I loved Shannon’s garage. It was such a comfortable place. All
the pictures and postcards and momentos that he had afixed to the
inside of the garage door were endlessly interesting to look at,
read, and laugh with. Pictures of Shannon when he was a kid karting
with his Dad, pictures of all manner of family and friends and
heroes, admission tickets from races, pictures of random
motorcycles he liked from over the years. Old number plates
presumably from Shannon’s moto racing days of yore. Funny ads
clipped from magazines or newspapers. Industry stickers and many
different kinds of reminders of good times and interesting stories.
It was a thing of beauty to make any true gearhead sigh.
Many a party or gathering ended up in there. At least the ones I
was present for. Which was usually when other moto heads were
there, and the garage is where we naturally gravitate to. The
bikes; his Mini that usually lived in the garage. Often his Triumph
Speed Triple that I loved to stare at, sit on, or ask questions
about. Visitor bikes, loaner bikes, bikes he was helping a friend
fix, maintain or store.
I got to use the garage for its true purpose once, as well. When
I got a big brake kit for my Audi S4 wagon, he offered up his garage
to install them. Since his mechanical experience far outstrips my
own, not to mention the fact that mine wasn’t sufficient to perform
the job by myself, I quickly took him up on the offer. He also had
told me of his super-duper brake fluid sucking device that sounded
divine, so I packed up the two big boxes of the kit, Frankie — my
dog — and even the odd tool, and headed over there early one
Saturday morning.
It turned out to be a hellaciously hot day, and Shannon and I sweated
continuously the whole day working on those brakes. The original
ones were a total bitch to get off. It didn’t help that I had
roasted the shit out of them at Laguna Seca raceway a few months
before. The stock brakes of that car were definitely not up to the
rigors of even light track use. My show-the-stock-brakes-no-mercy
driving style at the track that day quite wrecked them, and so there
I was in Shannon’s garage, installing my new uber-cool BBK. I
always forget one or two things, sometimes important, sometimes
minor. This day I forgot to bring the special brake fluid I had
bought, so Shannon took me to a little parts store near his house
in the Mini and I bought some kind of crazy blue German or Austrian
“racing” brake fluid. Turned out to be a good idea because it was
so easy to discern the new fluid from the old, worn out fluid.
Many, many, sweaty hours later, after we had removed both the old
front brakes and installed the new ones, I discovered that the wheels did
not fit over the brakes! Aiee! There were many guarantees on the
web site of the place I bought the kit, and just about every page
of the lengthy instructions and other paperwork that came with the
kit assured the purchaser that no fitment problems would ever occur.
Right. I was completely flabergasted. Shannon kept his cool,
however, and prodded me to call some Audi dealerships, even looking
up the telephone numbers for me. The San Jose dealership, as well
as all the other relatively nearby ones were closed on Saturday.
This was all the more annoying because one of the reasons that my
friend Ken wasn’t involved was that he works for the nearby BMW
dealership in the service department and had to work on Saturday!
I eventually got an answer from the Burlingame Audi dealership, some 40 miles away.
No, they informed me, their service department wasn’t open. I asked
for the parts department, why, I’ll never know, and asked
them if they had any wheel spacers. They said, well, no, they
don’t, and besides they’re closed on Saturday too. But then they
said try this tuner shop down the street from them, they sometimes
work on Audis and who knows what they might have. Long story short,
I hit the odds of the lottery and yes, they did have the correct
wheel spacers (!), and they also turned out to have longer lug bolts
that would fit the new setup, as the stock bolts would be too short
with the spacer installed. Unbelievable luck, or the result of Shannon persistence? It turned out that
while I had cleverly ordered the BBK designed for the previous
generation S4 which had 17″ stock wheels and therefore a smaller and
lighter brake rotor, no one had ever tried to install that kit on the
current generation car which had 18″ stock wheels. The smaller rotor
package weighed significantly less than the larger one, but people
are so incorrectly obsessed with bigger-larger-bigger that I was the
first person to ever try this combination. The way the wheel spokes
eminate out from the center of the wheel, the huge calipers were just
a couple of millimeters too wide to fit. Just goes to show that
there’s always something, and it pays to be prepared as much as
possible.
Shannon was his usual unflagging gracious self and insisted on
driving me all the way to Burlingame and back in the Mini (the S4
sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere), helping immensly at the tuner
shop with advice and questions too. About $16 worth of gas burned
up in the Mini later (gas was still around $4/gallon in those days),
we were back at his garage, got the spacers installed, the wheels
on, and the brake pads bedded in (lots of smoke and smelliness).
By then the temperature had actually started to dip below easy-bake,
and I insisted on buying Shannon dinner, so we went and got some
gourmet pizza at his favorite pizza place.
The best part about that day (and night) was getting to hear the
stories about Shannon and his dad going kart racing when he was a
kid, and Shannon passing on to me all the mechanics advice his dad
had endowed him with over the years. That, and, oh yeah, now I had
new brakes on the wagon that actually worked and didn’t scare the
crap out of me.
I was very jealous of how well Shannon kept his garage so organized,
clean, and functionally useful. My garage should be exactly like
his, but I just watch too much TV I guess. I kept thinking to
myself that I was not a good person, for I did not have a stocked
sink in my garage where hands could be washed and dried before
coming into the house; fluids, tools, parts, rags, grease, oil,
sprays, cleaners … all so well laid out and quickly accessible
for any project. But Shannon had a gift and a desire to make you
feel like his garage was your garage, so then there was no need to
spend your time doing what he had already done. He actually had a
knack for making you feel good about borrowing his garage!
It was truly a man’s garage.
