a new engine for Miss Fitz
This is a long read and I know that time is precious. The short story is that the engine blew in our Element in the middle of a cross country road trip and we're not financially capable of fixing it AND getting ourselves home. Repairs came to $3564 total for the trip* (*so farwe still have to make it home). We've paid for the repairs and we're down to our last $500. We need help covering the cost to get back to Phoenix, keep paying our bills, and make it through the projects and jobs we have set up for the fall. A generous friend already contributed $250 so the remainder is $3314. We’re starting the drive back Monday August 9th and any help you can extend us will be greatly appreciated. No amount is to small to help us home. Getting a portion of the repair costs covered will get us back to Phoenix safely. What follows is the long form story of what got us here and why we are asking for help.
I could say what went wrong started around 10:45 central time on Thursday July 15th about 30 minutes outside of Montgomery, Alabama heading towards my hometown of Auburn. Our serpentine belt started chirping like a gaggle of crickets and I thought of all the silly sounds old cars make and made a joke about it with Chelsea. A few minutes later the crickets quieted down and we noticed the AC wasn’t running and the battery light was on. The temperature gauge was also pegged out on the HOT side. I immediately pulled into the breakdown lane and hit the flashers. I turned off everything except our headlights and dropped the car down to 25 mph. I didn’t want to just let the engine bake in the still humid night but it wouldn’t end up mattering. We were 6 miles from my parents' house.
I could also say what went wrong came to a head for us around December of 2019. We realized that the leather business we were running together wasn’t going to support both of us and I had the better chance of turning my experience and credentials into something that would pay enough to cover our living expenses and get Bad Craft through the low points that are an inevitable part of cashflow when you run a small growing business.
I started looking for work that looked interesting and stood up to our values and we kept going to markets and pushing our online sales. The business could pay its bills and pay us a little bit and we made up the rest in side work. In mid-March when it became apparent that we weren’t going to be spared exposure to the coronavirus outbreak, we stopped going to farmers markets and fairs. Two weeks later our online sales petered out.
We were privileged to be able to shelter in place without a steady income. We live in a home that my mother owns and we rent it from her at below market rate. We would absolutely be facing eviction today otherwise or would have been forced to ignore the CDC and try our best to make a living. We had a month or so of work fabricating and designing art installations that didn’t require we break CDC guidelines; I briefly collected unemployment before being kicked out of the system in May when I started working again; and we used SBA emergency loan money along with our focus on growing Bad Craft Motors to try to pay ourselves a salary of $27,000 a year. When the money wasn’t available in the business account we would just suspend payments. In 2020 we were too close to the edge to focus on our business and too focused on the hope that our business would save us financially to make good decisions about our time, our priorities, and our development timelines. A few things that should have been prototyped before being sold were sold before they were prototyped.
I didn’t believe I could find work during this time. I might have been wrong. The idea of finding a salaried position that supported us was too distant an idea to pursue at a time when folks were on a hiring pause. At this time many businesses who were hiring folks like me still expected us to relocate and we’d just started finding our footing in our local activist community. Phoenix is an incredibly large city with an incredibly harmful police force and a very tight-knit group of people working on fixing our city and making it work for the people who live there. We love living in Phoenix. We may not have water in 15 years, but it is our home and we will try to stay long enough to adapt to the world as it becomes harder or to work together to make it less hard and a place where folks can afford to live a decent and dignified life.
After a year of small jobs, SBA disaster funding rounds, paperwork, taxes, and a few failed attempts in the gig economy we found ourselves in Phoenix, vaccinated, and staring down the barrel of another Phoenix summer.
We wanted to escape the desert at its worst, see our family on the east coast for the first time in years, and spend a few days in the mountains relaxing and brainstorming what our future looks like. I have a few adjunct teaching classes lined up in the fall and the city starts to pick up again gearing up for the school year, the holidays and the incredibly gorgeous weather we have from November to March or April.
