Amateur Hour: Sometimes a Temper Tantrum Solves Everything

I walked halfway down my driveway, then set a modern record for hurling a Ford Motorsports finned aluminum valve cover into Langport Road, where it missed a landscaping truck, bounced twice, then collided with the far gutter. “Had your little fun, did you?” I screamed. “Not so funny now, huh?” At some point, my voice broke and I was croaking a susurrate whizzing hiss mixed with atomized spit.

My girlfriend, Denise Wigor, witnessed this display. “The neighbors,” she said.

I told her what the neighbors could do. I was still conjuring complicated F-bomb gerunds as I addressed the valve cover again: “Have a good life in the Franklin County dump, pal. Hope you enjoy the diarrhea-soaked Pampers.”

I don’t recall Denise saying goodbye.

That scrap of shamefulness followed my first serious DIY automotive project. I had bent a couple pushrods in a solid-lifter 1970 Mustang Boss 302—missed shifts, I’m assuming, because I’d just detached the Motorcraft rev limiter, which I felt a certain Dearborn engineer had installed to insult my testicles. Then I lashed the valves, following vague instructions in Hot Rod magazine. I slathered Mr. Gasket goop on both sides of the valve-cover gaskets—strings of it drooling onto my new Hooker headers—and wrenched down the bolts with, oh, I don’t know, roughly the same torque specified for the four-bolt mains. I should have witnessed the aluminum flanges cracking. What I witnessed instead, upon start-up, was two quarts of Castrol jetting onto the headers, igniting a blaze that at least carbonized off the scarlet Mr. Gasket stains. There might have been some other issues.

After that? I treated aluminum with the respect I afforded my mother on her 70th birthday. I later unbolted an aluminum cam cover and wrapped it in a feather-plumped Eddie Bauer vest so it would feel good about itself.

This was a half-century ago. There was no Google back then, only Barney Google, who was a cartoon, just like my mechanical skills. And the Chilton books offered nothing useful on Cleveland-head canted-valve small-blocks owned by entitled teenage sons of Midwest defense lawyers.

So, I was entirely self-taught, even as I began rebuilding the engine after every race. Seriously, how hard could it be? To which I received the cosmos’s molten reply when I installed—all at the same time—a General Kinetics camshaft with more lift than a Wonderbra; a costly dual-point Mallory distributor; and twin Stewart-Warner electric fuel pumps. When I lit off that deranged Rubik’s Cube of time/space continuum—using a faulty timing light, of course—scientists in Greenwich lost 13 minutes on their atomic clock. It was vivid, especially when the 850-cfm Holley pulled a full Old Faithful, by which I mean individual blazing Walden Ponds of Sunoco 260 atop my prized Shelby intake manifold, which that week I’d polished to Hall of Mirrors sheen but thereafter resembled a festival of black scabs. Plus, another header fire, although by then such nether-region blazes didn’t concern me. My dad glimpsed me holding the garden hose. “Everything OK out there?” he asked, although he knew enough not to await an answer.

In fairness, I was 17. The only actual training I had received on any topic was 20th-century British literature. Nobody I knew owned a full set of Craftsman sockets. Every twiglet of my mechanical knowledge derived from Jegs—the original store in Columbus, Ohio, with redheaded Jeg Coughlin fussing at the flow bench. I’d corner any Jeggy salesman too slow-witted to flee. “How do torque wrenches work?” “How come hex-head bolts can’t be loosened with a flat-blade screwdriver?” “What if I wired a radiator fan atop the carb?”

I warped one of the Boss’ cylinder heads. Well, more than one. “I might need a head job,” I informed my Jegs consultant, having heard customers asking for valve jobs. He stared, lit a cigarette, began to speak, stopped, then said, “I’ll be right back.” But he wasn’t.

See, what happened: First there was that radical cam, then 12:1 Holman & Moody pistons, shaved deck heights, and valve springs so stiff they’d be appropriate on a Caterpillar D9. Did I mention this was all my own top-secret recipe for speed? I actually knew enough to test this pressurized pipe bomb before towing it 400 miles to Mosport. And guess what? The Boss banged off a 13.3 quarter-mile at National Trail Raceway. There’s me, king of the DIYers, hoisting a 3.2 percent Pabst. So how come my chrome-yellow Boss squeezed out a head gasket during practice? Also on lap five?

Back at Jegs, where I was floating a four-digit debit courtesy of my dad’s possibly expired Diners Club card, the salesman had news: copper head gaskets. Six pairs. “Ain’t meltin’ them bastards,” he assured, blowing a blue plume of Benson & Hedges through my Keith Richards sideburns. The gaskets resembled something Cartier might sell out of a chrome display case.

Cartier or not, they failed, of course, in a tsunami of steam at the Moss Corner, in what was supposed to be a three-hour race with my best friend Bill Adam co-driving. I drove an extra lap to punish the gaskets, then chiseled them off in the paddock. Which enabled me to insert one arm into gasket cylinder-hole one and the other in cylinder-hole four and stretch the thing into coppery trapezoidal Guggenheim shapes while lacerating and burning both biceps. “You drew a small crowd,” Bill later informed me when my blood pressure had ceased melting its own gaskets. “You said something about Mr. Coughlin.”

I should have quit. Instead, I learned to change head gaskets in 90 minutes, right there in Canada’s dirtiest paddock. Which is how a guy named Brian Burgess found himself grasping the Boss’ high-capacity coil while I bumped the starter to locate top dead center. From all available evidence—I mean, from where Brian landed in the dirt—I killed him. “Oh, grow up, he’s fine,” said Bill. “Just drag him out of that puddle.”

Brian mutely stared at the sun for 10 minutes, then valiantly shuffled off my mortal coil, a comeback line I conjured only a year later because the Mustang had liquefied my brain.

For 54 years, Bill and I have remained close. Yet here’s how he initiates most of our conversations: “Hey, uh, listen, you OK?”

So, by all means, do it yourself. Even better, consider doing it without yourself.