What are some repairs you are absolutely willing to pay a mechanic to do them for you? For me it's wheel bearings
Replacement wipers, blown bulbs etc
>>28655264Motorcycle tyre changes. Bought the tyre irons to do it myself, even with rags it was going to scrape the shit out of the rim.
>>28655264tyre changes, engine rebuilds, mostly because it's a 'been there, done that' affair
For me it's anything that involves fluids. It might not be a hard thing to do but I hate dealing with it. Also anything involving wires. I don't have the patience for it. And of course anything that requires big expensive specialist equipment like mounting and balancing tires. Also anything where if you do it wrong then it destroys the car like anything involving the engine or transmission. And anything that involves removing body panels or interior trim pieces because I never figured out how to get those plastic things off without breaking them. But pretty much anything else I'll do myself.
I’m considering finding someone to do my transmission fluid/filter but only because my car requires the subframe to be dropped and it sounds like a pain in the ass with only jacks.
>>28655417>But pretty much anything else I'll do myself.So, nothing?
>>28655440He struggles to bring the groceries inside in one trip and rides that high of feeling like a man for a week
>>28655440Hey now, he could still give his gas cap a twist when he gets an evap code
>>28655440
>>28655264Clutch replacement. Any issues that need the gear box dropped (or the subframe dropped).
>>28655264>be me>engine swapped car that never came from the factory with a manual>Take it to shop to get the clutch done>mechanic quits>Thanks to the mining industry taking all the good workers and unlimited 3rd world immigration the labor marked is so fucked the the only mechanics they can get are dodgy 3rd world immigrants.So my car has been at the shop for what? 1.5 years now? It's a tough situation. I don't want some 3rd world retard to take on this aftermarket frankenstein clutch job and doing it myself would be a huge pain in the ass. The car is being stored indoors and I don't have under cover space for it at my place so I've just let this situation continue.
>>28655264Oil change
>>28655264I only trust the dealership to do a transmission drain and fill. I don’t trust Latinx chopshoppers to not fuck it up.
>>28655264Brake lines.
>>28655264Windshields
>>28655264Alignment, you are a nu-male
>>28655285>engine rebuilds, mostly because it's a 'been there, done that' affairLol bro you've never seen the inside of an engine just shut the fuck up you larping fruitcake
I'm at a point I don't trust anyone to work on my cars. Good mechanics exist but I seemingly cannot find them, so for that reason it's just me, a cold beer and an afternoon of fixing shit in ADVANCE so it won't go kaboom when I need to get somewhere. I guess it's my autism at play, but I find it enjoyable and essentially a free way to spend my time... and my vehicle always works.
>>28655604I found working on cars enjoyable when I was in that social circle but the idea of working on them alone doesn't appeal to me at all anymore
>>28655264Head gasket, transmission rebuild, A/C compressor or line replacements. I've done motor mounts but I've paid to have some changed as they're annoying on certain cars.I can't imagine paying anyone else to do any fluid changes, I'm autistic enough about brands and measuring amounts to not trust anyone else. Watching ugly fluid drain and clean fluid go back in is also incredibly satisfying.
>>28655601>why yes I only set my toe to dead zero how could you tell?
>>28655604You basically have to do everything yourself at this point, from house work to fixing your car, unless whoever you're hiring has a reputation for not cutting corners and they charge a lot to reflect that effort.
>>286556731/16 to 1/8" toe-in you noob.
I have a great local shop that specializes in my car's make and they do everything because I'd rather spend my free time on my hobbies. The only thing I do myself is swap summer and winter tires.
>>28655680This. I make 2500/day at work. Why would I want to spend free time wrenching?
>>28655264Walnut blasting. Yeah, I'm not dropping $1600 on equipment I only need to use every 50k miles.
>>28655707no you don't
>>28655417Is the joke that you can't wrench and won't do anything?
>>28655735He changes his own wiper blades...
>>28655724Cope
>>28655741how is this proof of literally anything bro lolanybody can make this in excel or MS PAINT for that matter.
