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I’m in my mid-30s and I've been wrenching as long as I can remember ,dirt bikes, go karts, as a kid, then my first high school Blazer that I lifted in the driveway. I guess I was always that 1-in-100 kid who not only enjoyed working on things but could actually do it. Honestly, maybe even 1-in-1000 these days feels like. It really does feel like a dying breed know adays.
Now I’m in the trades. I own and run a construction company. I started out swinging a hammer, crawling under houses, sweating through summers like everyone else. These days I’m mostly estimating and running crews now at a desk lol.
And I’ll be honest — I think about this a lot. On one hand, the fact that fewer people want to do this kind of work feels like job security for life. But on the other hand, I worry whether I’m going to have enough skilled hands in the future. I’m around 20 employees right now, and while some stay with us for years, the younger guys (18-25) tend to bounce. A lot of them don’t want long days, physical labor, dirt, heat, crawling under houses, ladders, etc. I get it — it’s hard work. But it does keep me up some nights wondering if I’ll still have a workforce when I’m 60, when I’m not the one grabbing the shovel or wrench anymore.
Same thing with these old cars. I know project cars aren’t really investments, but the Porsche world is on a different level. A used 3.0 is $25-30k. Coming from the C2 Corvette world where a crate 350 is $3k and parts are everywhere, it’s wild. Porsche parts are getting rarer, more expensive, and honestly the pool of people who can work on them is shrinking too.
Right now I can lift my own car, fabricate lines, do a clutch, tune CIS, whatever. But my dad is 78 ,I do the bigger stuff for him now. I look ahead and wonder: in 20 years, who’s going to be doing clutches and fuel systems on these cars? How many shops will still exist? What will it cost? Will I be able to get parts? Or am I putting time and money into cars that may appreciate in value but become less drivable because you can't maintain them? or simple be useless because no one can work on them.
Maybe that sounds dramatic ,I’m not doomsdaying anything. I just really love this stuff. I love the hands-on part of life. And when you see that fewer and fewer people want to get dirty, whether it's construction or old cars, you can’t help but wonder where things go from here.
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