I'm like you. I fix my own things including vehicles.

In the past, schools had shop classes and home economics. I took both when I was growing up. Many schools don't have these classes anymore so kids don't get a foundation in being hands on. They don't get comfortable doing their own things. I think this is bad for society.

I know retired folks who work as handy men who have people in their 20's and early 30's as clients. They do simple things like hang pictures on walls (not joking).

Skilled trades working in plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, and so forth are going to be in higher demand in the future. Many are hitting retirement age and the back fill behind them isn't happening. This is happening at the same time construction is going up. Where I live it's almost impossible to find someone to do minor work around your house. Everyone is off doing the big ticket jobs.

Of course, the idea of recycle old things and buy new isn't working out so well. It's often throw out the old (where we fill dumps at increasing rates) and buy new. Setup by companies who make more money that way. For their financial benefit rather than our or our planets benefit.

Fixing things has never been easier. You can learn a ton a youtube these days. There are books, too. Parts are easier than ever to find and order.

A bit tangential, but construction isn't rising. More houses were built in Los Angeles in the 50s than today. More in New York in the 20s. But the populations are far larger and expand more. (Hence the explosion in housing prices.)

Viewing the data is a bit less extreme at first: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST You can see that we are around the mean today. However the population is 2x larger...

also, reduction in household sizes.

all wealthy countries have observed significant falls in household size over the past century. tenements used to have whole multigenerational households in a single room. that's obviously not tenable today (and it shouldn't be) but now the same amount of people needs more units.

That graph shows new development rising. It’s not as high as it once was but it’s an upward trend. The valley was around 12-13 years ago.

Talking to people currently in the industry, they are busier than they’ve been in years. I know people trying to find contractors for small jobs who can’t.

NY and CA may not be having a lot of new construction. But, other places are. California is seeing a population decline

>>Parts are easier than ever to find and order.

So true. I was surprised to be able to replace a circuit board on a (probably) 20 year old garage door opener. Surprised, in that I had no knowledge of the things, couldn't really be sure I was searching for the right part, no instructions for replacement on YouTube, etc. Fortunately you could look at the drive, see that there was a PC board in there which was screwed in so you could remove it and look it over, google the part number.

Pretty sure if I had called a specialist out to repair it, they would have told me it's not worth repairing, hard to get parts, will just break again in a different way due to its age, just get a new one. And that argument is probably both true and well intended.

So I’m one of those people who doesn’t know how to fix anything; I wish I did! I’ll tell you what holds me back: I didn’t grow up around anyone particularly handy, so I don’t know what I don’t know.

Simple example: I was trying to hang some shades in my kid’s room. First set went in fine, second set, my drill hit something too hard for it (brick? Metal?). At this point I’m kind of stuck. I can search Google for this scenario but it’s hard to know conclusively which situation I’m in, and I don’t know how dangerous or destructive what I’m doing could be.

This is probably laughable to lots of you who know, intuitively from experience, what’s happening and what to do, but for someone who had no idea like me, it’s pretty intimidating.

(Coda: we bought stick-on shades and they were trivially easy to install and worked great)

I understand the predicament where you have a project that needs to be completed but you don't have the background skills to understand how to do it efficiently or at all.

I would like to point you to a subreddit [0] where you can get answers to questions like the one you described. There are lots of people like myself who hang out looking for inexperienced people who just need guidance since they already have the motivation.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY

People post everything from complex projects that took them multiple months to complete to ordinary maintenance tasks like replacing light fixtures or door knobs.

I hang out there a lot. I'm a guy who grew up fixing things and just never stopped even when I had the money to pay someone else. I (we) don't mind passing on useful skills to inexperienced people. It's very satisfying to know that someone tackled a problem that they thought was difficult and solved it using something you recommended.

Good luck!

You probably hit a "nail plate" or just happened to hit a drywall screw directly.

It can be really hard to start off without someone to at least bounce ideas off of over a beer; one of the nice things about knowing handy people, for sure.

>I didn’t grow up around anyone particularly handy

I grew up in a similar household. Fortunately I was the handyman for my family. I never had tools but I used to improvise. I also used to fix some of my hot wheel toy cars and I longed for a soldering iron and pliers.

