MORLEY’S WORKSHOP

MORLEY GETS TERRITORIAL OVER HIS TOOLS AND TALKS ECU WOES

Been a tiny bit busy at the Melbourne Bloke Centre, but still managed to get a few of those fiddly little jobs done on Her Royal Brownness (check out Our Shed). Actually, it’s amazing how much you can actually get done when you have even just an hour or so when the phone isn’t ringing and deadlines aren’t looming. At least, it is if you can just walk into the workshop and start spannering. If you have to move the Camira to get to the Torana so you can move the Commodore (thank you Darryl Kerrigan) it aint so convenient.

To tell you the truth, if you ask me, this is where a lot of projects stall: It just becomes so much trouble to get to them, move the junk that’s sitting on them to one side, find the tools you left in the boot last time and then actually start work, that it all becomes too hard. Next weekend. This, folks, is how so many worthy projects become garage shelving, I reckon.

Anyway, ever since buying a hoist, I never leave tools inside the car when I’m finished for the day. Because you can bet your bottom dollar that the exact, specific little double-jointed socket doo-dad you need will be sitting on the dashboard of the car, way up there on the hoist. Bugger it… next weekend.

In fact, no matter what I’ve been working on, I always replace tools back in their proper spot inside the tool chest before washing my hands, cracking a coldie or performing the mechanic’s victory dance that only we backyard geniuses understand. And you know what? As a result, I reckon I’ve lost one socket (a 12mm, quarter-inchquarter- inch drive if it matters to you) in the last 20 years. It’s not that the MBC is a picture of order and neatness (quite the opposite actually) but when it comes to tools, they all have a place to sleep when they’re not working.

I think this is why most of us get that niggling, hair-on-the-back-of-yer-neck thing happening when somebody is helping themselves to your tools. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to have mates drop around and make use of the equipment at the MBC and they’re always welcome, but putting stuff back where you got it from is the golden rule. Fortunately, the majority of the galoots that wander through the MBC share a common denominator of uselessness and are happy to let somebody else get their mitts dirty on their behalf in the – often – vain hope that I’ll do a better job than they would have.

There’s one other rule at the MBC: Don’t leave your rubbish lying around. If you create an empty oil bottle by tipping its contents down the rocker cover of your car, don’t leave the empty at my place. Changed an oil filter have we? Don’t leave the old one lurking around my shop where I’m likely to trip over it and spray used 10W40 from one end of the place to the other. And if you must leave whole vehicles here while you wait for parts/summon up the courage to tackle a small job that became a big job/any other reason, then be aware that if they’re still here in six months’ time, they become the property of the MBC and its proprietors. That would be me.