When the engine in my neighbors Nissan Altima started to smoke she hoped to avoid the repair shop by letting her husband fix it at home. Find the problem, get the parts, buy a repair manual and fix it myself. Doing engine repairs in my spare time. Sounds simple, eh?
But her husband struggled to remove the bulk of covers and trim surrounding the engine, breaking half of the parts removed,. and when he used a screwdriver to pry the plastic valve cover off, it shattered. What came next was even worse. The Nissan dealer wanted $200 to order a new one.
Mechanics say they’ve seen it all in recent months, including incorrectly installed brake pads and antifreeze poured into engines, engine oil in the transmission and so forth.
A lot of people, they’re in dire straits, as far as I’m concerned. Trying to do this stuff at home in their driveway.
The results can be frustrating, expensive and sometimes outright dangerous in several ways.
An old customer of mine took her Chevy Trailblazer SUV to a back yard car-expert, the neighbor charged $500 to replace her front and back brakes, rotors and calipers, less than the going rates at nearby repair shops.
Later, on a highway ramp, her brakes developed an odd feeling, she pulled to the side of the road. The problem? Her neighbor forgot to tighten a certain part that bolts to the wheels, setting off a chain reaction that caused the tires to react poorly.
The car had to be towed at about $100.00, and she ended up paying an additional $400 to have it fixed at my shop.
While well-intentioned, many people forget that today’s cars are vastly more complicated than models made just years ago. Most are so computer-controlled that owners can’t spot problems without access to specific scan tools and data programs that cost thousands of bucks.
Even jobs that were once simple, such as changing the oil, can take hours to complete now.
Home mechanics are not able to do nearly the work that they used to do , in many cases it’s even going beyond the heads of a lot of technicians who aren’t keeping up-to-date.
Even so, some car owners remain unflappable. I was using Google and studying queries for the terms “rebuilt engines” and “engines for sale”, up from roughly 77 percent and 99 percent respectively in just the past month, according to my data.
Other car repair search terms-replacement engines, reconditioned engines and remanufactured engines remain at three-year highs.
The urge to cut out the middleman extends to even the wealthy, Most feel the need to be frugal and save money.
But that doesn’t mean repairs come easily. My buddy tried to change the oil on his BMW sedan and wound up covered in dirty oil, saying I felt like it was an episode of “The Three Stooges” He also failed miserably at replacing spark plugs on his BMW.
Auto shops say there’s an easy way to save money: Just be upfront about the repairs you’ve tried at home. Most do-it-your selfers, play coy when mechanics start asking questions about what went wrong with the car.
Rather than saving themselves time and money by telling us the whole story, they’ll just say, ‘This doesn’t seem to be working,'” he said, “without going into the details of what they’ve already done to destroy the whole mechanism.”
To piece together what went wrong, mechanics typically have to start asking questions, and lots of them.
“It’s like, ‘What’s the real story?'” … “You play the 100 question game before the full truth comes out.”
People who try the at-home tinkering are usually out of work or low on cash.
Many of them are men who work as contractors or handymen in another trade and think, no problem, if the slob down thw street can do it, let me apply my skills to car repair.
It’s those people who have that mindset, “Hey I can fix this, I can fix that.”
My neighbor with the smoking engine learned her lesson. Her husband won’t be laying his hands on the car anytime soon. And we will be going to a comptent mechanic next time I think I need an engine repair, and, he’s not going to do any more car repairs.
