The $25k car is going extinct?

Any recommendation how to start learning repairing a car? I have absolutely zero experience. A friend of mine said just learn to change a tyre first and I have been procrastinating since.

Commit to doing all the maintenance on your car yourself to start getting comfortable with it. Easy jobs to start:

-replace cabin air filter -check for even tread wear -top up the wiper fluid -replace the windshield wipers -take off a wheel and look for tears in rubber bushings or grease leaking from seals. -replace anything broken like switches, trim pieces, etc.

Assuming it’s a gas car: -replace engine air filter -inspect spark plugs -check fluid levels: brake fluid, engine oil, coolant -check 12V battery voltage with the engine off and also running -change the oil

build one from scratch (kit car)

I am still a somewhat of a novice.

Your friend is right IMO. Do something simple first. Like a broken piece of trim, replace a light bulb, change the wiper blades yourself and build yourself up. I had repaired bicycles/motorcycles before hand.

Past that. I literally go on YouTube and watch someone do the task I intend on doing. I have the service manual downloaded for the car (people dump scans of the manuals online as PDFs) and a Haynes Manual (about £20).

Over the last 6 months. I've gone from barely being able to change the wiper blades to replacing a turbo.

I bought an older vehicle(s) that have a good aftermarket parts market and are known to be easy to work on. The simpler / less refined the car is the easier it is to work on.

I went down this route in the early 2010's. In preparation for an over landing expedition I wanted to have mechanical knowledge to be a sort of "mechanic" on the trip so I bought a bunch of "project cars" and began tinkering. While it WAS a lot of fun and I feel smarter, it was a total waste of time.

To save you all the trouble of all I went through, it was fun debugging mechanical stuff, but ultimately there is no "self-reliant car owner"

It all comes down to tools and parts. You need easy access to a lot of both or else you are limited to extremely ugly temporary fixes which amount to super gluing your engine back together.

On our overland trip, when we had an issue, it turned out impossible to fix without a massive lift and air tools, so all my years prep was essentially reduced to having a few extra words I could tell the actual mechanic capable of performing the fix.

If you still want to go down this route I recommend the book "zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" and have 4 Saabs you can have lol. I'll even throw in the clutch kit you can't install without a custom Saab tool.

Buy POS 30yo car and just start getting it in shape to be daily drivable. You can typically screw things up three times over before it'd be cheaper to pay someone.

All you really need is the internet. China tools via Amazon are "fine".

A word of warning. Usually these things are simple, but not always. Either way, you'll get your hands dirty, and mind off other things.

The YT video for changing my cars' front light bulbs was less than two minutes. After half an hour and a lot of scratches / bruises, I thought I got it done. Started the car, checked the light goes on and off. Scrub hands from dust and dirt, be happy.

Mandatory inspection two months later found out that it was pointing so badly off that their targeting device could not even get a reading. In other words, I had been blinding oncoming traffic. Car didn't pass inspection, I was defeated, and took it to the mechanic.

He also spent twenty to thirty minutes on readjusting the bulb, before it was done and up to spec. It costed only 15 euro, though, as they also expected it to be a 30 second operation.

I guess my point is, don't get discouraged when things don't work immediately, or don't work exactly like a manual / video makes you think. Often it's a learning experience, and while those can be fun, they also sometimes are very much not.

(I'm also a complete novice, and not particularly enjoying the experience, just not affluent enough to pay for all of the maintenance work.)

Look at your local community colleges if you are in the US. a lot of them have classes for simple every day car repair to classes to become a certified mechanic

> so all my years prep was essentially reduced to having a few extra words I could tell the actual mechanic capable of performing the fix

That is valuable as well, in some places car mechanics could be eager to let's say make repairs more costly than needed

Theses kinds of questions have no easy answer. Ive done a lot of my own auto work including an engine swap with a friend years ago. This stuff comes with experience but it helps to grow up with an engineer father with a machine shop. It also helps enormously to have gear head friends and have a life long interest in mechanical workings.

Repairing a car these days is not the same as it used to be but I would start with the basics: maintenance items. As you mentioned, changing a tire is a good first step as it will teach you how to secure and jack up a car *safely*. You should also get familiar with tire pressure, acceptable tread wear and tire rotation. Once the tire is off you'll see the brakes and the suspension components. Disc brake pads are simple to change and a good next step: two bolts, caliper slides off, pop out pads, compress piston, insert new pads, slide and bolt back on, done. Under the hood, there are a few educational and simple maintenance items like checking and changing your: air filter, oil and oil filter, brake fluid reservoir, coolant level, and power steering fluid. The above items are like 90%+ of all garage visits.

