Rob Siegel has been writing a column in my car club magazine for as long as I can remember.  He discusses fixing up an endless series of older BMWs than run through his household.  Rob concentrates on getting things running reliably, not so much on polish or period-correctness.  He would appreciate my father’s trick of turning around bearings on pre-loaded shafts to “wear the other side of the races”.

“Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic” is part spiritual guide, part practical repair guide.  It starts off a little heavy on the spirit side.  For a while I was worried I had come across another “I’m not really here,” which was a book my *comedian* Tim Allen that wasn’t about humor at all.  But Siegel levels off and brings the two into a more than workable balance.

The book addresses what to look for in a car you want to “fix up” or just older cars in general.  More to the point the importance of matching up the amount of work you actually want to do with the reality of a given car.  He describes several examples of evaluating cars and why he walks away from some.  [His discussion of the “seven-car rule” tells you which side usually wins].

There are several sections devoted to freeing stuck nuts and bolts.  I used to attribute his running into so many of these as a side effect of east-coast (i.e. rusty) cars.  But now that my car passed 25, I’m finding its bolts more and more frozen in place.  Another section discusses specific maintenance items to keep up reliability.

He also mentions that he does not work on other peoples cars, and gives some early examples of this going wrong.  For example, when removing an exhaust header, you run the risk of snapping the threaded stub embedded in the head.  If you do break one, its bad.  If you break one on a friends engine, its really bad, and likely to cost them all of the money they were hoping to save having a friend help.  This becomes kind of a running joke with six sections devoted to it.

Writing short pieces for decades influenced the organization of the book.  Its broken up into lots of little sections that are usually just a few pages long.  It worked well for reading a little each night, being the kind of person who has to stop reading at the end of a chapter or at least a heading.

I enjoyed “Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic” and recommend it to anyone with the gumption to work on their own vehicles.  While some of the information is BMW specific, the overall message and knowledge imparted applies to everyone.