Suze, I too tip my hat to you. It’s great to hear of someone doing something that interests them without regard for stereotypes. And I tip my hat to your hubby too. He too is ignoring stereotypes and oing what he appaperntly is interested in. Nursing is a hard, difficult, underpaid and underappreciated job requirung far more knowledge than 99% of the people realize. It is a true profession.
I’d always rather work on my car than the hubby’s…it’s a 1969 Le Mans Super Sport and is a dream to work on…has 427K miles and still going with just minor maintenance work. And it was either me learn how to fix the cars while the husband was overseas thanks to the US Army, or pay someone else to do it…when it came to changing out a tranny on his Plymouth (back a bazillion years ago) it was either spend a month’s pay to get someone else to do it, or spend a week’s grocery money doing it myself…I sorta like eating so i learned how with the help of a library Chilton’s checkout and the neighbors tools. I have two sons…neither one of whom will touch a car engine…and a daughter-in-law that works besides me under the hood.
By the way, sincere thanks to your hubby for his service to our country and sincere thanks to you for the sacrifice you endured while he was doing so.
It’s interesting that you have a 69 Le Mans. Just a couple of days ago my wife was talking about the 68 Le Mans she had back when we were dating in the late Cretaceous period and how much she missed that car.
It was a good one also, no doubt about it and I’m in agreement about thanking your husband for his service and your sacrifices also. 
I have a brother that worked in construction as field engineer, office engineer, project engineer, and finally construction manager over multi million dollar jobs for over 30 years. Since this recession hit he got laid off and with construction being so slow wasn’t able to find another job in the construction field and ended up going back to school to pursue a career as a nurse. He’s 56 years old and starting a new career. He is scheduled to graduate from nursing school later this summer. He’s a very smart man, took a fast track nursing course and knows his chosen fields well, but I wouldn’t want him working on my car or anyone else’s. I use to live only about 1.5 miles from him and when he had car trouble he’d call me with my high school education wanting advice. Kind of made me feel good that I was better/smarter at at least one thing than he was. He was going to add a bathroom to his house several years ago and although he was an engineer and could have drawn out a blueprint if I’d needed it, I’m the one who ended up being the grunt man. He knew what he wanted, but didn’t know how to actually do the building. I have three brothers one is an accountant, one a lawyer, and one starting a nursing career with only about 10 years left until retirement, but neither of them know anything about mechanical things. As a child I was always the one who was interested in helping dad fix things and it’s paid high dividends considering the thousands of dollars I saved doing my own mechanical, electrical, plumbing and building. I never made the money on my jobs my brothers do, but my mechanical knowledge and building skills have made up for lots of the difference.
Suze, just remind him if you’re sick he has to baby and fix you as payback for giving his car tender loving care. I too think it’s great for women and teenagers to try to learn as much as they can about their vehicle. At least if they know the basics and are paying a mechanic to do the work for them they have an idea of the complexity of the repair and don’t get taken advantage of. Even thought I do the majority of my son’s automotive repair, ever since he started driving I’ve been trying to teach him a little bit about cars and sometimes allow him to do part of the work so he get’s familiar with doing some of his own work and how to use the tools properly and be safe while doing it.
I learned a valuable lesson when I was younger about safety when working around cars. My dad always taught me to be very careful when working near a car on a jack and stay out from under it. When I was still a teenager or maybe in my early 20’s I had a car jacked up using a bumper jack to change a tire, it was one that only had a thin piece of metal that slipped into a slot in the bumper and just as I got the wheel back on the piece of metal that went into the slot broke letting the car come down. Even if it had fallen while the wheel was off I’d have been OK, because I never put any part of my body underneath a car that was only on a jack. Never get under a car that’s not properly supported!!
thanks guys for the kind remarks…hubby does indeed take very good care of me whenever I become ill…and kudoes to the fellows that went to nursing school as a second career choice! It is unfortunately a career where there is never enough help so they will be greatly appreciated.