These items are all part of various subsystems which make up a car so as you work your way through you will get a feel of what things do. With experience you'll be comfortable with popping the hood and getting your hands greasy. I also want to mention that you can and will get hurt, scrapes, small cuts and bruises are not uncommon, it's rough work at times. Take your time, be safe, wear ppe, and work with someone if you can.

I got a fixed gear bike with the promise it'd be easily fixable at home. The reality is you need a special tool for more than half the things you'd wanna swap/change

I imagine a car is x100 worse

Gosh, I didn't realize people weren't learning these things anymore, just as a matter of normal life.

I'm an early(ish) Millennial woman from the suburbs, from a family with no meaningful mechanical knowledge or training of any kind, and I've done most of these things.

I would have considered myself pretty ignorant about cars prior to reading your comment. Thanks for shifting my perspective to seeing myself as having at least a useful basic familiarity with things!

Any recommendations?

This seems like a really nice starting point: https://www.howacarworks.com/video-course/

Get to understand the internals and then dive into specifics...

Do these even still exist? And is it reasonable to get one road-legal somewhere like the U.S. for less than the cost of buying one (once you assign at least some value to your time)?

YouTube is fantastic if you already diagnosed the problem and know what part you need to replace. You just follow along with the video, pausing while you go. It’s perfect.

YouTube is kind of shit for diagnosis, though. Most of the videos just gloss over it. “Hey guys! So, my fuel pump is dead, so here’s a video on how to replace it!” Ok, thanks, but how did you figure out it was the fuel pump? Not a lot of YouTube content along those lines.

Youtube is one of the best resources. Almost every time something goes wrong, I was able to find a video of someone fixing that part, usually on the same model of vehicle.

Scanning for codes is useful too, every manufacturer has their own scan tool. For example BMW has ISTA+, Ford has Forscan.

I think that as right to repair laws become more prevalent, there will be more information generally available.

> but ultimately there is no "self-reliant car owner"

We are rare, but we exist. Prior to moving on from it due to an unrelated injury, for the decade prior I did all my own work including numerous engine swaps on my vehicles.

However, this is because as noted, I had the tools and parts. I had all the spanners and sockets I needed, easy access to parts via wreckers and parts networks, and had my own engine crane and stands. My vehicle of choice for most of that time was 2x 1987 Toyota MR2 AW11's.

I mostly got into it because it was my "non computing" hobby for the most part. And for the time I spent engaged in it, I really enjoyed it.

thank you for saying this, I feel less bad about not knowing anything about fixing cars now.

Not disagreeing, just elaborating, about “fine” Chinese Amazon tools.

I needed safety wire pliers to assemble some brake rotors. The metal in the ones I got on Amazon was softer than the metal wire they came with such that the cutting edges got little wire-sized dents in them and increasingly useless the farther I got along in the job.

Returned those afterward. Junk.

But there’s other stuff I’ve gotten from RANDOMLETTERS Amazon that’s actually holding up “ok.”

Also, Harbor Freight is a better source of ok/fine tools where you don’t need quotes around those words.

I've done this for a little while, it was fun. Something I didn't expect going in is that 90% of my time was spent in removing parts that were rusted stuck, or hard to apply torque to (e.g. a bolt in the middle of an engine somewhere with very little clearance)

That isn't true. You are overstating the problem. I've built a custom fixed gear. I have 3 custom tools. They cost me £45 all together.

My current toolbox for the car is:

- Socket set (£50 halfords)

- Spanners (I already had these I guess £20-30)

- Allen Keys (£5)

- Several different types of Cir-clip pliers (£20-40)

- A battery powered soldering iron (£50-100). I have no mains power where I work on the vehicle.

- A lighter (£1)

- Mole-grips (£10-15)

- Axel Stands (£50)

- A Jack. (£100)

- Fuse Pullers (£3)

- Tub of Grease / Copper Grease (£15)

- Toolbox (£10)

- Stubby Screwdrivers (£10)

Great comment because I wondering the same thing. Do people not do any of those things on their own anymore? At a minimum, changing the oil was something I did with my dad as a kid. The hardest thing I've done was probably change a starter.

ICE's are conceptually pretty simple. Anyone who has built a computer should be able to do basic car maintenance if they want to. The electronics is what makes newer cars more complicated, and I assume EVs even more so.

