The following article appeared in the Nov. 29 issue of The Santa Fe New Mexican’s Drive Magazine.
If it’s true that everyone is born with a natural gift, as Scott Haynes says, then his is the urge to create or work with something different. And there are few things on wheels more different than a Clark Equipment Co. Cortez motorhome.
Clark, perhaps the nation’s biggest builder of forklifts, developed a sideline in 1963 to build an RV and did it for seven years. A neighbor gave Haynes a rat-infested 1969 model in 2005. It took him more than a year to bring it back to life, though the worn tan-and-yellow body still needs a paintjob.
“Rats had taken over the whole thing,” said Haynes, 46, who came to Santa Fe in 1986 with his wife, Shawn, from their hometown of Monroe, Mich., 60 miles south of Detroit. He and his brother were part-owners of a Harley-Davidson repair shop there.
The Hayneses live with their teenage son and two daughters in the N.M. 14 area.
Haynes owns Need A Lift auto repair in the Siler Road industrial area, Santa Fe’s broken-car heaven. He opened in 2000 with the unique idea of renting his three lifts at $25 an hour to “knowledgeable do-it-yourselfers” who didn’t want to pay his $55 hourly rate to fix their own brakes, clutches and the like.
His insurance company, super-cautious, nixed that idea after three years, but Haynes kept the name. There’s not a speck of oil on the concrete floor under the lifts. A blue-covered Bible rests among the car, truck and Good Housekeeping magazines in the waiting room. He’s spotted customers thumbing through it.
“God owns the shop; I only run it,” Haynes said.
If God is watching, Haynes has only Him for company because he works alone.
“Every day is spent alone with vehicles,” said Haynes, who will take on one major vehicle restoration for a customer a year — as a “time filler.”
“I only trust myself. Employees bring a whole different dimension into the business. You take on an employee and you have a couple of slow days, you still have to pay the employee.”
Shiny before-and-after photos of the mostly 1950s cars Haynes has restored are plastered to a bulletin board, his trophy case. His daily driver is a red 1972 Corvette, one of seven vehicles in the family, including his 1980 Harley.
“The only way to restore cars is if they’re somebody else’s,” Haynes said. “It takes too much time and too much money because of the parts.”
But he didn’t follow his own advice when it came to the Cortez, which will spend the winter on one of the lifts as a rat preventive. He couldn’t resist making it new again. But parts alone cost him about $4,000 so far.
“It was a challenge,” he said. “Anybody can rebuild a car. Try to rebuild something that you can’t get the parts for.”
But Haynes has a talent for making things work.
“Everybody is born with a gift,” he said, sitting on a stool at his shop workbench. “This is the only thing I’m good at. I never had to try hard at it. It just comes naturally. Some people never find out what their gift is.
“I started when I was so little. My dad would get me a new bike at Sears, and within two weeks I’d have it apart and alter it some way.”
Why?
“Because I thought I could improve on someone else’s design. I couldn’t stand it: Anybody could buy that bike, I had to turn it into mine.”
The Cortez, one of 3,211 built, was meant for family fishing trips but has become a parked playhouse for his kids. It took 40 hours to clean out the rats’ nests and droppings before Haynes could start restoring the yellow-and-beige interior. The work included rebuilding the water tanks, the plumbing and the electrical system.
The 8,000-pound, 19-foot RV, which Haynes described as driving like “an overloaded Volkswagen bus,” is powered by a fuel-injected 1990 Mustang 5.0-liter V-8 that gets up to 12 miles a gallon of unleaded regular.
It cost the previous owner $9,000 and replaced the original Ford 240-cubic-inch inline-six that moved the RV at a pace that was “extremely patient uphill.”
Richard C. Gross is a Santa Fe-based writer and editor. E-mail him at drive@sfnewmexican.com.
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