"Can you direct me to a good mechanic in my town?" is a message we receive with some frequency. On some occasions, we can and we do -- more likely, we've never even heard of the town, let alone know which shop has the best reputation there. There is also a good probability that there is no good resource for older Volvos in the area.

Now, don't get us wrong -- there are many garages around the country doing fine service on the old cars. What's remarkable is that there are large areas where such service is not available. What's worse is that the service might appear to be there -- you might have no trouble finding a garage that will be happy to work on your car, but that has little chance of repairing it correctly.

Old Volvos are very simple cars, and one might expect that just about any mechanic would have no trouble doing good work on them. You won't find a mechanic at most dealerships, though -- "technicians," perhaps, or (even worse) "artisans," but few mechanics. How many of these well-intentioned, well-trained and experienced people really understand how an SU carb works, or how to rebuild one? How many know why a vacuum leak in a D-Jetronic system actually causes the engine to run rich? Can they get parts for your car? Do they still have a manual covering your model?

If the answer is "yes," you have found a valuable asset. Be patient with them and treat them well. If the answer is "ummm, maybe," there's no better time to start learning how to work on your Volvo yourself. If the answer is "no," we hope you already know how to do much of your own work. At the very least, get a good manual for your particular car and start reading up on how the various systems work.

Back when our skills were limited to doing things like changing oil and sparkplugs, we had a problem with fouled plugs causing misfires. We took our Amazon down the street to the "Import Car Specialist" place for diagnostic tests and subsequent repair. "Time for a rebuild," we were told, "your rings are shot. Luckily for you, we have another old Volvo out back. We just rebuilt the motor -- took us six months to find all the parts -- and the owner skipped town. We're going to part it out; you can have the motor for $800. A bargain."

"How 'rebuilt' is 'rebuilt'?" we asked, being cautious.

"I mean 'rebuilt!' Everything!" came the answer, with overtones of insult. "It might as well be factory-new. Take it or leave it."

We took it. The car ran worse after the transplant than before. After a various trips in and out of the shop, it finally got as good as it had been before, but no better. They blamed it on today's gas, declared it fixed, and that was that. We were not happy, but short of some cumbersome and expensive legal action, there was not much we could do about it.

We soon moved to another town and found, again just a few blocks from our house, a foreign car shop. There was a showroom-condition Jag XK-E parked in the front window and some exotic Italian cars being worked on in the shop. Would they condescend to working on a humble old Volvo that needed some TLC? Sure!

They never got it to run any better, either. When something really broke down, they fixed it -- in fact, if it was just a ten-minute repair, they wouldn't even charge us. These were great guys -- but the car never really ran the way we thought Volvo must have designed it to run.

Out of frustration, we started tinkering with it ourselves. We had a Haynes manual, and tools accumulated as needed. Many times, we made the car run worse, but were always able to undo the mistakes. We learned, slowly.

After a few more years and a move to a town where we knew of no foreign car specialists, we came to the conclusion (correctly) that the SU carbs needed rebuilding. Repeated phone calls failed to find anyone that would even look at the job -- and this is not a small town; there are 300,000 people within a half-hour's drive -- but the Volvo dealership would sell me a parts kit.

We'd just have to do the job ourselves. As it turned out, the carbs had been the main problem all along. The old motor had not needed rebuilding; that guy sold us a bill of goods, pure and simple. In fact, when we eventually tore down the "factory-fresh" motor, we found broken rings, a holed piston, bearings worn to nothing and the original felt main seals -- that motor had conceivably had a valve job (we don't know one way or the other), but nothing more.

At one point, I had given the second shop carte blanche to fix whatever mechanically was wrong with the car. Amazingly, for people who regularly worked on British cars with SU carbs (the manager drove a Mini-Cooper S), they never even suggested fixing those throttle shafts clanking around in their bushings. An oversight? Simple ignorance? Or did they just not care?

We won't go into the "new paint job" story right now; how expensive it was, how long it took, how shoddy it was or how we got the car away from them as soon as it could be driven and put it all back together in our driveway...

The word professional is usually understood to mean "skilled in a trade." In some cases, it means only "willing to accept money." Today, we do all our own work on the car except for contracting out specific operations to a machine shop when required. We never charge ourselves $40+ an hour, we never start taking the car apart at 4:30 when we need to be driving it at 5:00, and we do the best job we can every time because it's our car. At this point, we like the car even more than before because we have so much effort invested in it. It's not just a great car, it's a labor of love.

Volvos stay on the road as long as they do not just because of their sturdy design and reasonably good materials, but because they were built to be fixed. Start developing your skills now by buying a good shop manual for your car. Start tinkering. Surely there are three or four small things you've been meaning to get fixed -- go ahead and fix them. Work up to the larger things slowly -- it takes years to develop real skills as a mechanic -- but begin now. If you think a job is out of your depth, take it to a professional by all means, but study the section about the system in question in your manual anyway. That will put you in the position both to spot the scam artist and to learn from what the skilled mechanic does.

And don't forget to check in with us from time to time. We'll help if we possibly can.

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