I view all of this as a Venn diagram that has a very small intersection.
On one hand, you have people (even young people!) who can turn wrenches and who are interested in mechanical stuff. Having spent a 20+ year career as a shipboard officer in the Navy, we had to have young people with skills (and hopefully, interest) in mechanical pursuits. Some of them were very, very good and enjoyed what they did. Multiply that by 250+ ships across the Navy and you have a huge number of mechanically-inclined young people, receiving training, using equipment, starting and leaving the military.
While that's only 1% of the population (people who are veterans) that still accounts for a lot of young people (and older, like me) who learned how to use tools and other skills in the military (particularly considering the other branches as well).
When I left the military, I managed a couple of power plants. While I tried to hire veterans more often than not, I still had young people who, without military backgrounds, enjoyed turning wrenches. In fact, two of them were second generation at the same company, and several others were second generation in the same line of energy production.
All this to say...there are still young people out there who can turn wrenches.
Now, are there the same number of young people who can turn wrenches as there were in the past? I don't have data to back up my thoughts, but I am certain there are far fewer. The reason is that there simply isn't a need anymore. When cars (and other things) required regular maintenance, it was up to the owner to provide much of it.
Nowadays, cars (for example) are so complex that it's easier (and faster) to pay the dealership (or whoever) to do the required maintenance and/or repair (the dealership where I've bought most of my cars does oil changes for free, so I haven't changed the oil in any of my modern cars...why should I? I don't have to take the time to prep the car, buy the oil, buy a filter, and then recycle the oil...that's a huge savings for me). So having the dealership do the maintenance on my cars is a no-brainer for me. Why take the time to learn how my cars work when I don't work on them?
While the people who are mechanically-inclined still exist (albeit at lower numbers) the other part of the Venn diagram is "the economy, stupid" (in the words of Bill Clinton...)
Back in the 50s and 60s, it was possible to buy a Model A for less than $100 (and even far less, depending on condition). With inflation, that's $1100 in current dollars...pretty cheap for a car in _any_ condition. If you drive around the parking lot of my daughter's high school, there are plenty of cars from the 90s and 2000s in use by students today. In the same way, in the 50s and 60s, Model As were 20 and 30 years old. AND, they had a following (another strange, and unusual phenomenon...one of the only cars in existence with such a following...but that's for another discussion...).
So you had kids with cars that cost around $1000 and that could reasonably work on them with basic mechanical knowledge required for many basic car ownership tasks in the day. Back then, the Venn diagram of people with mechanical skills and who could afford one of these cars had a lot of overlap.
Fast forward 60-70 years and the young people who are interested in turning wrenches don't have the money to invest in an old car. For a person in their 20s and 30s, to have an income in the low to mid $100k range gets them in many areas to "just above poverty level" when all of their expenses are taken into consideration, particularly if they are lucky enough to own a home and have a family (this context is coming not just from lots of reading, but from having mid-20s kids, from their friends, and from my mid-to-late 20s and early 30s co-workers...it's a real doozy...)
So, just keeping one's head above water and staying out of major debt puts a damper on expensive hobbies like vintage cars. And yes, in the world of hobbies, buying and properly maintaining a Model A isn't a cheap hobby anymore.
What ends up happening is that the young people who are mechanically inclined and who are interested in vintage cars can't afford them, so there are fewer people who are learning about the cars and from there, even fewer who are willing to work on them, particularly as a career. It's a vicious cycle.
Yes, there are always exceptions. Yes, there are young people out there who are involved in working on these cars. But they are very few and far between.
Since we're veterans of the first century with cars, the cycle hasn't yet shown the end state. These cars were new, and 20 years later, they became jalopies. The guys who liked jalopies in the 50s through the 70s are now dying off and because there has been a continued gap between cost of these cars and the amount young people can afford, the number of potential owners have dramatically declined. What will happen in the next decade? Or the following decades? No one knows because the trends haven't been made yet.
As an aside, at least the Model A community has a large following, even though it has shrunk considerably over the last decade. Think about the brass and nickel cars...they are in the untenable position of being priced well out of the range of most people AND the people who know how to work on them are decreasing by the day.
While I like to think I'm somewhat competent when it comes to work on my Model A, I'd be totally lost when it comes to working on a Peerless from the 'teens. And, more importantly, having to drop over $100k just to get my foot in the door for a car like that...there's no way I'd go down that road...wrap up money in an asset that I can't figure out and if something breaks, I have to sell a kidney to get it fixed??? No thanks...
My three cents...
Dave
