That piece of news was startling enough, but when he told me he turned the key and the engine fired up right away, I had to call him a bald-faced liar. "Most people can't even find the engines in their cars, much less the carburetors," I said. "Now you're telling me you removed the carburetor, held it in your hands and then put it back?"

"Yup," he said. He didn't spit on the floor and wipe his chin with a greasy purple rag, but you could tell he was proud of his accomplishment. After all, this guy is a lawyer by trade, and I thought he would be more adept at removing someone's heart than removing a carburetor.

I mean, removing a carburetor requires a certain amount of skill, a skill most of us no longer possess. I was in awe.

When I was a kid in Everett, I used to work on my cars. You never took your car to a mechanic and paid good money to have the engine tuned and the oil changed. You did it yourself in the backyard or went to a neighborhood gas station where one of your buddies worked pumping gas on Friday and Saturday nights and you could use the tools and hoist.

It was a matter of economics to save a few bucks. But it was also a matter of pride. It was your car, and you fixed it. Of course, sometimes it didn't work out in your favor. A friend and I once rebuilt the 8-cylinder engine on an old Buick I got by trading my moped (that was a motor bike you could pedal when you ran out of gas) for the red-and-white car.

The engine rebuild was going very well until we tried to start it. It backfired a couple of times and then the carburetor — which was about the size of a coffee can — let out a huge blue flame, and suddenly everything under the hood was on fire.

That was bad. But what made it worse was that we were doing the rebuild in my parents' garage — and the garage was in the family homestead's basement. I had visions of the house burning down and me trying to explain the whole thing to my father.

I did the only thing I could think of and slammed down the hood of the Buick. The fire burned another minute or so before finally going out. It left this huge, bluish-gray circle in the middle of the Buick's red hood.

That was the last time I worked on a carburetor. This was one reason I was impressed when my friend told me he took apart his carburetor and put it back without burning down his house. But the thing that impressed me the most was that he was actually able to find the carburetor in the first place. Finding a carburetor on today's car is no easy task. Older models made it fairly simple. It was the thing sitting on top of the engine. An air filter covered it. But the modern cars don't give you a clue.

The Truly Unpleasant Mrs. Johnston once bought a car that had its engine in sideways! When I first saw it, I thought she was playing a cruel trick on me. But it turns out the car manufacturer put the engine in that way on purpose. They didn't say why, but I'm guessing they had their reasons.

Steve Johnston is a retired Seattle Times reporter. He can be reached at stevejonst@aol.com. Paul Schmid is a Seattle Times news artist.