What are some car-repair jobs you always wished you could do but have never done?

On 11/4/2017 12:24 PM, rickman wrote:
> RS Wood wrote on 11/4/2017 9:00 AM:

>> But I've never replaced an engine mostly because I never drove an engine
>> into the ground that needed to be replaced. I envy people who have
>> done it
>> because it must feel great to put a new engine in yourself.
>
> Same here.Â* Any car of mine that needed an engine wasn't worth putting
> an engine in.Â* Older cars were not made to last and that was true for
> every part of that car.Â* Even things like seats and headliners were shot
> by the time the engine was shot.Â* My current truck has 240,000 miles on
> it and the engine is one of a number of parts that shows nearly no sign
> of going anytime soon.Â* The parts that have been repaired often were not
> repaired right so some have needed repairing more than once, but
> otherwise the truck is very sound.
>

Evidently you never owned a Buick or Olds with the 3.8 engine from the
early 80's. I know of many being rebuilt/replaced. I had the engine
replaced on my '83 Cutlass and drove it until the next one died. The
car had 130,00+ miles. Not sure how many as the odometer stopped
working. I was determined to drive it until it does. Left work one
day, started the car, drove 3 feet and it died. Took the company pickup
home and stopped at a car dealer on the way and bought another car.

On 11/04/2017 06:00 AM, RS Wood wrote:
> rickman wrote:
>
>> None, I've done a bunch of work on cars in my day, but I'm fed up with it
>> now. I wish I could find someone who has half a brain who would do a decent
>> job fixing my truck. It's old and has issues, but the repair people I seem
>> to find these days fix one thing and break something else.
>
> My observation with repair people is that it's hard to find one who cares
> to do what he was trained to do.
>
> Recently a bolt was missing from a repair job and when I came back to ask
> why, the guy told me it didn't do anything.
>
> I reflected that the car still works fine without the bolt, but there is no
> way they put that bolt there in the first place if it didn't do anything.
>
> He didn't believe me.

Sounds like the Ford dealership jerk who replaced the starter on the 69
LTD. One loose bolt, one dropped on top of the starter and one
completely missing. He was partially right, it ran for a couple of
years afterward.

--
Cheers, Bev
I'd rather trust the guys in the lab coats who aren't demanding
that I get up early on Sundays to apologize for being human.
-- Captain Splendid

rbowman wrote:

>> I am pretty sure my biggest hurdle is that alignment takes KNOWLEDGE where
>> you have to convert degrees and inches using trig and measure a lot of
>> things to an imaginary centerpoint and to each other.
>
> After replacing the joints I aligned my pickup with a tape measure and
> plumb bob. I was not at all confident so i took it to a tire shop. It
> was within spec and didn't need any tweaking.

Each has a hurdle that has to be overcome, both in measuring and in
adjusting.

For example, adjusting toe is easy (just spin the tierod ends), but the
wheels have to slip under load, which isn't so easy.

Measuring TOTAL toe would be easy if you can clear the undercarriage, but
that's not really how the manufacturer usually specs it.

Measuring individual toe (to an imaginary centerline) isn't all that easy,
is it? How do you do it?

Then there is the problem of specs. The toe spec is often in degrees
whereas we measure in inches, so you have to think in order to convert.

Likewise, camber is easy to measure with a plumb bob, but you have to clear
the sidewall of the tire and then calculate from the centerline of the
tire, so, you have to take precise measurements and then calculate an angle
from those measurements after first clearing the sidewall somehow.

Caster is the hardest to measure directly, and I don't think we can measure
caster directly in a home setup. Can we?

So caster will take thinking, which, after all, I think is the hardest part
of an alignment. All the other jobs anyone can do - but alignment takes
thinking because of the kinds of issues above, most important being that
the spec is never (Murphy's Law) in the form of what you can measure
directly.

wrote:

>>Spray cans for a roof? Interesting. If it works, it works! (that's my motto
>>when my wife asks me "Is that the way it's _supposed_ to be done?".

> The cans with the blue head and the wire you can see in the gap seem
> to have the best fan pattern.

This is good to know! I've seen this type. Never understood them.
Then again, _every_ can of paint I have ever used is really only a
single-use item (just like many instant glues seem to be) because of the
clogging up (and yes, I clean them out upside down).

> The trick with painting with cans is not to hold the button down all
> the time and keep the can moving. Start your sweep push the button,
> stop painting before you stop moving. It is pretty much the same with
> a gun. Then remember you are layering the paint on, you are not trying
> to cover it completely in one coat.

I envy you that you've done it.