Now I really wished I could learn in a more formal way on how to repair and maintain things. I have severe anxiety dealing with people and the attitude and workmanship of some of the repairmen makes my anxiety worse.

Kudos for you on starting a new life long addicting hobby. One of the things in repairs is that sometime you encounter problems that force you to learn new things. Why is there a metal or brick in your wall? What can you do next time to know if a particular wall has a metal or brick? Learning how to solve these kind of problems is what makes them so fun. I've ruined countless things over the years but managed to fixed much much more.

Oddly, I've gotten a similar response when I tell people I'm building my own house by hand instead of hiring contractors.

When they ask "why on earth would you do that," I just say: "because we're rapidly moving toward a point where nobody actually knows how to do anything because they just hired someone else to do it and now those people don't exist (and other people weren't interested in inheriting their knowledge). 20 years down the road, I'd like to be able to fix stuff when it breaks without having to wait months, years, or potentially never to get it fixed."

There's a deep, deep need for a resurgence of DIY culture across the board.

If I had the time, I would have a house built by others when it comes to concrete, framing, roof, electrical and drywall. The repetitive skills those tradesmen have is far more efficient than DIY. I quickly learned that by watching concrete videos on youtube of professionals. For DIY, I've come to appreciate the time and quality it takes to do the finishing work such trim. Oil based paint with high VOCs can't be bought in California unless it is small such as a pint or quart, but it's the most durable and looks the nicest for trim. It can be ordered online from out of state though.

I'm building for myself without concrete, stick-frame or drywall. I decided to go more traditional with stone and timber frame joinery. It's an approach that takes a lot more attention in the labour and is hard to mass produce but will last as close to indefinitely as anything can, as well as being more environmentally friendly.

Doing this has given me a much stronger appreciation for how much we rely on fossil combustion in all the basic infrastructure of our society. Producing things for longevity is going to be a big part of reducing our carbon emissions, otherwise we just need to lug all that heavy concrete or steel or whatever around again every couple decades when we remake the poorly made things.

> I'm not sure how to fix it. We have a lot of people who are afraid to get their hands dirty, designing the things that are supposed to be the future of our civilization. That's a real problem.

I think "garbage" disposal is way too cheap: books, clothing and electronics are things that should be really expensive to throw away as most often they can be re-used, re-purposed or at least gutted. When disposing them as garbage is more expensive and less convenient than finding someone who wants to take the stuff, people will be motivated to at least donate them.

Getting rid of trash service would solve a lot, yes... though it would take some adjustments. It's a lot harder if you're denser urban.

I got tired of paying a lot of money to have trash hauled, so I solved it around our property. I built a trash trailer out of some old stuff laying at a relative's place (old pickup bed trailer and a topper, some new plywood for the bottom, some Great Stuff foam to seal it up, and a couple used tires), and I now haul trash every 18 months, aiming for 24 months. Food waste goes to the property cats or the compost bins, and I'm able to separate out almost all our waste stream into assorted recycling or reusable packing material (boxes, newspaper, random padding, stuff like that gets reused either by me or by some other people locally with some ecommerce sorts of sales flows). Very little ends up in the trash trailer, and it's not organic, so it just sits there until I haul it.

It's really quite eye opening just how much waste there is in the normal flows of packaging material. I have a local(ish...) way to deal with plastic waste, so I can deal with the "mixed unusual plastics" in a recycling flow as well (it goes to be burned to offset coal use in a cement kiln over in Utah), but that makes up an awful lot of volume in our waste.

With the metal recycling, though, I'm "net positive" on annual trash spend now, and I'm far better able to optimize our waste streams down than I was before. But I also recognize this isn't something that will scale nearly as easily as I can do it.

My trash pickup is included in my rent, but to take out the trash involves walking 500 feet accross the property, which turns out is a lot of effort carrying tens of pounds of awkward trash.

So I make less trash now. That cheese danish in the store looks tasty, but the plastic clamshell packaging is incredibly space inefficient as trash, so I'll buy the cookies instead, they're in easy to compact paper boxes. Maybe you think I'm putting a burden on myself but I didn't need either the danish or the cookies in the first place!

