Hello members! It’s time again for Wrenching Wednesday, the weekly just-for-members feature where you get to join The Autopian team and your fellow members to talk about your current ratchet-wrangling, screwdriver-spinning, PB-Blasting projects–and/or help others with theirs, and if you like, get downright philosophical about the taking-apart and putting-together that we all enjoy.
Of course, some projects are more fun than others.
But is enjoyment why you wrench? Hopefully that’s always part of the equation when you dig into your toolbox, but there’s also saving money. I called around to see how much my recent brake job saved me. The answer? An astounding three-hundred bucks! It only took me an hour! Knowing the job was done right is a factor, too. Shout-out to all the paid pro’s who take pride in their work, but there are plenty of people who command a fee to fix things but sometimes don’t. Even if you trust your local pro, you may not trust them (or the rest of the gang at the shop) not to let a broom tip over and ding your door, or lean into a fender and drag a belt-buckle across the paint. Less concerning for the family Camry, much more concerning for the vintage Corvette.
But hopefully, most of all you just plain like to spend a few hours listening to tunes and turning wrenches for the satisfaction of doing it. I’m confident you’ll agree, maintaining a good-running car to keep it running well is also maintenance for the well-being of the mechanic. And when things are broken, as they sometimes are, fixing broken things helps repair more than cars.
I did a lot of nodding & smiling reading through people’s reasons here.
Like many here, I started wrenching because I was poor. Kept at it partly cause it kept me out of bars: I never worried about driving home from a junkyard.
I started to wrench as an escape from my humdrum workadaddy corporate drone life. I worked in a world of ideas, meetings about them, and documents about them. The problem is that nothing was ever finished. A project appears, drifts through a succession of emails, phone calls, meetings, and letters. It eventually sort of fades away, but generally can be counted on to pop its ugly head up six months or a years later for: reasons. I even had someone from my company call me at home three years after I retired to ask about an email I had written two years before that. Wrenching, I can see progress and then results.