Hot Rods out in the garage at quarter till three AM

I wake up a lot between 2:30-3:45 .most mornings.I turn on the news and have my coffee and some internet(Hamb) and I am happy. But work on my old cars-Never! Neighbors would turn me in! LOL

 

I was out in the garage, it was quarter till three, fire and smoke were all I could see. That's when my wife came to the door, as I fell over the dog lying on the floor. She said come back to bed, before I decide to break your head! Then as we tried to go back to sleep. I just tried to count some sheep. The water pump will just have to wait, even if it's in a broken state. Morning will come soon enough. So Good night all, and to all have a good night.
( My try at a country song )

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35 years is probably WHY they think fondly of it !

 

That's the great thing, you just never know! Ain't Life Grand.

 

With the short verse it comes across more like rap lyrics, but I like it. HRP

 

That’s kinda like my regular life (before this job). I’ve always worked into the wee hours and started my day later....right now Mondays are rough . It’s cooler, quieter and way more calming after 11pm. The drawbacks are you need to have the parts already (or some good stock in the garage) and sound proofing or live away from people.

Luckily I live next to a freeway, which drowns out almost all noises I can make and I have a pretty good stock of repair parts and materials. I can’t wait to retire to return back to my real life.

 

I used to get the tweaker thing. I worked at a service station in my 20’s and it was a 24hr place. A lot of nights the shop part was open late (2am) because I was still there working on my cars. Some of my customers would laugh and call me a tweaker.

 

First time I redid my 48 I worked swing shift at a Ryder truck shop. I'd get home just before midnight and go out in the garage and work on it until around 3 and go to bed and get up when my son who was about 3 then got up and have breakfast with him and then we spent time in the shop until it was time to go to work. My wife worked days and that was pre cell phone and we sometimes were never awake at the same time all week.
Now our lab usually gets me up some where between 03:30 and 5 am and I have a hard time going back to sleep so I could spend a lot of early mornings in the shop if I had the shop finished.

 

[QUOTE. If it's a dream why are my hands so dirty?
Danny did you fall on the way back to the house? That's why yours hands were dirty!

My garage is also away from the house at the rear, bottom of then garden. I've blacked out all the windows so if I sneak down there when the lights are on no one can see..... however I have yet to somehow sound proof it because if anything goes wrong, my cussing and cursing can be heard for miles in the middle of the night.

 

Alan, I have seen the TV shows where they wear gloves to work on cars but I have never tried doing any kind of automotive work wearing them. HRP

 

I get more done at night if everything is working right.

 

I built most of my roadster between 2:30 and 4:30 Am in my pajamas. I would wake up and think of something and I would have to go do it before I forgot what it was.

 

Do you know what Danny, I can't get on with wearing gloves when I am working on my cars, you cannot feel the nuts and washers etc, In tricky places, and the gloves always seem to rip just at the critical moment. I don't know how these guys do it now.

 

I have spent many late nights working on racecars. I don't think the neighbors thought it was funny when cranking up a dragster around midnight in order to make sure everything was back together. Never had any complaints but I didn't do it often.

 

The next door neighbor came over at midnight once when i was zeding my chassis with the 9” he was lucky i was awake


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When I was writing my 288 page nostalgia book about jalopy racing I sat all day at the computer, stop about 5:00 and re start about 8:00 and go until 11:00. Upon climbing into bed I would ponder how the next days pages would go and several times I got about 12:30am and worked another 90 minutes because I had ideas I wanted to try or at least start. Get up 8:00am the next day and do it all again. I wouldn't change the experience at all.

 

Been there done that. If i get something rolling around in my head i got to get it done. Car stuff is the worst.wife thought that would stop if we got a shop not attached to the house, nope didn’t help. What the hell what else do we have to do.

 

Its 2:26 AM and I was going to go and work on the Fairlane but I got tied up on Frankie47's other thread heaping praise on HRP for his threads.

 

I have pulled lots of all night thrashes . Years ago I removed the engine in the coupe at midnight on a friday night, installed another engine, tunnel ram set up, and was driving the car at 11 saturday morning. Good times. Gettin a little old for that now. LOL.

 

Not on a creeper, but I did wake up a few times at sunrise only to see the bottom side of my Model A. That was just short of 40 years ago. I must say I prefer the mattress now...

 

The night that I broke my timing chain at the drags, we left the track at 11:00 pm, an hour drive home, unload the car, and into the shop at 12:30. Then we pulled the heads and by 3:30 am we found and removed 3 bent valves. This happened when I was 22 years old. I can still pull the heads off an sbc quickly at 44, but the idea of doing it that late at night is not quite so fun anymore.


