To All The Cars I’ve Loved Before | First Cars
Christian and Doug explore automotive nostalgia & personal car memories on our podcast— featuring true automotive stories and childhood car memories from everyday enthusiasts.
To All the Cars I’ve Loved Before shines a light on everyday enthusiasts, from father‑daughter/father-son duos and automotive brand launch managers to the restoration students and expert-level instructors at McPherson and Weber State Colleges. Real stories, real people, real passion—thats why our car podcast stands out from others.
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To All The Cars I’ve Loved Before | First Cars
Lessons in Classics Cars | Richard’s Tale of Corvairs, Beetles, and a Lifetime of Learning
Click here to share your favorite car, car story or any automotive trivia!
Richard McCuistian is a walking textbook of car history, and his episode feels like auditing a fun class in Automotive 101 (with plenty of heart). He shares how working on a quirky Chevy Corvair – yes, the “dangerous” one from the Ralph Nader days – taught him about engineering and safety firsthand. From there, Richard dives into restoring VW classics: the beloved Beetle and a Type 3, unpacking vintage car stories and restoration tips he gathered over years as a mechanic and teacher. Listeners will pick up fascinating automotive technology insights, like how air-cooled engines operate and why old-school craftsmanship still matters today.
Richard's favorite episode is the Weber State student/instructor duo episode, "From Mustang GT Builds to Pontiac GTO Restorations: Weber State Automotive Tech & Education" https://www.buzzsprout.com/2316026/episodes/16548659-from-mustang-gt-builds-to-pontiac-gto-restorations-weber-state-automotive-tech-education
Despite the technical knowledge, the narrative remains warm and personal: Richard recounts mentoring students on engine rebuilds and how sharing these car memories forged lifelong friendships.
This episode is a goldmine for classic car enthusiasts – blending educational content with nostalgia – and it leaves you with the uplifting message that our most beloved cars often teach us as much about life as they do about engines.
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Listen on your favorite platform and visit https://carsloved.com for full episodes, our automotive blog, Guest Road Trip Playlist and our new CAR-ousel of Memories photo archive.
Don't Forget to Rate & Review to keep the engines of automotive storytelling—and personal restoration—running strong.
Welcome back America to All the Cars I've Loved Before, your podcast, where American history and automotive history meet your history. And well, it's more than American history here because, as we've said, we have blown past Season 1. Season 1 is in the books and as we barrel through and towards season two, we are heard globally. So thank you for that. We appreciate the boosting, the awareness that helps us produce more, reach people, get new guests and it's all a self-fulfilling cycle, right? So again, thank you to everyone who emails us. We appreciate the feedback, both good and bad, because, hey, it helps us grow.
Speaker 2:The feedback, both good and bad because, hey, it helps us grow. Good morning, doug. How you doing Morning? I'm doing well, just recovering from a case of COVID that cut me down for the last five days, but in full recovery mode. So glad to be here with you again.
Speaker 1:Lovely Glad you're on the mend. You don. You don't sound 100%, but you sound about 93 or 94%, you know what. That's probably good enough for us. So, hey, as we've mentioned, we continue to propagate to different or additional, I should say, podcast streaming platforms of choice. Now, apple is the most prevalent, most known Spotify okay, all the others. Please helps out a lot If you follow the show. Download the show so that you can watch in the airport, have no signal whatever when you're on a plane. Download it. Hey, I do that sometimes with the podcasts I listen to as well. Any technical updates? Doug, I know that as we've moved past season one, we learned a lot. Season one, thank you for that. 10 episodes in the book, anything technical that we've done that the audience needs to be aware of, in addition to carslovecom, our website. Feel free to email us, christian at carslovecom or doug at carslovecom. Anything more to mention before we move on?
