Do-It-Yourself Part III
Fixing Cars

By: Jerry Smith
Publisher: StClairCountyAl.com

Working on your own car is as old as the automobile itself, but getting under the hood became somewhat different in the Fifties and Sixties, when folks started doing things to their cars just for fun. In postwar America, an ordinary car simply didn't cut it anymore for some of us. We insisted on making them work better, look sharper, and run like a scalded dog. Like with all other DIY efforts of that time, parts and equipment suppliers helped us meet the challenge.

Sears, Roebuck guaranteed that any hand tool bearing their Craftsman logo would be replaced free of charge for life if it failed to do the job. They'd sell you a cabinet full of quality tools for one low price, to help you become a self-declared automotive whiz overnight. Another innovative company, Snap-On, peddled their expensive, professional-grade line to established garages on-site from large trucks, but a lot of these prized tools found their way into private hands.

Auto parts sales were brisk at neighborhood stores such as East Lake Auto Parts, Rocco & Cheater's Speed Shop, Westwood, et al. Before long, we had stores like Genuine Auto Parts and NAPA, destined to be joined a decade or two later by modern giants such as Auto Shack, Bumper To Bumper, and Advance.

J C Whitney's original mail order catalogs offered a bewildering array of repair parts, custom pieces, engine soup-up kits, special tools, and enough tacky gadgets and add-on gimmicks to turn the family sedan into a raging, raucous racehorse. Many local garages made extra bucks by renting out their service bays and hydraulic lifts after-hours.

With all this self-helping going on, one would think a lot of professional mechanics would have been forced out of business; not so. The pros made a nice living un-fixing botched repair jobs as well as carrying other projects to a higher level than the home mechanic could handle. Sure, most anyone could change their own spark plugs (or at least we could when we could still SEE the dang things), but there were few complete car projects that anyone could handle totally by themselves. Our tinkering actually brought in more business, not less.

Every parts joint and repair shop worthy of its name had a Parts Pup wall calendar, usually behind glass in a locked frame. Those highly collectable (steal-able, in other words) works of art had giant, finely printed pages displaying pictures of really luscious young women wearing hardly anything at all, usually wielding some tool she'd probably never heard of before the photo session. As an afterthought the calendars also listed days of the month, although a particularly fetching portrait might remain displayed for months.

Of all the things one could do to a car in those days, probably nothing offered a cheaper thrill than buying new tires. Oft-heard phrases were like, "Them tars that come on it ain't worth haulin' to the dump," or " I need some casins' that can handle my kind of driving". It wasn't unusual to drive a long way to show off a set of brand new rubber. At family gatherings I've witnessed many a spirited argument that broke out over the merits and perils of various brands and types.

If a car still wore the same tires that came from the factory, it probably belonged to someone's daddy. Well before the coming of long-lived radials, those old bias-ply nylon or rayon corded tires invited frequent updating because most only lasted from about 15,000 miles if the old man was driving to less than 2,000 if Junior got to use the car.

Customizing was not new to the Fifties, but that's when the idea really took off. Suddenly, no stock car was acceptable. We lowered them, cut the window glass area down to narrow slits, dropped the top, junked original bumpers and installed nerf bars (no relation to nerf footballs), painted flames all over the sides & hood, removed door handles, and/or added fender skirts & continental kits. Unfortunately, hardly anyone chose to install seat belts.

We hopped up engines to the point where they sometimes blew themselves to bits. Likewise, we installed transmissions with way too many gears and matching clutches almost too heavy for a gorilla to stomp. We're talking big V-8's and Sixes with an average 200-plus horsepower which could easily be doubled if you knew how. Mind you, we were doing all these things to stock automobiles that already could have left most of today's dinky offerings far behind.

Parts manufacturers and speed shops wrung their hands with glee, and flooded the market with precision engine heads, over-size this, reamed-out that, special camshafts, belt-driven superchargers, tuned headers, and tires to match.

They even got the lowly Volkswagen Bug into the act, eventually bolting on enough Empi Big Bore kits, methanol injectors and other goodies to produce Beetles that could do the quarter mile in less than four seconds. It got so a young man couldn't say he owned a car unless he'd had the engine heads off at least once. Busting a piston or setting an engine on fire in a back-street drag race was the kind of thing that generated real peer envy.

The Fonz would understand.

Photos by Jerry Smith
Top Right: Don Garlits' Fuel Dragster c. 1963
Bottom Left: A show car of the early 60's.