Classic car museum closes due to lack of mechanic who understands carburetor

A museum of vintage cars in the United States will close its doors and auction off part of the collection for a reason that would have seemed unlikely in the not-too-distant past: no one in the region knows how to handle carburetors anymore.

Snook’s Dream Cars, in Bowling Green, Ohio, has been operating for 24 years as a “living museum” — all the cars on display, from models from the 1930s to the 1970s, have to leave the place on their own. The collection brings together Bill Snook’s collection and is run by his son, Jeff.

The detail is that the one who kept this fleet moving was Terry Stetler, a veteran mechanic of the house, who decided to retire. Jeff Snook looked for a replacement, couldn’t find it and concluded that it was also time to hang up the screwdriver. Living museum with a parked car, after all, it’s just a very well decorated parking lot.

There is a lack of someone who knows how to regulate the

buoy In an interview with the Toledo Blade newspaper, Snook said that the bottleneck is in training: those who leave technical schools do not learn about carburetors or old cars, which makes it increasingly difficult to keep these cars running.

In the United States, the last models with a carburetor were discontinued in 1994 — the Isuzu pickup and the entry-level version of the Subaru Justy. The record holder for stubbornness was the Lada 2107, manufactured in Egypt until 2014.

In Brazil, almost 30 years without a zero-kilometer

carburetor Here the story is similar. Electronic injection debuted in the Volkswagen Gol GTi in 1989 and spread over the following decade under pressure from Proconve’s emissions rules. The last carbureted gasp was with the Volkswagen Kombi, which only migrated to injection in 1997.

In other words: for almost three decades no one in the country has bought a zero-kilometer with a buoy, giclee and choke – enough time for the subject to migrate from technical schools to neighborhood workshops and clubs of old-timers.

With the closure of the museum, 15 cars from the collection were put up for sale through Hagerty, which specializes in insurance and classic auctions. The list includes pre-war examples, icons from the 1940s and 1950s and European roadsters , including Ford Model A, Packard One Twenty, Jaguar E-Type, Alfa Romeo Giulia Spider, Volvo P1800, Ford Mustang and Datsun 240Z.

The other cars in the collection are still not for sale and can be seen on a virtual tour of the museum itself. For those who disassemble a carburetor with their eyes closed, here’s a tip: there was a vacancy open in Ohio.