Speaker 2:dot com. Anything more to mention before we move on, let's see. So we've talked about the blog in the past. Yes, reviews. I have updated the listen page better format, easier for us to track things, so you can see all the episodes all in one place. We also have links smart links at the top and the bottom for Facebook, instagram, apple Podcasts and Spotify, but we are on many of the other platforms. But, as Christian said, we'd love to hear from you. Please give us your feedback the piece that helps us is followers and downloads and, of course, your feedback. We've got a couple reviews out there on Apple Podcasts, but we'd love to hear more ideas for season two and appreciate everybody's support worldwide.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, Thank you for that. And the feedback is big. So please let us know what's working for you and what drives this forward is additional guests. So this is one of those things where it has to grow, to move forward, and as we grow, we thank you for that. Can't do it without you. Kudos to Doug. The website is looking better and better every day. He's a constant tinkerer. Instead of being under the hood of a car, he's in a directory in a server making updates, and it looks really good. Every week it looks better and better. So thank you for that partner.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you If I could just get my car back from the shop, which is probably a good prelude to this week's guest.
Speaker 1:Whenever you're ready, Well, yeah, when you own seven cars, when you got one car for every day of the week, one's not going to hurt you too much. But that was a perfect segue to today's guest. Today's guest is a little bit of a curveball. Came to us, not in the typical way. I was sitting around talking with Tiffany and her dad, philip, and I was telling Philip about the podcast and he said instantly I grew up with this guy. You have got to get this guy on your show. He is one of the most interesting guys out there. And so he proceeded to tell me about the story of today's guest, richard, who has had multiple acts in his life. I just find this so interesting and the man obviously cannot sit still.
Speaker 1:So he grew up working on cars. I can't wait to hear how he got involved with that, who he learned from, what was that like initially? And then he was a mechanic for a lot of his life. Then, about 23 years ago or so, he became a teacher at a college teaching the art of mechanics right, troubleshooting, fixing, diagnosing. As he moved forward in that endeavor, he started to write, and he writes for a magazine. I'll let him tell you which magazine.
Speaker 1:And then the crowning piece that really brought it all together is he's become a YouTube influencer. So I'm going to read you the description from his YouTube channel. And, if you believe me, don't go there unless you have a few hours to really dig into it, because the videos are so well done. Don't go there unless you have a few hours to really dig into it, because the videos are so well done. You know he doesn't just sit there and talk about it off screen, off frame, or it's fuzzy and these things aren't in focus. He will have a schematic of what he's troubleshooting. He'll have pictures of the parts, an old one versus a new one. So it's as if a professional mechanic who is a writer, who teaches people, has brought it all wrapped up in a bow one-stop shop to you on YouTube.
Speaker 1:As such, here's the description of his YouTube channel. This is where we learn about fixing cars and dealing with customers. We believe mechanics should be honest, dependable, dedicated and tough, with performance, attitude, integrity and dependability. He logged in more than 25 years as a professional technician and has been writing for Motor Age Magazine since May of 2000 and teaching college auto mechanics since January 2001. And oh, by the way, this isn't sort of three or four views here. They're over seven and a half million views, within spitting distance of eight million views, and he joined YouTube in February of 16 of 2008. So it's all a mouthful, but I had to get that in. So, richard, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you, sir. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Glad to be on the show and it only dawned on me as I was talking about all that, that everything in your life, all the stops, all the experience, even sort of the timing, time in this act, time in this act, all the experience, even sort of the timing, you know, the time in this act, time in this act has brought about the being on YouTube. Could you talk a little bit about how putting all of what you would learn together on YouTube sort of came to you? How did that happen?
Speaker 3:Well, whenever I was teaching, there would be some of my students that wouldn't be at class, and I wouldn't want to have to go back and redo the class or go over the material with the students that weren't there, and so I said, I think I'm just going to open a YouTube channel and what I'll do is I'll go ahead and record my classroom lectures. You'll see, if you look back in my videos, you'll see me teaching in the classroom early on. I mean, if you go back a few years, and they all knew how to get to my YouTube channel and if they missed class one day as far as the classroom part of it, they would actually go and watch that and then that way they could catch up. I didn't expect other people to start subscribing to the channel, but I think my subscribers are like 19,000 and some change now and I got something like 1500 videos on there. But anyway, I started doing that just for that and didn't expect the channel to do what it has done.
