If you need engine parts, he’s got ‘em

IDAHO FALLS – The automobile industry would like us to see it differently, but from Bud Cheney’s point of view, very little has changed about the internal combustion engine since Model T’s were rolling off Henry Ford’s assembly line 100 years ago.

The electronics are different, the materials are more durable, and the lubrication is more efficient.

But at the heart of it, a coil still supplies the spark that causes the explosion that fires the piston and turns the crankshaft. What could be more basic than that?

For 40 years, Cheney, 62, has been working on antique car and truck engines. Step inside his shop on South Holmes Avenue, and you’ll run across a Model A Ford engine hanging from a hoist, a disassembled engine from a 1917 Franklin, an Oliver tractor engine waiting to be rebuilt, and parts from Pierce Arrows, Packards and Cadillacs.

People send engines to Cheney (a distant cousin of Vice President Dick Cheney) from all over the Pacific Northwest and as far away as Alaska. He points to a pallet outside the shop door, loaded with parts.

“This is the kind of stuff they bring me,” he said.

Once a customer brought him boxes of parts in the back of a pickup truck, telling him he had the makings of a 1910 Buick.

“When I finally figured out what we had, we had the leftovers of three restorations,” Cheney said.

It generally takes him three to four months to rebuild an engine, fabricating parts when he can’t find something that works.

But you’d be surprised how readily parts are available and how inexpensive they are.

“You can get about anything for a Model A or a Model T,” he said. “It’s actually pretty reasonable.”

Cheney got into the antique engine restoration business in the 1960s. At the time, he was building Model T Speedsters. To get engine work done, he had to go to Salt Lake City, where Jess Jewel had his shop.

He thought it looked like something he might enjoy, and he noticed Jewel was getting on in years.

“I told him, ‘If you’d like to sell this business, I’d like to buy it,’ ” Cheney said. “I was considering it for retirement, but it became a full-time job.”

Gary Schwarzenberger of Idaho Falls, another antique car enthusiast, remembers the move, which involved three trips with a semitrailer.

“It was quite an adventure, I’ll tell you that,” he said.

He said Cheney can fabricate just about anything mechanical, including parts for old farm equipment. Although a big company isn’t going to bother with an order for 2,000 sprockets, “Bud says, ‘OK, I’ll do it,’ ” Schwarzenberger said.

That willingness has led to some loyal customers.

“We still do quite a lot of work for the farmers,” Cheney said. “We have some who won’t go away. We have a clientele that’s been with us for years. … We pretty much know who we’re working with.”

Idaho Falls has a large cadre of antique-car buffs, with about 72 members in the local Veteran Motor Car Club of America, of which Cheney is president. Its big local event is the annual swap meet and car show in Tautphaus Park, scheduled this year for June 18 and 19.

Swap meets are a particular passion for Cheney. He has a trailer full of parts, which he takes to about 15 swap meets every summer.

“You can’t imagine the caliber of people you meet going to these swap meets,” he said.

The Internet has changed the business dramatically, but Cheney said it doesn’t worry him. “We just tell ourselves, after they’re done with the Internet and they’ve bought parts that don’t fit, we’re still here,” he said. “If you buy it from me and it’s wrong, I’ll take it back.”