Making Repairs Underneath the Car 
in a Private Garage 
By HAROLD WHITING SLAUSON 
F or years the comic papers and humorous peri¬ 
odicals have been devoting space to illustra¬ 
tions depicting mishaps to automobiles on 
country roads; and invariably the luckless o'wner 
or driver vv^as shown sprawled on his back in a mud- 
puddle under the car trying to find the trouble. It 
makes no difference if the story which this picture 
was supposed to illustrate had plainly stated that the 
trouble lay in the radiator,—the repairs had to be 
made from a reclining position under the car. In 
fact this seems to the mind of the imaginative 
cartoonist to be the only possible way by which 
repairs may be made in the country. These pic¬ 
tures may have been more or less true to life 
several years ago when all motor cars had the 
engine and transmission in some nearly inaccessible 
place under the seat, but modern design with the 
power plant located un¬ 
der a removable front 
hood and the transmis¬ 
sion system and clutch 
within convenient reach 
under the floor-boards, 
has done much to lessen 
the troubles of an or¬ 
dinary breakdown, and 
temporary repairs can 
generally be made now 
from a much more digni¬ 
fied position than our 
artist friends would have 
us believe. Neverthe¬ 
less it is oftentimes ab¬ 
solutely necessary when 
in the garage for the chauffeur, or the owner if he 
does his own repairing, to replace some broken part 
or to make some final adjustment which can be per¬ 
formed only by obtaining a “worrn’s-eye view” of 
the car. 
If the man who must work under the car is lucky 
enough to be in a garage where a pit is provided in 
the floor for such purposes, his troubles are fewer 
than those of his less fortunate brother who must 
squeeze his ten or twelve inches of chest between the 
floor and bottom of a car having from eight to four¬ 
teen inches of clearance. In a position such as this 
every muscle becomes cramped, the radius of action 
is limited, and a formerly good temper may be tem¬ 
porarily ruined. 
At first sight it appears strange that so many of 
the new and so-called “up-to-date” garages have no 
provisions in the nature 
of pits to facilitate work¬ 
ing under the car, but 
when it is remembered 
that many of these re¬ 
pair shops have cement 
floors and are located 
above the ground floor of 
the building, it will be 
seen that there are many 
obstacles in the way of 
properly fitting up a 
public motor car repair 
shop. 
The owner of a small 
private garage does not 
have these troubles to 
THE REPAIR PIT; TIGHTENING THE FRONT SPRING CLIP 
172 