If you want to sell a few year old used car, the paper trail of the professionally done service is a bonus.

I had to replace the full wiper system on what is a project vehicle (which I intend to daily once it is all fixed). It took me several months to get the wiper system all working again.

The main problem I ran into was

- Parts that were marked as compatible that were absolute rubbish. You would there is little difference between one brand of wiper arm and another. Apparently not!

- It takes 2 days to order a part from the internet. The nearest part supplier is a 30-40 mile drive. So if you forget to order a part you are either waiting another 2 days or you have a 2 hour drive.

As a result. I ended up rebuying all the parts about 2 times and I should have gone to a local parts dealer where they give you either Genuine, OEM or quality aftermarket. The thing is that I compared the genuine parts that did work with the ones I bought from ebay and visually there is little difference. So now I only buy Genuine, OEM or quality aftermarket.

It is all part of the learning experience. Even though at the time it was frustrating.

You need two things for your engine to run: fuel flow, and spark. If it starts but doesn’t run everything follows from there. If your starter motor doesn’t turn it over start there instead.

> In other words, I had been blinding oncoming traffic.

Most modern cars blind oncoming traffic anyway. Either that or 20%+ of morons riding around with high beams and blue/purple LED retrofits.

You may have been defeated by the inspection, but the battle for headlight brightness/alignment was lost years ago.

Or maybe their "alignment" tool was a scam you got robbed of 15 euros?

> I'll even throw in the clutch kit you can't install without a custom Saab tool.

With a lot of swearing and heaps of scrap metal to find the right sized scrap you can will power it out I promise.

caterham https://caterhamcars.com/en/models/assembly

Maybe private party, but I've saved this stuff up before and dealers DGAF.

For what it's worth, headlight alignment is not something a lot of people think about or even realize is a thing - it's just changing bulbs, right?

With any DIY car repair, you always run the risk of things like this, where you don't-know-what-you-don't-know. But it's still worth the ride and the lesson, imo.

You also need air and compression! And if you want the engine to run longer than a few minutes, cooling.

Lightbulbs are horrendous these days. On my first car they were like changing a room light bulb, you just reached in and changed the bulb. More recent cars I've had to take the battery out or pull out the whole headlight assembly. It's good to have an idea of how the bits of the car fit together and the main components but significant maintenance is only for hobbyists or people with a lot of time on their hands.

When I was first driving I went through how to change a wheel with my dad and also brake blocks, oil changes that kind of thing. Even my dad who has rebuilt engines from scratch normally goes to the mechanic for everything now.

I'm not in the US so no idea ... but according to answer in Google:

> All Caterham models are imported as rolling chassis. They are street legal in the U.S. under EPA kit-car regulations and can be registered through processes specific to individual states.

source https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/2015-caterham-seven-360-sta...

I've found the best knowledge on that front are youtubers who buy beater old cars, get them running again and maybe even restore them to resell at a profit.

Their videos are between 20-60 minutes and run through the general process of going from no-crank-no-start to running, which is basically the same for all gas-powered cars. Diesels are a little different.

If I had the space+money, I'd go for a Factory Five kit: https://www.factoryfive.com/mk5/complete-kit/

and add an LS drivetrain.

The reality is that learning how to repair modern cars yourself without the help of someone experienced is a great way to get yourself killed.

You might not know about Harbor Freight jackstands being far overrated and thus kill yourself by assuming that they will hold their rated load.

You almost certainly cannot find more than some youtube videos about how to do things on your post 2015 vehicle. Haines and other repair manual companies don't exist or on life support and haven't made a new guide since 2020 at the latest.

The average entry level talent, i.e. the folks at Jiffy Lube/Vavoline, are often doing things so wrong that it'd be better to never try to "learn" in an environment where they will impact and strip your oil plug, up-sell grandmas with fake dirty filters and "blinker fluid" stories, etc.

If you don't have an actual experienced mechanic to learn from (i.e. someone who can strip and put back together an engine and it runs perfectly) - don't even bother! I'm not joking and I'm exactly like you in that I want to learn to work on cars! But I've learned that the tactics that allow you to get to making 300K a year in tech without much of being taught by other people do NOT work with cars. You WILL need to socialize with a master mechanic. There's no other way.

oh btw - most of the stuff like oil and car related gunk that will touch you when you work on cars is TOXIC AS HELL. Same with what you will breathe (most people don't mask when they should in a garage and they often don't ventilate too).

