Not New, Just New to Me

Yesterday I remembered something my cousin’s husband said twenty-five years ago. He was an Air Force mechanic and would make a twenty-year career of it. He was assigned to the F-117 stealth fighter some number of months before its existence was publicly disclosed in 1988. Immediately before that he was working on F-4 Phantoms, the Vietnam workhorse that the Air Force had been flying since ’63. Sometimes he would marvel at the improvement in some state-of-the-art system, like the brakes, and then learn that it was the same system as used in the F-15 and not so new after all. From the perspective of the Phantom, a lot was new that wasn’t so new.

I changed spark plugs yesterday on a 2002 Chevy Prizm. This is the same car as the Toyota Corolla, which led to my young daughter calling it the gorilla prison. I’d heard before of individual ignition coils above each spark plug, but never dealt with such. Each coil was disconnected and unbolted and the boot pulled up off of the valve cover, and to my amazement a half-foot long, three-quarter-inch thick rubber tube followed it, the strangest spark plug wire I’d ever seen. It had occupied a metal sleeve descending between the dual overhead camshafts to the spark plug way down deep, well beyond finger reach. I was amazed, and then a little embarrassed at my amazement. When built, this was the most basic vehicle built by GM, and that was thirteen and a half years ago, but that’s the only kind of car I would be working on. The Prizm was built in the California factory where Elon Musk now turns out Teslas (which don’t have spark plugs). When I pointed out the common origin of our cars to a Tesla-driving friend he wasn’t at all disturbed by the coincidence.