The life of a car enthusiast is often one rife with its peaks and troughs. Cars can deliver some of your best days and some of your worst, especially if you goofed up because you didn’t know something important. Maybe you learned about how rear-engine cars handle the hard way, or that if you wreck a financed car, the insurance payout will likely be lower than what you owe. What car lesson took you way too long to learn?
Sometimes I am a stubborn person. If I feel that something is working, I’ll keep doing it until I have evidence otherwise. Unfortunately, in more than one instance, that required “evidence” was more than word of mouth, and required something stupid or bad to happen to me.
My best example of this has to be how I used to lift cars for servicing. Today, I use a sturdy floor jack to lift a vehicle, jack stands to secure it, wheel chocks to keep it from moving, and a spare wheel under the vehicle as a last resort. But this wasn’t always the case. When I was younger and dumber, I took far more chances than anyone ever should.
In my early days of car enthusiasm, if I needed to lift a car for any reason, I always used the vehicle’s factory emergency jack. Of course, in the days before cars shipped from the factory with a bottle of goop and some well wishes, you had actual spare tires and a tire change kit.
Every single time I wanted to swap wheels, work on brakes, or do some other kind of work that necessitated a wheel removal, I busted out the old scissor jack, pumped my car up, and got to work. For at least the first couple of years of my wrenching, that tiny black jack was the only thing holding the car up. Later, I learned to slide a wheel under the car for safety, but I still used the stupid scissor jack, anyway.
My good friends would tell me to stop doing it because, as they told me, scissor jacks are really only supposed to be used for emergencies. Even then, they’re liable to topple or buckle. My friends called them “widowmakers.” Sure, I had seen scissor jacks fail before, but I thought it was because the people using them didn’t know what they were doing. I made sure my cars were level and that the jack was properly locked in and perfectly vertical. I mean, just look at this image from an eBay listing for a generic scissor jack, especially the car on the bottom!
Then it happened. One day in 2020 or so, I was swapping wheels on a Volkswagen Passat when the car shifted, the jack buckled, and the car came down. Thankfully, all wheels were mounted, and my body wasn’t under the car, but that was enough to scare me from ever using one of those jacks ever again, even for their intended purpose. Now, the emergency jacks in my inventory just sit around doing nothing. If I have a tire emergency, the floor jack comes out.
My last bit of advice here is that if you are using a tire iron or factory wrench to change a flat tire and you just can’t get the nuts or bolts off, pump the jack up under the wrench to break the wheels loose, and then lift the vehicle. Don’t jump on the tire iron unless you feel like cutting your leg or otherwise hurting yourself, as happened to me once.
How about you? What important car lesson did it take you way too long to figure out? It doesn’t have to be wrenching related, but maybe a driving skill you learned or perhaps a car finance trick.
Scissor jacks are still an upgrade over the old time American bumper jacks of the 50s-70s. Both my cars have good tires and new batteries. Both my cars have a jump box and air compressor stashed away. If your car came without a spare, get one if there’s room at all to fit one. My wife just made a 100 mile trip to visit relatives. If she had a flat, calling AAA to change her tire is a lot better than calling for a tow to get dumped someplace unfamiliar.
I’m still not 100% on this, but I’m a lot more attentive to safe footwear in the garage since I ripped a toenail off some years ago while pulling an engine on a hoist up the apron into the garage, which also pulled it right into my boat shoe.
When you finally know what part needs to replace (neutral safety switch in my ’92 F350 as an example, or the brake booster) get a very good look and pictures of the part in place. Many cars have transition parts from one year to another. The ’92 F350 has ’91 neutral safety switch and brake booster, not a ’92. When I first ordered and received the neutral safety switch, it was wrong, of course.