And I guess I am grateful to the Army for sending the hubster off to various and sundry places for long periods of time…because the Army posts always had wonderful workshops for the wives to learn basic skills…like auto mechanics, plumbing, masonry and basic carpentry. I took any and all of them offered and this past year got to put all of them to use. I added a room onto the house all by myself, then converted a closet into a new bathroom, refloored the living room with solid wood and installed a solar panel onto the roof. Now if I can only start to remember the names of engine parts so I don’t sound like an idiot when posting, I will be forever happy!
By the way…I have two sons, neither one seems to know anything more about cars than where to put in gasoline…and a daughter-in-law that works under the hood of her Jeep right along beside me! LOL
What age do people stop wrenching ?
It really all depends on the person.
With age often comes various pains which change one’s perception of the need or ability to do it one’s self.
One of my long term mechanics had BOTH shoulders replaced !
Then there’s the conundrum of time vs money.
There’s an awful lot of things I COULD do myself that I choose to bring to the shop because the overall bottom line, including time, is more acceptable.
I am 54. Been DYI for almost 40 years. I do all my own maintenance and repair on my 2001 ZX2 (226K+ miles) and my wifes 2002 Jetta (156K+miles). getting all dirty, etc, doesnt have thesame ‘appeal’ that it did when I was younger but I still prefer to do it myself then have to take it to the shop. I just did a radiator and thermostat housing replacement on the Jetta which has the VR6 engine. What a job that was! Im going to be replacing the catalytic converter on my ZX2 soon and it will need timing belt/tensioner soon too. The AC needs recharging so I take it to the local shop for that. Everything else I do.
“By the way…I have two sons, neither one seems to know anything more about cars than where to put in the gasoline”
That sounds like my brothers, drive it till it stops then worry about it. They’re all good at their jobs, but when it comes to mechanical things they’re lost. One of my sister in laws is always glad for me to come for a visit, because she always has a list of things for me to do.
Most of the jobs I had prior to becoming disabled consisted of doing mechanical things or building. For a few years after getting out of high school I worked in a plastics molding facility molding car bumpers. I starting out as a laborer and when they closed down 3 years later I was set up for 5 injection molding machines, training new operators, making minor adjustments and repairs to the machines and changing molds. When I left that job I went into construction, I started out as a carpenter helper, then to a carpenter, carpenter foreman, instrument man running survey instruments and doing building layout, party chief (foreman) for the survey crew then field engineer, but all my promotions came from working my way up though the ranks learning from experience and from other people who had done the same thing instead of from a college degree. Don’t get me wrong, I think a college education is great it just wasn’t for me. I think hands on experience is just as important and in many cases a better teacher.
The facility where I was a set up I think the main qualification for being a foreman was being retired military (which about 90% of the foremen were), I agree they had experience with supervising people, but most of them had no idea about what was going on or where to begin if a machine gave problems and some of them didn’t even know how to operate the machines. I worked most weekends, lots of double shifts and even worked triple shifts a few times. If set up for other shifts didn’t show up I had no choice, because the foremen were lost without a set up person at their side. I’d never have been comfortable trying to supervise people doing jobs I didn’t know how to do myself. One time I went in at 3:00 one afternoon and didn’t leave until 5:00 the next afternoon, that was on a Thanksgiving day and the day after which were both holidays for us. We got triple time for holidays so that made it somewhat bearable. Since I was always dependable and willing to work overtime my foreman told me he didn’t care what I did while on the job as long as the other employees and upper management didn’t know about it and I kept the machines running. After that there was often a cooler of beer in the car, but I didn’t overdo it maybe 1 or 2 during the shift then after work myself and co workers would get together play poker and party for 5-10 hours before going home and resting, often coming in hung over saying we wasn’t going to do it when we got off work, but by then we were feeling better and would do it all over again. A few times our party/poker game was still going when it was time to go back to work the next day. Of course I was in my late teens and early twenties then, if I tried to work like that now and party the rest of the time it would kill me. Now if I drink a beer it relaxes me and I’m ready to lay down and take a nap. It’s terrible to get old, but still better than the alternative, dying young!!!
