Talkin' Shit About A Pretty Sunset

My friend Dan is back from Ghana and we've been working on his smooth-looking British sports car -- a red 1960 MGA convertible. I'm borrowing it in May to store in my garage and keep the motor in functioning order while he's working at the US embassy in Rome for a few years.

The thought of driving this car in spring will get me through the dreaded winter months. This is the car that Elvis drove in the movie Blue Hawaii. This is the model of which only 101,081 were built (MGA wiki link). And god damn, this is the car that only costs $140 per year to insure.

Dan and I have been working on it for the past few weeks -- getting the brakes in working order, etc. It got me thinking about how people these days rarely work on cars. Shouldn't everyone have basic engineering skills and a general understanding of how mechanical things function? Even ladies? Isn't that important?

I had experiences as a kid that helped me with this. First, my mom used to give me and my brother old appliances like blenders and sewing machines to spend the day dissasembling -- just to keep her brats busy. Second, my friend Colin's grandma gave him her junk '60s Oldsmobile for us to "soup up" however we pleased --- meaning we spent an entire summer getting gunky black with grease stripping the engine to a bare steel block, but we never got the motivation to figure how to put the damn thing back together.

Taking mechanical stuff apart is a good learning experience. If you haven't taken an engine apart, how can you properly explain how an internal combustion engine works? That's something online diagrams can never do.

So far, Dan and I have replaced one rear brake cylindar. Man, I love the smell of the inner corners of a 48-year-old car. The work is fairly simple, other than the fact that all the nuts and bolts are neither metric or American system; it's some weird third way that the British designed.

Once we get the brakes working and the DMV stuff sorted out, man, I can't wait to get a pair of cheap aviator goggles at the Army surplus store and a thin, white scarp and drive up to Germantown to visit Jason. Hell, I might even unbolt that tiny windshield and just let the bugs die while flying into my face at 50 miles per hour; this car is just that awesome. Check it OUT:





God damn, Spring is gonna be good for ole Lonnie Bruner. Yea, that's right, I referred to myself in the third person. Driving a convertible MGA gives one license to do that.