Why Hack?

Although the moniker "The Hack Mechanic" started to appear in my BMW CCA Roundel Magazine columns some 25 years ago, the desire to tinker, to fix, to make things better, to not pay someone else to fix my stuff has been with me as long as I can remember. In Matthew Crawford's very interesting book "Shop Class as Soulcraft," he has a chapter entitled "To Be Master of One's Own Stuff" that hits this nail on the head. Modern economic theory proffers the concept of "opportunity cost," which attempts to quantify the value of time and the cost of spending some of it doing something when you could be doing something else. This has its place, but when it is applied to, say, a salaried professional repairing his own car, numbers are often presented to show that it makes no sense. That is, if you are paid Y dollars an hour for your professional services, and you can pay someone else X dollars an hour to fix your car, and X is less than Y, the argument posits that you should pay someone else and spend your free time doing either things that make you Y dollars an hour, or things you enjoy. The fallacy, of course, in this argument is that it ignores the possibility that you might actually ENJOY working on your own car. The fact that gardening and fine woodworking (for example) are generally not regarded in the same light is, I think, a class issue -- these are accepted leisure activities for moneyed fifty- and sixty-somethings. Auto repair, like other "trades" such as plumbing and electrical work, often seems to be looked down upon.

But to some of us, it's just in our blood. Before I was a Car Guy, I was a Bicycle Guy. I used to ride bikes, build bikes, rescue them from the trash and rehabilitate them. Then, I got my driver's license, and most of that tinkering energy immediately jumped from the self-propelled to the internal combustion realm. Even still, raising three boys, we only bought one new bike -- the rest were yard sale specials or trash pulls. (Hey, I live in Newton. People throw out a lot of good stuff.)

Every once in a while, it's nice to reinhabit the role of Bicycle Guy. I'm currently on vacation on Nantucket, waking up mornings and riding a bike I pulled out of the trash in Newton eight years ago that needed nothing but two new tires and a thorough lubing of the chain. This year I treated myself to a new gel-filled saddle. Total expense -- $30.

It's the same thing with the fishing gear. At the start of each vacation, I spend a blissful evening pulling the reels apart, lubing and cleaning them, and putting them back together. I don't WANT to pay someone else to do this. I don't WANT to buy new reels. I want to get the grit out with a Q-tip, smell the WD40 on my hands, hear the reels spin free. Last year, my classic American-made Penn 704Z reel snapped its spinning bail. Turns out this reel and this part are no longer made, so I jumped when I found the part on eBay for twelve bucks. The satisfaction I got from putting this old friend back in service was immense.

I could go on about the deeper reasons why so many of us like to get down, get dirty, get in there, but it's time to go to the beach.