Speaker 3:To tell you the truth, and the only reason I kept doing it after I retired in May of 2019 was to and I hadn't written. Incidentally, I haven't written for MotorAge since 2021. Basically published my last article with them but I had written for them for 21 years. But anyway, I don't write for them anymore. But I actually do edit online material for carpartscom. To give them a plug, they basically have online articles and if you go to carpartscom and you look at the team, you'll see a much longer bio for me on there where I edit their articles and I usually do 10 articles a week for them that I go and review that other people have written and I sort of make them, you know, try to streamline them and add illustrations and all that. But anyway, I hope I answered that question and didn't get too far into the weeds.
Speaker 2:Not at all.
Speaker 1:We're all about the weeds. We're all about the weeds and the rambling here. Did you say 10 articles a week?
Speaker 3:Yeah, 10 articles a week, and that's I basically. I take them, I pull them up, I review them, I add text, I gray out some text that doesn't make sense. And I think the guy basically has people who have some credentials college credentials researching the articles online and putting them together based on metadata and all that, and then he sends them to me to make sure that they're accurate and that nothing needs to be added and everything is the way, and so that's what I've. I'm about halfway through a batch of 10 of them right now that I'm doing, but I can usually do them pretty quick, you know, and he pays me a little something for each article, you know, sure, sure, so, but anyway, that's basically what I'm doing right now on that, but I'm not writing the whole article, I'm just reviewing and doing some minor edit suggestions and adding some illustrations and stuff.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because, if you think about, the internet brings all this information to you from all over the world, but somebody's got to write this content, even if it's a product description, all the stuff on Amazon. Amazon's a huge company. They didn't pay anybody to write this stuff, right. But as you go down the chain to smaller organizations, whatever inventory you have online, you can't just throw it out there. How big is the piece? What does it do? What are its specs? Link to reference information.
Speaker 2:That's an interesting part for how e-commerce has to work, so thank you for sharing that. Yeah, and it's great you've parlayed that into the YouTube channel, motor Age Magazine, but also carpartscom, right? I mean, you're really just using all that expertise and giving back and, as you said, you're getting paid a little bit for it and it's keeping you busy. From what I gather, you like to be kept busy.
Speaker 3:I do, and also I'll tell you something else, and it and something I learned a long time ago, back even from when I was doing, when I was working on cars at the dealership and all that the more you explain stuff to other people, the better you understand it yourself, and so that's why students absorb about 11 or 12 percent of what they're taught, and instructors absorb 88 percent of what they've been gathered material to teach, and so I also like to try to make it simpler, so that Einstein I think it was it said, if you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself. Yep, love that. Well said yeah, but anyway, that's just-.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Sometimes when I'm talking to my kids I have this half-formed thing. My sons look up to me like I know. You know I'm like anybody else, making it up as I go along. But a lot of times you know how, you have this half formed thing in the back of your mind and you start explaining it to a child, to someone, and it's just, if you can't explain it, how are you going to explain it to somebody who's going to start asking you questions back, that, back and forth? So huge Right.
Speaker 2:No, no, it's true, I must know it fairly well, and if I can explain it to the point that somebody else understands it, then I probably know it even better, right? That's huge.
Speaker 1:That's huge Knowledge transfer.
Speaker 2:And the things we take for granted right Electric starters, things like that right.
Speaker 3:My dad. He opened a shop in 1960 in Daleville, alabama, with no automotive training. All he had done is help his dad, my grandfather, work on tractor engines because my grandfather was mechanically inclined. So he opened this shop and he put on their foreign car garage because we were next to a military base and nobody wanted to work on the foreign cars, everybody wanted to work on the domestics in 1960. And so he just threw that sign up there and he started hiring people. There were two buildings facing each other and one of them was a body shop and the other was a garage. And he told me he said I was taking in $100,000 a year and bringing home 100 bucks a week for myself because he made sure everybody else got paid. Anyway, he actually worked on 28 different kinds of foreign cars with no wiring schematics, no shop manuals or anything. But whenever the bank actually there was a bank that bought that property and he lost the lease on it and so he had to move his shop closer to Enterprise Alabama and he bought another little building over there and he decided he was just going to specialize in Volkswagens because he didn't have to have a lot of tools.
