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

The problem I've had with dealers is they lie like a rug.

I'm sure Indys lie like a rug too, but dealers don't know *more* because they lie just as much.

More than a few times I brought cars to the dealer under warranty where they said there was nothing wrong when, years later, I find out that it's a common problem.

It has happened so many times, in fact, that I assume now that the dealer is lying to me every time I go there.

If you want examples, I'll tell them to you, but my main point is that it doesn't matter if the dealer knows more because they lie just as much or, what they know doesn't trickle down to the guy who tests the vehicle.

This is Toyota and BMW and Infiniti and Nissan mostly though as when I had American cars, they were used and therefore not under factory warranty.

I went to the Toyota dealership last week for a part and I was dismayed totally at the lack of knowledge of the guy behind the counter.

So I UNDERSTAND you that the dealer *SHOULD* know better. My experience is that they're worse than the Indy in terms of knowledge.

I'm not saying the dealer doesn't do a booming business. I'm just saying that their prices are twice those of everyone else. And their work is no better than anyone elses and the parts are the same.

Never gonna happen. Never. I can *always* find parts at Camelback online for example, for my Toyotas that are about half the price of the local dealer every single time.

For my bimmers, autohauzax and Max in Texas are always half the dealer's prices for the exact same parts.

The dealer is NEVER the place to go for anything, other than something you need out of inventory. Most of the time when I call ahead, they don't stock the part, and then I give them a lecture to the tune of "how you gonna sell anything if your prices are double and you don't even stock the part?".

They tell me they sell plenty of parts at their prices (just not to me). :)

That would be just after the cat, right? I wonder why then, they made the last half of the system SS too?

I was just making up numbers to show what I had meant by the spread, but your point is perfectly valid that it can only be applied against the same type of oil.

We've all seen the never-ending "what oil" threads, where, in the end, the oil change interval matters more than what oil.

This is logically tenable.

Also tenable in that changing the oil is more important than what oil.

When I have a choice, which is usually at Costco, I take the dino juice with the lowest spread but I agree that synthetic juice would be better (for a couple of things) but in the end, the same cost since basically it lasts twice as long and costs twice as much.

So it's a wash on cost, and on slipperiness, the dino juice works fine.

Yup. Oil changes matter more than what oil we use.

I get my news off the net.

But someone must be watching TV or cable (I don't have cable either).

My point is only that people spend time watching TV so they can't say that taking your sweet time doing an oil change is wasted time if they're wasting time watching "As the World Turns" all day.

Thanks. Had I done the job even once, I'd know more than I do, so I will gladly take your word for it that there are three choices and we must pick one of the three.

1. Gear
2. Belt
3. Chain

We have to pick one. Which is the most reliable?

As I said with my lawnmower example, if someone makes a cheaper tool and passes on the savings to me, I'm all for that.

I buy Craftsman and not SnapOn. Is SnapOn better? Probably. Almost certainly. Right? But I don't pay SnapOn prices. I pay Craftsman prices.

However, if someone sells me a cheaper hammer and then tells me it works better in the snow at breaking ice, I'm gonna call him out on his marketing bullshit.

I get it that a hammer can be made cheaper. I do. I get it that a hammer's main job has nothing to do with breaking ice in the snow, but that 10 days out of the year, the snow is deep enough when I need to get to work that I have to break the ice with that hammer.

But for 355 days of the 365 day year, I'm stuck with that crappy handling hammer. That's OK if the REASON I bought that crappy handling hammer was because it was cheap.

It's not ok if I say that the crappy handling hammer handles better than my hammer in the snow because losing handling 355 days of the year to gain a smidge of handling in *deep* snow on the 10 days of the year that you have to drive in it - is just not logical thought processes.

It's OK to admit FWD is cheaper. It's not OK to lie about what it can do.

That's marketing's job.

It would be interesting to look at the normalized price.

A car then, was $5K, and now is $50K so 10x doesn't seem too much off from even given inflation.

Spoken like a true Marketing person! :)

My RWD car has never seen snow in 20 years except a few runs to Tahoe where they legally required chains to get there.

Even when I lived in the snow belt ... deep snow was only on the road when I needed the road for 1 or 2 days of the year, and at max, 10 days out of

Think of that. Lousy handling for 355 days and just barely ok handling in deep snow for the other 10 days.

The real FWD tradeoff was *never* handling. It was profits.

I have nothing against a cheaper tool. Nothing. A car is a tool. A FWD is a cheaper tool.

I just have something against someone seriously trying to tell me that his cheaper lawnmower works better in the snow than does my more expensive lawnmower.

I work off of logic. Not marketing bullshit.

I never said I was always right though ... so if someone can show me fwd in the best handling cars on the planet and at a cheap price ... count me in.

Not to denigrate the GOOD engineers out there - but he sure thinks like a typical engineer - - - One with no practical experience and a "god complex" only exceded by orthopedic surgeons.

Basically almost smoke!!!

And also making the pedal a bit "spongy" from trying to squeeze the gas.

Never bought two in one yer even when my wife was still driving. She usually got my hand me down. I just bought a new car two weeks ago. I honestly can't give you a valid reason for doing so other than I like the color better.