Things are looking less precarious in the fall as I’m putting together a pre-order for our second OEM remanufacture piece. I launched it in May and worked hard to get things done before we left Phoenix. The heat slowed me down. I don’t have an indoor workspace and it was 114 degrees in the shade on the back porch where I've created a make-shift shop. I could only put in about 3 hours a day. I really shouldn’t have taken this on in late May, but the necessity of paying bills forced my hand. I only shipped 1/5th of the orders from the preorder before we left town. I didn't get around to thinking through what the car needed before we left. I didn't get around to the routine maintenance. I changed the oil and that’s about it.
A few days before we left Chelsea and I headed into the bank. We’ve got 3 years of business transactions with Wells Fargo and we though we may be able to increase our credit limit. This would help us pay for the redevelopment of our website, which includes faster load times () better SEO () an absolute user experience overhaul () and a ton of back-end tweaks that will make it easier for us to charge appropriate rates for shipping, suggest popular add-on items and streamline our fulfilment. (.) We took in 3 years of IRS Schedule 1040-Cs and a comparison showing consistent $15,000 top-line revenue growth annually. The response from the bank was that the ownership on the line of credit changed (we made Chelsea the majority owner so we could be an official WOB) so they say we have to pay it off to even have a new credit evaluation and that there is no guarantee it will be as large as our existing line of credit. That’s an obvious dead end so we move on.
With very little runway and very little opportunity to make more money during this trip I asked my parents for $5000 to get us through the summer. They wanted the chance to see us and knew we wouldn't be coming through the South if we couldn't afford to leave Phoenix. They oblige us. The weekend before we leave town, the Element broke down in the Safeway parking lot. I happened to have the missing bolt in my spare parts box and repaired the car in the parking lot before the sun came up the next morning so as to avoid 100+ degree phoenix blacktop. A few days later we headed out to Dallas to see a friend before hopping to my parents' and then over to Charleston where Chelsea’s parents live. At our first fill-up in Tucson we heard a big thunk as we drove over one of the ground tank filler spouts. From then on out the entire back of the car shook violently.
<This is about to get pretty auto technical and you should skip it if you want to>
In El Paso we stopped for gas and I pulled into an auto parts store to see if there was anything I could do. The boots on my rear axle were toast and there was grease everywhere. I hoped it wasn't a problem with the bearings and felt the axle with my hand for excessive heat. It was about the same temperature as the other axle, so I decided if we could live with the vibrations, the car would make it to Dallas. I bought a quick-boot and did my best to patch the axle in the parking lot. El Paso is hot, but much more pleasant than Phoenix. The vibration remained but we made the rest of the trip to Dallas without any additional trouble.
The next morning, I found a nearby shop and had them replace the axle. It got caught on something and bent. The shop got the car back to us at closing time and we planned to be back on the road in the morning. We needed an alignment after the axle replacement so we took it to a shop with laser alignment that our mechanic recommended. We waited around for a few hours for the alignment tech to show up and then he said he couldn't break any of the suspension bolts. We’d been killing a couple hours outside of Dallas and had nothing to show for it. We left the car unaligned and drove on to Alabama.
That night our engine blew though we didn't know it was blown yet. It still ran and drove but the serpentine belt that would normally drive the accessories wasn't pushing anything. We paid to have it towed to a shop the next morning and they told us the water pump pully shaft sheared off. They said they could put a water pump in it for $850. We approved the work and head on to Charleston in a buddy’s car. (Thank you, Zach!!!) By Tuesday, Miss Fitz was fixed and waiting to be picked up in Opelika, Alabama. Wednesday morning I made the 6 hour drive back from Charleston to pick the Element up from the shop. It started funny and ran like shit. I pulled over and had the shop tow it back. The next day around closing they called to tell me the head gasket was blown and there was coolant in the cylinders.
The whole county was short mechanics and nobody was willing to take on a head gasket diagnosis. The original shop thought they were in the clear because the water pump was busted and needed to be fixed anyway to pressure test the engine. Without any way to know if the head was warped, I started looking for new engines. I found a shop in Atlanta that had one but that was 120 miles away. I reserved a uHaul and Zach offered to help me tow it to the shop where Chelsea would meet us and take me back to Charleston.
