DYI Vehicle Repairs

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  • 71% of car owners have tried to repair their vehicle instead of taking it to a mechanic.

  • Car owners think the most DIY-friendly car brands are Ford, Honda, and Toyota.
    Outcome of DYI attempt?
    50% fixed problem
    39% fixed problem but it took longer than expected.
    8% gave up & took to professional
    3% made problem worse % took to professional

When asked which brands were the most DIY-friendly, car owners named Ford, Honda, and Toyota. They also said the least DIY-friendly brands were Porsche, Lucid, Rivian, Mercedes-Benz, Infiniti, and Tesla. When faced with an expensive car repair, nearly 2 in 5 car owners would rather try a DIY fix than pay a professional to do it.*
** Car owners say the most expensive car brands to repair are Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and Tesla.*

I fondly remember doing auto repairs in the 1970’s & 1980’s, except during winter months, swapping out alternators, oil changes, carburetors, water pumps, fuel pumps, master brake cylinders & tune ups. Everything was mechanical. And there was plenty of room in the engine compartment to work. One just had to be organized removing the parts and reversing the process on installation of the new part.

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My favorite DIY job was changing the timing belts on multiple Honda’s in the 1980s. That’s because it gave the biggest bang for the buck. The dealers were charging about $800 plus the part cost to do a timing belt change, and it really needed to be changed every 60,000 miles or so. A good friend from graduate school usually did the job with me. We did it many times - for my Civic, for his old Civic, and then his new Civic, for his dad’s old Accord, and then his dad’s new Accord, and for his brother’s Accord, and later for a couple of friends who drove Hondas. It took us less than an hour to do, but we could only do it on a weekend when we could borrow the “big” impact wrench from a mechanic friend (my puny impact wrench could loosen the crankshaft pulley bold, but my compressor was strong enough). We has a trick that saved a lot of time - using screwdrivers, lock the camshaft gears and the crankshaft gears in place, so you don’t have to redo the timing after replacing the belt. It made the job much faster for us. We probably saved ourselves, our family members, and others $800 each time for at least ten times over the years, maybe even close to fifteen times! We also did plenty of other DIY jobs on our vehicles over the years.

And we are still friends more than 40 years later. Sometimes we lament that our kids don’t do any of this DIY stuff anymore. But I suppose they do other kind of DIY stuff nowadays - phone apps? Media creation? Photo editing? Etc.

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Youtube makes it easy but with all the sensors and plastic parts it makes it a pain. That is why I bought a 74 Jeep CJ5. Lots of room to work on and not so many parts.

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My dad taught me well, had one of these for all our vehicles.

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When I was young and poor I took a course from some guys in Cambridge who (later) turned out to be The Car Guys on NPR. Showed me and my girlfriend how to service my VW and her Karman Ghia.

Now I’m not young or poor, and I take it to the dealership if it’s new, and a trusted local mechanic if it’s not.

So worth it.

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You met Tom & Ray! I am so jealous.

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In addition to maintaining a vehicle mechanically, I believe it’s important to keep the cosmetics up too. If you don’t it isn’t long before you’re driving a vehicle that looks like a piece of junk.

I drive a 2003 F250. In addition to keeping it in top mechanical shape I have maintained its appearance too.

I accidently dropped my motorcycle against the driver door once. Put a dime size dent in the door. It was $800 dollars to fix it. That’s probably about the price of a new truck payment. A few months later my youngest son scraped the left side of the truck, $1200 to fix that. About 3 years ago the driver’s seat was showing a quarter size wear spot in the upholstery. I well known upholstery shop just happened to have the fabric in stock. The die lot or maybe years of fading, (the truck sits in the garage most of the time) was very slight. $250 for that repair.

I look at new trucks occasionally, but I just can’t justify the cost.

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Americans may get to experience the joy of automobile maintenance out of necessity.

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Youtube has been a godsend as far as auto repairs. In many cases (most cases?) there is a trick to doing something or maybe you need a special tool. Even if I know how to do something, I find myself watching the Youtube video first, just in case. It has been good.

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“The Car Guys on NPR.”

Click and Clack ?? Repeats of their show can still be streamed on NPR podcasts. They cracked me up many a time, infectious laughter, and smart as a whip when it came to cars, stream an episode or two every so often, it’s been so long that I have no memory of having heard any of them, so far anyways. And they did inspire me to take on some repairs.

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This is what Uncle Tony recommends.
He believes this is a trend many will adopt. This certain old model will appreciate in value.
I won’t count on that though. An older vehicle 2000 or older likely has zero depreciation left. Might require a few bucks to make it servicable but then one has a reliable mode of transport.

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Oh do I remember those days, and happily. I had a very non-intimate “gay” (opposite of pejorative use as he was a genius about it) friend who owned (from the “reserve tank & hand valve” that preceded gas-gauge years) an old VW Bug that needed TLC. I would gap the lift rods, test and clean plugs, and all that other magical mysterious stuff now being lost to the earth. It was much more fun and lucrative than replacing electronic stuff….

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I have no memory of them being anything but competent car repair guys. The garage held about 10 cars, and it was a “VW” session, so my girlfriend and I both went and learned how to replace the brakes, work on the engine, etc. Lasted maybe 6 weeks, one night a week, if I remember, which I probably don’t. I was in Cambridge between ‘72 & ‘76. They started the show locally on the BU station, WBUR in ‘77.

But as I say, there was no hint that either of them would become a thing. Just “car guys”, not “Car Guys”.

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I had a copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide in my V-dub ‘trunk.’ A car so simple, even I could work on it. Though driving it sometimes felt like being in an egg shell with a tank of gasoline in front.

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Old days, I mean really old days, the late '50 on to the '90s I tried doing most of the work myself, various cars, trucks, but as tech grew, some things were just too much, time was more important, I had a great mechanic, independent fellow, always going to classes, and he got a kick sharing, and knew I was on top of the basics… I’d worked in a small gas station as a teen, hung out there, helping there as well as friends build hot rods, bikes (motorcycles), over the years, the old '41 Ford flathead was a pain, but I ground the valves, kept going quite a while.. “7- Maverick, 200” six was great, other than fouling pugs, so new seals, cured it, but a '76 Mustang ate my lunch, rebuilt the trans, but missed a snap ring, hidden under the cardboard box flap, out of time dealer fixed it.. So simpler plugs, oil changes, batteries were OK, but today, a new RAV4 Hybrid, I opened th hood once since we bought it in '23, couldn’t even find the nine, and everything is computerized, from the 360° cameras, to lidar, radar, etc.. No way I’m touching it… My mechanic retired, new guy just isn’t as savvy, so my F150 has a BRAKE lite on the dash he wasn’t able to fix. Web searches led me to it being a cold solder joint, but I’m too lazy lately to bother fixing it… Only put ~470 miles on that F150 in the last year! It can wait… I have all the Shop manuals for the '06 F150, used the OBD2 port to chase misfires, but with low miles driven, the battery being charged is the most important, so I keep a LiIon Jump starter handy…

Anyway, now, new vehicles are not for the DIY guys, and I’m not going back to points, condensers, and such, no more carburetors, either… We’ll see how the dealer works out, but I may be shopping for a new, savvy independent mechanic, once I’m out of warranty…

Then there’s that '76 XT500 in the workshop, needs tires, fork bushings, seals, clean up the carb… But I gave up my M/C endorsement, so, no rush there, either…

Onward…

weco

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