If you can afford to buy a new car every year and take it to a mechanic every time it hiccups, you don’t even have to know how it works, much less be able to fix it. But if you are trying to get the most out of the transportation you already own, it pays to find out what makes
your two-ton, mile-a-minute investment tick.
Even if you don’t make
most repairs yourself, it doesn’t hurt to know what is making all those mysterious ticking sounds, clunks, roars, hums, and squeals; to know where they are coming from; and to know whether they are telling you to make an adjustment or not. At the very least, if you know how to perform simple maintenance checks, you can prevent or delay breakdowns.
Also, if you understand something about how a car works you can describe a problem to a professional mechanic in a way that may save some high-priced time while he tries to trace it.
The big pay-off, though, comes in doing the kind of repair jobs your-self that can be handled safely in your spare time. |