>>28655741So you’re saying you work 11 hours a day?
>>28655741just say you're a poorfag next time
>>28655707If true then please tell me what you do for work!
>Paint>Welding/Rust Repair>Windshields>Tuning, especially if the car is fast (dyno better + less likely to have problems)I guess transmission jobs are a easy one too. I hate pulling a transmission. I'm tempted to sub out the steering rack on my Subaru too if its under $500.
>>28655741Are you literally a traveling nurse anesthetist?
>>28655741why is the hourly a different font size?
>>28655264>wheel bearingslmao we got a subaru owner here. For me it's tire changes and alignments. Changing tires is already hard enough like >>28655275 mentioned: cars are even harder. Alignment is pretty tedious shitasss work and you still won't get close to what a shop can do.>weee time to jack up the car and crawl under it for the hundreth time to adjust toe of one wheel 1 mm and the cam bolt is starting to strip out.>>28655673There's not much wrong with dead zero. Toe in makes the car more stable driving straight while toe out makes it more responsive turning. Both increase tire wear. Zero toe is unironically a good compromise. I'd say a little toe out on the rear wheels probably okay as most cars tend to under steer with factory alignment.>>28655712If you get an oil catch can and do it even less than that, anon.
>>28655781>>28655741how do you have time to work when you have to line up at the food bank and welfare office just to survive?
>>28655556>Thanks to the mining industry taking all the good workershappens a lot
Literally anything that an expensive shop owned tool makes 10x easier.
Since I only have one car, everything. If I try it I'll have to make a million trips to autozone and home depot and it'll take 3 week for me to even muster the willpower just to get up and do it. Getting up and doing it was always the hardest part for me.
>>28655602yes i have. i no longer have the tools nor the motivation to do a complete tear down. i still do top end rebuilds though.
Anything suspension. Wheel bearing, anything involving removal of the axle nut.
>>28655264>Wheel bearingsAnon, old style bearings are ez.New ones are even easier to replace.
>>28656051by new, are you talking about the ones using sealed bearings? i feel like they'd be more involved because the last one i had needed a press to get them in and out
>>28656056New sealed bearings are usually 3 bolts.Doesn't get easier than that
>>28655707Because you like cars?
>>28656073interesting, never seen one of those. must be in american makes then. maybe even yuro, although knowing them they'd probably make it as painful as possible. Am used to 90s toyotas where snap ring pliers and a press are needed.
>>28655264Pulling a transmission or engine, I don't have room for a cherry picker and that's too involved for my small workspace.
>>28656096>I don't have room for a cherry pickerdo you work on industrial equipment or something? at least for cars you just need an engine crane and a stand, though they do take up a bit of room. but nowhere near as much as a full blown cherry picker
>>28655264everything. i'm not a grease monkey
>>28656094FWD cars have slightly harder wheel bearing changes but they're still not hard.
>>28656109right, so that's taking off the hub, but what about the actual bearings races and rollers? can they just be grabbed right out like on older cars?
>>28656134Modern wheel bearings are all sealed. You don't have to pack or set any lash.
>>28655841>oil catch canThat's the plan, but they don't make one for my model. Thinking of adapting one made for a similar model and doing a little fabrication.
for cars i cant rebuild auto transmissions, but at the same time ive never tried to.so the next time i shit one ill give it a go. I also cant do details well so when assembling an interior ill mostly just give up and leave it half baked. Also i hate doing things twice so if ive rebuilt my front suspension and something subsequently breaks ill get mad and not work on it so i make sure to do everything once and correctly. For motorcycles if it has starting issues im usually at a loss, for some reason making a motorbike run is harder than making a car run, maybe its something to do with bikes being fiddlier, but once its running ill happily work on anything it has going on for it.i cant mount car tyres since i dont want to buy a niche one purpose machine for the job and i can de mount motorbike tyres with irons but fuck putting them back on.
