Quote:
Originally Posted by ford38v8
I started this thread with an idea that I didn’t communicate well. I was trying to lament the loss of knowledge available to the new generation. The lessons learned by the real old timers and passed on to us almost old timers is now dying off with what remains of us. The newbies must now make the same dumb mistakes that we avoided because we had tutors. We know things like mustang front suspensions are crap and split wishbones are troublesome at best, but the new guys gotta make their own mistakes. They never heard about ‘37 steering boxes so they want Vega steering boxes. There are damn few true old timers left, and even less of them here on the Barn. For us if we had a question, hell, the local junkyard had expert advice and had the parts to do the job. We didn’t hesitate to rebuild a transmission, we just took the busted gears out to match up at the junk yard, and got the bonus advise to upgrade to ‘39 gears. That kind of expertise is not available to the young’uns today, and they look at us sideways when we try to set them straight because they read some fool hack writer’s magazine article telling about Jaguar independent suspension.
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I don't think it's the problem that you are postulating. Think of all of the books put out by the EFV8CA over the last 30 or so years. None of that knowledge was available when I started out. It's only getting better; there is an entirely new '33-'34 book in the works, (even though I thought the original was excellent). I am sure that you have heard that "once something is on the Internet, it's there forever". I'll bet that 50 years from now, every bit of knowledge posted here (or on the H.A.M.B and other such forums) will still be easily accessible.
And, I have to disagree with you about "the local junkyard had expert advice". I will guarantee you that the advice you can find on rebuilding a pre-war Ford transmission here will beat the hell out of what you got at the local scrapyard 50 years ago. I got a lot of good parts from Jim at Carmichel's Auto Parts in the fifties and sixties, but also some bad advice ("you don't want this Columbia for $10, they're nothin' but trouble).
Actually, things are pretty good now, and they'll only get better as technology advances and gets cheaper.