Angling and Automotive Repair @ FPL

Bob Wiken moved to Fayetteville from Maine 15 years ago. He goes back every summer. “Good striper fishing,” he says.

Bob works at the HiLand Dairy ice cream freezer, which mean he's putting in a lot of extra hours this time of year. When he's not freezing cream or fishing for trout (Bob's a member of Tight Line Fly Fishers), he's probably working on one of the family cars—which is why we ran into him at the library.

Bob helped the library iron out some early wrinkles in our Chilton's Automotive Repair Center database. Now that it's up and running, he loves it.

“I go online almost everyday, answering some question about one or other of the cars we have. Since the kids and I are all driving cars, and they're all at least ten years old, one of them's always breaking down.”

The old hardcopy repair manuals don't quite measure up to the database, he says.

“You can blow up a diagram on-screen, print it, and it's there. If you get the thing greasy, you print it out again. You don't have to worry about cleaning the grease off the book for the library, which is just about impossible. Last year we blew the head gasket on our Honda, took out the Chilton's book for it. That was a lot of work and when we were done—the book was real greasy.”

Does Bob use the library for anything else?

“Sometimes it'll be two years before I stop in, then suddenly I'm getting another car, I'll need to hit Consumer Reports . Or it's, ‘How do I get this lawn better?' It's mostly research for me. Of course, my wife has three or four books out all the time.”

Then, he remembers: “There was that book Fishes of Arkansas . Beautiful book. Expensive, so I don't own it. Had to check that one out.”

Back to the trout stream.