I once had a very frank discussion with the VP of Operations of an electric utility with many coal-fired plants. We talked about training and what young engineers made the best plant engineers. He told me Ivy League graduates from upper class backgrounds need not apply. He preferred farm boys with reasonably good grades but with a practicial bent of mind!
I could not have agreed with him more. Most of their plants were in relatively isolated parts of the region, and resourcefulness is a key quality. The armed forces also have a high regard for farm boys.
I remember being behind a lady at sears. She was upset they could not fix a flat in her threadbare tires. Her quote, "I know I could have gotten another 300 miles if I had not driven across that gravel parking lot"
Some while ago I enjoyed cheapest people, and 2 I remember are, I guy never bought any clothes so wore his work clothes provided by his employer to his daughters wedding. No name tag needed I suppose. The other was a family that spent Friday night rolling two ply toilet paper on to 2 separate rolls.
After reading the comments here, I decided to replace the selonoid contacts to the starter! Well, technically I didn’t do the replacement. I took the starter off the car, then drove it to an auto-electric shop and they put in new contacts for me, both the two flat ones and the center piece. Cost? All of $10 including labor. It took them about 5 minutes, and they weren’t busy so they did it while I waited and joked around with the shop owner about how cheap I was. He said he gets people coming almost daily doing the same thing, so it’s not that unusual. It starts great now, but another problem reared it’s ugly head, I’ll post that in another thread for comments.
Also I thought your idea of having a cool-looking big lighted button mounted under the dashboard to start the car is the way to go. So I installed one as part of the starter upgrade. I took a trip to Radio Shack and bought a big illuminated red pushbutton switch. That’s the way I start the car now! Push and Go! Just like a racing car. It’s pretty fun! lol … anyway, thanks for the ideas …
I suppose I could throw my Michelin tire experience in. We have a narrow curbed driveway, and it is near impossible to enter or exit without a bit of abrasion. I had the tire shop they were bought from take a look a few years ago, and they deemed it a cosmetic issue, not a tire defect. I could peel off the black rubber easily if I wished, but now I have ragged (no offense to fellow hillbillys) hillbilly whitewalls. So I thought how the down to 6mm tread depth would do in the snow. Due to an unusual snowless December the first major 3" snow all was good. Mind you I would replace the tires if safety was a factor, but looking at keeping the car a while, and being cheap, thinking, I get an extra 15k mile x 4, I could save a set of tires.
Back in the 80s when whitewall tires were more popular a dealer I worked for used to have a guy come around and add whitewall striping to the blackwalls on brand new cars.
This guy would raise the car up one wheel at a time and the tire would be rotated by a machine that would also peel a shallow groove in the tire sidewall and add a strip of white rubber tape to that groove. They charged 5 bucks a wheel for this and these “whitewall tires” were a 100 dollar option at the time.
Of course that brings up the question about sanity and peeling rubber out of a tire’s sidewall…
OK4450; in the sixties when blackwalls were slowly coming back in, some manufacturers layered the tires with a white strip under the outer black. To get whitewalls, they shaved off the black at the factory.
I ordered my 1965 Dodge Dart with blackwalls (7.00x13) and with the “Ben Hur” spinners on the wheel disks got quite a few compliment about the “European Look”.
“The armed forces also have a high regard for farm boys”.
Docnick–the farm boys were invaluable in WW II. Many of them had worked on cars, trucks and tractors. That experience made it easier to train them to work on aircraft engines, tanks, and other motorized military equipment. This gave us a real advantage over our enemies who had fewer farm boys. Also, many servicemen had built and/or repaired their own radios. This experiece was useful in teaching them to repair radar and communications equipment.
Today, even farm equipment is so technologically advanced that a specialist often has to be called in to make a repair.
I grew up in the country and my family didn’t have a lot of money. We learned to do our own repairs. The experience I gained from working on cars, mowers, and radios made college physics seem real to me. One thing that bothers me today is that so much has changed and due to job pressures, my repair skills have slipped to the point where oiling a squeaky door hinge is about my limit.