Disconnect your battery before working on a car stereo. Almost 30 years ago when I had my Merkur XR4Ti I decided I wanted to take out the factory one in the car and put in something else. I remember I had to use two little sort of paper clip like implements to release some bit of the front before it would pull out. Of course, after beginning to fully remove the unit I must have let the back or side touch whatever metal was behind the dash. Cue instant electrical gremlins that I didn’t even realize were going on until one day soon after when a fellow motorist informed me that my brake lights weren’t working but instead both amber turn signals were coming on steady. Obviously that tiny zap I gave the car caused some kind of logic box in the car to flake out. However, being that I didn’t have a proper workshop manual or electrical diagram handy (and the Internet was in its infancy), I opted to hot wire the brakes by running a couple of wires from the mechanical pedal operated brake switch up an “A” pillar, under the headliner, and into the hatch where I could then route them to the brake lamps. Worked great, but the whole incident could have been avoided if I’d only disconnected the battery.
Could you have just swapped the wiring harnesses for the side & brake bulbs? Then you’d have a brand new problem to work out.
Can’t recall exact specifics, but I do think I had to cut the original wires going to the stop lamps so that just my bodged ones straight from the switch were the only source of power from then on. The indicators then worked normally too. It was a weird one for sure.
I have orange duct tape strips on my 1/2 in and 10mm wrenches.
The difference between a stressful drive and a relaxing one is 3mph.
If I am driving on a freeway, it is not for “sport” or entertainment, so I just chill.
If your battery is a few years old and you know it is on its way out, replace it before you get stranded. Even if you have roadside assistance, even if you have jumper cables, even if you have a manual transmission and park at the top of a hill, getting stuck with a dead battery sucks. It always seemed to happen on a 100 degree day or when it is pouring rain. If you have an electric parking brake you won’t be able to roll start a car with a manual because the brake won’t release.
Thanks for the nudge.
Had car’s oil/filter changed last week by a local shop and they let me know my battery amperage was running low. So, I added “new battery” to my To Do List.
Just called and set up a time to get a new one.
Cheers
Yes I now change my battery before I goes. Hard lessons esp. when it is -30F out.
I like to keep a battery-powered jump starter/air compressor in my kit, I just have to remember to check the charge every couple of months.
Lithium powered jump packs are one of the best accessories one can carry in their car. Not having to depend on someone to jump start a dead battery can be a life saver.
Having a jump pack and cables is great, I have used the jumper cables that I keep in my car many times over the years, but I think it’s better to use them to rescue other people who are stranded than need them yourself if you can help it.
That time usually comes right around 6 months after the battery’s warranty expiration. It’s actually kind of impressive just how well they’ve perfected their expected lifespans…
Sometimes it is cheaper to pay someone who knows what they are doing to do the job.
100%
Especially on a daily driver that you need to rely on to get to work or get your kids to/from school.
This is true for home maintenance also.
Also, stop signing in for autopian accounts, they never approve my comments anyway…
That is our fault, sorry! We have an automatic spam filter that is supposed to filter out the fake Nigerian princes and such, but it spends most of its time capturing real comments. I try to catch the filter in the act when I can. In your case, it was way too long before I noticed your last comment got caught by the filter.
I wish we had more control of the filter, because it’s as annoying to me as it is to you. But again, sorry!
Take pictures and label things. Even on a 10 minute job once you get past 2 or 3 steps screws start looking the same.
And take several photos before you start, so you know the configuration of everything.
For projects with a lot of parts removal I’ve started using a piece of scrap cardboard to hold the bolts (I cut a small hole and push the bolt in). You can also label them with the step # if you’re using a shop manual or timestamp if following a YT video.
Sometimes taking off more parts to get better access saves time compared to not taking those parts off. Along with that, keeping the car body corrosion under control to make that possible. Older me has thanked younger me a bunch for learning those lessons.
When you get frustrated or feel pressured to finish a project or maintenance item, just walk away. Take a break. Have a beer. Spend time with a loved one. Maybe even just sleep on it. You will get so much more done when you pick up where you left off with a fresh set of eyes and more patience in the tank. I still need to remind myself to heed this piece of advice now and then and that just because a project should be easy doesn’t mean it will be.