Donating itself is also fraught, however. Very few people are going to want a 20-year-old pulp book, soiled magazine, out-of-date manual, etc. Librarians commonly have to curate their collections which includes throwing out a ton of books, often donated books. Clothing is also often stained, holey, or dirty. While clothing can be repurposed to cleaning rags I suppose, I don't know if one can easily repurpose books.

> While clothing can be repurposed to cleaning rags I suppose,

Not anymore, when almost all clothing is partly synthetic. If it isn't 100% cotton or 100% wool, it is probably going straight to a landfill.

You can find online the absolute bales of clothing crap Goodwill et all throw away; people use them as a dumping ground for garbage so they don't have to feel bad about it.

I thought most donated clothing ends up going to "the rag trade".

> Donating itself is also fraught, however.[...]

That again is a problem the receiver of a donation has to take care of as they'll have to pay for the disposal of actual garbage. When I was donating my library before traveling for a few years, someone was coming to my apartment, checking out my donation and he did reject 2 or 3 (of a few thousand).

> Clothing

... can in worst case be shredded and used for thermal insulation.

It's not just cheap. The effects of disposing of all the things are out of side and out of mind. People don't see the results of their actions.

If you get rid of garbage disposal, you get people dumping things in random places. Maybe it's more expensive, maybe some places can enforce not doing it, but if you make instigating negative externalities the easiest solution, what you get is the destruction of the commons.

Two thoughts come to mind ...

[1] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [2] Shop Class as Soul Craft

Huge impact for me over my decades here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_... [2] http://www.matthewbcrawford.com/new-page-1-1-2

I would add https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Volkswagen-Alive-Step-Step/dp/15...

title does seem to hint at [1] indeed

Owned an '86 Subaru BRAT GL (EA81, not EA82). You could take the whole damned car apart with a 10mm, 12mm, 14mm, and 17mm socket. The 4 speed 4wd (not awd, that came later) transmission, however, is a pain in the ass to get apart. I had to do that to replace the input shaft seal. It was a great car.

Nowadays, the running joke in the Subaru community is that you change the spark plugs any time you have the engine out of the car whether they're due or not. My wife has a 2018 Impreza. It's somewhat more cramped in the engine compartment. I dread the day I have to work on it.

I have a 1995 BMW R1100GS. You could do almost anything to that motorcycle using the toolkit that lives under the seat.

The one exception is checking the valve clearances; that requires feeler gauges that weirdly aren't included (although the kit includes feelers for the ABS sensors and valve checks are necessary every oil change). I haven't replaced the final drive lube because, without removing the rear end, it requires suspending the motorcycle vertically, although I have siphoned much of the lube out and replaced that.

re transmission -- someone told me a long time ago, you really do not want to open a transmission

A manual isn't that bad, and I know people who work on them, but the main problem is that they're just an entirely different set of tools and techniques from just about everything else. You need a bunch of different tools for "rotating part" assembly and disassembly, and a bunch of different skills. Mostly, manual transmissions don't fail randomly, though.

Automatics be black magic boxes that will fail expensively, though. :/

Precisely this. If you don't need to actually rebuild a manual and just need to get to a seal that can only be replaced by cracking the case apart, it's not that bad. There just isn't that much to a manual.

Keep it clean, and work with care and diligence, and you're probably not going to get in truly deep shit.

I'll second that a manual in normal service is unlikely to fail catastrophically. The synchros can wear or the transmission can start popping out of gear, but they tend to experience graceful degradation, and the control software is sufficiently adaptable to work around the quirks.

Not true at all. They do have a scary reputation and unlike a lot of other vehicle maintenance, you need to be very aware of cleanliness. But they are just mechanical devices. They can be taken apart, worn components replaced, and reassembled. Watch Gary Ferraro on YouTube if you're interested.

> just pay someone else to do it

Sometimes that's what you have to do. I generally like to have at least a cursory understanding of what the person I'm paying is doing.

> Well, it doesn't matter if it's easy to fix, we'll just recycle it and build a new one

Last night I've diagnosed the problem with a Z80 computer - the one I wrote my first lines of code in 1988. It cannot be replaced. I'm waiting for a chip to come from China to fix. Cost $1.50 + my spare time.

