Aztek.
I just moved into an apartment for the first time in 30 years. So I have a year to find a garage with some living space attached/adjacent
It all hinges on how spartan you’re willing to live.