Some time ago, I posted an excerpt from a lengthy review of Mathew Crawford's first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. Since then, he's written a couple more books and has also begun a Substack. At his Substack, Archedelia, there is a very nice article about someone whom he considers a master at his craft. An excerpt is below. The full post may be read here.
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A while back I pitched the editor of Hagerty Drivers Club Magazine on an idea to write a profile of my machinist. The article appears in the current issue of the magazine (print only), but we arranged it so I can share it with readers of Archedelia as well. Labor Day seems like a good day to release it, so here you go. For this assignment I teamed up with my friend Henri Boulanger, a Bay Area photographer, motorcyclist and lover of all things vehicular or musical. You can find more of his work at his site; I encourage you to check it out. -Matt
Not people who know how to Google it, or AI-prompt it, but who have a web of knowledge in their heads that is vast and detailed and synoptic, and who are able to synthesize it on the fly to arrive at some practical solution. This kind of knowledge accumulates over the course of a lifetime, slowly ripening and finding its way into their bones, to the point they probably couldn’t tell you how they know what they know.
Ken Jansen is the go-to machinist for the performance air-cooled Volkswagen cadres of Northern California. For the drag racers, in particular. Full-bodied Bugs powered by his motors have made it well into the 10s in the quarter mile. That’s all motor (no boost, no bottle). With boost, he has one customer who is currently in the 8s.
Ken’s shop, Jansen Enterprise, is in Belmont, which is perhaps the least glamorous of those unglamorous towns that dot the northern Peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area. It may come as a surprise that there could remain anything like a “town” in this sprawling metropolis, which attracts the sleekly credentialled from every corner of the globe. But in places such as Belmont and Redwood City, one finds pockets of residents who grew up and still work in the place where they were born. There is still an industrial ecosystem of little shops tucked away, often with no storefront, where mechanics and machinists continue to hang on by a thread under the shadow of Big Tech. They represent the area’s last vestige of a certain middle-class type, defined not by income so much as by disposition: tradespeople who are self-employed, have no truck with computerized bureaucracy, and whose attitude to the surrounding powers is proud rather than servile. These survivors are the ones who had the wisdom and the means to buy their buildings thirty or forty years ago.
I found my way to Ken initially because I wanted to get the bearing journals on a crankshaft polished. I cut my teeth on Volkswagens as a teenager growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s. After an extended foray into motorcycle repair and fabrication in Virginia, I returned to my VW roots in my late 40s. I also returned to the Bay Area in 2019. Asking around for a machinist, I was told by other shops to call Ken.
Looking up his location, I got an uncanny feeling. This is going to require an autobiographical digression before we get back to Ken – a brief story about remembrance and the transmission of some tiny, meaningful corner of the world from one generation to the next. I suspect such stewardship is what keeps the world as a whole from petering out.
The year is 1982 or thereabouts. Charles Martin (Chas to his friends) was a machinist by training. He worked the parts counter at Donsco, a VW speed shop in Belmont. He also built race motors for them and pitted for their off-road racing campaigns. Once a classical guitar-playing Buddhist vegetarian, he was now a gun freak and brilliant misanthropist. He still had long hair, but it was rarely released from the bun under his tweed cap. His orange, split-window VW bus, with wheel wells cut away to accommodate large off-road tires in the back, was a chaotic treasure trove of superb American handguns, Snap-On tools, and VW parts. The darkness behind the cab carried a sharp note of Berryman’s B- 12 Chemtool on top of a more subtle smell that is generic to mechanics—a mixed-up aroma of various petroleum distillates that had been oxidized by combustion, thickened with road grime, and ripened on a substrate of shop rags to the point of acquiring substance. He kept a large tank of CO2 in his bus for running an air impact wrench, indispensable for swapping out a broken transaxle on a race car in the desert. This bus was his only personal space, and at this time cell phones were something you saw only in the movies. Outside Donsco business hours, you reached Chas by calling the Lyons restaurant in San Mateo, where he manned a certain stool at one end of the coffee counter.
Oppressed in my seventeen-year-old way by the liberal pieties of the time, I had recently taken to wearing combat boots to Berkeley High and reading Soldier of Fortune magazine. But Chas was something different, the first genuine reactionary I ever met. Deeply cynical and deeply witty, he loosened up these angry tendencies of mine with his corrosive humor. By that I mean he both lubricated them and dissolved them, like penetrating oil. He also initiated me into a certain positive possibility opened up by alienation from all things respectable: the pleasures of metal.
