Another good point. I grew up trying to keep whatever wreck I had that month running. There was a point that I was spending more transferring the plates from one to another than I was in parts.
As a good example, I had a girlfriend who had an '85 Audi 5000 when I met her. It had been a good number of years since I'd had anything so simple to work on. Straight five cylinder, sittin' right up pretty as can be under the hood, and plenty of room to work on things.
256,000 miles later, she traded (up???) to a '97 A4. I raised the hood on it and found everything completely enshrouded, and the few things I could get to were yellow, like a dipstick and the caps to add oil and windshield washer.
Typically over-engineered. I recall a problem that showed up on a 95* day down around Richmond, VA. Idiot light for engine temp came on. I looked at the gauge and it showed MAYBE a little warmer than usual, but nothing extraordinary and nowhere near the red line. If the needle had been high, I'd have done all the stuff like roll down the windows and turn the heater on full blast, take any other loads I could off the motor, and gotten somewhere to check out coolant level and the like. But the engineers at Audi programmed the car to do it automatically. Idiot light comes on, it automatically disables the clutch on the A/C compressor . . .
I get back to NY (this would be NYC, where about the only thing most Audi owners know about their cars, apart from the doodads they can reach from the driver's seat is where to find the gas cap)and take it down to the dealer. The new service writer (not my usual guy, who is there but dealing with other folks--luck of the draw for me) is mystified (Idiot light is on but needle reads okay) Just from my experience, I was thinking there must be two different sending units, one for each, and asked where they're located. I also asked if this new whiz-bang engine was like the old five-cyl, and had the thermostat located near the water pump, which is behind the timing cover and requires pulling the motor to change, and whether one of the sending units might be in that area. Poor kid (he's a service writer, remember) took on the look of a a deer in the headlights and, at my insistence, called a mechanic down to talk it over with us.
Sho 'nuff. Connection for the gauge is up on the top of the engine on the radiator side. Sending unit for the idiot light is on the hot side of the thermostat. Bad thermostat. $600 labor to pull the motor and timing cover and water pump to change a $48 (their price) thermostat.
$650 is bad enough just to change a thermostat. The real aggravation is that after I isolated the problem for him, the little snot of a service writer must have spent the rest of the morning doing his research and had the brass to call me later in the day to suggest that there'd never be a better time to change the water pump than right now, for an additional $400 and some. I allowed as how I would base my decision on the input from his tech. If the tech thought the pump was showing signs of excessive wear or failure, then yes. Otherwise, clap it back in. It went back in and is still running.
Circling back to the original lament that started the thread, it's a general decline that leads me to atttribute it to general changes in society. Kids don't learn mechanicin' under a shade tree the way they used to, but the folks with five ASE (or whatever those initials are) certificates adorning the walls behind the service counter seem to be being trained to change parts, not to fix things. The tech that took care of that whole thermostat thing is a dying breed. How that kid I dealt with ever got to be a service writer, I don't know. Well, yes I do. He's trained to take advantage of the ignorance of car owners about how things work to make extra money for his employers. And he does it with trainaing that amounts to little more than the script like waht is provided to those customer service people answering phones over in Asia.
If we don't take back some of this stuff, we're gonna be in a world of hurt before too much longer.
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Today's Featured Article - Choosin, Mounting and Using a Bush Hog Type Mower - by Francis Robinson. Looking around at my new neighbors, most of whom are city raised and have recently acquired their first mini-farms of five to fifteen acres and also from reading questions ask at various discussion sites on the web it is frighteningly apparent that a great many guys (and a few gals) are learning by trial and error and mostly error how to use a very dangerous piece of farm equipment. It is also very apparent that these folks are getting a lot of very poor and often very dangerous advice fro
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