@FordMan1959, your story about your brothers being not-so-mechanically minded made me laugh. Because that’s me to the T! I have absolutely no in-bred, gifted, mechanical ability. I screw up all the time. I put things together with the part backwards all the time – when all I’d have to had done is make a sketch of it before I took it apart. I take short-cuts that almost always turn into disasterous long-cuts because I have to do it all over again, and usually have to fix something that wasn’t broke in the first place. I’m a total mechanical nimcompoop. But like the other areas of my life where I likewise have little to no inherent skills or abilities, this doesn’t stop me from reading an article in Popular Mechanics and giving it a go! Here’s how I think about it: If I waited for something to go wrong that required skills I actually have, I’d be doing nothing but waiting!
Thank heavens for the folks here on Car Talk forum, many who are truly mechanically gifted, and more than willing to lend an opinion or give some insight to the rest of us.
I'm 65 and chasing 66 (and winning). I've been working on my vehicles since I was 14. Currently we have an '01 Jeep Grand Cherokee, my '06 Chevy Silverado, and my '04 hot rod H-D Road Glide. I do all the maintainance and repairs I possibly can. The thing about being semi-old is that you have enough experience to know when to let a pro take over. I will say that for the most part, cars seem to be more reliable. A little tougher to repair sometimes.I will probably do more diyw as I grow older. for several years I slowed down because i was so busy at work. lately doing more because i have more time. when i retire i will (probably) do more because i enjoy it. just keep my wife in the house cooking dinner and we are good!
@GeorgeSanJose, I owe most of my interest and mechanical knowledge to my dad for letting me be with him and help him fix things when I was young, when in reality I was probably more in his way than I was help to him, but I felt like I was helping which gave me encouragement and gave me the opportunity to learn how to do many things. Now that dad is gone, I miss and really appreciate the time we spent together and the things we worked on together. Sometimes when I’m working on things now and run into a problem, I think to myself, I wish dad was here to give me ideas of what to do!!
@FordMan1959, great story, my dad (who, like yours, is no longer here) would let me help him out too. I had fun and learned quite a bit helping him out. One important thing I learned is that no matter how mechanically inept one is, you should go ahead and try it anyway. Sometimes it is the most fun when you really foul things up and have to figure out how to work your way out of the mess you created. This mechanical ineptitude of mine must run in the family. Pretty much every time my dad would change the points in his truck, my job as a kid was to hold the flashlight, to make sure the little nut didn’t drop into the distributor. But no matter how careful he was, my dad, he’d almost always drop the little nut into the distributor anyways, and he and I – holding the flashlight – would then spend a couple of hours fishing it out with a magnetized screwdriver. I’d sometimes ask him “can we just remove the distributor and turn it upside down and shake the nut out?” and he’d say “NO NO NO , we’d never get the distributor back in correctly and my truck would never work again !!!” … lol … and I’m not EVEN going to mention about all the problems with backing up the vacation trailer to park it on camping trips … well, I’ll mention that one time my dad managed – with me guiding from behind – to get the trailer stuck between two huge ponderosa pine trees … lol
I’m still wrenchin’ on vehicles at 59 and have been doin’ it since I was sixteen. And over that time I’ve amassed all the tools and equipment that allows me to continue to do so. So I’m the piston head of the family. If a family member has a problem with their vehicle it comes to me.
But I also repair other people’s vehicles and have been doin’ it for years. It just started by word of mouth and now I have customers I’ve known from the time they were single, got married, to where I now see their kids go off to college. How time passes. Now I service the kids vehicles.
I’ll keep wrenchin’ on vehicles 'til the arthritis in my fingers gets to the point where I can no longer hold a tool.