Speaker 3:You can have just a little small shop and get the engine out of a VW bug in about 30 minutes if you're good at it. And he made a lot of money doing that for a long time. And I was out there when I was about 14 one day at his shop and I said if I was going to build a buggy, where would I start? And he says, well, I would take the body off of that 64 model over there because it was sitting in the weeds. And I says, okay, and this would have been probably in about 1970 or something like that. And I said he said, how do you do that? So we went and turned it over on its side. He goes take all these bolts here out. You got to take the steering column loose and all this. And boom, I had the pen sitting there. And I said, what do I do now? And he says get that transaxle that's laying in the weeds over there and drag it up and bolt it into this thing. And I was so into that that whenever I got through with it he says now let's put these tires on it and roll it up on the slab.
Speaker 3:And he had been building an engine for the darn thing he could build a VW Bug engine out of parts that he had laid around the shop in about two hours, you know. And we popped that engine in that thing and put an old army bed frame to support the steering column and I drove that thing all over the place up and down dirt roads, learning how to steer and right to go left, kicking up dirt and everything. But anyhow, that was basically the. I kind of taught myself how to drive on that thing, and that was before I had a license. And then I had a 55 Chevy pickup that had belonged to him. That he didn't drive much. I drove all over town with no license and never got stopped, but I was always really careful.
Speaker 3:And then when I turned 16, it was in 1973, he parked two cars out there in the driveway and one of them was a blue 63 Corvair Spyder and this one had the tack on the dash and everything. It was a beautiful car and there was a VW Beetle that he had. He could paint cars too Fresh paint job. He said choose your weapon. And so for some reason I said that Corvair is really cool.
Speaker 3:He had bought it from a guy that I knew from school that had jumped a railroad track and busted the bell housing on the transmission and he bought it for nearly nothing and he fixed that and I drove that car until the crankshaft broke and then I had to get something else. But one night the Corvair story there, one funny Corvair story After church, all of us teenagers went out there. I was only 15 at the time but I was already driving that Corvair, so this was before. He actually gave it to me for my regular driver and I said I got in the car and there were seven other teenagers piled in there with me. For some strange reason I don't know why this happened, but we were packed in there so tight that I was having to operate the gear shifter and the gas and the guy that was sitting between me and the door was having to do the clutch and the brake.
Speaker 2:That's what I was going to say. You must have shared responsibilities there. We did Eight people total.
Speaker 3:Yeah eight teenagers piled into the Corvair. I mean it was a two-door and four in the back, four in the front, and there was a girl next to me and a guy on the other side of her and there was a couple of girls and a couple of guys in the back and there wasn't room for anything to go on back there. You know what I'm saying. So we just packed in like sardines. So we were driving this thing and, uh, we would have wound up over on industrial boulevard somehow, and every time we'd go around a corner a little too fast it would try to fish tail a little because the engine's in the back and it's heavy, and um, so we get pulled over because we're on industrial boulevard and it's a sunday night, nobody's supposed to be out there.
Speaker 3:And so the guy sitting next to me his name was David and the guy on the other side of the girl was 16. He had his driver's license. But in Alabama back then, the driver's licenses were postcards, without even having a picture on them. Believe it or not, it was just a postcard, a paper postcard.
Speaker 3:That was your driver's license came to you in the mail. And so, uh, david was terrified when we got pulled over because he says he's going to ask me for my license because I'm sitting closest to the door. He said Danny, danny, give me your wallet. And so at the last minute, when the cop, when he was rolling the window down, danny hands him his wallet and the cop says I need to see your license. And so he has to fumble around with his hands shaking to get Danny's license out of his wallet, figure out where he's got it.
Speaker 3:So he hands it to him and the guy looks and the hair color and the eye color is close enough that he manages to pass muster, you know. And so he says he looks down in the car at all of us kids in there and he says you know, if you're going to go parking, you need to do it somewhere else besides Industrial Boulevard. And the girl that was sitting next to me says parking, that wasn't very nice, but anyway we weren't parking, we were just riding around like a bunch of idiots, you know. But anyway, that was one of the funniest things that happened with that Corvair. But you know, if I went around a curve too fast on that Corvair, it would slide, but it never even tried to go up on two wheels.