Some things just have to be recycled and rebuild. Batteries come to mind. Modern cars should be getting progressively easier to repair - they have onboard computers that basically _know_ what's wrong. But the parts we replace are getting larger and larger. Where we would replace a capacitor, we are replacing entire computers.

Some things it's worth paying for because the person you're paying has years of experience - I can hang and tape drywall but I absolutely suck at it and will willingly pay to get that done.

Other things are worth paying for because the tools to do it easy are very expensive.

But in many of those cases, you should still have a general idea of what is going on, or have hired someone who does (this is often the general contractor).

Unfortunately, I've encountered the same thing. It's universal though.

Tinkering is a lost art. Increasingly, people seem to just watch others tinker or solve problems. Why do x if you can just search for what happens on youtube? Why think through the process or what a reasonable answer is if you can just google (andisearch is good too) it? (Why search, when you can just post it as a question on a forum?) 10 years ago, commenters here would talk about tinkering with their systems in basic, when asked how they learned to program. Nowadays, people talk about textbooks or the like. But why?

Everything is more complex and complicated. Fixing something in 1950 was easy, you could wire it yourself with copper, you could replace the vacuum tubes. Nowadays, you can just replace electronic parts - but you can't make the circuit board yourself (well, some people do, but that's much more in depth, requires very fine motor control and you are still just soldering tiny components. I suspect a lot of would-have-tinkereds give up when they take apart their x with a screw driver and can't figure out what anything is. Their curiosity nipped right in the bud, they default to trusted solutions and devote less of their daily mindshare to understanding, and eventually improving the world.

(Even there, it's not like many people could create vacuum tubes in their garage in 1950 to repair something...)

You can do your own surface mount soldering on boards for assembly, but it's an awful lot easier to design a single sided board (at least for the surface mount stuff) and hot plate it to get the solder melted. It's rather magical to watch surface tension in action - parts just... zoop right into the positions.

I live in weird circles, I suppose, where this and "do your own PCB etching" are still things.

> but you can't make the circuit board yourself

True. Thankfully, they have become dirt cheap. I can design and push a button to order a multilayer board from China, which is going to be done by the same industrial processes as any commercial boards, and will even be tested for me. I don't have to worry that I left it etching for too long. Or drilling holes. Or silk screening text. All that, and shipping costs more than the board.

> I suspect a lot of would-have-tinkereds give up when they take apart their x with a screw driver and can't figure out what anything is

I suspect your memory is playing tricks with you (as it does with everybody). Open an old CRT monitor and you won't know what anything is. Sure, you may learn what the individual components are, but you need a lot of schematic study to even understand what all those components are even doing. Today, we can just open a phone and go "oh, that's the wifi chip".

It is still possible to do SMD work at home. Air rework stations have dropped from 4 digit dollars to 2 digits. Other tools are getting cheaper too. Oscilloscopes have never been cheaper (and, if you don't need anything fancy, at least in the US there's a flood of perfectly good used models).

Microcontrollers are incredibly cheap. A lot of what was done by hardware today can be handled with software. With <$1 parts.

3d printing allows us to not have to drill soap containers for our electronics cases.

Also, all those old electronics magazines? Most of those circuits can be built today just fine.

People dabbling in electronics were always a small subset of the population. I am willing to bet that, percentage wise, those numbers are way bigger today.

>requires very fine motor control and you are still just soldering tiny components

I thought the key fob for my used Impreza just needed a new battery but the relay had actually fallen off the board.

I had to buy a soldering iron and fine point tips but the rush I got when it finally settled in place and I could lock my car remotely was intense. Or maybe that was the lack of ventilation.

My wheel hub and brakes on the other hand… I’d need various grinders, pullers and oxyacetylene to get through 12y of Ontarian corrosion. Not even a 4lb hammer on a breaker bar shifted my axle nut or caliper bracket bolts. With rounds of bolt blaster and blowtorch.

Luckily my local garage charges reasonable rates and lets me supply my own parts. From here on out maintenance is gonna be a breeze!

