Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [36]
Skeleton viewed end-on
often seems to us mysterious because it resists the easy patterns of the fantasy, whereas there is nothing mysterious about the forms of bad art since they are the recognizable and familiar rat-runs of selfish day-dream. Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.8
Pursuing his hypothesis about the galling on the cam lobes further, Chas took one of the valve springs and, with my extra pair of hands, clamped it in a vise together with an ancient bathroom scale that had once been white and was now black. Using a vernier caliper to measure spring compression, he had me close the vise until the caliper reading corresponded to the installed height of the valve minus the maximum valve opening. The reading on the bathroom scale was higher than it should have been. I distinctly recall Chas clucking with satisfaction. “Yep. As I thought.” To accommodate higher rpms, the previous owner, a known shade tree performance enthusiast, had installed stiffer valve springs, which put more friction on the cam lobes. In twenty years, my motor had been subjected to who knows how many such interventions. It had been the site of focused attention by others, and its present state represented the layers of their varying purposes, gathered together in a material thing. The forensic efforts of a skilled engine builder are thus a kind of human archaeology.
Measuring spring compression
Volkswagens in particular, as the People’s Car, tend to get passed around like cheap whores, and it is rare to find one that hasn’t been pawed at by a train of users applying more urgency than finesse. The story that unfolds in the course of rehabilitating a VW engine can take different twists. It may have been subjected to clumsy, boyish innocence, such as my predecessor surely felt in his heart as he ripped open his package from JC Whitney and held the brand-new “high performance” valve springs in his hand, then proceeded to drive the reciprocating parts harder and faster, without any heed to the motor’s lubrication issues. Or it may be a tale of appalling moral squalor, as when it becomes evident that the previous owner failed to change the oil, like, ever.
Rebuilding a motor, then, is more humanly involved than assembling one on an assembly line. It is a craft activity. But what does this mean, exactly? We have seen that a mechanic’s perception is not that of a spectator. It is an active process, bound up with his knowledge of patterns and root causes. Further, his knowledge and perception are bound up with a third thing, which is a kind of ethical involvement. He looks for clues and causes only if he cares about the motor, in a personal way.
Personal Knowledge
We usually think of intellectual virtue and moral virtue as being very distinct things, but I think they are not. The mutual entanglement of ethics and cognition was captured by Robert Pirsig in what is to my mind the best (and funniest) passage in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The narrator’s bike’s engine has seized up at high speed, a disconcerting experience that causes the rear wheel to lock up. Not wishing to get involved in a big mechanical hassle himself, he takes the bike to a shop.
The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was going full blast and they were clowning around and talking and seemed not to notice me. When one of them finally came over he barely listened to the piston slap before saying, “Oh yeah. Tappets.” 9
Three overhauls, some haphazard misdiagnoses, and a lot of bad faith later, the narrator picks up his bike from the shop for the final time.
[N]ow there really was a tappet noise. They hadn’t adjusted them. I pointed this out and the kid came with an open-end adjustable