Recently, I’ve been hearing that the old car hobby is going to fade away as today’s players "age out." This sort of talk has been going on for years, and I’ve argued the point that the hobby is alive and well on more than one occasion. As a challenge, I’m usually asked, "Okay, so where is it hiding?" The people asking don’t necessarily want to know about the next generation of enthusiasts interested in vehicles from the ’80s and ’90s —the cars of their own youth. The real question is, usually, "What happens to the vintage hardware of earlier periods? Does it become obsolete and unwanted?"

I’ll cut to the chase and say that I don’t think so. There’s been interest in cars and trucks from periods that predate certain enthusiasts’ lives by a few generations now, though I admit that it’s good to see proof of this from time to time. I got a chance recently while working on a story for another one of our magazines.

A friend of mine is attempting to install a later-model overdrive manual gearbox in an earlier pickup truck, which requires some internal modifications to the transmission. Neither my friend nor I trusted ourselves to successfully dismantle a transmission we were unfamiliar with, so we enlisted the help of a professional. In this case, it was the proprietor of an independent transmission shop a couple of towns over.

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