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9 years ago my youngest daughter (11yo at the time) was diagnosed with cancer. I had just bought an OT 75 triumph spitfire project to mess around with... That car became my refuge for the next two years. After dealing with all the stress, and worry, and details of treatment, in home schooling, PIC line flushes, Chemo, surgeries, etc during the day I would go out to the garage after everyone was settled for the night and just loose myself in the project. It was my coping mechanism, my stress reliever, a kind of soothing balm for my nerves and my brain... I would find myself at 4am in the midst of a distributor rebuild or cleaning a pile of small parts and think "I really should go to bed". Fast forward a couple of years and my daughter is perfectly healthy and cancer free. I drove the car for a year or so after I finished it and when I decided to move the car on to finance another project the first guy that came to look at it heard the story and bought it on the spot... It seems his grand-daughter was battling cancer as well and he was looking for a distraction... In our family that car is lovingly referred to as "The Cancer Car". I truly believe that car saved my sanity.
Call me crazy, but some cars do have a soul.
Chappy

 

Hey H,
Boy, that scene is reminiscent of the early days of the 1958 Impala escapades. It was my duty to get the car prepped for the Saturday morning assault at Lions Dragstrip. Most of the stuff was done after school and on Friday nights, only if the Impala stayed home. If my brother left to go somewhere after school and did not come home until dinner (if at all), then I had to decide when to do the adjustments and replacing stuff. There was no time on Saturday morning as the gates opened up early. So, it was usually the late nights on Friday around midnight or the very early morning hours.

In those late night/very early morning sessions, I could not replace the parts using the tools in the driveway near the house, just because of the noise of the ratchet, moving the jack stands and the hydraulic jack around in the dead of night. I had to pick and choose what made the least amount of noise or no noise.(replacing spark plugs with a non-ratchet socket/gapping tool, etc.)

But, it was usually replacing the 4:11 rear axle gears with the 4:56 Positraction, complete 3rd member. So, it was moving the Impala to the rear backyard away from the neighboring houses on another concrete slab. To cut the noise down even more, I made a “ratchet wrap” out of old towels, t-shirt strips and masking tape. It worked, somewhat.

Boy, what a pre-driver's license 13-14 year old will do to please an older brother…Plus, it gave me the advantage of knowing and doing mechanical hot rod work at that age. Did I like it? Probably not, thinking of a warm bed instead of running around in two t-shirts, Levis, a sweatshirt, and my old baseball style jacket for warmth. Gloves? No one wore gloves except older women on a dinner date.

“All of those nights spent under those two cars changing the third member unit weekly or monthly is/was ok. It taught me a lot about perseverance. I wanted to drive, race, cruise, so it had to be done. It was a ritual to get everything set up and start the process as soon as possible after school. Especially for Friday nights, then it was already set up for the weekend Lions Dragstrip races. “ FROM AN OLDER POST

Jnaki

What a tough kid… Ever try pouring smelly Positraction Oil back into the teeny hole after everything was buttoned up, laying upside down on a blanket, and with the bright yellow, wire enclosed, shop light for warmth? In looking back, I would not have it any other way. (Oh, I did have a Thermos of hot chocolate and a plate of my mom’s chocolate chip cookies to make me feel better about the situation at 2-3 a.m.)

These days, I have been asked why I am up so early on the West Coast. Well, after 57 years of early rising for the consistent surf sessions, 40+ years of actually getting up at 4 am and down at the beach at 5am, I am used to my eyes popping open before 4 am and getting up. (Before daylight savings time kicks in, during the fall months.)

Currently, it is hard not to get up when our little guard dog comes over to say it his time to go outside to do his stuff. So, a hot cup of coffee, very eerie, quiet house and a nice couch with the laptop, is home for the next hour or so. The darkened room is offset with the screen glow and a small keyboard light. The little dog is fast asleep, again.

It is hard to break that habit of early rising. I have trained myself from those early days, to wake up before the nasty alarm goes off and to shut it off just before 4 am. But, now, I just open my eyes and it is 4 am. No alarm necessary, but also, no working in the garage, either on cars or the little die cast cars itching for some mods. I like the quiet house in these early hours, as the memories flow with the inclusion of old photographs from our early years in So Cal. So what if there are projects waiting out in the garage, it makes too much noise in the dead of night/morning.

Old habits still linger, after all of these years.

Exchanges without jack stands, but time saving clues. The in-place axle pull outs instead of complete removal. So, Friday nights all over So Cal, this was a common place happening.