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My three sons

tarafied1

Well-Known Member
All three of my boys are gear heads. Not sure where they get that...
Anyway, my youngest is working on his 75 Torino wagon. Put new wheels and tires on it today.
My middle son built a DOHC 4.6 you might recall, seems to have broke the timing chain tensioner. Started making a noise then wouldn’t hardly run. Compression is good on one side really low on two of the others and zero on two. Towed it over to a friends with a lift and started to pull it apart.
My oldest has a 92 notchback. Had a thermostat issue. Broke off the bolt in the manifold. Long story short I went to a pick a part and got a Explorer intake and did that swap.
On top of that had to put a new power brake booster on our wagon. Still waiting on my driveshaft.
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You must be very proud of your boys.I sure I would.
And it must be very nice to sit at the table and talking about car and how to fix things and suchs !
I would love to do this to my son too but he has other interest like programming robots and so.
So we don't have alot to talk to.
And yes , my daughter is a smart a$$ , has a university degree and yes , her boyfriend even know less !!!!!!
I am so alone !!!!!
 
Growing up around it makes a big difference.
I don't know if it makes as big a difference as we might think. My oldest would have next to nothing to do with working on cars while still at home. Now in the Marines he is loving wrenching on the F35s and bought himself a truck that he runs out in the desert with his buddies. Says NOW he gets it. My teenage son at home is currently not having much to do with it either. My oldest suggested that instead of asking him to work alongside me, rather to give him his own project and turn him loose. Says he would have been more likely to participate if I had approached it that way with him. Something about less pressure to be good at it, etc. I guess it makes sense. {.} does say I can be an asshole at times, after all.
 
My son knows his way around a car and can fix most anything, he's just very "mechanical". My nephew on the other hand....he hit a deer and stopped by to see if I would help him fix it. We pulled it into my shop and I handed him a wrench and told him to start pulling the fender bolts, he proceeded to try to use the wrench like a screwdriver, he was holding it vertically to the bolt with just the tips of the wrench on the bolt....he now knows the proper way...
 
I used to bring my daughter into the garage with me when she was very little. She liked to pretend to work on her pedal car while I worked on the mustang.

Now she has no interest at all. Most of the time she tells me she hates the mustang and wants to smash it with a hammer. Not sure where I went wrong.



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I used to bring my daughter into the garage with me when she was very little. She liked to pretend to work on her pedal car while I worked on the mustang.

Now she has no interest at all. Most of the time she tells me she hates the mustang and wants to smash it with a hammer. Not sure where I went wrong.



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HA! This is a pic of my son at 4-5 yrs old (22 now and going to be a daddy in 6 months). I have it hanging on my wall at work. favorite pic of him. I was cleaning up underneath my car and he decided to do the same with his pedal car.
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Wow, this is some great stories! And yeah I forget my StangFix son Bill is a gear head too!
I grew up with a dad who was/is a gearhead, his dad (who died before I was born) was a gearhead too. I was my dad's shadow from the time I could walk. I am sure it was annoying to him that everytime he wanted to do something he had to put up with me. When I asked him about it recently he said it was actually a help because he taught me to get the tools and parts for him. Anyway, I could go on forever with stories about my dad. My oldest son has an interesting back story, his mom left or rather I tossed her out when he was less than a year old. I won't get into the details but long story short I was a single dad until he was three. He grew up literally in the garage with me. I had an old race car tire and I would put him in it with some hot wheels and he would play while I worked, as he grew I even had him in the car working the ignition switch when I converted it to Duraspark II. When we first fired the big block it had no headers or manifolds and he worked the key while I poured gas in the carb. When it fired, flames blew out the heads. He still talks about that! Later though we had a rocky relationship as he became a teen. We did mend the fences and he is living close by again so things are good. My other two boys are from my relationship with Tara. They grew up with me tinkering on stuff but didn't show a lot of interest until they were getting close to driving age. As kids I raced RC cars with all three of them so that was fun. It taught them a lot. My goal was to spend quality time with them because I have always traveled a lot.
Anyway, as they have grown up they all have different personalities but all three get along and have strong mechanical skills. My oldest worked for NTB in Illinois for two years before moving down here and works for a local shop. My younger two are going to school still, the middle one to be a mechanical engineer and the youngest to be a mechanic.
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I love to hear the stories of family passing on car culture. It seems to be hard to find anymore.

