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Snook’s Dream Cars, a nice-looking little car museum in Bowling Green, Ohio, is shutting down and liquidating after 24 years. The resident mechanic is retiring, and when the owner wasn’t able to find another wrench who could keep the eclectic collection of old cars running, he decided to retire himself.
Eric Taunton from the Toledo Blade caught up with proprietor Jeff Snook and got some insight on the closing. Longtime mechanic Terry Stetler, who maintained the museum’s fleet of American, European, and Japanese vehicles from bygone decades (and also worked on privately owned classic cars in the neighborhood), is ready to do something else with his life.
“With him retiring, I haven’t found anybody around that I would hire to be able to maintain the cars,” Mr. Snook said.
“Kids that come out of auto trade school, they don’t know about carburetors and old car stuff,” he said. “There’s just a lack of knowledge out there because I think it’s harder and harder to keep old cars on the road without qualified, skilled, professional mechanics.”
There are currently 15 cars from Snook’s collection listed on Hagerty’s auction site. Hagerty
Conceptually speaking, old cars are often easier to work on than new ones. There are typically fewer things to remove to access a part, and with fewer parts involved in general, trouble diagnosis can be more straightforward. Some old-car parts can even be remade from scratch with pretty basic hardware.
But the practical reality is a little more complicated. A bolt might be easier to reach—but if it hasn’t moved in 50 years, it could be a lot harder to break loose. Same goes for diag. Carburetor tuning isn’t necessarily hard, per se, but it is a bit of an art—there’s a lot of “feel” involved in old car maintenance, and it’s tough to understand without, well, a lot of experience.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there’s the reality of the auto mechanic profession in general. There are not many jobs in the car world that revolve around keeping ancient cars running. And being the wrench guy at a small museum, well, it sounds really cool, but I’m guessing it’s not as lucrative as working in a commercial service bay where demand is high.
All that to say—even as a carb-owner and an old car head myself—I’m not particularly surprised that Snook’s Dream Cars couldn’t easily find a replacement for its seasoned pro house mechanic. Though it sure is a bummer.
If you’re nowhere near Bowling Green, you can take a free virtual tour of the museum from your computer. Or swipe through these images here to get a feel for it—the memorabilia and assorted oddities are just as fun to look at as the cars.
If you love old cars like this, the best thing you can do is start learning how to maintain them. It’s only going to get harder to find shops willing to tinker with carburetors and distributor points.
Meanwhile, Snook’s collection is being auctioned through Hagerty this month. The lineup is quite diverse—he had a WWII Jeep, Jag XKE, an early Datsun Z, and some streamliner-style American iron. The hammer drops Monday, September 28 at 2:45 p.m. Eastern. The museum itself is scheduled to close the week of October 11.
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Automotive journalist since 2013, Andrew primarily coordinates features, sponsored content, and multi-departmental initiatives at The Drive.
