Auto Repairs - Do It Yourself? - The Wise Guy

  |   diesel Magazine stripe When I was young and broke, I had no other choice but to work on my own truck. If it needed an oil change, I did it. If it needed a new exhaust system, I did it. If the floors rusted through and needed patching, I did it. There was no way I was going to pay somebody to work on my pride and joy because that would cut into the money I had to buy parts and tools. As a teenager, I never understood why some of my mentors would take their truck to a shop and have it worked on. In some cases, I knew they had the tools and the knowledge to do the work themselves, but they would still opt to have someone else do the wrenching. If I asked why, I would get the standard, "My time is worth more than my money." As a kid making minimum wage, I couldn't imagine my time being worth more than my paycheck. When I was making $4.50 an hour, it might take me 10 hours of work to pay for one hour of shop time. The math just didn't work out. So I learned how to remove and replace my own transfer case, fix worn-out starters, and do my own brakes. The way I saw it, buying tools and doing the work myself kept me ahead of the curve, and it would set me up for a life of cheap car repairs. Of course, life was a lot simpler back then. When I was young, I had time to burn. Now I feel like I need more than 24 hours in a day just to fit it all in. If I even get to wrench on my own vehicles it's because I'm broken down on the side of the road. If I want to rebuild an axle, it's not the cost of the parts that stops me anymore, it's finding the time to do it. I'd have to take a vacation day, hide from my fiancee, and take pictures of the work just so I felt like I got the most out of my time. If I needed to rebuild a transmission tomorrow (so I had something to drive to work), I would have to take it to a shop. Right now, I have far too many responsibilities to be without a vehicle for a week (which is how long it would take me) as opposed to the one day it would take a shop to get the same job done. So now in some cases, my time is worth more than my money. The young guys reading this won't understand. The older-and let's face it, wiser-guys know all too well. You're the group of guys taking this all in and saying, "Just wait until you get married and have kids and a mortgage. Then you'll really have no time." Now I've decided that working on trucks is something I do as part of my job at Diesel Power. Unfortunately, it's a very small part of my job. I'll keep all my tools handy and pull them out whenever I can, but I know that working on my own truck for fun is going to be on the back burner for a while. The way back burner. As I write this, I remember reading columns by other car-magazine editors coming to the same conclusion over the years. I recall their confessions to their readers that "they just don't have the time" to do the cool stuff they show in the magazine. Their rationale always seemed weak, but the part they missed-and the thing I want you to take away is: If you have to pay someone to work on your stuff, don't pay someone to do a job as good as you would have done it, pay people who do better work than you could have done. Seek out the talented TIG-welders, the CNC-machine operators, and the computer engineers who have developed amazing solutions to your mundane problems. You'll pay good money for their services and never regret letting them do the work for you. It always feels better paying for something you can't do than paying for something you don't have time to do.-David Kennedydavid.kennedy@sourceinterlink.com