I needed this, I get project burnout all too often and I forget to remind myself it’s supposed to be enjoyable
Hey, thanks! Yeah, it’s easy to want so much for the results to be perfect that a person forgets, like you said, that this should be fun.
And it’s not enjoyable, don’t be afraid to bail. I did that on a repair a few years ago with zero regrets.
For me, it took too long to figure out that it’s worth buying the right damn tool for the job. Even if it means stepping back from the job till you can have the right tool delivered. Even if you’ll only use the tool once. Just buy it.
Heh, I was literally typing the same one when your comment popped up. 😉 Absolutely save yourself so much energy and frustration by planning ahead and renting or buying the tools intended for the job. And a corollary to that: buy cheap tools, then replace the ones you break from regular use with a higher quality one.
“Buy cheap tools, then replace the ones you break from regular use with a higher quality one.” I love this and now I’m going to hear your voice in my head now whenever I’m debating which tool to buy.
If you want a name for that rule, my wife and I call it the “Lucas Rule,” after our friend, an ex-ASE Certified mechanic, who shared that bit of wisdom with us. We use it for anything we plan to buy, in addition to tools.
After turning a 15 minute belt change into a multi-hour ordeal because I tried to use a breaker bar that didn’t _quite_ fit in the space and stripped a nut, I feel this. Plus, I ended up buying the correct breaker bar anyway, but I also had to buy a couple of rounded nut removers too.
There’s the saying in safety that every regulation is written in blood. I feel like that applies to tools. There’s a stripped nut or broken bolt behind every tool.
PPE took me way too long to learn. Permanent damage to the fat cells of my hands and getting cancer at 34 suck.
So stop trying to act tough and just wear the PPE.
We actually had an employee that caused liver/kidney poisoning in one of his children because the baby liked to suckle on his fingers. He was a diesel mechanic.
I’M LOOKING AT YOU, DAVID “I Changed my Oil Without PPE While Looking After My Baby” TRACY
Gloves are cheap and disposable, children are neither.
When I was 17 I sanded my air-cooled Beetle down for a repaint. I used no PPE, was blowing paint residue out of my nose for weeks, had chemical burns on my arms from paint strippers, scratches and scrapes from the wire brushes I was using on my drill…and to top it all off, would wash my hands off with gasoline and used oven cleaner to help clean certain parts. Probably one of the dumbest series of things I ever did, especially since that was 2010 and I really should have known better. The last time I did sanding, on a 150+ year old dresser, I got a proper respirator and it made such a huge difference I wish I’d bought one years ago.
Good goggles, not just glorified Oakleys for eye protection. Especially if you are spraying ANY chemical. Stripping off coveralls as you run the nearest shower because a drop of brake parts cleaner found a perfect parabolic arc over your glasses and into your eye is not a fun way to wrench on a weekend.
I made the no goggles mistake about five years ago and ended up with fuel injector cleaner in one eye. Not fun. You’d think I would have learned by then. Wearing glasses and eye protection sucks but I always do it when fucking with aerosols like that now.
That lesson close to 20 years ago while working on a dirt bike carb. There are so many odd angles and ports that the one you’ll be spraying will have something pointed directly at your eye, no matter what…
Pretty sure the directions on a can of carb cleaner are:
1) Point at face
2) Press spray nozzle
It’s just inevitable.
Children ARE pretty disposable. Easily created by unskilled labor in fact. Once they are trained into fully functional adults (takes about 40 years), THEN they are expensive to replace.
My Father in Law died with Cirrhosis of liver. He didnt drink at all and was healthy otherwise. If a tree was down, he’d be there with his truck and chainsaw even if it was 99 degrees out. He had at least a decade of firewood stocked up.
Anyway, he ran an auto repair business out of his huge garage out building for decades. Old skool. He’s the kind of guy that washed the grease off his hands using gasoline or the parts cleaner. Didn’t have running water in garage, so forget the GoJo. We figured all the auto fluids over the decades did him no favors.