Speaker 2:You know what I I mean? Yeah and it um. So it would slide, but it was easy to recover, right?
Speaker 3:it didn't oh absolutely. It didn't have that momentous oversteer breakaway that many from the dirt road stuff I did on the buggy. I had already learned which way to turn the wheel to recover you know I mean a lot of people have no idea how to recover from a skid because they didn't learn how to drive on dirt road and in the mud. You know, like we did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like my 17-year-old daughter is learning to drive. Yeah, yeah, we're not there yet.
Speaker 3:My next favorite car and I had a whole bunch of VW Bugs was Dad got this 58 Volkswagen Bug that he got from somewhere and he says I think we're going to play with this one a little bit. And he shaved 125,000 off the heads because he had something to do that with. And we raised the compression on that thing and boy, it was a boss. I mean, that thing was just. I'd owned a bunch of Volkswagens by that time but nothing would run like that thing would and it didn't have any bumpers on it. It was a crappy looking gray. He painted it gray, an ugly color of gray, and I put an oil pressure gauge and an amp meter on the dash. You know where the. You know if you're familiar with the bugs. Above the radio you had the knobs for the last wipers. I cut those out with a hole saw. Actually I just drilled and filed them out, put a couple of gauges in there and I ran a line from the wall pressure outlet to that gauge so I could watch it. And I was on Interstate 10 going through New Orleans one time on the way out to Texas after I went to work out there years later, driving that little car and this guy on his Jaguar kept passing me up with his beard and his glasses and his convertible and he'd look at me like I was a termite and all that kind of stuff and the traffic flow would get to where I would actually work my way around him again and we got kind of out on the open road and he goes to pass me again. He's looking over there at me and so I caught another gear on that thing and I took off like a rocket and left him behind and really surprised that guy. And the next time, of course, I drove until I saw the oil pressure starting to drop and I says, okay, this is enough, I'm going to burn the thing up. So I started slowing down and the next time he went by me he had a big smile on his face and he gave me a thumbs up, you know, because he didn't realize that little bug was a sleeper. That was a little bug that I also did possum hunting on it and I went in places where four wheel drive pickups couldn't go because I had mud grips on the back. I was working at a gas station then so I could change the tires out at will, but anyway, that was the next one. But the square back I was talking about was the one when I finally moved to Texas, down there in 78 to work for that offshore services company in fleet maintenance. I went down there on that green square back because I could haul all my stuff in it and everything and I drove it down there and I drove it around for a while and I was sitting.
Speaker 3:I used to talk, to sit in the coffee shops and I talked to. I never did drink or anything, but I'd talk to this old postman and this old postman would sit there and he would talk to me and he would say you know, he'd goad me and we'd talk about stuff and all that. And it was a really curvy girl that came in there to visit a friend that worked at the place and he says I bet you won't ask her out for a date. I bet you're afraid to. I says I'm not afraid of anybody. So she comes and she sits next to me because she's wanting to talk to the girl on the other side of the counter and I says, hey, have to do is say no. And she didn't like being second guess. So she says, sure, pick me up tomorrow night at eight and we'll go to whatever.
Speaker 3:And that was when she told me after we rode around on that, uh, it wasn't at eight, it was like basically in the middle of the afternoon, cause we went to the matinee and she said it's too hot in here, I'm not comfortable, the car doesn't. I really would like to go home. I said, well, if this car shot me in the foot on a date, I'm going to get me something else. I got a 74 F-150 for $2,000 used. It had air conditioning on it and I drove it for years. That was my next vehicle. I could talk a lot about that thing too. Anyway, if you've got any questions, I didn't want to just talk to you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've seen some squarebacks and I think they're also called the type three. Yeah, top three. Yeah, the top one was the bug, top two is the bus.
Speaker 2:Top three was the squareback, yeah I see gotcha, and did the squareback have a official name as well?
Speaker 3:uh, they just called it. They just called it a top three, top three, square back yep, very, very creative.
