Last week I drove the GMC to work one day and arranged to pick up my now retired (8 years ago) high school shop teacher for a short ride to lunch at the BBQ place in town.
16 or 19 years ago (has it actually been that long?) I didn't have much fun in high school except for perhaps Geometry and my time in small engine repair class taught by Mr. Knick.
He owned and operated his own auto repair shop in town which combined with his own tinkering, racing, and general good natured trouble making resulted in an accumulation countless stories and un-measurable knowledge in all things mechanical. By the time I met him he was the long time small engine and auto mechanic shop teacher at the local technical school turned high school.
As part of the first semester we had a partner, a workbench, small tool box, and a B&S engine. We first disassembled the engine, cleaned, measured, checked and eventually reassembled, started and adjusted it. Sounds simple now but was quite the job back then, we even had to read the manual.. and sometimes look up parts on the microfiche machine.
At some point he challenged us students to fiddle with a known running engine and make it not run anyway short of causing actual damage to it. Then within some unbelievable short amount of time, like minutes, he bet us he could have it fixed and running again. We did basic stuff like carburetor adjustments, improper spark plug gap, no or sheared flywheel key, and tricky things like draw a pencil line down the porcelain insulator on the spark plug, plug the vent in the gas cap.. and I forget what all else. Sure enough he'd come back in the shop and in quite literally no time he had it running again. It seemed like fun then and little did we know it was a real clever way of helping us understand and learn how engines run, what they need, what symptoms are caused by what problems and what to do about it.
Mr. Knick's plethora of stories of fixing and troubleshooting countless mowers and vehicles among other life stories only added to our education. Like the one of driving an old British sports care so low to the ground he could open the door and throw sparks by holding the bottom of a steel beer can to the pavement. You can't even make these sorts of stories up, much less tell them in public school today.
I forget now how many semesters I had with Mr. Knick because even when I didn't have an actual class I'd come in at lunch or any free time and work on my own projects. He usually left the door open but even when he hadn't I could quickly "unlock" it with the 6" steel scale I always had in my pocket (though I never told him that part). Projects included fiddling with some of my old hit and miss type engines and swapping the 235 engine in my 52 Chevy PU for another I had rebuilt.
Took me a several years to realize just how much I had learned from him though I expect he knew at the time. Simple things and good practices like always troubleshoot the easiest and cheapest cause first, remember the basics and and after eliminating the cheap things then look into the more expensive causes/solutions. My second year in HS he held a seemingly informal competition and test and soon enough I was in Richmond competing against students from other regions for the state championship of small engine repair in VICA (now SkillsUSA). That summer he took me to the National competition in KC where I finished 4th. A few years later he had a student finish even higher, first in the nation if I'm not mistaken.
Anyhow I had been thinking how important that time and those experiences were to me and that I ought to tell Mr. Knick as much while possible.
He's always been curious what trucks and old stuff I've been playing with and I hadn't yet showed him the GMC so a ride across town and back for a BBQ lunch seemed like the right way to go about all that.
Grigg