The next morning Zach and I got up early only to find out that uHaul was out of car trailers and didn't have one any closer than 100 miles away or 2 weeks out to reserve. Bummer. I took off again with Zach's car back to Charleston to wait out the repair and catch up with some old friends of Chelsea’s for the weekend.
The next week the Atlanta shop owner sent someone down to pick up Miss Fitz and toss an engine in. The whole thing was done in record time. His shop picked the Element up Tuesday morning from Alabama, towed it to the far side of Atlanta, and put an engine in it in by Thursday afternoon. Nikko said the engine ran great on his first long test drive but he wanted to take it on a few more to make sure things leveled out. We spend the weekend in Charleston with Chelsea’s folks and head to Atlanta to pick up the Element on Monday and head back to Alabama to return Zach’s car.
<This is the point where the element is fixed and I don’t list a car part every other sentence>
SO! Now we are in the mountains. We’ve had some time to breath in fresh mountain air, a boatload of tree oxygen, sleep well, take a long walk with the dogs, and think about both what Chelsea and I are capable of, and what we ultimately want to be doing with our lives.
The car isn’t perfect. The serpentine belt is loose and I’ll have to tighten it in another parking lot before we head back east, but also it’s a 70k mile engine that seems to be running as strong or stronger than the 235k mile engine that blew a few weeks ago. The total list of car repairs for the trip (so far) comes out to $3576.00. We’ve got a couple hundred bucks left, but it won’t stretch us all the way back to Phoenix. A generous friend put a dent in that by shooting $250 our way and we’re asking for help to pay the rest. That will get us back to Phoenix where we can take on the jobs we’ve set up for this fall to keep the boat afloat. We keep doing better every year and have come up against a wall like this before and made it to the other side.
<what does Bad Craft look like moving forward?>
What does the future of Bad Craft look like? Well, it needs to be detached from our ability to pay our bills and live a restful life. With our own house in order and money to spare we would be able to hire folks locally, both by sourcing from other Arizona small businesses and by hiring folks who can learn and replicate the processes we’ve hammered out to keep delivering the products we’ve already ironed out.
The first step of that is switching over to the new website. ChelseaHickok.com will be a fully fleshed out site where you can purchase prints of any of her pieces you may have missed the opportunity to purchase as originals or didn’t have the budget to justify purchasing at the time. BadCraftMotors.com will be a stand-alone site that will offer limited runs of our products as I can make them available, products from other Element-focused small businesses, and some Bad Craft merch that will help us pay for product development, business overhead, and a new-hire to increase our ability to sell what we’ve been making over the past 7-8 months.
I have already started looking for work. I’ve witnessed the focus shift away from on-site work and an expectation that I relocate for full time positions. I’m fully vaccinated and cautiously optimistic about how protected that makes me as a middle-aged human. I have director level experience in a startup that was actively spiraling towards bankruptcy (hey TechShop folx!). I have a snazzy degree in the innovation of products and services, have implemented and co-designed programs teaching design-thinking, and have been flown internationally to present in front of USAID and US Consulate work in Vietnam.
I’m looking for director level positions focused on identifying and serving customer needs efficiently and effectively. If you know someone who needs someone like me in their organization, please reach out and connect us. If you can help us crawl back the impact of these Element repairs, thank you. If you are just able to listen and hold this in your conscious, I only ask that you think about how unsupportive our capitalistic system is, how crazy the past year has been, and have some grace for the people out there who are in dire straights and at witts end. Many aren't as privileged as we are and that is the only difference between us and our neighbors trying to survive on the streets. It’s a hard world and it’s getting harder. We can build a world where we take care of each other or we can build walls. We get to choose, but we have to be willing to put in the work to make change happen. Thanks for any help you can give. Thanks for rolling through this entire essay. Thanks for being a human being.
Stay safe, be well.
Ben
Bad Craft