Speaker 2:So it kind of is like a looks like a carmen guia station wagon ish sort of the carmen guia.
Speaker 3:I had one of those one time too. Um, that's funny too. It had megaphone tailpipes on it and it was. It smoked a little bit. It was just an old carmen guia and whenever I would drive along, you know the volkswagen tailpipes had little fiberglass stuff on the inside of them so they'd be really quiet. Well, this one here had hollow megaphones on it, looked like two shotguns sticking out the back and when I was cruising along I could let off the gas and I could switch off the key for a second and fill the exhaust system up with gas. When I turned it back on, two flames would bust out those things that looked like there were two shotguns shooting out the back oh, and that that's where the name shotgun name kind of comes from yeah, I guess, but anyway, that one's a lot.
Speaker 3:That carmen guill was lower to the ground than that, that that square back was was a lot taller and it had a higher center of gravity and it had a uh, you know the. The engine was configured differently and in 68 that was the first widely produced car that had fuel injection on it and it basically had Bosch fuel injections and basically the board. You could have just about bought any part at Radio Shack. You needed to rebuild the engine controller on that thing, but most people didn't like the fuel injection because of problems that would develop and it had dual carburetors on it. The square back did, and so the one that I had was just before the 68 fuel injection, but a lot of people would convert the fuel injection back to the carburetors because they didn't like the fuel injection when it first came out. If you understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:Yep, yep, absolutely. I mean a DeLorean with Bosch KJ Tronic fuel injection. Yep, I hear a lot of those complaints.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I worked on well that KJ Tronic fuel injection. I worked on those at the Volkswagen dealer and I also worked on a DeLorean that belonged to the guy that owned the dealership I worked at and that system is extremely interesting because it's got atomizers, all these little spray atomizers that pop into some O-rings for each cylinder, and then the fuel distributor in the middle has got a piston in there that goes up and down, based on a plate that raises it when the air comes in. That's like nothing else anywhere. You know it's a totally different system, but I got familiar with those and they had an auxiliary air regulator for idle speed and they also had a, a control pressure regulator. So when it was cold it would actually enrich it a little bit by letting the piston come up a little higher and then, as it warmed up, it would put more pressure, more control pressure in the top.
Speaker 3:I mean, that was. That was an interesting deal. But DeLorean, the fact that DeLorean chose to use that and you remember the Eagle Premier yes, the Eagle Premier was actually just an Americanized R25 Renault. Yes, I remember the DeLorean and that car had the same engine but it was a three liter instead of a 2.8. Now the DeLorean had a different fuel injection system.
Speaker 2:Yes, he remembers everything. I was going to say it was a three liter, but I didn't need to. Yeah, yeah, and there he remembers everything. I was going to say it was a three liter, but I didn't need to. Yeah, and there are people that have replaced those three liters. In fact, for what it's worth, in my DeLorean club there are people that have put Chevy LSs in it. I've actually met the guy who kind of created the kit. His name's Josh Shatternick. He created the kit for bolting in a Chevy V8 into a DeLorean.
Speaker 1:Okay, whoa, what a great story. Thank you for sharing that, Richard, and I really enjoyed getting to know you. Thank you for taking the time and joining. Great way to start season two. You were everything as advertised by Philip. My only regret for today, my only regret, is that we didn't get to talk trash about our mutual friend, philip, that that you grew up with interesting guy trying to come on here. Now you know he's seen your example and well, we did, we did that.
Speaker 1:All fair, though well, it doesn't count, it doesn't count, we didn't get it on there. Yeah, anyway, richard, thank you so much yeah, thank you, richard.
Speaker 2:I feel like we could have you back like three or four times.
Speaker 1:All right, thanks for having me on the show, you get it All right, everybody. So that concludes this episode with Richard. Check him out online. We will post to his channel Feedback. Check us out on your platform of choice. To all the cars I've loved before. To all the cars I've loved before. To all the cars I've loved before, remember, because every car tells a story. We're heard around the world. Hit me up at Christian at cars, lovecom. Dove. At cars, lovecom. Take care, we'll see you next time, everybody. Goodbye.
