Two weeks ago last night I damaged my own car.Sure, just like finding someone who can beat the market is much preferred over buying index funds and settling for market returns.
It is difficult to find people competant to work on most anything including cars/trucks. From my experience finding a competant tech to work on cars is much preferred over most owners that attempt to do their own work. In most cases the results of owners attempting their own work cost more time and money and often lead to unsafe situations that can be severe.
And this "owners attempting their own work cost more time and money and often lead to unsafe situations that can be severe." is just the standard fear mongering, anti-DIY rhetoric spread by so called "technicians" and their shops that want to extract $200 an hour out of someone to do poor quality work. Its no different than money managers telling you that "managing your own money can have significant costs and result in poor outcomes, you really need to hire me and pay me 1% of AUM while buying my high load, under performing funds." Nonsense.
What has cost me more time and money has been the poor quality work of so called "professionals" that I later had to correct myself. Spark plugs over-tightened until they blew out of the hole, pinion seals installed so poorly they were leaking within 10k miles of the "job", obvious suspension issues not caught on inspection that I later had to fix, and my personal favorite, a battery cable that was so loose you could pull it off with your bare hand.
The next morning I took it to my body shop person to see if it could be fixed by him.
He asked me if I was computer savy, telling me that if I could order the parts on Amazon they'd cost half as much as he'd have to charge me.
I did that and was shocked that their total costs delivered and with sales taxes was less than $300.
Yesterday I went to his place at 10 AM to get the parts put in. We still were not finished by 5 PM with me lending a helping hand whenever possible.
It's a 2004 Honda Accord so an old car.
I saw all the issues that happen with an old car when taking existing parts off, like pins and screws breaking.
He had all the substitute parts to take car of that problem.
But there were many issues that arose that he, because of his experience, was able to take care of by smart improving.
During a day I learned a body shop technical term - "hammer fit" - which means banging the item into place so that it finally fits.
At each of those times he improvised I would have been flat out stuck and stopped in my tracts because I did not have any of the spare parts on hand or I'd have no idea who to improvise a fix with the problem the parts bought were presenting us.
That is Exhibit A why I let the professionals who know what they are doing do the work. I love watching someone work who knows what they are doing as opposed to it being a total frustrating time for me.
Statistics: Posted by yankees60 — Sat Sep 28, 2024 6:55 pm — Replies 113 — Views 8324
