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Anyone wandering into my garage the other night would have said I was crazy, but I prefer to think of myself as "differently saned."

I was, you see, standing at my workbench, wearing a pair of green coveralls, red rubber gloves and a black Arai full-face motorcycle helmet. Under the helmet was a dust mask of the Darth Vader pig-snout variety.

A pretty frightening picture, and part of the reason, I think, we have so few visitors from outer space landing on our rural Wisconsin property. They have their standards and can be freaked out just like anyone else.

In any case, space aliens tend to land in Western desert areas where property values and literacy rates are even lower, and they have a natural affinity for simple-hearted people and never show themselves to cynics like myself, even if we appear, superficially, to be adequately crazy to accept their weirdness.

Where was I? Ah yes, at the workbench.

So. Why all the odd-looking protection?

Well, I was disassembling a set of rusty Lotus Elan brake calipers and blowing them apart with compressed air. This is an ugly and dangerous job you shouldn't try at home, especially if you have nice wallpaper or tropical fish. I usually lock the caliper halves in my bench vise against a block of wood, cover the thing in rags and then feed compressed air in through a bleeder hole.

The corroded old piston awakens with a shudder, then slowly begins to ooze out of the caliper. When it finally reaches the end of its bore, it comes out like a cannon shot, usually releasing a fine toxic mist of ancient brake fluid into the air. Hence the dust mask and all the body protection.

I've never had a brake piston ricochet off the vise and hit me in the head, but there's always a last time. The forces unleashed here are fearsome.

This one exploded safely, however, and I found the caliper filled with a rusty sludge that looked like a mixture of wine silt and drain oil, only not as appetizing, beverage-wise. Unlike a fine Burgundy, brake fluid doesn't get better with age, and this car had sat motionless in a barn for 25 years.

The caliper bores were, as expected, badly pitted with rust. They'd have to be machined and re-sleeved. So rather than disassemble the other three calipers, I boxed them up for shipment to a place in Virginia where they restore your calipers for about twice the cost of your first car, if you're as old as I am.

Relieved of further combat duty for the night, I took off my helmet and dust mask and picked up a relatively recent cup of coffee. I checked the surface for brake fluid slicks, but there weren't any, so I sat back in my workshop beach chair (picture the turquoise and white on a 1956 Corvette) to ponder my latest garage project: the 1964 Lotus Elan.

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