My story is a bit different. My dad traveled 5 days a week when I was a kid so I had no connection with him. On weekends it was all about sports with my brothers.

I always say I think I was born with a matchbox car in my hand. I had no idea where my love of cars came from.

I started working on cars on my own when I was around 13. Learning as I went along. In high school I took Auto shop. Probably the only class I every got A's in.

I didn't find out my dad was a car guy until my teens. He started working for old cars weekly and we would go to car shows. He'd tell me of all the cars he owned and that he used to race Corvettes and build them in to drag cars. I couldn't believe it. We bonded for the first time and shared our love of cars from then on until the day he died.

I bought my mustang in 2004 and finally got to go to a few shows with him. Some of my best memories. He passed away in 2006.

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Matchbox cars. Hotwheels actually are my thing too. Was mom's bribe when I was young to behave at the grocery store. Stick to her side and keep my hands off the shelves for that short trip and I got a new car each visit. I still have them. Did similar with my boys when they were younger. Of course they got special ones too from Target or whatever on occasion as well. My oldest grandson gets a car practically every time he comes over (lives close by). Always pick up a few to have on hand. Seems to work better on him. He's into cars already. His favorite XBox games are racing types. Like that kid!
 
Craig:

It's funny how skills get passed down the generations. My Mom was the wrench turner when I was growing up. Simply put , she hated the idea of paying a repairman to fix things so she dove in, usually completely ignorant, and mostly fixed things (washing machine, oven, etc). By around age 4, I had discovered cars and never looked back. Auto Shop in high school and summer jobs as a service station jockey furthered me along the path to turning my own wrenches. Once in college, I bought a used car and quickly found out I couldn't afford to pay anyone else to work on it. A service manual and a rudimentary set of hand tools later, I was doing all my own repairs and maintenance. By the time I sold that car 8 years later, I was setting the timing precisely by ear, modifying the suspension for better handling, and all the other things one needs to do on a car with 120,000 miles on its clock. Fortunately, both my boys took to wrenching. My oldest makes a living diagnosing difficult problems for Lexus and my youngest who works in the tech field has embraced the aftermarket tuning world that includes intake, exhaust, and suspension upgrades as well as all maintenance on his car. Occasionally, they even come over to help dear old Dad on one of my car projects. Now it is time to start passing down the knowledge to my granddaughter who already likes Mustangs at age 2-1/2.
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this is really cool! I love the story's! Jeff, my dad had a similar approach to your mom. He figured if he couldn't fix it then he would try to get help but he was going to tackle it first! He taught me a lot. One of my memories is that he never answered my questions, he would ask me questions to get me to think about what I was trying to figure out. I think it is what taught me my skill set that I now support my family with. I travel the world troubleshooting manufacturing problems!
And Terry and Pat, I have similar memories with hot wheels but more so with model cars. When I was young my mom would take us ids to the grocery store with her to do the weeks shopping. The store had a toy aisle that was filled with model cars. I would stay in the toy aisle the whole time she shopped with my sisters and look at every model and read the boxes and study the box art. I collected pop bottles and mowed yards to get spending money and when I had enough I would buy a model and build it. My dad built models when he was a kid and he enjoyed listening to me show him what I was building and how I started to kit bash the 3 in 1 kits left overs into other kits. I eventually got into slot cars and it grew into RC cars when I was a teen and young adult. Then my kids skipped to the RC's but they all built models a little bit as well.
And Terry, that picture with my youngest was when he helped me put the ORP roller perches on, He was in 8th grade. he is 20 now and went to the bank today to start the loan process to build his house! Time flys!
 
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