If you work on older rusted vehicles, a high quality impact gun and air hammer are worth every penny. A shitty impact gun will take off like 60% of things, a high quality one will take off 90% of things. And for the final 10%, (likely in combination with torches and large breaker bars and impact gun) you can air hammer the living fuck out of the bolt or part for 15 minutes and it should help break apart some of the rust.

And for future self, a tube of anti-seize.

I questioned the need for my heavy equipment "fuck-you" sized impact gun when I bought it, but ive helped out more than a couple people remove old rusted on shit with it that their cheaper consumer impact gun simply couldn't handle.

I have plenty of money for these tools but what I can't afford in modern day America is a shed to put the tools in, a garage to work on my car in, and an alternative means of transportation to get me to the parts shop while I take 3 days in my off hours trying to figure things out because I'm inexperienced.

I’ve always lived in places with crap driveways but this one is nice, paved and level. Unfortunately no room for a garage or shed so yea, I spend about 20 minutes hauling various tools out of the basement (and hoping they don’t get stolen) before I can even loosen my lug nuts.

I came across this great article from 1986 about adding an airlock door to your entry way the other day.

https://books.google.com/books?id=NUzwukoJzGIC&pg=PA96&sourc...

Give it a read and realize the author is suggesting you repurpose other doors, and mismatched pieces and parts of larger windows to create an entry that looks like it’s off from a luxury home for $62. He assumes the reader knows how to cut and set glass, separate door frames, cut ellipses, and all sorts of little things that very few people today would have the skills or tools for. Read on and you’ll see that just by illustrating alternative designs the reader is meant to understand how to build it. It’s “Draw the rest of the owl” to us today, but it wasn’t then. This made me realize the great loss of practical knowledge that has been going on over the last 30-40 years.

I work in the tech industry as well but in a more hands-on division (hp inkjet) and in a small town (Corvallis OR). Here it's the norm to work on your own stuff, build your own structures or fix cars, really mostly for fun and out of pride than for economical reasons.

I think this attitude does carry over into our product design efforts but only to a degree - in consumer tech it makes sense to make your product somewhat robust and serviceable but a device from 10 years ago, with lo-speed Wifi, no bluetooth, no USB, etc. just isn't useful anymore. On the flipside, the manufacturing tools we design for our own use are so robust and reconfigurable that they are still cranking out product 20+ years later.

Is a printer with low-speed WiFi really so obsolete? I can't really imagine that that is the bottleneck while printing (of course, lots of more recent printers have lost the ethernet jacks, so really they are downgrades).

Same situation, hardly anyone believes me that I'm skilled in construction, electrical, plumbing, electronics, and car mechanics in addition to my IT skills, because hardly anyone actually tinkers with things or repair them. Meanwhile, I always followed my dad's advice (who was doing construction when I grew up) that you should invest your time and money in tools and knowledge, not in disposable things. I can disassemble, repair, and reassemble nearly anything, and thanks to that have built my own high quality things, repaired many older high quality things, and generally structured my life around "buy it for life" with repairability as part of it.

Unfortunately, the one exception to above is laptop & phone, where I buy Apple products because they are just clearly the superior option, but unfortunately are not very repairable at all. Nonetheless, I kept my iPhone 8 going until just recently where I finally bumped to an iPhone 14 Pro, and I have kept my 2013 MacBook Pro going and am still using it, although it may be replaced soon.

I really wish things were built to be repairable, but like you I have long suspected (and cursed) the engineers who design products have never actually tinkered with them so don't even consider this as part of the design. They are only optimized for assembly because there is a business cost reason to do so, but repairability doesn't matter to them.

Its deliberate. Things are deliberately made hard to repair so you are forced to buy a new one when it breaks.

That's a cynical take -- I'm not sure it's untrue, but another factor is cost. Things that are not meant to be maintainable also tend to be cheaper to design and build initially. You don't have to worry about maintenance access when you design the product, or making the components replaceable, or using industry-standard parts.

By avoiding maintenance concerns in design and production, you can sell a cheaper product, and the vast majority of buyers will look at purchase price and not total cost of ownership when they are evaluating choices.

