Surf's Up

Youngest son Jesse works for at Gunner’s Great Garage and helps out with some detail painting and minor mechanical work. However, what he’s really good at is surfing the Internet for old cars he thinks we should buy.

Now, we haven’t bought a vintage vehicle since purchasing a ’75 Ford tow truck we thought would be a good promotional item. Then, we put about $6,000 into fixing it up. Which all turned out not to be a great investment, since tow trucks take up lots of room and require special insurance.

After the tow truck, we kind of lost interest in buying anything, because we have no storage room left. Nevertheless, Jesse is online almost every night finding Packards and Rivieras and Triumphs we “should” buy. In fact, he is quite good at locating really nice, reasonably priced cars.

He is so good at this kind of thing that I often wonder how we could take this skill of his and turn it into a profitable new career. He would probably be much better at tracing down four-wheeled treasures than he is at turning wrenches.

This, in turn, made us think about the paramount changes that computers and the Internet have brought to the old-car industry. Today we ordered a set of Coker tires entirely by email. Then we listed an engine for sale online and already have six people interested in it. And tonight, Jesse found the Packard you see here offered for sale for $38,000. That’s a whole lot of push-button commerce going on for a 24-hour period.

We could get deeper into this topic, but someone just turned the computer back on and the surf is up. Although it gets to feel a little like an addiction at times, it sure is hard to put the keyboard down.