Fixing Your Vehicle: Sometimes It's Easier Than You Thought

You Don’t Always Need A Mechanic
Granted, in most situations, you’ll do better to get help from a professional—but not always. Before you bring your car to a mechanic, don’t be afraid to get down on your knees, look around, and see if there’s something you can fix. Sometimes you’ll have a pump start leaking or a motorized component wears out. Sometimes, you just need to plug something back in.

Fuses
Say your air conditioning goes out—it’s not that it won’t blow hot or cool, it’s that it won’t blow at all. What’s wrong? Well, you could have a mechanical failure requiring the apparatus to be taken apart and fixed, or you could simply be dealing with a burned-out fuse. Look at the system, and see if a fuse has burned out. If it has, switching it will fix the problem. 

Fuses are cheap, and you can find a schematic for your fuse box, as well as directions to find it, in the owner’s manual located inside your glove box. If you don’t have the owner’s manual, look it up online using a search engine; it’ll be somewhere free, just click around for a few minutes. 

Also, some fuse boxes are in the engine compartment, some are in the cab, sometimes you’ll have two or three different fuse boxes. Recently the writer of this article had a situation where windshield wiper fluid wouldn’t spray. Opening the hood, he found a burned-out fuse in the slot for the windshield sprayers. He switched it out, and now it works. 

Belts
There are a lot of half-ton older pickups with timing or serpentine belts you can replace yourself; just buy the belt, pull off the old one, and put on the new one. Many newer cars aren’t this way, and some use a timing chain rather than a timing belt. Even so, check to see if you can do it by hand before spending a few hundred bucks at a mechanic. 

Headlights
Sometimes headlights are configured in such a way that replacing them requires a mechanic to pull out the radiator—that’s the case with a lot of new trucks. But for most vehicles, it’s a simple matter of popping out the old headlight, and putting in the new one; you’ve just got to take your time and study the components to figure it out. Check before assuming you need to visit the mechanic. 

Changing Your Own Oil
This one’s a bit more difficult: if your vehicle rides low, you don’t have a pan, and you don’t have about two hours, you may do better going to a lube joint. Some cars have a pan that’s installed beneath the vehicle as well, and properly draining it requires pulling it out. 

Even so, for the most part, you unscrew the bottom of the oil reservoir, let the old stuff drain out into a pan, then pour in as many quarts your owner’s manual dictates into the top. It’s usually pretty simple—unless you’re dealing with some funky Volkswagen. Those Germans like to make stuff tough. 

Changing Your Own Tires
If you’ve ever had to deal with a flat, you already know-how. Just jack it up, pull off the old tire, and put on the new one. That said, most tire places will do this for you for free, so it’s one of those situations where you’re probably better advised to just do this at the tire place. 

Saving Money At The Mechanic
You can change your own tires, your own oil, fuses, headlights, and belts with relative ease on most vehicles; though some vehicles are more user-friendly in terms of maintenance than others. 

Whatever you do, hop out and look at the issue you’re dealing with before just automatically heading to the mechanic. For more tips on car maintenance and acquisition, check out our blog at Anybody’s Autos!