What do I owe my first car? My life, basically.
Ali and I are just colleagues — maybe friends at best. I tell myself it doesn’t mean much of anything that I’m teaching her how to change a radiator fan in the parking lot of the Arkansas newspaper that employs us.
We’re surrounded by a chicken processing plant and an industrial brewing operation. The weather is good. The wind blows the smell of chicken away.
It doesn’t matter that I could have swapped the fan out in 10 minutes. She wants to fix it herself. After a trip to AutoZone, cursing Jeep for inventing an inscrutable wiring harness, and a long, long moment of crossing our fingers hoping the fan starts with the engine, we solve our first problem together.
My dad said I could have a mint, manual, V8 Trans Am for less than the cost of restoring my wrecked, automatic, Buick V6-powered Firebird. It would be the height of insanity to restore the disaster of a car that cost more to ship from Missouri than to buy.
So, of course, he spent hundreds of hours fixing it.
It’s thanks to him that I ended up with my Pontiac in the first place. Gas prices first hit $4 a gallon in 2008 when I was looking for a car I could afford on my grass cutting money, driving the price of Civics, Corollas, and anything reliable, cheap, and fuel efficient through the roof.
The Firebird, despite regularly getting 27 MPG, was still relatively cheap. It had less than 30,000 miles on it despite being nearly a decade old. It was $8,000, but he helped me negotiate it down to $6,500.
I drove my first car home in the aftermath of Hurricane Hannah. I washed it, waxed it, and took my mom’s suggestion to name it after the storm. What else was there to worry about?
Well, what about the oil, my dad asked? What about the transmission fluid? Why doesn’t the stereo sound right? What’s making it squeak?
I thought the 162.5 times I had to cut my neighbor’s 2-acre lawn to buy the car was hard work.
Crap.
I learned how to change the oil and transmission fluid. I swapped out the stereo. I solved the annoying squeak the rear seat made when it was up.
At least once a week, I'd drive the car to 7-Eleven. I'd take the t-tops off, sit on the roof with my friends, and drink a Slurpee. I'd pick up my friend to get him to high school.
I took my first road trip in the Firebird, down the Blue Ridge Parkway the summer before college. As I complained about the trunk release button failing, the sun visor fell into my girlfriend's lap.
I took the Firebird with me to college. I drove across North Carolina to write about a board meeting for a journalism class. The car overheated on the way home. The engine cut out near Greensboro. When I checked the oil, steam came out.
I took it to a mechanic who replaced the fluids and then limped it back home to my dad in Maryland. That's when I really learned how to work on a car.
It took months. When we finally decided there was nothing to do but rip the engine apart, we were thwarted every step of the way by an engine that's mostly underneath the windshield. Some bolts took hours. I was so frustrated, but my dad taught me how to think through mechanical problems, and to find joy in finding solutions.
We got the car running again. I’ll never forget the relief when the car slowly chugged back to life — oil, blood, and sweat burning off the engine.
I am used to fixing cars by swapping out old parts that are broken with new parts that work.
However, GM stopped making parts years ago. When parts simply don’t exist and you’re racing against everyone with a broken car to harvest what you need from fresh arrivals at the junkyard, you begin to really appreciate machinists, painters, and engineers.
After buying the Firebird back, I took a week off work and drove to Maryland. I would have been completely lost without my dad’s engineer brain.
Our first week:
We took the axle rod out of the passenger side, took a bent plate off that was holding the brake caliper at an angle, and took it to a machinist to straighten it. We took the driver’s door off to replace the original pin and bushings in the hinge, hanging the door from the rafters with a rope to hold it in place while we worked. We replaced the mounts for the window motor. We replaced the window switches, which had broken. We replaced the oil and filter. We changed the transmission fluid. We replaced the brake calipers, pads, and rotors, bleeding the brakes in the process. We took the wheels to a restoration shop to determine if they could be refinished, the shop determined they were bent, and so my dad and I drove across Maryland to pick up replacements from Facebook Marketplace. We started patching holes in the junkyard bumper I found. We remounted and hooked back up the factory amp. We replaced the tail light and bulbs. We manufactured new axle bump stops and installed them.
Over the next 4 years, I made more trips to Maryland to tackle more problems with my dad, pay a shop to weld in a new rear quarter panel, and hire a painter. My wife and I refurbished the interior, finding a pen from my first internship in Arkansas, a coin from a car wash near my high school job at NIST in Gaithersburg, and a glove underneath the carpet presumably from the Canadian (Firebirds and Camaros were built in Quebec in the 90s) who installed it in the first place. I worked in my garage to fix the AC, the leaky differential, the headlights, the stereo, and a hundred other problems.
My dad and I finished the car in March.
What do I owe my first car? My life, basically.
Deciding to restore the Firebird was a dumb decision I would make again. It continues to do what it’s always done — fall apart to bring people together.