Fix the car yourself or take it to the garage?

It’s clear that in the times we live in today, when something happens to the car and the moment comes to face a repair of the kind we know is expensive, we start to go pale and tremble like leaves at the thought of the bill that the mechanic on duty is going to put in our hands, at which point we have (at some point) thought What if we did it ourselves?

It turns out that I’m one of those people who enjoy getting their hands dirty in the engine and doing whatever repairs they can humanly manage, without taking it to the garage. The truth is that some minor jobs can be done yourself with a bit of ingenuity and, of course, having the necessary tools. Many repairs, replacements or adjustments are really easy to do, but others require more skill. Still, as time goes by, and the more jobs you finish well by yourself, you become bolder and approach things with more confidence.

But the problem comes when what we’re doing doesn’t turn out well and we finally have to take it to some mechanic who gets us out of the problem and, along the way, spend more money than we wanted to spend in the first place by doing it ourselves.

Yesterday I was about to replace the bearings of one of my car’s wheels, which had started making strange noises a couple of days earlier. From previous experience, I had only once watched a professional mechanic do it, sequences and images I tried to fix in my mind so that, when the time came to do it myself, I could say “I’ve done it”.

With black hands and after half a day’s work, I found the problem bearing almost welded, fused to the axle, and I could only remove some fragments. What remained of the part resisted and kept resisting coming out, so in the end I gave up and handed the job over to a mechanic. In my defense, I’ll say that not even the mechanic has been able to assure, at first glance, that he can remove the remains of the bearing without using very extreme measures.

Being able to do a repair well is an achievement if we do it ourselves, with the right tools and the time needed to do it, two things that are really scarce for most people. But nothing beats an (honest) professional in the field, even if we think we’re very handy with such matters, even if we know very well what the job involves or we’re very fond of getting our hands dirty. Trust me. You’ll save time and quite a lot of money if you run into unsalvageable situations like the one I’ve just faced.