Underground Woman and I love to out scammers. Our favourite targets are those door-to-door home comfort guys: you know, the fast-talking sociopaths who are “working with the province” to replace your perfectly good, paid-in-full furnace with a new Energy Star model that you have to rent for at least a decade. I love it when they try to defend their bullshit sales tactics on our blog.
My next-favourite targets are auto mechanics. For some reason, we as a society have consigned special status on these flimflam artists, and for no reason other than that we don’t have the specialized automotive training that they possess. Which allows mechanics to charge outrageous sums for work that barely raises a sweat.
Take, for instance, your brakes: six hundred dollars, possibly more, to replace both front pads, when the parts cost at most $25 per (retail, not wholesale) and the entire job takes half an hour. One hour, maybe, if the old pads are difficult to remove.
Or a more personal example. One CAA-recommended mechanic had the gall to quote $5500 to overhaul an engine after it had started to mysteriously stall at high speed. He spent more than an hour analyzing my poor baby with an onboard diagnostic code reader ($199.99 at Canadian Tire), did not show me the results of his inspection, and then gave me every conceivable line of technobabble about what the cause of my misfortune might be. It was like exploratory surgery, he said: hence, the price.
In the end, it cost me six hours of my personal time, an old toothbrush, and a nine-dollar can of throttle body cleaner to resolve the problem myself.
A few bucks in parts and a half hour of labour does not several hundred, or several thousand, dollars make. These, my friends, are scams. And we’ve all paid into them, at one time or another.
But you don’t have to. Not really. Here are four ways to do the work yourself, and save many thousands of dollars in the process.
Auto Mechanics 101
Fall and winter are ideal seasons to sign up for super-cheap introductory auto mechanics lessons. If your local high school has a well-provisioned and functioning service bay, chances are it offers DIY car repair instruction at night.
Underground Woman and I found one such course up the street from our home: $75 each for six one-hour classes with a retired, Ford-certified mechanic. We consider that to be money very well spent.
This wasn’t a hands-on experience. In fact, it reminded me of a Victorian operating theatre: students gathered ‘round to watch a half dozen up-close-and-personal autopsies, using our own vehicles as cadavers. The point here was not to train the next generation of crack apprentice mechanics. It was to give us the confidence to repair our own cars, using basic tools, in our own driveways.
These aren’t spaceships. Passenger vehicles are not engineered by NASA and serviced by rocket scientists. Quite the reverse: they are designed to be assembled and repaired by people with high school educations. Once you accept that concept, the rest is simply growing enough of a pair to pull your engine apart and put it back together.
It was always my dream to restore a mustang convertible. In spite of Underground Woman’s considerable misgivings, I spent $3500 on a safetied and e-tested 2002 V6 with close to 300,000 kilometres on it. By mid-spring, I had cleaned that throttle bottle, replaced the thermostat, installed a new fan, switched to performance spark plugs, fixed the climate control switch, and put in a new driver-side electric window actuator. Total cost for all repairs: about $250.
By the end of the summer, my baby had a new Flowmaster exhaust system, new manifolds, new ignition coil, a new top, and some body work to deal with her rust issues. That was a little more expensive. Parts alone were about two grand, and I needed some professional help with the exhaust and the top. But I saved a fortune by sourcing everything myself, no markup, with labour as my only additional expense. You can measure labour charges on a wristwatch.
My baby is now at 325,000 kilometres and running like the badass Pussy Riot she was born to be.
I love my car. I know everything there is to know about her. They talk about Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
Repair Manual
Six weeks of observational training doesn’t magically confer an intimate knowledge of your vehicle’s innermost workings. For that, you need a repair manual.
No, not the owner’s manual. That’s for routine maintenance. I’m talking about a step-by-step guide, with pictures, to repair anything that could possibly go wrong with your wheels. I’m talking about the same book to which your dealer or independent mechanic refers when you bring your sweet ride in for service.
Where, you might ask, may such a magic document be found?
Canadian Tire. Amazon.ca, and Chapters/Indigo. In fact, you can find a repair manual for your car almost anywhere books or auto parts are sold, usually for between $10 and $20.
The two best publishers are Haynes and Chilton. They publish repair manuals by make, model, and year range.
Chilton has been publishing auto repair manuals for 80 years. The company offers an extensive library of very well-reviewed professional and DIY manuals for almost every brand. I prefer Chilton.
Haynes put out its first How To in 1956 and is now the leading publisher of repair manuals. Its catalogue includes cars, motorcycles, ATVs, and scooters. Amateurs especially give these books top marks.
Both Chilton and Haynes provide excellent repair information, but they present it very differently. If you can, find a copy of the Haynes and Chilton for your specific vehicle and judge for yourself which presentation best suits your abilities.
YouTube
If the step-by-step instructions in your repair manual remain insufficiently clear, in spite of the pictures, there’s always YouTube. It’s a free resource, and you will almost always find a video that shows you how to remedy the exact problem with your make, model, and year.
I use YouTube on my Surface Pro to complement the instructions in my Chilton manual. There’s considerable value in watching first, then mimicking what you watch, with the ability to replay key procedures until you have them memorized. This is how I dismantled my driver side door and replaced the actuator. I couldn’t have done it without a live visual reference.
Auto Parts Discounter
In every city, there is one auto parts discounter who supplies all of the dealers and mechanics in the area. Find that discounter, and you’ve found auto parts Nirvana.
Even at retail, these guys will often charge less than half what you’d pay for the same parts at Canadian Tire or PartSource (which is owned by Canadian Tire, so it’s pretty much the same thing). If your Auto Mechanics 101 teacher is friendly with the staff, they might even let you use his high school account to receive additional discounts.
Don’t underestimate the savings you’ll realize. Most OEM replacement parts aren’t terribly expensive, and you’ll likely keep an extra buck or two in your pocket as a result. But if you do enough of your own work at home, this can quickly add up to some serious coin.
Which discounter should you visit? Ask a taxi driver. The best parts source in town is always where the cabbies shop.