>>28656073>New sealed bearings are usually 3 bolts.Clearly you've never dealt with ones corroded in place. And that assumes the bolts weren't seized in place either.FWD/AWD you also get to deal with the axle stub going through the bearing. First, is the big-ass nut that most people don't have a socket for and has to be ordered because no one stocks a fucking thing anymore. Second, there's a non-zero chance the splines of the axle and hub have worn and meshed so you're never getting them apart.Then some designs are that the bearing is pressed into the knuckle which means you have to remove the knuckle from the car, press the bearing out of the knuckle and then press the flange out of the bearing and reverse the process to assemble. tl;dr wheel bearings can and will be a shitshow
>>28656139right, but you still need to press them in and out with a press right? You kinda got my hopes up that new bearings are just held in with some bolts and that's it lol
>>28656168No those wheel bearings just installed with three bolts. There's no press involved no lashing no greasing.>>28656167This nigga is afraid of a CV axle nut
>>28656189>ignores the rest of the post in order to try and look smartHow so very brown of you
>>28656189wait what. so that entire hub unit is just replaced with the bearings built into them? I mean that does sound incredibly easy but...I dunno how I feel about tossing an otherwise good hub just because the bearings in it are trashed
>>28656207That depends entirely upon what vehicle you're dealing with. Could be as easy as he's saying. Could be much more difficult like the other guy is saying.
>>28655437Why did you buy that piece of shit? Must be a ford or kraut car right?
>>28655264changing tiresthats literally itI dont even bring the car to the shop, I bring the wheels seperateI dont even get legitimate inspections, I just pay some tech to rip stickers out of the book for me
Tire change/balance, anything Hvac besides a freon refill, transmission rebuilds, deep wiring harness shit. I really hate finding electrical issues the industry should work to simply electrical shit since everything is interconnected now and among the most common issues. With all the huge 10"+ infotainment screens in every car with quad core CPUs why do I need to plug in a OBD2 scanner and get a code that I have to google that puts out a vauge issue.
>>28656204I'm the epitome of a white dude.Born and raised on a Dutch dairy farm.Drank unpasteurized milk for my early life.Every male in my family is over 6ft3in tall.I still drink 2 gallons of whole milk a week.You cannot stop me.>>28656207Those sealed wheel bearings are like $200 bucks. When they wear out, you just chuck them and get a new one.They usually last 200,0000+ miles as well Swapping wheel bearings and newer cars is stupidly easy.
>>28655264I have shops deal with charging the AC system, mounting and balancing tires, and alignments(with my provided target specs). I do everything else
>>28655417>And anything that involves removing body panels or interior trim pieces because I never figured out how to get those plastic things off without breaking them.what i do is look up pictures of where the tabs are in the trim pieces, then i start prying it off from there.i think those tabs break when you apply force elsewhere.
>>28655264Ball joints. The fuckers are always rustwelded in there and the bigger the truck the more they suck. Had ball joint press spacers explode on me. If I need to do it I'll take the whole control arm off so I can swing a 5lb sledge at it, and that still takes a bloody half hour and then you're in there with a debur wheel making sure the new one will fit
>>28656219Yes, it’s a kraut car (RS5)They don’t make anything easy to get to
>>28655264Probably anything transmission related in my SUV. It's over 180lbs and it's a real cunt of a job taking it out on the ground. Being a 4x4 makes it a lot worse.
>Unmodded, no stickers manual Subaru, clean interior>Took it in for tire replacement>The wheel shop on the mil base>Come home>1 of the studs on the FL wheel was completely stripped with no nut>3 of the nuts on the FR wheel can be turned with 1 fingerGoddamnit guys. It's not difficult to replace a stud, but wtf.
>>28655264nothing short of having to take my shit to the machine shop for boring cylinders.
