Rebuilding a Yugo

We had a wonderful evening last night.  Mostly we just sat around and talked.  We had no homeschool or anything else to worry about so we just relaxed and talked.  Christian and I got into a discussion about what might be a good project for us to work on together.  We definitely want to continue with our art–with an emphasis on drawing and pottery, but Christian and I talked about doing a guy thing.  The two things that came to mind were either building a wooden sailboat or getting an old car and fixing it up.  A while back, I had told Christian about a car that my friend Marco Ramos had when we were both getting our Masters Degrees in Industrial Engineering at University of Texas at El Paso.  We were both starving students.  Marco had the panache to buy a brand new Yugo.  It was truly a badly made car from Yugoslavia.  My sense is that the car was not really a bad design, it was just not built with too much desire to get it right, what with the nature of communism and all.

One day in a fit of nostalgia, I told Kelly and Christian about a song that got popularized when Rush Limbaugh played it on his talk show.  It was Paul Shanklin’s “In a Yugo” that is truly a classic of its genre.  Be sure check out the YouTube video.

From that moment on, Christian has been enamored with the idea of some day owning a Yugo.  I have to admit that it has some appeal.  In the discussion, I explained what it meant to “blueprint” an engine and how it would be fun to get an old car to rebuild together someday.  He thinks the right car might be a Yugo.

Maybe he is right, but there is something to be said for taking the route one of my best buds took when he was in high school in the late 70’s.  The gas crisis was going on so everyone wanted a car that did not use too much gas.  Bryan did the calculations and decide that it would be less expensive to buy the biggest Sedan de Ville he could find, because you could get them so cheap at the time.  It took years before the savings derived from using less gas in a small car could make up for the cheaper purchase price.  I was always envious that he had thought of the idea first.  It definitely had style to tool into school in a brand new looking Cadillac and park it in the middle of all of the old rusted out VW Rabbits and Datsuns that everyone else drove.  They were safer, too.

Christian, it is going to be a tough decision.