I have a mechanic buddy that tore his eyelid when grinding on a car and his safety glasses were on his forehead.
Yeah but was his forehead ok?
“cheap and disposable, children are neither.”
THAT depends heavily on where and when you live.
Given this site mostly caters to Americans, I’ve heard children are INCREDIBLY expensive just to bring into this world. In more civilised countries, I was out 5 days of hospital parking to bring our little one into this world against her will.
$14 for parking though, goddamn highway robbery.
“Given this site mostly caters to Americans, I’ve heard children are INCREDIBLY expensive just to bring into this world”
YMMV. As usual its a matter of whether you have good insurance and how difficult the birth is.
I’m used to “$0 in all birthing circumstances” so anything above that is incredibly expensive.
$0? Are you birthing kittens in an abandoned Jeep?
Nope. 7-day hospital stay with an emergency c-section. Parking was a fee, but that’s not an in-hospital service.
Not even a copay? Impressive! Where was that?
Canada.
Nice!
I have no mechanical aptitude. Focus on making money to pay others.
A number of folks mentioned gloves, but I’ll mention eye protection too. It takes most of us too long into our 20s or later to realize PPE/safety matters.
And eye glasses are not eye protection.
Shoot, I noted this before seeing your original post. Whether it is a speck of rust that fell down while you were under the car looking up, or a splash back of one of the many caustic chemicals we use, it’s the fastest way to at best, a bad day
For those tasks where you have to lie down looking upwards, I got myself some of those covid-era face shields. Perfect for falling grime and such! Cheap enough to have a few hanging from a nail in the garage.
That’s a good tip, thank you! I have goggles that fit over my regular glasses (damn getting older), but this sounds like a much better solution.
I bought some +1.25 reader safety glasses that are full lens magnification not just the little 1/2 moons. TOTAL game changer and I use the hell out of them.
This is great advice! I just happen to have access to some…
Depends on what you need protection from. Polycarbonate eye glass should be as impact resistant as safety goggles/glasses, maybe more so since eyeglasses can be thicker depending on the prescription.
In grad school eyeglasses were fine for the chemistry and research labs as long as the wearer had side shields as well. Which was good because the safety googles/glasses often ended up causing more problems (fogging, sweat, obscuring scratches, discomfort, etc) for eyeglass wearers than they solved.
I finally got prescription safety glasses a year ago. Totally worth it and should have done it 20 years ago
Never start a project without at least a dozen “spare” 10MM sockets. You will need one, you will lose one. YOu will also need one after you lose the first one. Where do they go? They’re probably hanging out with all of the socks I’ve lost to the washing machine and dryer, but who the hell actually knows?
I found a 10MM socket in a parking lot a few years ago. I think it was just there waiting for the getaway driver to pick it up and take it to an undisclosed location.
LOOK at this https://www.harborfreight.com/10mm-metric-essential-socket-set-10-piece-58957.html it is so cool.
They got me for a set last time I stopped in. This way, I can make sure that whatever I need to adjust in a parking lot won’t be a 10mm.
Torque wrench. Know your torque specs, use a torque wrench.
Left-loosey, righty-tighty is REALLY important when it comes to cars.
A lesson my friend learned the hardway, make sure it’s not a left hand thread nut before you use the impact with 1000 ft-lb of breakaway (or tightening in this case) torque .
Learning to be realistic about what I need.
When you grow up in hillbilly land and one of the few things to do is to hit trails, vehicle setup is very important! Some of what you tend to add to a vehicle comes from obvious necessity (lockers, lighting, tool boxes, recovery equipment) some of it you learn from unique situations (dedicated clean dry storage for shit tickets and extra clothes!) but a lot of it comes from a “better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it” – This last one is what has cost me thousands of dollars. It took me way too long to understand that I don’t need a 6” long arm kit and 37s immediately to go on every Jeep I own- aggressive 33s, stock suspension and a winch will handle 99 percent of the trails I frequent, and make the vehicle 3000% better to drive on road, which is 90 percent of my time behind the wheel.
