When it comes to auto maintenance, nothing beats getting to know your local mechanic. You’ll make great friends with them and you’ll make some serious savings without getting ripped off. However, there’s another step you can take to ensure that you’re making great savings on all auto repairs: doing it yourself.
Not everyone understands the inner workings of their car and it’s actually fairly difficult to get to grips with if you don’t have a background in a similar field. However, if cars are your passion or if money saving is on your mind, then there’s nothing stopping you from learning how to repair and pamper your vehicle.
Major Savings
Learning how to repair your vehicle has one major advantage: huge savings. However, what you save on is actually just money and not so much time. There’s nothing more efficient in terms of time spent than just taking your car to the garage. You could spend hours looking up tutorials and learning how to fix various parts of your car, but ultimately the experience and knowledge of a mechanic is usually worth the money assuming you can afford it.
However, if you’re dedicated enough, you can learn to repair your vehicle over time and whenever you’re stuck with a task that’s beyond your skill level, you can always just hand it over to your local garage to fix instead. Keep in mind that some of your savings are going to be used on stuff like tools, parts and so on. This ultimately means that if you screw up a repair, you could end up paying more to fix your car in the future, so only consider DIY repairs if you’re willing to see it to the end.
Start Learning
The best way to start learning about cars is to simply buy an old vehicle. These can usually be bought for a few hundred at the local scrap heap or junkyard and you can turn it into a weekend project to try and fix up. You can look up a free guide on the internet to learn how to weld panels, you can rent out some of the machinery and tools needed, and you can seek assistance from online communities or friends to guide you.
In addition to buying an old vehicle, you’re going to need quite a lot of space to store the junk vehicle and a lot of patience. Your significant other might not like that you’re tinkering like a grease monkey every day, and there’s a chance that you won’t really make much progress until a few weeks.
The Big Question
So ultimately it comes down to this question: is it worth it? The simple answer is yes, but only if you’re willing to put in many hours into learning about your car. You should be learning to do DIY repairs because you’re interested in vehicles, not because you want to save money. If you want to save money on your repairs and you don’t want to invest time into learning about your car, then the best option is to simply make some extra money so you can pay a mechanic for their time.
