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so I don't know about on the professional level, but on the amateur level... just about anything you might want to do to your own car? you can find a youtube tu
by lsc 11y ago
so I don't know about on the professional level, but on the amateur level... just about anything you might want to do to your own car? you can find a youtube tutorial. Last time some asshole busted out my window to steal my laptop, I replaced it myself; took maybe an hour and a half and a $60 window from ebay. And a youtube tutorial. Same with replacing brakes/rotors, though those took considerably more time and effort. (have you ever replaced drum pads? Jesus. The video makes it look so easy, and I'm sure it is if you know what you are doing, but my god. Next time I'm letting the professionals handle that one.)
Even if I'm billing out at my full sysadmin rate, the cost to me of replacing the window was dramatically cheaper than the $400 my local repair shop quoted me for a new window. and considering that I pay for car repair out of post-tax money, the difference is even more dramatic. (now, this is silicon valley prices, but the window was for a decade-old toyota sienna, so it's not luxury car in silicon valley prices)
Especially if you are willing to go with 'craftsman' level brands rather than 'snap-on' level brands,[1] tools are pretty cheap compared to what you pay for auto repair, even if you want things like air tools and compressors.
All that said, while youtube is great for figuring out how to do a thing, it's less great for troubleshooting; but I think the reason why things like stackoverflow/serverfault is so great for debugging is that our error messages are printed out in text that we can search on.
And yeah, I've got an ODB2 reader, and for those errors, the internet is awesome. (I replaced my oxygen sensor at the request of my odb2 reader a while back, and that was also easy, facilitated by a youtube video again.) - but for "my car is making a funny noise" kind of errors, it's hard to search for the problem without knowing the jargon, you know?
[1]for auto tools, I really don't see much difference between the craftsman level brands and the better brands. I suspect this has to do with my skill level; I am very solidly in the shade tree school here, and I'm not ashamed to get the damn thing towed to someone who really knows what they are doing if I get in over my head, and that does sometimes happen.
For screwdrivers and other things that you use to rack up or take apart computers, I have strong opinions, and am significantly less happy if I have to do the job with my 'backup screwdriver' - also, I can tell you the difference between a phillips, pozi-drive, and JIS drivers and become agitated when someone assembles an object with fastener heads that are more than one of those.
- mikestew 11y ago[1]for auto tools, I really don't see much difference between the craftsman level brands and the better brands. The difference is that you don't use the same wrench a dozen times a day, day in and day out. Same reason my home toolboxes don't have roller bearing drawers: I don't open the drawers a dozen times a day anymore, so it's a waste of money for me now. As I said above, Craftsman is fine for the DIYer. It's the brand I frequently buy. I haven't talked to a Snap-On driver since I left the field.
- lsc 11y ago>The difference is that you don't use the same wrench a dozen times a day, day in and day out. yeah, that's kind of what I was trying to say with the bit about how I care very much about the tools for dealing with rackmount computers and how I have a favorite screwdriver. I didn't care about screwdrivers either until I started using them a lot. I would bet money that you are right and that if I worked on cars more, I would care more about getting a really nice set of automotive tools, but I don't work on cars that much, so I don't really understand how the really good tools are different from the merely "good enough" tools, because that comes with experience. But my main point was that there are tools that are adequate for the shadetree mechanic that are cheap enough to more than pay for themselves after a single use in a shadetree level project. If you can afford to have your car fixed, you have the capital to buy adequate (maybe not really nice... but adequate) tools to get started with your automotive hobby or the beginning of your education as a mechanic. I do imagine that like IT people, most, or at least a whole lot of mechanics start out as hobbyists. The two seem similar enough to me.