The guy that gets my old one with 38k miles is getting a real cream puff.

Any shop can do a starter, water pump, but most don't have the expertise for some of the electronics. Dealer may be 1 hour at $75 versus the indy at $50 but takes three hours to figure out the problem. If my adaptive cruise control stopped working I'm not trusting the corner gas station.

If your brother worked for a particular brand dealer for a long time I'd not hesitate to take that brand of car to him as he knows it well. Of course dealers do work on all brands but they have lots of expertise on the core brand.

After an unfortunate shifting incident in Arkansas, we hobbled in to a local repair shop in Fort Smith and had the pleasure of watching the guy rebuild the motorhome trans by hand. He had Parkinson's, but it disappeared while he was working. I swear he looked like a machine programmed to pick gears up and put them down in exactly the right place.

In life there are always tradeoffs :-(

It's amazing how far one can be thrown when it's discovered that its stuckness is the cause of the engine overheating.

Intelligent people question Arrogant people think the know everything.

On page 10 of that example the Master's Thesis covers the set of piston rings, where nothing said is the least bit complex.

The author talks about the compression and oil ring, and that each has its purpose. He talks about the location of the piston ring. And that the first ring takes 75% of the pressure.

The paper suffers enormously from lack of English language skills, which is to be expected in a paper from Europe, where, for example this is a verbatim sentence: "The choice of the number of rings should be the result of careful analysis, with one hand, depends on to the gas that passes into the crankcase should be the minimum, on the other, the number of rings determines the mass of the piston, engine height and friction losses."

But that's as "technical" as the paper gets with respect to piston rings, which makes the paper essentially a summary of piston rings that anyone who isn't even an engineer could easily do.

Then the guy shows a diagram of piston rings in action, with a few typos (so the paper isn't all that well reviewed), and then he talks about how bad it is to have burnt oil.

The only slightly technical thing in the paper is a chart of clearances for the sealing and scraper rings that he clearly crobbed off the net somewhere and where he doesn't discuss any of the engineering tradeoffs involved.

On page 34 he defines a temperature for each of three rings (finally spelling the word "scraping" correctly) and then he shows a trivially simple picture showing, essentially the same thing (so why does he do it?).

That's it for page 34, so we move on to page 49 and page 50 for the last discussion of the piston rings.

On page 49, he seems to be covering the same thing, in effect, as he did on page 34, starting with the verbatim sentence "The piston rings take a very important place when cooling the piston." Um. OK. Tell us something we didn't know before we read the paper please.

He then chooses a heat for the piston crown that is high, saying the rings won't work at that temperature based on his simulations, but that they work at a lower temperature. Um. OK. (This is basic high-school level stuff.)

Lastly, on page 50, he tells us "Increase the high of the scrap ring in order to adjust to reality". He doubled the height from 3mm to 6mm and lo and behold, it worked where it didn't work at 3mm! (Notice the tolerances here ... we're talking *huge*.) He also added channels to the rings which is, again, high-school stuff.

In summary, while I am not going to fault the guy for his poor English, I will fault someone for not reviewing the poor English - because it just means that this paper is not a reliable paper because it was clearly not reviewed.

Worse ... this paper didn't say *anything* that any high-school student doesn't know, about piston rings. The changes he made were enormous, where all he simulated was that it didn't work before he made the enormous changes, and then it did work when he did.

Let's get back to reality, shall we. I never said that the design of *anything* is super complex at the stage of designing the perfect system. I even said that a spark plug is complex at that level.

But at the level of using the thing in fixing a car, you already have very limited choices since all you're doing is fixing a car. To say that fixing a car by replacing piston rings is scientifically complex is just pure bullshit.

And it's even worse that you backed up that claim with a high-school level paper (yes, I know it's a thesis but that doesn't change the sophomoric level of the paper).

As an engineer, I'd be embarrassed if I claimed that paper said anything that is even remotely related to proving that, in practice, the selection of replacement rings for repairing an engine in your driveway is in the least bit complex.

I give up if anyone thinks that paper proved otherwise because I'm only using very basic logic here because that's all I do.

That's a joke, right?

I realize in *some* parts of the US, the dealer may be more than half what they are here, but it's closer to $200 and even an Indy is at $100 an hour here.

In a sense, it makes even more sense to DIY here than wherever you are, since the price difference between you and me for the shop rate is enormous.

Let's give up on the FWD. If you think they're made for handling in the snow, then they'd come with snow plows on the front.

OK. I'm joking, but they're not made for handling. They're just not.

No logical person on this planet can argue that with another logical person.

Since at least one of us isn't thinking logically, and since you think it's me and I think it's you, let's just give up, because both of us can be right on that but given that, we'll get nowhere.

You think it's all about handling. OK. You keep believing that.

They claimed that power windows would work long enough to allow them to be rolled down. Do they assume it would take minutes for the electrical system to short out? Is that reasonable?

Our 70 Dodge pickup has them. What you can't get is the stuff that keeps the windows from rattling.

For a while I thought I wanted a car intended for third-world repair capabilities -- everything possible manual, etc. And then I discovered the joy of pushing the tiny button on the key that unlocks the doors :-(