How to Repair Your Modern Car

Step1: Finding What’s Wrong

If it weren’t for the entrenched car repair services, you’d be calling tech support’s hotline right about now. Yes, I am serious – if it isn’t a mechanically obvious thing, such as, the front wheel fell off, or a totally obvious electrical problem like a blown fuse, then you might have as much insight into the problem as a classic car mechanic.

Especially if you have an OBD-II reader.

OBD-II is a magic porthole into the mystery-shrouded world of your car’s brain. “ODB-II” stands for “On-Board Diagnostics version two”, a mandated way of asking cars of any make and model what’s wrong with them.

It’s a wonder there isn’t a cell-phone car OBD-II support attachment to plug into your car for roadside assistance.

So, why does that make you a better diagnostician than your mechanic? Did you ever watch your mechanic try to fat-finger in your bill into his computer? Need I say more?

Step2: Finding the Replacement Parts

“Luke! Use the Internet!” Hey, that’s what Obiwan would have told Luke Skywalker, had the movie been made today instead of the 1970’s. Search your local variety of auto parts stores, and then physically go to the store to check to see if they really have the part you found, and the found part number is not actually a rear bumper to a Desoto. The hardest bit here is figuring out what the broken part is actually called. Public library-hosted Web-accessed repair manuals can help here, and are somewhat useful for the next step. The auto parts stores often offer tools for lend as a bonus (even those OBD-II scanners!).

Here’s a tip: if it didn’t kill you when the part broke, those super-cheap Chinese replacement parts will be good enough. Besides, the expensive name-brand part is most likely made in China anyhow.

Step3: Replace the Broken Thingy

First, hardcopy printout the sections of the repair manuals you found on the Web that deal with your particular breakdown. Then, print out the forum messages between folks that have attempted the same or similar repairs.

Unless you run into the key warning phrases, like ‘…should not attempt to repair…’ or, off a forum message ‘…#$#%@@… still can’t get the friggin….’, follow along with the general gist of what the smarter of these sources indicates that you do.

Oh – watch out for the classic ‘Step 1, remove the engine as in section A1-12.224’ trap in those maintenance manuals. You won’t have printed section A1-12.224, it won’t actually be the right section, and you don’t want to remove your engine!’

A little common sense goes a long way here; it you are trying to fix a stalling engine and they have you removing the driver’s side window, there might be a bit of a mix-up in chapter numbering… It’s either that, or a car manufacturer’s engineer was having a very bad day with that particular model’s design work. Really. I mean, to simply remove spark plugs on many cars now requires such steps as ‘Place the car in Neutral and block the wheels to prevent rolling’ and ‘Release the engine mounts to allow the motor to be rocked forward’. I am totally serious, sad to say.

Step4: See if you Really Fixed It

What I mean here is ‘see if it’s fixed without getting stranded by your now thoroughly messed up car’.

There are two distinct checks to be made; 1) did the problem go away and 2) I haven’t made new/future problems by forgetting to replace some of the screws or misconnecting other odd bits removed.

One other step involved here: get back on your OBD-II connection and clean out the fault code messages. That way, you won’t be scratching your head wondering if what you see next time is old news or a brand new set of troubles. You can actually test your fix in many cases by checking the fault codes after running a test drive, if you erase the old error codes first.

SUMMARY: Why’d you cut out the Mechanic?

I bet that your total cost was less than half of what a garage would charge, and less than a third of what a dealer would charge. And no unneeded service items were added! How many times has the mechanic told you that your car ‘also needs the [enter part here] replaced…’ when you had it in for service? Finally, there’s little doubt in your mind that the repair was actually done (unless you skipped some steps above…)

There now – wasn’t that easy?