Being one's own mechanic

[Andrew Buc <72220.443@compuserve.com>]

While I don't have it handy, someone in the last few days made (in connection 
w/another lister's son who was taking a 4kq back to the Univ. of Alabama 
w/him) a pitch for the whole idea of doing one's own maintenance and freeing 
oneself from dependence on the monkey lads. I think that's a great idea if you 
have the mindset for it, but based on my own experience, I question whether 
everyone does.
 
About 15 years ago I thought I'd work into doing more of my own work on my 
Saab 96. I'd done basic things like tuneups and coolant changes. To make a 
long story short, I was not only unsuccessful, I also went through a lot of 
frustration, to say the least. I wound up turning the problems over to my 
mechanic in the end, and his explanations of what was wrong made perfect sense 
after the fact, but I had no luck diagnosing the problems on my own. The 
perfect problems for me to solve, seems to me, would have been ones lying just 
outside the boundaries of my existing knowledge, so I could reason my way from 
A to B. The problems the Saab gods sent me were <considerably> outside the 
boundaries.
 
As I see it, these are some of the problems in being your own mechanic:
 
* Unless you have a backup car (whose costs negate a lot of the financial 
advantage of DIY work), you're under tremendous pressure to fix problems 
quickly, while keeping all the other plates (work, etc.) spinning. This does 
nothing for your analytical mindset. At one point during this period the 96 
just died and stranded me 4 times in as many weeks, and the last couple of 
times it happened I got so frustrated and angry that there was nothing to do 
but walk away b4 I broke something.
 
* Keeping parts around so you can swap them out for diagnostic purposes isn't 
absolutely impossible, but it's harder than it would be for a garage, and it 
can get expensive.
 
* The car doesn't always behave according to the book. You wrench on 
something, and the threads strip--what now? I'm guessing that experienced 
mechanics have a certain critical mass of knowledge that lets them improvise 
their way through these situations. At the rate I was going, it seemed to me 
that I wouldn't reach this critical mass if I lived to be as old as 
Methuselah. It was like the old saw, "How do I look something up to learn how 
to spell it when I don't know how to spell it?"
 
A friend (who also had a 96) was giving me some help at this time, and he said 
that he'd had a Corvair when he was in college, and he did his own work on it 
and kept it going because he had to. I'm inclined to think he has a certain 
aptitude for this stuff, and w/o that aptitude, no amount of necessity would 
have given birth to invention. I'd also mention that some years ago I took a 
battery of aptitude tests from Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation (anyone 
here familiar w/them?). The literature they give you says an aptitude for 
inductive reasoning is important in diagnostic work, and I scored in the 30th 
%ile in inductive reasoning. I also scored in the 10th %ile in finger 
dexterity. The examiner's take on the latter was, "This doesn't mean avoid 
work requiring finger dexterity like the plague, but do avoid work where you 
have to assemble things under time pressure."
 
Comments on all this?
 
--Andrew Buc, Seattle, WA; 29-Dec-97, 21:35