Maybe you’ve been there. The in-tank fuel pump on some aging EFI car has quit. You’re in the shop lying on the frigid concrete. The cheap plastic siphon pump you bought to drain the nearly full tank just made a huge mess before it broke. (In-tank fuel pumps never seem to poop out when the tank’s empty–in contrast to Chinese siphon pumps that blow out when the tank’s about full.)
The tank strap bolts are somewhere in the dark void between the rear axle and…who can see what’s up there? The “rough service” light bulb in your trouble light just quit, so you’re working blind again!
It doesn’t matter much anyhow because there’s so much corrosion on the strap bolts that the ratchet (fitted with a huge “cheater” pipe) can barely turn them a quarter turn.
“This is taking forever,” you think.
Your mind wanders to that pristine, rock-simple T-bucket build that only took about 22 minutes on one of those Saturday morning gearhead shows. “Man it must be nice to work with all-new parts, in a best-of-everything shop, on a bitchin ride that will bring oodles of BangShifter glory. Not this hideous, rusty, gunk-covered POS! What’s that awful smell?” Back to reality.
One end of the tank’s dangling, and cool, stale gasoline seems to be dripping from one of the half-dozen hoses you had to disconnect. Then suddenly the last thread on the corroded strap bolt gives way, 100 pounds of gas tank is now sloshing on top of your chest.
“What idiot designed this mess? He hate me!” (“He hate me” is about the only thing I remember about the XFL football league. The XFL was another one of NBC’s brilliant prime-time programming experiments. And “He hate me” was emblazoned as a name on the jersey of one of the XFL’s players named Rod Smart)
So why does “he hate me” come to mind when time, corrosion, and cost-target auto engineering conspire together as they often do? Because BangShifters probably hear a lot more television than they see. It’s one of the sacrifices of the BangShifter’s life.
You know how it happens. Often when you’re cloistered out in the shop, immersed in a car project, there’s a television playing from up above a workbench or on a shelf. It’s usually just out of view. It’s background noise, playing some motor race or ball game or one of the endless repeats of Barrett-Jackson.
If something important happens, they’ll put it on instant replay, you tell yourself. Of course you’re probably not paying enough attention to even notice the replays. And you’ll just nod knowingly the next day when some non-BangShifter asked you if you saw the “great play” that everyone’s talking about.
Somehow out of the haze, a phrase you hear, like “he hate me,” implants itself in memory. It lies domant until decades later. Then it just comes bubbling up out of the cranial tar pit at the very moment when frustration meets flawed engineering.
“He hate me,” as it turns out, is subconsciously associated with another time when you just wanted to have “a word” with the automotive genius who cooked up or approved some other snap-on, grind-off, field-service-resistant, sealed-for-your-protection fiasco.
“So does he-–some obscure cubical farm auto engineer who probably got laid off ten years ago–REALLY hate me?”
That starts a little internal debate between your logical side and your emotions:
Emotion: “Well he (or she) must! Or he’d have put a five-cent drain plug in that tank and a little access door in the trunk to get to the pump without dropping the tank! That’s just common sense!”
Logic: “Nevermind that some clueless committee of accountants and lawyers had to veto all of that as expensive, unnecessary nonsense to hit the cost target. Besides, how often do you have to replace a fuel pump anyway?”
Emotion: “What! If he didn’t hate me, those cubical-oids in the gas tank department would have stood their ground and demanded for the common good that the thing be made easy to service in a dirty, unheated garage a couple of decades later!”
Logic: “They design the mechanical parts of cars for ease of assembly, not disassembly. That’s just how it has to be to keep prices low. If they put all of those access panels and Dzus fasteners you want, nobody could afford the car! And all those fuel economy and emission regulations force them to pack a lot more stuff into a smaller package…”
Emotion: “Balderdash! (or something thereabouts) If those engineers had to take this freakin’ thing apart at home with a rusty set of Craftsman tools and a couple of jackstands, they’d have made this junkpile a lot easier to work on! Look at how easy it was for those OG hot rodders to work on Deuce coupes and Model As! Now it just about takes a friggin’ college degree to keep one of these modern wonders of planned obsolescence running.”
Logic: “Yeah, but those old John Milner-types had to work on their cars all the time. What have I had to do to this thing for the past 170,000 miles, other than fill it with gas, change the oil and throw on a set or two of brake pads?”
Emotions: “But at least they COULD work on them without a huge roll-a-way tool box full of specialty tools, a sailor’s vocabulary, a library of repair manuals, and a case of bandages?”
“And OBD scan tools! Why don’t they just build those into the dash? Why should I have to spend extra just for a tool to read the computer they made me take! And then balance the freakin’ thing on my lap while I test drive with the ALDL cable tangled around my legs. That’s progress? Nope, it’s settled. He hate me! I’m unloading this pile on the first sucker I see (if I ever get it running again) and I’m gonna get me an old school rod.”
Hey, somebody want to help me get this gas tank off my chest?
