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5 days ago | 
hagerty.com | Rob Siegel
Anyone who’s been living in the same house for 33 years—as my wife and I have—knows all about being overwhelmed by stuff. It’s everywhere. The place is packed to the gills with it. And it just keeps coming, via Amazon purchases, yard sales, inheritance, and gifts. It’s like there’s a giant, unseen conveyor belt that keeps dumping it in. Furniture is perhaps the worst, as it doesn’t take up space by accident—it’s designed to take up space.
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1 week ago | 
hagerty.com | Rob Siegel
Preventive maintenance before a road trip falls into two categories—dealing with the known and forestalling the predictable. Regarding the known, it’s pretty foolish to set off on a long trip with a car that has a serious known problem (for example, overheating or stumbling) and simply hope for the best. Regarding the predictable, I’ve found a short list of things likely to strand a vintage car.
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2 weeks ago | 
hagerty.com | Rob Siegel
About ten years ago, I bought a 1987 BMW E30 325is that had a seized compressor. I resurrected its air conditioning by finding a used compressor, flushing the system out, and recharging it with good old-fashioned R12.
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3 weeks ago | 
hagerty.com | Rob Siegel
Last week, I went into a fair amount of detail about the ins and outs of replacing the cat-back portion of the exhaust in my 2008 Nissan Armada. Although the article was all flanges and nuts and bolts and dollars and cents, there is a philosophical side to the exercise that deserves some scrutiny. So grab a chair while I light my pipe and dun my Harris Tweed jacket with the suede elbow patches. Owning a car is expensive. That goes for any car.
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1 month ago | 
hagerty.com | Rob Siegel
Okay, folks, it’s back to the 2008 Nissan Armada, the vehicle I love to hate, except when I need to tow home some prize I’ve purchased, in which case all is forgiven. If you recall (well, you don’t have to recall; you can read about it here), I bought the cheap Armada in February 2024. I massively underestimated its needs, but I was aware that it had a leaky exhaust.
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1 month ago | 
hagerty.com | Rob Siegel
Not long after I began contributing to Hagerty eight years ago, I wrote a detailed four-part piece on electrical relays and how they work in cars. You can still find the articles here (Part I: Why We Need Them; Part II: DIN Numbers and Different Types of Relays; Part II: Troubleshooting, and Part IV: The Solenoid).
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1 month ago | 
hagerty.com | Rob Siegel
When I bought my salvage-titled 1988 BMW E30 325is last fall and found out that it was the rear two-thirds of one car and the front clip of another, and had the low-revving 121-hp fuel-efficient “Eta” motor to boot, one of the lowest-priority items on the punch list was tires.
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1 month ago | 
hagerty.com | Rob Siegel
There’s a classic Monty Python routine called “How to Do It” where they issue laughably simplified explanations on how to do very complex things (“Today we’re going to learn how to build box-girder bridges. But first, here’s Jackie to tell you how to play the flute: ‘Well, you blow here, and move your fingers up and down there.'”) I come back to this time and time again because it tracks with just about anything that requires expertise someone else has that you don’t. Witness broken bolts.
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2 months ago | 
hagerty.com | Rob Siegel
Last week, I described how, in 4 ½ days, while sleeping in the house of someone I’d met once for ten minutes, I took Louie—a 1972 BMW 2002tii that I’d bought sight-unseen in Louisville—from being dead for a decade to running, driving, and stopping. However, that didn’t mean we were ready to cut loose and head for home. I met my friend Dave at a BMW SharkFest event in 2014. He lives not far from the pole barn where I was working on Louie, and came by to wrench with me.
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2 months ago | 
hagerty.com | Rob Siegel
The story thus far: In early 2017, I’d recently lost my job and was struggling to piece together income from being a self-employed writer along with some engineering consulting work when I committed to buying a decade-dead 1972 BMW 2002tii with no title sight-unseen in Louisville, KY. I got the go-ahead from both my incredibly supportive wife as well as from a sense that the universe was telling me that this was what I should be doing. But it was pretty crazy.
