I'm 38, and for the life of me I don't understand what this "we can't repair them" whining is all about.
Now my background is simple -- I enjoy learning new things, I'm getting to be pretty good turning a wrench, but I often don't know what I'm doing till I read the manual.
I was replacing the left front wheel bearing/hub assembly two weekends ago, and saw a thingy-ma-jig that looked like it needed to be replaced while I was there. Took me a half hour of looking through my Hayne's manual and on the internet to figure out the "thingy-ma-jig" was the outer tie rod end.
And you know what? I replaced that, too.
Truck's six years old. It's been in a shop twice for mechanical work -- once because of an internal failure that required dropping the transmission to fix (mostly covered by the extended warranty, but I had them do the clutch, etc while in there). The second time was last week for a $50 machine alignment because my nice Michelin tires are 90% new and I didn't want to risk ruining them after I replaced the tie rod ends by doing the front end alignment myself -- although it looks like with a tape measure and some time I would've been perfectly capable of doing that, too.
162,000 miles. Still on the original spark plugs and wires, still has the original serpentine belt. Those are on my list to get around to sometime. I've done full front and rear brake jobs. Did the front shocks while I was right there with the tools doing the hub bearing and tie rod work, just because they looked like they wouldn't make it through another winter. I've found and fixed vacuum leaks. Other then that it's all been just filters and oil changes (far too few) and lightbulbs.
Yeah, the older vehicles may have been easier to work on -- they had to be. I'm 62,000 miles over due on 100,000 mile lifetime sparkplugs. I remember talking to my papu when I got my '96 S-10, and he was recalling when he had the trucking company (he retired before I was born), and his mechanics used to be rebuilding engines every 15,000 miles.
The vehicles from the early 1990s onwards, in my experience, and leaps and bounds ahead of the vehicles from the 1970s and 1980s I had before them -- far more reliable, needing far less work done to them, with more comfort and much more safety, and longer maintenance intervals.
If I can get 162,000 miles out of a car today, having paid someone just twice to fix things, what is the problem? So things aren't what they used to be, stuff is tighter to work on and you might have to use metric sockets...BFD. Most of the work that needs to be done most of the time can still be done by a shade tree mechanic if they want to do the work instead of bellyache about how tough it is.
Sorry if for the ranting, but if *I* can work on these modern vehicles, anyone who can turn a wrench can.
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Today's Featured Article - Third Brush Generators - by Chris Pratt. While I love straightening sheet metal, cleaning, and painting old tractors, I use every excuse to avoid working on the on the electrics. I find the whole process sheer mystery. I have picked up and attempted to read every auto and farm electrics book with no improvement in the situation. They all seem to start with a chapter entitled "Theory of Electricity". After a few paragraphs I usually close the book and go back to banging out dents. A good friend and I were recently discussing our tractor electrical systems when he stated "I figure it all comes back to applying Ohms Law". At this point
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