Secret Diary of a Female Petrolhead
I have a confession to make: I’m not actually a petrolhead. Not even a little bit. I didn’t play with cars as a little girl, and I didn’t go to track days with my father. I never learned to drive, and wouldn’t have been able to tell the crankshaft from the water pump even if you held a gun to my head.
At least, that was the case three months ago. I’m not going to go into the many and varied reasons why, sitting on the sofa one November weekend, I decided that I wanted to know more about cars. Suffice to say that maybe I was going a little house-crazy from being stuck indoors with the flu.
So I decided I was going to rebuild an engine.
This is a difficult and challenging task if you’ve worked with cars all your life. It is nigh on impossible if you can’t tell your pistons from your poppets. I also decided I was going to learn how to drive. This, too, would be a challenge, as the last time I’d been behind the wheel of a car had been twelve years ago. My father decided that, as I was seventeen and had my newly-minted provisional license in my pocket, the best thing to do for my first hour in the driver’s seat would be to take me out in London rush hour and make me practise three-point turns and parallel parking. After miraculously not killing anyone, I swore that I’d never get behind the wheel again.
The other major drawback is that my father was an engineer and a mechanic. He had engineering for his work, and mechanics for his hobby. You can imagine what his reaction would be if one of his children finally – finally! – showed an interest in anything remotely mechanical. Even if it was the girl.
Obviously, you can’t just walk off and buy yourself an engine. Well, actually, you can, but there’s not much point. First off, you have to work out where you’re going to keep it. There’s a useful space in the back garden, and I’ve measured for tarp, engine stand, and general manoeuvrability. It will, I am told, be sufficient.
Then, you have to come to terms with the fact that you’re building an engine, not a car. There’s no space to keep a clapped-out old banger in suburban London, and I’m not about to shell out for a garage for no apparent reason. The downside is that my beautiful rebuilt engine will never be seen in action. The upside is that I am far less likely to explode myself and the neighbours.
Thirdly, you’re going to need to get some tools and learn about engines. And therein lies the rub. Have you ever tried to find a general mechanics course? Have you? I have. There are two choices:
- Full-time year-long course leading to an NVQ or equivalent;
- How to not explode your car when changing the oil.
OK, so they weren’t terribly suitable. How about a textbook? I used to be an academic, I’m good with textbooks. Well –
- Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals by John B. Heywood – looks interesting, and has been added to the wishlist.
- Essential Car Care for Girls by Danielle McCormick – well, it’s pink. It must be just for girls. The reviewers helpfully point out that this is a book simple enough for even women to understand. OK, then.
Pink automatically makes everything simple enough so even a woman can understand.
After wishlisting the first and stabbing my eyes out over the second, I decided that textbooks may be all well and good, but what I really needed was an opportunity to take the damn thing apart myself. (Yes, I was the child that disassembled all my toys to see how they worked.) Unfortunately, in order to do that… Yup, I was back at square one.
Despondent, I complained about this Catch 22 to a colleague of mine, who had been making similar noises about getting a little fed up of being pushed into a knitting club or daisy-counting-clique. What she really wanted, she said, was to mess about with something a little more robust, like an engine…
So. We’ve measured the back garden. We’ve ordered appropriate textbooks and acquired a couple of Haynes manuals. We’ve ordered a model engine to get a rough idea of how this all works. I’ve signed up for driving lessons in the vain hope that I can overcome my car phobia.
And then, once the sun comes out, we’re going to lay down the tarp and set up the engine stand, and buy a crappy clapped-out engine off eBay for 50p and take it apart.
I’m not going to tell my father a word about all of this. I have a horrible feeling that he will be so delighted that I have finally come around that he will decide to show me how to do it ‘properly’. Where my teachers failed to instil any interest in me at age 12, I am hoping that my own interest at age 29 will bear out and let me stick with it.
Who knows? It might even work.
To be continued…
I see that “Essential Car Care for Girls” not only has a pink cover, but that the woman depicted is wearing a short skirt, seamed tights and stilettos. Crumbs! I assume that the book is intended for a female readership. Are purchasers supposed to identify with the woman on the cover? I assume that you, Viktoriya, aren’t thinking of adopting such an outfit for your engine-building enterprise.
Good luck with it. The nearest I came to building an engine happened at school. Someone gave the school an old engine which, we were assured, would be available for teaching us the basics of mechanics. First though, the engine needed to be be put into a presentable condition. The job assigned to me was cleaning out the sump, which is a horrible task. Having cleaned out the sump, I never heard mention of the engine again. Perhaps (for all I know) it was installed in the science teacher’s car. I hope your experience is better than mine.
We never did anything remotely like that in D&T at school, we mostly just made stupid wall ornaments that immediately broke. I am quite excited to get all dirty, to be honest!
I of course plan to strip the entire engine down while wearing a lovely tea-dress and a pearl necklace. Well, it was either that or some sturdy over-alls, and the book has taught me the error of my ways…
I never learned to drive, either, and always find it heartening to discover that other adults lack the skill. During the 1980s, I allowed myself to be bullied into taking driving lessons, and hated them. Now, aged 64, I find it comforting to reflect that nobody is likely to think that I should learn to drive. At 29, Viktoriya, you may lack that comfortable assurance.
I’m reminded of something from when I was around 29 years old (I’m talking of the mid 1970s). I had a period of looking at army, navy and air force recruitment ads. It wasn’t that I wished to join the armed services, but that I wanted to know the maximum age for joining. Seeking to gain an assurance that, soon, even in the event of a sanity meltdown that would make me wish to join, growing too old would save me.
This sounds like a really good idea. I passed my driving test on the fifth shot, haven’t driven very much since then (3 years ago), and have a HUGE fear of running someone over. Learning some of the mechanics of the car seems like an excellent way of overcoming irrational fears surrounding driving: you’d maybe start to look on it as a vehicle that you have mastery over, rather than a monstrous killing machine…
You mean that cars aren’t monstrous killing machines?
Yes, exactly! I spent some time with a manual over the last few weeks, and it finally let me wrap my brain around what a clutch is and how it’s supposed to behave. My clutch control improved startlingly over the period; my instructor asked suspiciously if I’d been taking lessons with anyone else…
Cars? Are those the things that are either in my way or in danger of veering into me when I’m on my bike? I don’t think I like them. :(
Yeah, they’re those scary big lumps of metal that seem to find bikers invisible. :/
I’m really glad I found this post, I can relate so much. I actually have a degree in engineering and was a professional engineer for a while. Having said that the academic skills you learn through a degree don’t directly translate into the practical nitty-gritty know-how you need to do things like rebuild engines.
I know how an engine works. My dissertations were both automotive based (one on an alternative to the poppet valve, another on crankshaft failures through excessive vibrations) … and yet the reality is knowing all that doesn’t help when you’re confronted with a huge lump of complex parts. Not everything looks like it does in the textbooks, and not all engines are the same as those I experimented on at uni.
I also can’t drive a car. Being a Londoner meant I never really needed to learn that skill. But I did get a motorbike licence because bikes are way more fun, cheaper to run than cars and can filter through traffic. ;) And smaller bike engines are really easy to work on too! I ended up taking a mechanics class at Merton College (SW London) which was great but it was expensive.
I want to say so much more but I’ll read the rest of your blog to see how this story develops first.