I Make a New One

I’ve told you people a million times that I’m prone to hyperbole. So you’re sort of forewarned. Here goes: This Swiss dude is The King of all the anal-retentive restoration project YouTube video generators, and there are legions of them. There can be only one, and he’s it.

I started you out with the book press, a small dose of My Mechanics. It’s just 25 minutes long, because I’m not sure you’re ready for this guy’s whole thang in one eyeball injection. A little later on, I’ll post his three-hour saga of restoring a Datsun 240z with the same level of care he brought to the book press. This is like homeopathy, you can’t tolerate a full dose right away, you have to build up to it.

I could have posted any one of his other videos instead of the book press. An old table lamp. A battered, venerable kitchen scale. A set of headphones it looks like Edith Piaf used. Each, in their own way, is the work of a lunatic. I mean that in the most complimentary way. I love lunacy like that.

There is no rational explanation for the amount of effort and care he puts into every project. There’s no way to torture a spreadsheet to make it profitable on its own merits. Stuff taken off the walls in a defunct Swiss TGI Friday’s and restored to perfection is not a business plan. There’s no way for someone with that particular set of skills to make it pay off by fixing flea market finds.

A highly skilled machinist like him makes bank. He’s the only one who could possibly afford to hire him, because he’s not paying himself. No one is going to give him twenty grand for a restored bookbinding vise, no matter how nice it looks. After watching his 240Z restoration, I wracked my brain thinking of someone who could afford to buy it when he’s done, if you factored in all the highly-skilled effort that went into it. Maybe Toyota? I doubt even they have enough money in their couch cushions. Museums? They don’t have that kind of money in their budgets. And what would they want with these mundane things, just because he made them perfect?

So I settled on the idea that that he does it for one of two other reasons. Either he does it for the love of it, or he does it as performance art. Upon further reflection, neither one of those explanations seems like a viable answer, either.

For love? This guy doesn’t love doing what he’s doing. He’s obsessed. Any girl with a stalker will explain the difference between love and obsession. He is demanding that the world conform to his standard of workmanship. He is a Bridgeport Canute ordering the rusty tide not to rise. Hell, he’s telling it to recede, and he’s getting it to go back out to sea.

He doesn’t just restore things to their original luster. He plows past restoration and fixes any original sins he finds. He grinds off extraneous hidden casting marks that came straight from the factory, and chamfers every single edge. He’s not a fairy godmother. He’s an avenging angel.

As performance art? We’re getting closer here, maybe. He has a prodigious list of Patreons. YouTube videos with the counter in the millions pay fairly well. Selling the objects could never make it pay, but letting people watch you fix them seems like a going concern in the rarified air of millions of YouTube subscribers.

But it’s a very unusual form of performance art, if that’s what it is. He never shows his face, never utters a word, never even grunts when a particularly tough nut won’t turn. Performance art is the land of “look at me.” He doesn’t seem to want to live there. Personality cults require more personality than he feels like delivering.

I wanted very much to put this guy in context, compare him to things that came before him. Shadetree mechanics? Model railroaders? Reproduction woodworkers like Wallace Nutting? Basement boatbuilders? Hell, ship in a bottle makers?

I began to fear that the guy doesn’t even care as much about the objects he works on as much as making a video of what he’s doing. It’s easy to overlook that his videography is better than all the other restoration channels, too. Unlike his competitors, you never fast forward through his vids. He never skips anything he needs to show you, and never lingers on any operation long enough to be boring. And you’ll eventually sit on the edge of your chair, waiting for him to find something that’s not up to (his) snuff, and the chyron to read, “I make a new one,” and watch him do it.

So I don’t know who or what this guy is, or what he represents. But he sure is something, ain’t he?

And if he can bang on this thing for 2.5 years, without even getting to the engine or interior yet, you can spare three hours, can’t you?

A Happy Father’s Day

This video requires a commitment from you. It’s pushing three hours long. In TikTok world, it’s the equivalent of a trip to the moon. But it’s worth it, for various reasons.

The Tube is awash with people bringing a trailer and rescuing cars from barns, and from other guys with trailers. I’ve watched a lot of them. I especially enjoy the fellows that put the cars back the way they were when they were new. The fellows that paint 1970s Toyotas the color of a stripper’s toenails after adding a supercharged 428, not so much.

I think these fellers at Turnin’ Rust are a little different, and more commendable. Like many who stumble on internet notoriety, they’ve cycled through a handful of names while deciding which side of the bread the butter is on. They’ve been at it much longer, and without a camera pointed at them for most of it. They’re a father/son team (with little sister recording), laboring in obscurity in a very obscure place, Bogata Texas. It’s pronounced “buh GAY tah,” I think. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I used to live in Maine, and we pronounce Calais “callous,” so I never cast any pronunciation aspersions.

Well, however you say it, Bogata Texas is The Last Picture Show in the flesh. It’s been shedding population for forty or fifty years, and has been whittled down from 1,500 people to about 1,000. The Bushes, Wyatt and Lance, have been fixing cars in Bogata for whoever’s left. Their skill set is an interesting one. They’re completely accustomed to resurrecting autos too far gone for anyone else to even attempt them, simply to get them back to running, and being useful again.

This isn’t Jay Leno’s operating room for Maseratis. While it’s interesting to see old supercars getting their very molecules polished enough to become museum pieces, I can’t count it as useful behavior. Making something work again, restoring its usefulness for regular people, is something else again. And just how many guys who’ve had a taste of TV notoriety have a zillion-dollar personal car collection? I’ve lost track. It can be a little off-putting. A museum for one person sounds like something Saddam Hussein would enjoy. Or maybe Tutankhamen.

The Turnin’ Rust folk’s specialty appears to be old Volkswagens. That’s not what I’d expect from someone fixing cars in the flatlands between Dallas and Oklahoma, but what do I know? Beetles were cheap and easy to fix back in the day. My brother had a VW, and it was a blessing that it was easy to fix, because it needed fixing all the damn time. But that was just a testament to its value to the impoverished. Cheap enough to buy, easy enough to fix is a mostly forgotten set of requirements for a daily driver. Cars today are mostly interchangeable, and ultimately disposable when they need substantial repairs.

The father/son team features a series of videos with no speaking, and no music. Those are a tonic for a weary internaut. They work together wordlessly, each knowing the other’s minds, and accomplish all sorts of difficult things without any chafing between them. The stuck bolts provide the only friction.

This video has plenty of discussion in it. It’s not surprising. Getting a 1947 International truck running after being left to rust in a field for decades is hard. I’ve picked this video out of their catalog of similar projects because it featured the longest list of seemingly insuperable impediments to their mission: to simply get the thing to run.

The opportunities to give up for good reason that they squandered along the way boggled my mind. They never complained, never flagged. No matter how hard it was, they kept going. And like all of their videos, there’s no cursing, and no high-fives. When things go badly, they regroup and continue. When things go right, they thank the lord instead of strutting and preening. And they do it all, literally, as shade tree mechanics. Their truck tire engine stand is marvelous.

And the grin on the phlegmatic, avuncular dad’s face at around 2:48:00 alone is worth the price of admission. The son is grinning, too, but it’s different. I know dad’s grin. I’ve experienced it once or twice with my own sons. If you could bottle it, you’d sell more of it than Jack Daniel’s ever could.