Additionally, production is more easy to automate than repairwork, and what you cannot automate you can outsource to countries with cheaper labour.

As long as demand (and other circumstances, i.e. currently somewhat of a "Ha!") are sort of predictable, hiding the length of your supply chain can be easily done by shipping things over in bulk and sufficiently in advance. People won't care whether their widget was produced five minutes ago in the back room of the store or three months ago on the other side of the globe and then shipped over on a slow boat, as long as it's available when they want to buy it.

For repairwork on the other hand, the same procedure doesn't work out as well, because you can no longer hide the latency inherent in minimising shipping costs.

Just because it's cynical doesn't mean it's wrong.

Just because it's cynical doesn't mean it's right either.

I'd say semi deliberate. Market dynamics evolved to cut prices extremely low.. so manufacturers don't make enough cash to want to design complex and manage parts etc.

Most printers are horrible.. even the assembly is hell, but if you pay a pro model (6x times the price) you get a modular and easy to open device.

The aversion to getting one's hands dirty I've found is common in software engineering as well.

It just takes the form of nobody wanting to inherit someone else's project. Nobody wants maintenance tasks, everyone wants to do green-field development or if they must inherit some existing product they quickly conclude a rewrite from scratch is necessary.

I too have a scrappy hands-dirty DIY IRL history starting with childhood. When I entered the software industry after years of sysadminning, it became very clear my enthusiasm for facing existing complexities head-on was somewhat unique among my peers as well.

But I think this is a more general struggle everyone encounters in life; it's always more attractive to create new problems than solve existing ones. (I'm pretty sure that's a quote I've heard/read at some point, but its origin escapes me)

Some examples from other domains:

Relationships (my mate and I are arguing and I've been sleeping on the couch, my OkCupid profile just notified me; cheat)

Automobiles (my car needs tires, brakes, a paint job, and thorough cleaning, the car dealership down the road is having a sale; new car loan)

Living spaces and projects/hobbies (the closet is an unmitigated disaster area, I can't even open its door anymore, but the spare bedroom is empty and I need to start a new project rather than finish any of the dozen abandoned ones occupying said closet; new projects in spare room until it too overflows) This starts to look like hoarding, but it's really just backing down from solving existing problems in favor of making new ones.

The list goes on, I'm sure you can come up with a bunch of examples yourself.

Starting anew is an immediate gratification, anything else, not so much until you make forward progress which almost certainly will be a slog since the immediate gratification low hanging fruit phase was already burned by either past you or someone else altogether.

Personally I find it far more rewarding to resolve existing difficult problems, especially now that I have so much experience that whenever I start anew I'm fully aware that I'm likely making problems future me will have to deal with. Existing problems usually have a bunch of evidence to scrutinize and inform what you're doing to make meaningful progress. Real problem solving. Creating from scratch is problem making.

Honestly I suspect it comes down to a sort of anxiety about failure.

Well written. That really resonated with me.

I work in IT and grew up in a locksmith/car repair shop where I got my hands dirty very early on. I got my DIY/repair attitude from my father who does almost anything by himself - building and maintaining houses, making furniture, metal work, vehicle maintenance. So that is also deeply rooted in me.

It's not uncommon in my circle to DIY, mostly as a hobby, to save money or because availability of craftsmanship is so poor (waiting months to get someone to do it).

I really like to get broken stuff, fix it and then use or sell it. Such work leaves you with a broad knowledge, and also who is designing repairable machines. Old style italian espresso machines come to my mind. While only some components are standardized (piping, thermostats, portafilters, e61 brew group) many proprietary components needed for repairs are still openly sold on 3rd party stores on the Internet. Sometimes the schematic is also published. The newer and more integrated plastic machines are less of a joy to work on, alas. That's mostly toss-and-rebuy gear.

Before I buy anything, I check maintainability first. Parts availability, hackability, etc. Glued stuff, soldered on chips (formerly RAM, wifi, CPUs etc), nonswappable batteries, hard cloud dependencies and similar scaries me.

I'm similar, except a Jeep guy. I was reticent to move into the new millennia Cherokees because I was worried about all the computerization of everything. When push came to shove I bought an adapter (Hell yes Jeep/Dodge/Ram for making this possible at a reasonable price!) and changed my air springs. I was initially quite pissed, who swaps coil springs for air!? But in the end it was way easier than changing the leafs on my old XJ.