>>28656237>Tire change/balanceunless you have low profile tires it's not hard to fight them on with tire spoons, if it's atleast got 3" or more sidewall it's not hard to do.balancing is kindof a meme if you have good tires on wheels that aren't bent or damaged.I only recently had to have my shit done by a shop because it was like 235/45 18s.usually you can tell how much of a bitch it will be to mount by putting your knee on the sidewall and feeling how hard it is to deflect.smearing soap along the bead usually helps alot.I would run these bitches over 120mph very regularly and never really felt an extreme vibration out of them.
>>28655264Transmission/Fluid and taking apart the engine. I can reasonably do anything else, but I don't want to fuck up my transmission or engine by thinking I know more than I do.
All of them, you are coping poorfags
>>28655264Some nig cut off my ECU plug to steal my ECU (fucking Miami man), and I rewired the whole thing into a replacement terminal. After measuring voltages and resistance and whatever for dozens of hours, I never want to touch electrical shit again. Also fuck Honda for using the same color wires for different things
>>28655264I replace the wiper fluid myself. anything else goes to the wagie
>>28655675In my experience the good mechanics and contractors don't generally even charge the most. They're mostly slightly to the right of the mean. The main trustworthy indicator is that they're backed up with work because they have standards that mean they can't raise their capacity easily by hiring shitters.
>>28655264The only thing I don't do is mount and balance tires because I haven't bought the tools for it yet.
>>28656073and a hydraulic press
If you live in the US you should be doing your own AC work. It's like $200 for a set of gauges and a vacuum pump and pure R134a is easily attainable. Shops seem to put fucking brutal markups on AC parts and repairs.
I own 3 vintage fast European sports cars, I would go bankrupt if I had to take them anywhere to fix but my own garage, I like working on them when I have the time at leastIts an abstract feel, you wouldn't get it
>>28655264>willingWilling to try anything once, I've been forced to be a wrenchlet for years, only recently getting the chance to do an oil change for the first time. Having the ability to fix things is nice, even if the upfront costs make me cringe.>things I will make a mechanic doAnything requiring multiple days of my only car being disassembled/nonfunctional, anything requiring expensive specialty tools that I will only use once. Anything requiring an actual garage.
>>28658096Specifically tools are often worth it even if you only use it once.
>>28655602if you'd ever done an engine rebuild or touched a wrench in your life you'd know it's typically the kind of thing you only want to do once so you can say you did it. after that just pay someone else to have the headache
>>28655741lmfao nigga didn't even try to make the numbers look correct lmfao
>>28656642>unless you have low profile tires it's not hard to fight them on with tire spoons>balancing is kindof a meme if you have good tiresreminder that these are the people you're on the road with.I'll just pay $10/tire to not have to do this and have better results.
>>28658629I meant specialty tools more like machinery, or stuff I can't store in a house and then move outside due to aforementioned no garage. I'm thinking of like a sandblaster or a tire balancer, real particular stuff.
>>28658666you'll pay 10 dollars extra to sling a lead weight off in traffic, stupid ass sheep.
I paid someone to do my motor mount since I'm afraid of getting under my engine with nothing but a floor jack holding it up
>>28659071Sure thing, Mr. Free Thinker
>>28658658x2 this I did a lot of stuff when I was younger and I bought a new truck so I can focus on work and not being up a 2am with a must do repair. Not fun anymore and I don't beat on my trucks like I used to either.
>>28656105>do you work on industrial equipment or something? at least for cars you just need an engine crane and a stand, though they do take up a bit of room. but nowhere near as much as a full blown cherry pickerNot that Anon, but curious as to what you are calling a cherry picker? Most people call those engine hoists like Harbor Freight sells a cherry picker.
>>28659555must be an australian thing. pic related are cherry pickers
>>28655264everything, i value my time
>>28655264I drive roughly 6000 miles a year so I get an interim service with my MOT because it's cheap and does all the essentials which means oil flush because I'm not jacking my car up. I change filters, bulbs, fluids myself. I don't know anything about cars but you save so much money for example buying a filter off amzon for 7 while they try and charge you 50+
>>28655417>>28656293honestly I'm thinking I need to just spend the $20 on a set of trim removal tools instead of using a flathead screwdriver