Took me to my mid thirties to understand this.
I think this comes with age and life as David is learning the hard way, but being a cheap bastard it took me a long time to realize the value of my time and that some jobs are worth paying for someone else to complete. I’ve spent hundreds of hours building a race car but I will gladly pay someone else to detail my daily driver.
1000x this.
I’ll do my own brakes (the markup there is astronomical), but will happily spend a hundred bucks to have someone else change my oil
I’m still with David on Team DIY Oil Change though. I have a garage and the necessary tools so I still like to do it myself to make sure that the drain plug and filter are tightened properly and it gives me an opportunity to look under the car and check for any other problems.
Just did this on my daily driver Mazda 3 last weekend (+ trans and coolant change) and found a missing fastener on the undertray which may have resulted in damage if left too long.
Fair. I found a little private shop that I trust (they were the only place around that was willing to service the ‘unserviceable’ PTO in my daughter’s CX-9 to keep the fluid from becoming peanut butter). They do good work, are very thorough, and document everything they see & do with pictures.
You do you. For me 15-20 minutes of stoned, high school dropout level work is worth the $75 bucks saved to put in $25 of oil and filter. Plus I know the job was done right instead of wondering whether that stoned, high school dropout actually did change the oil and filter.
Given the time it takes to drive to the oil change place, fill out the paperwork, wait and drive back home DIY is quicker too.
We received a few free dealer oil changes on our Mazda3 when we bought it…my wife was happy when I started doing them and she didn’t have to waste her time there.
Being a car enthusiast does not necessarily make me a great person for car buying advice.
Shift more slowly. Thank you tv and movies for constantly making me think fast n dramatic banging into gears is the way to go. Even now, I have to mentally remind myself to slow the hell down.
Wear gloves. The nuber of times a vehicle I was working on drew blood due my contact with any of the sharp metal edges that are everywhere on a vehicle is too numerous to count. I no londer do anything on a car without, at a minimum, nitrile gloves, and mostly full work gloves. I prefer to keep my skin unbroken, if at all possible, thank you very much.
Good one. I do my work in my parking garage, and it’s really nice to not have greasy hands all the way back into my apartment.
I agree with this. I have gloves all over the garage and can sometimes even find a matched pair.
I rarely wear work gloves to protect against injury, but I am a frequent user of nitrile gloves to keep my hands clean.
I used to be a Ford tech in the ’90s and was very anti-gloves which meant my hands were constantly dirty no matter how much I scrubbed. Around the same time my dad had cataract surgery, and one of the first things he commented on after his sight was restored was how dirty my hands were. I started wearing gloves more often after that.
Also the nitrile gloves will help keep you from getting cancer down the line from all the various fluids you are dealing with!
Can confirm. Didn’t really wear gloves from age 16 to 27, ended up with cancer at 34.
You don’t have to be old to get bitten by the monster.
Oof, sorry to hear that! At least younger folks today seem to be more aware of the danger than back in the 90s and earlier.
Part of my job now is delivering health & safety training, I can confirm the new generation actually listens, cares, and uses the PPE. It makes me very happy to see.
As I dive deeper into my late 30s, I’m glad to see the younger generation actively rejecting the Old Guard’s “tough guy” mantra.
I’ve become a big fan of those nitrile-coated knit gloves. In the summer I find plain nitrile gloves somewhat miserable to wear because of rivers of sweat they cause, but the knit ones breathe well enough to keep that under control and they’re only marginally worse for my dexterity. Most car parts are large enough that I don’t need extreme levels of fingertip feel anyway.
How much tire pressure affects efficiency.
I knew it was important since like ever, and I always kept my tires “properly” inflated in all my cars, basically if it was not overinflated or flat, it was ok for me. It was only after I got my Prius that I really learned how much a couple of PSI can impact my MPGs.