Labor costs in the Netherlands are frankly insane. Unless you are paying under the table there's no reason to have someone fix a coffee machine or vacuum cleaner. As for laptops, printers etcetera you can just get a tax rebate and buy new ones.

I am on your same wavelength. Props to you for pursuing this mentality. I believe you would enjoy the book “The Innovation Delusion” by Vinsel and Russell

> I work in the tech industry. I'm somewhat rare in that I also work on my own vehicles, do my own maintenance, repair things, build my own stuff around the property, etc. A lot of coworkers at various places I've worked over the years view this as somewhere between "eccentric" and "slightly mad." "Why would you do that yourself, just pay someone else to do it!" is the common sentiment.

I feel like it's partly a consequence of a highly specialized society. I'm not sure how to fix it. There's an opportunity cost. Why would I change the oil in my car when it's $40 to get it changed at the shop? Since I don't change my oil, I now don't know the basics of how to jack up the vehicle, I don't understand how to use the torque wrench to tighten the drain plug and I'm basically missing all the fundamental skills so I got no knowledge to build on.

The other contributor, is that growing up in the city, in an apartment, there was never any opportunity to work with my hands. I still recall a shop class in high school. I got to use a lathe and a oxy acetylene torch. That was many years ago now.

Now that I'm older, I make conscious effort to learn how to do things with my hands. There are things that I still must outsource, when they are on a critical path. For example if the car is down because the suspension needs to be replaced, I'm not going to spend 3 months researching and fixing it. We need it now.

I've come to really appreciate the famous Heinlein quote:

> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Im also very much attracted to the idea of a "renaissance man" [1] :

> Embodying a basic tenet of Renaissance humanism that humans are limitless in their capacity for development, the concept led to the notion that people should embrace all knowledge and develop their capacities as fully as possible.

"Specialization is for insects" indeed.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath

> Why would I change the oil in my car when it's $40 to get it changed at the shop?

The shop might be incompetent and strip the threads for example (very common) which will cost you a lot more money down the road when it's discovered and becomes a problem.

But, aside that, even competent shops can't provide the same quality of care than DIY because they have to operate on the booked time it takes to do a job. So they can't deviate from doing exactly what's on the work list.

Meanwhile, when I work on my cars I'm taking time to look around and pay attention and address any other upcoming problems I might notice even if they are entirely unrelated to the work I started out doing. And I clean the parts and nearby parts as I go, which a shop could never afford to do even if they cared.

Oil changes tend to be a loss leader so you can't often save money by DIY (but I always DIY due to the reasons above). But on other types of work you usually also save a lot of money by DIY.

For instance I replaced the fence between us and neighbor for ~$500 in materials. That neighbor had to also replace his other side fence (between him and third neighbor). Identical fence, but cost them over $4K to have it done by a contractor.

> Why would I change the oil in my car when it's $40 to get it changed at the shop?

Because you like your car...

Every decade or so, I try a fast oil change place, usually when I'm in a hurry, and it sells me on changing my own oil for the next decade, because it's either obscenely overpriced, they screw up my car somehow, or both.

Last time I took vehicles in for oil changes, it cost nearly $200 for my truck (I know it takes a lot of oil, but ffs...), and for the car, they didn't get the airbox back together properly, so I had a nice post-air-filter leak. They even left the bolt they couldn't get lined up sitting in the windshield air inlet tray - because they'd not lined the filter box up right. And, they forgot a crush washer on the drain plug, so I had a dinner plate sized oil puddle under the car in the morning. Sorry, I see no point in paying someone to screw my vehicles up like that.

DW took our car to Costco for a free scheduled tire rotation (mandatory to maintain the tire warranty) about a month ago.

She called saying "they're saying 'the lug nut broke'"; I was thinking (and asking) "how is that possible (it can't possibly be a defective lug nut)?" 10 minutes later "the stud is broken"; 5 minutes later "they [Costco] admitted to breaking it".