How many spray cans would an entire car take?

rbowman wrote:

>> I don't know anyone who does their own tires but when I watch the guys, I
>> wish I had that equipment, especially the air equipment, to just remove it
>> and put it back and spin it in between.
>
>
> I do the tires on the bike with tube type tires. I would do the tubeless
> but I worry about not having enough air to get the bead to seat. I
> brought the bike to an indy shop for a new set and everything was going
> good until the front tire. Even with a high flow air systems and the
> tools he had a hell of a time. The sun was sinking in the west before
> the bead finally caught and he could inflate it.
>
> I've had problems getting the bead to seat correctly with tube tires but
> with those you can deflate, beat on it, curse, inflate, rinse and repeat
> until it goes.

I'm glad to hear nobody scream that we're all gonna die if we do any work
at home!

The reason people don't do these jobs isn't that we're all gonna die from
nuclear radiation if we do our own stuff.

I don't know anyone who does their own car tires but many motorcyclists do
their own bike tires and everyone does their own wheelbarrow and bicycle
tires.

Tires don't have the same problem as alignment because, other than safety,
you don't have to think all that much to do tires correctly.

Assuming you have a decently flowing air compressor I don't think seating
the bead is the issue usually although we've all had all sorts of times
when we just couldn't get something to seat, so I'm sure it happens. But
they're designed to seat with air so if we have air, we should be able to
seat the bead.

I think the far greater issue with doing tires at home is that you need
special tools that greatly extend your muscle power and worse - you will
never have the tools to do the dynamic balance.

So I don't see how you can ever do car tires right at home because you
can't finish the job right. For some reason, motorcycle tires work just
fine without dynamic balancing.

That's an enigma to me.

Why would bicycle and motorcycle tires work just fine without dynamic
balancing while car tires require dynamic balancing to work right?

wrote:

> I did the bent on my wife's accord and I did the belt on her Pontiac
> Sunbird twice and noticed the second time that the lower pulley was
> defective. I drew the line on my Prelude when I saw the first step was
> "remove engine" It turns out you really just loosen the motor mount
> and tilt it up. (what the dealer did). On the other 2 you just remove
> the tire and take out the panel in the wheel well. It is a straight
> shot then. On the prelude the strut support, part of the unibody, is
> in the way.

Well, if replacing a timing belt is that easy, then maybe it's not so much
a crime that they put a 60k-mile part inside an interference engine.

wrote:

> A couple sheets of tin with grease between works in a pinch for slip
> plates -

I always wondered about how to support the car on its weight and still get
the wheels to slip. I've seen the greased tin and the linoleum tiles, and
even the newspaper trick - but I always wondered how well they work.

The other problem is measuring to the imaginary centerline.

> and for camber a simple square and calculator works just
> fine.

Camber is pretty easy to measure if you have some way of keeping the tire
out of the picture.

Usually that means bolting something to the wheel that allows the digital
level to stick out away from the bulging tire.

So I think the hardest part of camber is the setup has to be bolted to the
wheel (although I've seen ways to do camber with just a plumb bob and a
ruler).

> Toe in with a few sticks and a tape measure - or a simple laser
> level (bubble level with a laser built into the one end - used to
> "extend" the wheel angle instead of using sticks) works pretty good.

I think toe is easy to measure but hard to change.

For measuring, you just have to get around the fact that the engine and
suspension gets in the way of a straight-line calculation (as you did with
the laser suggestion above).

Yet you still have to have to reduce the friction when you turn the tierod
ends with the weight of the car (as you discussed above with the greased
plates).

> Calculating caster is a bit more difficult without the proper tools,
> but a mathematical genius (that's not me) could figure it out with the
> same square, ruler, and calculator.

Here is, I think, the REAL reasons most of us don't do alignment at home.
The actual twisting of the bolts is pretty easy.
Even the toe plate and camber plates are easy if we purchase them.
So are the tape measures and digital levels.

I think the HARD part of alignment is that there is ALWAYS a need to
convert from inches to degrees and from imaginary centerline to actual
centerline, and from trigonometry if we don't measure the actual item we
have the spec for so we have to calculate to derive the value.

To summarize, the hardest part of the alignment, I think, is that you have
to THINK, whereas almost every other job we discussed, you don't have to
think all that much (other than about basic safety, for example, when
compressing springs).

Alignment is a THINKING man's game.

> The laser level will do the tracking just fine, and a digital
> protactor or electronic level would make things easier.

I don't have a laser anything but I won't disagree with you that extending
a measurement to the wall 50 feet away can be useful to measure small
degrees.

For example, toe could be specified as 1/2 degree, which is easy to measure
if you extend a line from the wheel to the wall 50 feet away but which is
really hard to measure six inches from the centerline of the wheel itself.

My point is that the TOOLS to MEASURE alignment are more and more in our
grasp at a reasonable price. Even the toe plates and camber bolting to the
wheel are within our prices.

The hurdle to alignment, I think, is that it's a THINKING man's game, more
so than any other job we're talking about. I don't have the skills myself.

Or so I think.

