Mark's VW Werkshop - Page 1

So I've known Mark for a pretty good while. He's Good People. I have a pretty severe allergy to bullshit, and Mark's one of the most bullshit-free people I've ever encountered in my whole life. And he is of a kind and forgiving nature that allows him to put up with my bullshit, so we seem to get along well and I tend to hang around his little hole-in-the-wall one-man-show repair shop whenever time and circumstance permit.

I try to make myself useful when I'm there, but let's face it, Mark is in a league all to himself and I'm the Village Idiot.

So I stay out of the way for the most part, and seem to provide a sort of cheap entertainment for Mark, and will occasionally handle incoming phone calls, thus allowing him to distill and add a few more precious minutes of productive time to his workday.

So ok.

So he hasn't decided to run me off.

Nice, that.

His shop is like nothing else you've ever seen, and is redolent with a symphony of exotic sights, sounds, and smells, up to and including the people who avail themselves of his sterling services.

Which, of course, is catnip to a guy who writes, and double catnip to a guy who takes photographs.

Guilty as charged on both counts, your Honor. I throw myself upon the mercy of the court.

So once upon a time one morning, when I came rattling in to the shop and got out from behind the wheel of my '85 VW Vanagon, I noticed that Mark was smack dab right in the middle of a HORRENDOUS job that involved replacing a leaky evaporator in the air-conditioning system of yet another distressed automobile.

And what I saw there that morning, under the awning of the shop, caused me to immediately get back inside my van and drive home to grab my camera, so that I could capture the sight and save it for later, before it disappeared forever.

And that's what we'll start with.

Rubik's Dashboard.

Which has to be seen to be believed.

And it's not enough that the thing resembles nothing so much as the aftermath of a car bomb, there's a story that goes with it.

  This stuff used to control air flow

So we'll lead in slow, and kind of build up to things, ok?

And part of the lead-in consists in the fact that as equipment ages, it tends to slowly succumb to the ravages of entropy, and once in a while some of it will more or less dissolve.

Like the little insulated flaps that live inside of the air-conditioning box that itself lives up underneath the dashboard of this particular volkswagen.

Which is completely incidental to the actual task at hand of replacing the evaporator that also lives inside this box, but it needs to be addressed and rectified before the car can be returned to its owner.

 
Better than the original flaps, and please take note of the subtleties of these things' shape.  
 
  Yeah, the VW dealer makes you buy this whole fucking expensive box, instead of letting you just buy the little gray flaps. Mark is very much disinclined to put up with this kind of bullshit, so he does what he does and his workarounds are elegant ones.

Mark, being Mark, just skirts completely around the issue of having to buy the entire box the little flaps lived in, just to replace the damn things, and instead hand-crafts a brand new set of flaps from scratch, kinda like your great-grandma once upon a time made cakes and pastries from scratch. And drops them into the box, where they fit perfectly, natch.  Once constructed, the new flaps turn out to actually be better than the goddamned original flaps that came brand-new with the car.

This is just Mark's way, and it typifies his whole approach to things.

But we're not even here to talk about the stupid box or the flaps that live inside of it in the first place, right? What we're really here to talk about is the phenomenal job of disassembly and reassembly required to extract this goddamned box, with or without the fucking flaps, so that you can then remove and replace the leaking evaporator which is the root cause of all the contrapted nightmare set of complications that surrounds this simple-sounding task. I mean, how hard can it be, anyway? You just take the broken evaporator out of its little compartment and drop the new evaporator into the vacated space and tra la la, you're done. Nothing to it, right?

Well......maybe not.

Welcome to Rubik's Dashboard

Unfortunately, in order to gain proper access to the box such that it can be removed and worked upon, you must first deal with the small matter of having to remove the entire dashboard of the car to get to it.

 
The Box from Hell lives over on the right side, way up underneath everything where it's quite hard to get to  

And when you're done removing the entire dashboard of the car, which in and of itself is a most very definitely non-trivial task, things wind up looking like this.

What. The. Fuck?

At this point in things we may want to begin questioning what the engineers who designed this nightmare were smoking when they designed it.

A little more light so you can see a little better

I mean, it's the fucking evaporator for the goddamned air-conditioner.

What in the name of all that's holy would cause a bunch of presumably intelligent people to locate a component like this (a component that's sufficiently prone to failure that one might expect that the business of getting to it in a somewhat reasonable manner would live fairly high up on the list of design priorities for locating it) in a place that's so stupifyingly difficult to get to?

 
Please keep in mind that this end of things, over on the driver's side, has absolutely nothing to do with the goddamned box, but it all has to be dealt with anyway  

Were these guys on crack?

Meth?

Were they cackling in maniacal glee as they finalized their design?

Big steering column fun!

Who the fuck can know?

Not me, that's for sure.

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What the fuck is all this shit, anyway?  


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But it is what it is, and whatever it is, Mark is the one who's going to have to deal with the sonofabitch and make it right.

And so he goes to work on it, just as you or I might go to work on any of the mundane tasks of our daily lives.

The box lives in a certifiably awkward location

 

 
  Making ready, making right

 

 
In goes the damnable box  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
The box is more or less where it belongs now, but there remains just a smidgen of work left to be done

 

 
  And now the fun of reassembly can begin in earnest

 

 

 

 

 



In the end, of course, it all went back together, good as new. Better, even.

Enough already with Rubik's Dashboard of Doom.

Let's go look at the shop itself, ok?

On the Next Page.

 
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