By favourite hobby is gardening, but since moving across Canada, I no longer have a garden. I thought I could deal with it, but I now am beginning to miss it. Recently I've realized that another thing scratching the same itch is surprisingly (even to me), car work.
I think it started visiting my cousin, when he took me for a drive in his Toyota Celica as he un-winterized it. He got it off a friend who didn't have the know-how to fix it. He has the same tinkerer's mind I think I have--he's been modifying a modestly priced 3d printer by upgrading it with all kinds of things, and building a custom enclosure to print more toxic materials.
The interest grew dealing with all the steps of vehicle inspection to transfer my registration to a new province. I was given a short to-do list before the mechanic would sign off. I was able to do most of it myself by joining a small do-it-yourself auto club with reasonable membership and bay fees. With considerable coaching from the shop supervisor, I was able to change my shocks and brakes by myself. The only auto maintenance skill I learned from my Dad is changing my tires. One of the nuts on the shocks was rust-welded onto the bolt, and I had to let a mechanic fix that. But that didn't diminish the value of the problem solving.
My vehicle's engine doesn't have a port for a bulb to heat the engine block, so I had to settle for a tiny oil pan heater. Installing that, being underneath my car trying to route a power cable from the oil pan out of my car, made me realize where the oil filter and oil pan actually are. They are unexpectedly in really convenient places, and I'm not really intimidated to try to do my own oil change.
Visiting family over the summer I had the chance to ride in a custom turbocharged red truck that won an award in a Saskatoon car show. My uncle has a similar curious tinker's mindset, with and app on his phone, connecting to his car's obd2 port. I also got a tutorial on how to drive his sporty dirtbike. On a small vehicle like that, you can really feel the clutch start to grab and intuitively feel how you need to slowly add power to overcome that. It made the thought of driving a manual vehicle less intimidating. During this visit I also learned that my grandfather has almost always purchased Chevrolet vehicles.
As a kid, I would take apart old electronics, though I was never really able to put them back together again. This same skill and idea is present with a car. The only difficulty is that you need to be able to drive it home after. It's the same process. Taking off bolts or screws in layers and remembering the order so you can put it back together again.
Tinkering.
Tinkering is what I love about plants, and what I've recognized in cars. Growing ordinary plants is fun, but learning about heirloom plants and their genetics allowed me to tinker. Learning some of the intricacies of genetics and species and hybrids I really appreciate. I was actually able to see this growing 20 or more type of beans at once.
Cars have the same tinkering spirit. I can learn about different makes and models and frame shapes and companies. Understanding plants as a whole bunch of distinct components that each do something specific and useful. Some of them interact, but you can reasonably understand them one part at a time. Cars are pretty much the same when you look at them that way.
I've mostly been able to satisfy curiosity about plants through copious amounts of reading blogs, forums, and books on plant genetics, history, and breeding. It's the same with cars (and probably lots of other hobbies). There's blogs, Youtube channels, forums, books, Korean service manuals. I haven't even scratched the surface here, but it does seem to scratch the same itch--one that maybe needn't be exclusive to cars or plants. To me, this is the hacker mindset (the good kind), seeing a system and wanting to understand it to see what you can get out of it. Tinkering is the link for me. Without this hacker mindset, tinkering becomes tedious instead of thrilling.
My father drove across Canada for work in the late 90s. He met my mother and stayed there. I thought it would be really cool to try to get that (model) of car as a project car. Knowing my Grandpa's preference for Chevrolet vehicles, I figured I could start my search with late 80's or ealrly 90's Chevy sedans. Eventually I decided it would likely have been a Chevrolet Cavalier. So, I started researching, going down the same type of rabbit holes I would go down when curious about some aspect of plants. I learned all about the J-body frames common for mass market GM brand cars of that time period. Realizing I like the boxy look of the first and second generation Cavaliers through this research has refined my taste in cars in a unique way. Since I've never really had a "dream car", this was a good way to start to learn what I like.
Then I asked my Mom, and it turns out it might have been a Plymouth Caravelle, a car that wasn't as mass produced and didn't have as much staying power and isn't really available secondhand anymore. I was heartbroken since I had basically psychologically manipulated myself into believing the car with a personal backstory was the Cavalier. I might shelve this idea for a while. So until then, I'll keep tinkering with my existing small, white sedan.