> The most important thing - from having done alignments
> professionally, using sophisticated equipment, is MNOWING what the
> effects of different adjustments are - just because a car is "within
> spec" doesn't mean it will go straight down the road and won't wear
> tires. Tayloring the caster and camber leads is part science, and
> part witchcraft.

I agree with you that alignment is a THINKING man's game, quite unlike all
the other things we talked about.

Sure it takes thinking to diagnose a slipping clutch or to diagnose an
emissions problem or to diagnose an electrical system anomaly but it
doesn't usually take a whole lot of thinking to just replace the parts once
you've figured out which ones broke (and most people just throw parts at
any job anyway which is how a lot of things get fixed).

With alignment, you have to THINK, especially if, as you noted, you're
aiming to get a performance value out of changing a value such as rear
camber for cornering or trying to increase the oversteer for handling.

In summary, I see HUGE HURDLES to alignment at home, but those hurdles have
very little to do with measuring or changing the values.

Here are the first half of my hurdles to doing a home alignment.
1. I need a toe-measuring tool that clears or avoids the undercarriage
2. I need toe plates that allow for slip of the tire under load
3. I need a camber setup on the wheel that clears or avoids the sidewall

Here are the second half.
4. I need the specs in a form that I can measure or calculate
5. I need to figure out the imaginary centerline
6. I need KNOWLEDGE because #4 will always be in something I can't measure
directly (Murphy's law of alignment specs) so I will have to calculate the
answer.

wrote:

> The 69 Dart wasn't quite as radical but would do 104 all day long
> (225 slant six)

Ah yes. You reminded me. I also replaced a Holley 4-barrel carburetor!

It was fun to watch how the accelerator pump worked squirting inside, how
the throttle plate worked way down below, and how the choke plate on top
worked!

Is there a car sold today that uses a carb?
Probably not.

So that's a skill set along with dwell that we all have, but which isn't
all that useful anymore.

The kids that are 30 and 40 years old today probably don't even know what a
"condensor" is........

wrote:

> A GOOD tech cares as much as you do - mabee more - because a poor job
> reflects badly on him and can cost him BIG TIME if he gets a bed
> reputation.

I can't disagree that a good PERSON cares as much or more than you do.
But you have to agree that there are people who care more about getting
vehicles through the door than doing the job right.

If they can skip a step or save a minute, they will, but that doesn't mean
that they did a better job. It just means they did a faster job.

At home, you're never trying to do the job fast.

> I cared more about most of my customers' vehicles than they did for
> the 25+ years I was actively in the trade.

This may be true since you saw lots of abuse I'll bet.

I'll bet the people NOT on this newsgroup don't even think about their
engines all that much.

If they took a car to the shop for a cooling system overhaul, I'll bet
they're not going to look to see if all the bolts that came out went back
in, for example.

> And "redline" isn't necessarily the best or any better for your
> application/ use than what they put in.

Fair enough.
Some things matter. Some don't.

I know that with some things though, the "standard" application isn't as
good as the "better" application, but for gear lubes, it probably only
needs to be GL-4 80W90 and that's it (or whatever the car maker specified).

So, a $5/quart GL-4 80W90 is as good as a $20/quart GL-4 80W90 gear oil.

I don't know clutches but there must be "standard" and "better" clutches,
aren't there? How do you know what the shop puts in by default?

> Or they might. You just need the right shop, and the right
> technician.

That's understood where a guy who tells me that the bolt isn't necessary
isn't necessarily the right technician, is he?

rickman wrote:

> Same here. Any car of mine that needed an engine wasn't worth putting an
> engine in. Older cars were not made to last and that was true for every
> part of that car. Even things like seats and headliners were shot by the
> time the engine was shot. My current truck has 240,000 miles on it and the
> engine is one of a number of parts that shows nearly no sign of going
> anytime soon. The parts that have been repaired often were not repaired
> right so some have needed repairing more than once, but otherwise the truck
> is very sound.

You make a good point which I don't know the answer to.

In my kid days, plastic toys did not exist (transistor radios didn't exist
either), so our Tonka toys were rubber wheels and steel bodies.

Nowadays, if you leave a kid's toy car outside, the sun alone will destroy
it within a year or two.

So they certainly don't build *some stuff* the way they used to.

However ... cars *seem* to be different. Are they?

My Chrysler's and Dodges days (in the olden days, we had brand loyalties
that sprang from the brand loyalties of our fathers) showed me that a
tuneup was needed every year, bias-ply tires lasted something like 20K
miles, and, as you said, the interior was shot by the time the engine went.

And that was in the days before plastic bumpers and plastic headlights
(they were real glass bulbs in those days).

But yet, it seems to me, cars last forever now.
In those days, 100K miles was a lot.
Now, it seems, 200K miles is approaching a lot.

Do they really make cars better but nothing else is better?
How can that be?