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" Friends who&amp;#039;ve known me a long time would be forgiven for thinking that I came into the world drinking baby formula mixed with gasoline and sucking on a spanner rather than a pacifier. Nothing could be further from the truth. My passion for cars was by no means hereditary. Thanks to a decent bus system where I grew up and a home close to the steel mill my dad worked in, we didn&amp;#039;t have a family car until I was about 10 or 11. About a year or so later, enthusiasm finally took root when I bought my first car magazine, a 1978 issue of Road &amp;amp;amp; Track with a Ferrari 308 GTS on the cover. Among other wonderful articles, it contained Rob Walker&amp;#039;s report on the Long Beach Grand Prix, where Gilles Villeneuve had very nearly snagged his first victory. It wasn&amp;#039;t until high school that my transformation was complete. I signed up for auto mechanics as one of my electives and was fortunate enough to land in Mr. Andreychuk&amp;#039;s class. On that first day, I had only the vaguest idea of how an internal combustion engine worked. Mr. Andreychuk went on to teach us how all the major systems in a car worked. We took them apart. We studied them. We reassembled them. I registered for every auto shop class I could fit into my schedule after that, laying the groundwork for much of my career. Teachers and students regularly brought their cars into Mr. Andreychuk&amp;#039;s shop at the school for a variety of repairs. One victim, dragged in while I was in eleventh grade, was a chugging, belching and prematurely rusting 1977 Triumph TR7. Back when it debuted less than a decade earlier, Triumph touted its wedge-shaped sports car as &amp;quot;the Shape of Things to Come.&amp;quot; Things didn&amp;#039;t turn out so well for Triumph. This sickly yellow sports car was clear evidence of why. By this time, I&amp;#039;d been avidly reading the words of Henry N. Manney, David E. Davis, and their contemporaries for several years. To me, the TR7 before us was just a giant learning opportunity. I spent much of the next two years working on it. With a Chilton&amp;#039;s manual on the bench, I tore into the car with two classmates, gradually dismantling the 2.0-liter slant-four without pulling it completely out of the car. We eventually replaced the water pump (embedded in the upper side of the block), performed a full valve job and learned how to set clearances with the solid bucket tappets. Once it was back together, with the rats nest of vacuum lines reconnected, I fired it up. Gnarly. At this point Mr. Andreychuk introduced us to the piece de resistance, balancing the carburetors. In what proved to be a very high-tech operation, he handed me a screwdriver, a 12-inch piece of garden hose, and told me to stick one end of the hose in one of the Zenith side-draft carbs and listen to the other end. After alternating back and forth several times between the two carbs while adjusting them to get the same pitch through the hose, the engine was running as smoothly as it ever would. I may not have been born with a spanner in my hand, but for three decades, I&amp;#039;ve rarely been far from one. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/travel/a5606/stories-from-the-road-born-without-a-spanner/>