The resolution was to have a local shop replace the lug stud and get reimbursed for the repair cost: $125 (the part might have cost $2)!

I chalk this episode up to them hiring warm bodies lacking any mechanical experience or aptitude (to the extent of not being aware of "righty tighty, lefty-loosey") and handing them an impact wrench.

Huh. A couple months back, I helped someone replace a broken stud in their garage with some C-clamps and hammers. On a lot of vehicles, it's just "press the old one out, pull the new one in."

But there's a reason that r/justrolledintotheshop talks about "uggaduggas" as a torque spec - to make fun of the people who just let an impact driver pound away at things like lug nuts. Cross threaded? Screw it, more uggaduggas! It'll snap when someone takes it off? Not My Problem!

Oddly enough, it's not always righty tighty. I rode motorcycles that had axles that were the opposite (so normal rotation would tighten them), and it was well known on the forums that if you let a shop just go at it, they'd try to loosen it, tighten it, smash the spacer, and your wheel bearings would then fail in short order. I always either watched the shop take my wheels off, or just took the wheels off myself and took them in to get the rubber replaced (alarmingly frequently - I was riding a lot).

To be fair, it might not have been Costco's fault, it could have been the last guys to put the wheel on who impact gunned the fuck out of it, or shitty studs or lugs, or a combination of all three. That said, Costco should have had zero problems replacing a broken stud on the spot, any business who regularly removes wheel from cars should be prepared to replace a few studs here and there. It would be like hiring a guy to change your light fixtures but he can't finish because he didn't bring any spare wire nuts because he assumes their are already good wirenuts on the old light fixtures.

Well, the tires were purchased (and mounted) at Costco, and rotated at least once previously by Costco (since the path of least resistance for warranty maintenance is for them to have the records of doing the (free rotations) themselves; they'd have a hard time arguing in the event of a warranty claim that they'd rotated the tires incorrectly).

So history argues in favor of it being their fault. In fairness, they were apologetic and never tried to absolve themselves of responsibility.

Regarding "Costco should have had zero problems replacing a broken stud on the spot", I wish it were so (would have saved a bit of hassle), but which expert person at Costco is going to be capable of doing this? They seemed to have shop nearby that they farmed such work out to, but this problem occurred on a Sunday...

I would almost certainly have been comfortable driving it on the remaining lug nuts for a day or two until I could deal with it. The only way I can think of that I'd not just do that would be if it were a 4-stud wheel; anything with five or more studs shouldn't have a problem with one missing.

That said... I'd have wanted to pop into the shop and personally inspect the remaining studs to make sure they weren't on the brink of failure as well.

Costco sheared off the locking socket for my weird locking lug nuts, so I daresay they're more capable of some to just uggadugga it until it (usually) works.

I've also had similar bad experiences, usually at large "chain" garages where turnover is probably high. I think it's one thing to pay a mechanic you trust to do some work on your car and quite another to leave your car at a chain garage where it will be prodded at by some kid fresh out of high school and then taken for a joy ride to "test" it.

It's also not uncommon for garages to under or over torque fasteners because they're in a hurry. My friend had his power steering pump come off the engine block while he was driving because the garage didn't bother torquing it properly after replacing it.

>Because you like your car...

>Every decade or so, I try a fast oil change place, usually when I'm in a hurry, and it sells me on changing my own oil for the next decade, because it's either obscenely overpriced, they screw up my car somehow, or both.

The last time I resorted to having someone else change the oil in my car, because I was in a place where I couldn't DIY and didn't have time to go to a relative's place to do so, I used an actual garage and not a quick-change place, thinking they'd do a better job, I provided the oil, and they managed to overfill it by more than a quart.

The people that take jobs like these are simply incompetent; if they were smart, they'd be doing other jobs.

You change your own oil so that you develop the skills to do a brake job, which you do yourself to develop the skills to work on the suspension.

That said, depending on where you live and whether or not you have winter, any fasteners on the underside of your car may be rusted to the point where you need the oxy-acetylene torch you used in high school to get the damned things loose. The nuts and bolts on the steering and suspension systems live a particularly rough life.

I'm the exact same way. It's strange that it's seen as "eccentric" to be "well rounded"