I was born a poor black child... oh, never mind, that's Steve Martin's line. LOL
I was born with a wrench in my hand (mom didn't appreciate that!
LOL). But once my wrench & I made it into the world, I began applying that wrench on Triumph motorcycles by the age of 9, then Hondas, then assorted European bikes, then domestic cars. We were in the midst of the '60s, the muscle car era, and I grew up in the south bay area of southern California, hot rod central of the world back then (Torrance, Redondo Beach, Long Beach). Lyons Drag Strip & Ascot Park were both 15 minutes from my home, I could hear them racing at night from my house.
By the time I was a teenager freinds & family started referring work to me and I always had more work than I needed. Cars and motorcycles; maintenance, repairs and modifying. I did the work on evenings & weekends, never as a full time job, I never considered it a business, but it was a good source of pocket money. My clients were friends, neighbors and family; or friends of friends, friends of neighbors and friends of family. Never strangers. I worked first out of my parents garage, and later out of my own. I was the unofficial pit crew for many of my friends who raced their motorcycles or cars. Chassis, drive trains and suspensions where my interest, I've only done a small amount of body work, I prefer to leave that work to the folks who have the "feel" for it. It was a "boom" time for me when California first instituted smog inspections in the late '70s. I had to deal with a lot of those types of problems in that period and throughout the '80s as well. Those issues declined as fuel injection became standard equipment. Hot rodding was big in the '80s, and that's when the Mustang restoration craze took off too.
Because the 351C was the powerplant in my dream car (the Pantera) I made it my specialty, I was Mr Mustang to many folks in the Long Beach area for that reason. I've built about 18 performance engines in my life, not just Clevelands either; and I've worked on a couple of hundred of automobiles. I would farm out my engine machine work, head porting etc to pro engine builders, and always listened to their advice, I learned a lot from them.
I have an "engineers" attitude regarding mechanical things, rather than the "folksy" back yard mechanic type attitude. I have always found reading technical manuals and in depth engineering articles my favorite type of reading, I'm consumed with curiosity to understand why things are engineered the way they are. So you could say I've been "researching" this stuff my whole life.
All in all, I'm just another gear head.
your greasy friend on the PIBB, George