The vast majority of people make a very stupid decision by selling to a dealer and not selling private party.

A lot of Americans become very low IQ in the context of any car related financial decisions. Off loading their vehicles is one of the classic examples of this. Do NOT sell to your dealer. Carvana is the only exception and only because you can easily offload messed up cars to them without disclosing it.

I've done the math every time I've traded in a car. It's not always worth it, because of the additional time investment, effort, and travel required.

Don't worry, would be my main advice. Find an official service manual online and follow it. Avoid following YouTube advice without checking the manual as well. Many people on there are not the smartest and will make things difficult for themselves or dangerous for no reason. (I only like M539 Restorations and The Workshop nowadays)

Aside from that, get a clunker or, even better, a motorcycle to work on (if they float your boat, of course). Motorcycles are wonderful because everything is easy to reach, light and usually kinda sexy for the year and price.

Again, don't worry too much. You can rebuild an engine if you have the tools and follow the manual. It's all just following steps. Just don't get clever if you're lacking a tool or something. Take a break, get what you need, don't start doing "clever" things because you feel like it's life and death to finish something right this moment, and you'll be good.

Edit: Oh yeah, and a welding course is probably a good idea down the road. I keep delaying it, but it'd be useful, and it'll also surely be kind of fun.

The saying goes Harbor Freight is probably good enough for any tool you can afford to have fail. If your physical safety depends on it or if you use it so much that failure would cause a lot of downtime, you should probably spend a little more.

It is not incredibly different once you pull off the plastic engine cover and get a cheap code reader.

Youtube kinda sucks for anything that isn't an enthusiast car with a big following but is old enough that it went past beater car and to "you don't see these much anymore" status before Youtube became a thing. Thankfully paper manuals are good and cheap for that kind of stuff.

Everyone starts with no experience. You're making a mountain out of a mole hill.

I'd love a kit car that wasn't ridiculously expensive and/or designed to be raced. But I can understand that the kind of people who would invest the time in building a car would be okay with those propositions.

I wonder if there's a market for building something purely utilitarian, like a little hatchback or something, as a kit vehicle - with the express purpose of learning a lot of automotive principles along the way.

It probably varies between EV manufacturers, but my Tesla Model 3 has been the easiest vehicle to self maintain that I’ve owned yet. Mostly due to how little maintenance there is, but also because of the completely open and online factory service manuals and parts manuals.

It’s ridiculously easy to look up a part number, order it online from wherever is most convenient, and follow the steps in the manual to replace it.

I had the opposite experience with my 10-year-old Model S.

Most parts could only come from Tesla, including the Bilstein struts (a part number Bilstein refuses to sell to anyone but Tesla). $900 per corner.

USB port between the console? $400. I found a used one on eBay, fortunately.

When the wheel rotation sensor receiver went bad, it cost $2500 for them to install and reprogram the replacement, because they "upgraded" to a different mfr. When that one started to go bad (water ingress, which wasn't cured by the new part), I sold the car and said good riddance.

I have the book around for several years. Time to flip it open before my children do lol Thanks for the wise words!

Unless your car is very new, you have all the stuff you need to learn to change a tire in the trunk. Watch 2 short YouTube videos and go do it. It'll take you half an hour. You should use a torque wrench but if it was that critical, one would be in your trunk.

After that, look up your maintenance schedule, pick a job, then go figure out if you can.

When you get into bigger jobs, have a tow company and shop ready in case you run into problems. Mobile mechanics may also be an option.

Changing the bottom bracket

Changing any of the bearings

Tuning the spokes on the wheels

Changing the cog

All require special tools that cost more than 45 pounds

Only the several wrenches, Allen keys (because none are the same size), chain break and tire-changing plungers cost less

Every nut and every screw has a different size. It's madness

So, no, then? Even before valuing your labor at anything, they're more expensive than a lot of cars that come assembled.

I don't think there's any incentive for them to scam like that. The inspection shop I took it to was not a repair shop. Also further inspections for the repairs can be performed in any qualified shop.

It depends. I've gotten good prices from CarMax before, but like the other responder said, you have to research.

The other thing is that it's not always low IQ, but many people value simplicity. Do I want to show a car, deal with cashiers check fraud, flakey people, etc... or do I want money literally right now? I've sold cars to CarMax and I've sold cars and boats privately. The private price I think I can get has to be considerably more than what I can get with zero hassle.