Tester
I started with cars while I was in high school and worked part time at a gas station along with taking care of my parents and siblings cars. My dad had a little mechanical ability but he just flat hated to put his head under the hood; even for something as simple as an oil change or fue filter. It just all gravitated my way and I enjoyed doing it.
Funny thing is that while I was in high school my career goal was to be either an artist or an electrical engineer and as a senior chose to go the bleeding knuckles route because the nuts and bolts overruled oil paint/ink or 4 more years of heavy on the math textbooks.
If I live to be a 110 hopefully I’ll still be dinking around with mechanical things at that age.
@GeorgeSanJose, For remembering the order parts go back together I often lay them in a specific order to help me remember, especially if it’s going to be a day of two before I put everything back together. Some people also use digital camera’s and take plenty of pictures, but so far my memory hasn’t got that bad. I’ve seen people who could take things apart, throw everything in a box and and come back a week later and know exactly where every part right down to the last bolt and nut went, but I’ve never been able to do this. I’ve tried, but I always end up with more parts than I needed to put everything back together. Guess this just goes to show the manufacturer didn’t know how to assemble it. LOL
I too sometimes held the flashlight for dad or was the one looking through the tool box that was full of tools for that 1/2" wrench dad needed and it always seemed to be in the bottom of the box, I’d find every size except the size he needed. When I really started working on my own vehicles I started out just doing oil changes, coolant changes, thermostats and other simple tasks. After I got familiar with doing the easy stuff and my confidence level grew I gradually worked my way into harder more complicated repairs and now probably do about 98%+ of my own work. Between my cars, my wife’s car, my mom’s car, and my son’s car I maintain 8 cars with the newest one being 10 years old and can’t remember the last time one was sent to a mechanic for repairs.
I have a Monitor brand vented kerosene heater we use for heat in our house because it’s much more economical than the electric furnace (heated all winter on 85 gallons of kerosene while neighbors were paying $200-400 a month using electricity heating smaller homes), back in the winter it needed to have the burn chamber rebuilt because the safety features shut it down on a couple occasions in the middle of the night when the outdoor temperature was down in the teens or twenties and we would wake up to a 50-55* house, I tore into it mid afternoon one day back in February. I started taking parts off and knew where the parts went, but thought I’ll just put all the screws/bolts together, I’ll know where they go when I get ready to put it back together later tonight. WRONG! Should have been about a 2-3 hour job, well it took me about 10 hours to disassemble, clean and rebuild the burn chamber/heat exchanger, and reassemble, but I saved myself about $300-400 so I guess it was worth it. I had it almost back together, I had the right number of screws to finish the assembly and thought I was doing great, then one of the screws was too short to secure the electronic control circuit board/thermostat programming controls back into the heater, I had put the longer screw somewhere in the wrong place. I didn’t know where I’d gone wrong and I wasn’t about to take the heater apart again to find out, so I just went to my supply of extra screws/bolts/nuts and found one that would work. This was the first time I’d ever had to do any serious maintenance to the heater in 16 years of ownership, I didn’t have a service manual and everything I knew about working on it was what I had learned on an internet forum and was lucky to have found it, because there’s very little information to be found about these heaters, but once it was all back together everything worked fine and it didn’t give us any problems for the rest of the winter. I think I could have done the job without the help of the forum, but I’m pretty sure it would have been more time consuming and more of a headache. I found out the heater wasn’t really that complicated, but I later found out that about 90% of the parts I had removed to get the burn chamber/heat exchanger out didn’t even need to be removed. Now if I can only remember that next time I have to rebuild it maybe I can do it in the correct amount of time.
I don’t think there is any general rule. I’m 63 and retired and still do some work but warranties take care of a lot. I don’t have to have a car going every day anymore so don’t have the time pressure as before. If the car is in the shop for a day or two, no big deal anymore. It just depends on the job and how tough it is or the propensity for a problem.