When the transmission in my neighbors Ford Explorer started to smoke she hoped to avoid the repair shop by letting her husband fix it at home. Find the problem, get the parts, buy a repair manual and fix it myself. If needed, buy a rebuilt transmission and pop her in. Sounds simple, eh?
But her husband struggled to remove the bulk of covers and trim under the car surrounding the transmission, breaking half of the parts removed, and when he used a bar to pry the exhaust system down, it broke an exhaust stud on the exhaust manifold.. What came next was even worse. The Ford dealer wanted $200 to replace, not fix the manifold.
Mechanics say they’ve seen it all in recent months, including incorrectly applied brake pads and antifreeze poured into engines, engine oil in the transmission and so forth.
A lot of people, they’re in dire straits monetarily, as far as I’m concerned. Trying to do this stuff at home in their driveway.
The results can be frustrating, expensive and sometimes outright dangerous in several ways.
An old customer of mine took her Chevy Trailblazer SUV to a back yard car-expert, the neighbor charged $500 to repair her front and back brake system, replacing rotors and calipers, far less than the going rates at nearby repair shops.
Later, on a highway ramp, her brakes developed an odd feeling, she pulled to the side of the road. The problem? Her neighbor installed one of the parts that bolts to the wheels wrong, setting off a chain reaction that caused the brakes to react poorly.
The car had to be towed at about $100.00, and she ended up paying an additional $400 to have it fixed at my shop.
While well-intentioned, many people forget that today’s cars are vastly more complicated than models made just years ago. Most transmissions are so computer-controlled that owners can’t spot problems without access to specific scan tools and data programs that cost thousands of bucks.
Even jobs that were once simple, such as changing the oil, can take hours to complete now.
Home mechanics are not able to do nearly the work that they used to do , in many cases it’s even going beyond the heads of a lot of technicians who aren’t keeping up-to-date.
Even so, some car owners remain unflappable. I was using Google and studying queries for the terms “transmissions” and “transmissions for sale” up from roughly 77 percent and 99 percent respectively in just the past month, according to my data.
Other car repair search terms-replacement transmissions, reconditioned transmissions and remanufactured transmissions remain at three-year highs.
The urge to cut out the middleman extends to even the wealthy, Most feel the need to be frugal and save money.
But that doesn’t mean repairs come easily. My buddy tried to change the transmission oil on his BMW sedan and wound up covered in dirty oil, after towing it to the dealer, he was saying I felt like it was an episode of “The Three Stooges”.
Auto shops say there’s an easy way to save money: Just be upfront about the repairs you’ve tried at home. Most do-it-yourselfers, play dumb when mechanics start asking questions about what went wrong with the car.
Rather than saving themselves time and money by telling us the whole story, they’ll just say, ‘This doesn’t seem to be working,'” and, “without going into the details of what they’ve already done to destroy the whole system.”
To piece together what went wrong, mechanics typically have to start asking questions, and lots of them.
“It’s like, ‘What’s the real story, Dude?'” I would say. “You play the 100 question game before the full truth comes out.
People who try the at-home tinkering are usually out of work or low on cash.
Many of them are men who work as contractors or handymen in another trade and think, no problem, if the slob down the street can do it, let me apply my skills to car repair.
It’s those people who have that mindset, “Hey I can fix this, I can fix that”.
My neighbor with the smoking transmission learned her lesson. Before he unceremoniously removed half of the transmission while damaging most of what was removed, the job turned from a bad modulator, about a 75 dollar repair, into a rebuilt transmission.
Needless to say, her husband won’t be laying his hands on the car anytime soon. And we will be going to a competent mechanic next time I think I need a transmission repair, and, he’s not going to do any more car repairs.”
Enough said.
