Working with Bozz: Auto Repairs
Whew! I feel like I have been posting a lot of "Working with Bozz" posts lately! I have a ton of projects that I have been trying to get done before Winter gets here. I think the cold Fall weather is finally here to stay and I am running out of time.
About a month ago I started having some issues with my truck. I took it to the shop that I normally go to and asked them to give it a good "once over".
They spent a day taking a look at it and soon gave me a call to tell me that I was looking at about $2400.00 USD worth of repairs. I knew it was going to be expensive, but that was quite a bit more than I was looking to spend.
After talking with them for a little bit I decided that I would spend $700 USD to have them fix the things that I couldn't. I then gave my buddy a call and asked him to start looking up the cost for parts to fix the rest of the stuff ourselves.
He came over and put together a list, we went online and ordered the parts. The grand total came to about $450 USD for the parts. By doing the work ourselves I was looking at saving about $1250 USD!
I had the parts delivered to my friends house because he has a pole barn with a car lift. This would make it much easier to do all of the work on the truck. We picked a Saturday that we both had free to do the work and when it arrived I drove the 20 minutes to get to his house.
Fixing cars and trucks is just a hobby for him, but he decided to create a logo for his garage anyway and he had stickers made to put on vehicles that had visited his shop.
I will admit, it is nice having friends that have toys like this. The vehicle lift made it infinitely easier to do most of the work we had to do. I asked my friend to remind me to take pictures throughout the day so I would have them for this post. He did a great job of reminding me.
The full extent of the repairs were pretty vast and it ended up taking us most of the day to get them accomplished. Just to give you a run down, we replaced the rear shocks, the front struts, the front brakes, the spark plugs, and the belts.
You can see most of the new parts we used in the picture above. My buddy even staged it all so I could take the picture. He just might have a future on Steemit if I got him setup with an account!
The engine was still too hot from me driving over there to work on the belts and plugs, so we started with the rear shocks. We pulled the tires off and got to work taking the two bolts out of each of the rear shock absorbers.
This is a side by side picture of one of the old shocks vs. the new shock. The old ones were pretty much spent and it is easy to understand why my truck experienced so much movement while towing our trailer.
Doesn't it look pretty all shiny and new! After we had the rear shocks taken care of, we put the tires back on and moved to the front.
The struts in the front were held on with three bolts at the top and two bolts at the bottom. Besides one of the bolts breaking off and my buddy deciding he needed to break out the torch (seen in the intro photo), they came off pretty easy.
He decided that he needed to get a picture of me working on the truck. He was actually pretty hands off during the whole thing, he has done this kind of stuff before, but wanted me to be the one doing most of the work.
It may not look like it, but the struts were pretty bad too. He kept saying that my truck was going to feel like a whole new vehicle after all of this work we were doing to it.
As I said, besides the one bolt breaking the process of replacing the shocks and struts was really pretty easy. It was a total of fourteen bolts and everything was good to go. It is amazing that shops charge $850 for doing this service. My total cost for the shocks and struts was right around $250.
From there we moved on to the brakes as the engine was still a little too warm for changing the plugs and belts.
After we pulled the brake calipers off of the rotor, we realized that the store has sold me the wrong pads. We also noticed that the rotors were kind of wore. It is pretty common to replace the pads and rotors as a set anyway, so when we went down to swap out the brake pads we grabbed a set of rotors too.
After we got the pads in the caliper, we realized that the calipers weren't moving the way that they should be to allow the wheel to spin. We soon realized that the slide pins had seized inside of the caliper bracket and we needed to fix that.
It took us a little longer than we planned, but we finally got the pin out and put some grease on it to keep it from seizing up again. Then we put the calipers back on the rotor and it was time to get the tires back on.
By now the engine was pretty cool so we decided to get the belts swapped out. The truck has two belts, one is for the drive train and the other is for the A/C system. They were both a little cracked so I wanted to get new ones on.
Most newer engines have a tension pulley that you can move with a wrench and it removes the slack from the belt so you can pull it off.
I took a picture of the cracks in the belt to show how worn it was.
Finally, it was time to swap out the spark plugs. That process is pretty straight forward and the biggest issue we ran into was having enough clearance to get the last plug out and replaced. There just wasn't enough room to move your arm to turn the wrench.
I forgot to take pictures of the old plugs vs. the new plugs, so I pulled this image off of pixabay to show what a new plug should look like.
In contrast, this is what my old plugs looked like:
As you can see, they were very much in need of being replaced.
In all, it was a very productive day and it was nice to spend some time with my friend. We worked from around 8:30 AM to about 3:30 PM and stopped in the middle for about an hour to run and get some lunch.
Thanks for following along!
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Looks like you did a great job! Those kinds of savings are definitely worth it, plus it's also kinda fun to do these sort of repairs. Nowadays it's also not that difficult with the help of Youtube tutorials etc. (for the less technically adept under us at least :P)
For sure. There was a point where we had to use Youtube to see if there was an easier way to get that last plug out but we just had to fight with it.
Gotta love shiny new rotors!!
We save a lot of money working on our cars too. My husband recently redid my entire brake system for me, new everything, pads, rotors, calipers, lines, master cylinder, etc. He works in a parts store, and sells parts to the shops. You save money doing it yourself through labor, obviously, but also a lot of people dont know that the shops will mark up the price of the parts as well. You can save money by buying the parts from a parts store, and taking those to the shop.
Good job!! :D
Thanks! I bought most of my parts online through rock auto except the brakes because those were cheaper to get at the local store. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Getting to that last spark plug was seriously the worst part of the whole day.
Rock auto is one of the best priced places to get parts for sure. My husband actually orders from there frequently to resell when he has hard to find parts to supply.
That is cool. That is where my friend suggested we get them from. I was pretty happy with the timeliness of the shipping. The price was great too!
Wow, I'm pretty impressed that you can do all of this! Your car should be humming like a dream now, I like tweaking computers and stuff, so I guess it is pretty similar to that!
As far as cars go, I managed to change our oil and windshield water last week, I was pretty chuffed about that.... but I have changed a tyre without the car falling on me, so there is that achievement...
That is definitely an accomplishment. I used to change my own oil religiously. It isn't as cost effective anymore though.
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I wasn't doing it for tuning, but because the light was flashing! Anyway, the car felt better afterwards... although, I'm not sure if that was in my head placebo or a real thing?
It's always good to stay on top of changing your oil. The last thing you want is your engine seizing up!
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So cool that you can fix up your truck with your friend. That's a good one to keep! I know nothing about cars - if it breaks down, I pull it to the side of the road and grab a taxi or a ride. I am lucky that one of my best friends is passionate about cars and helps me out. He's the one who fixes everything for me. Without him, I would have to pay lots of money to the garages.
Indeed, he has been my friend for 30 years now or so.
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Thank you! I appreciate it!
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Amazing post!!! So detailed and fun. I’ve always wished I could do my own car repairs. Wanna come do my brakes? I need to replace them.
Hah, it would take longer to drive there than to change them! 😁 Thanks for the comment!
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@bozz, very instructive on auto repair. Great post.
Thank you!
Thats a lot of work but the satisfaction of doing it yourself and saving a bit of cash must be great
Yes, it was really nice to save all of that money. I am pretty happy with the end result.
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I am good with electronics, well I should be I was a telecom tech for years, but terrible with mechanical work, my Brother is the mechanic of the family
Hi bozz,
Visit curiesteem.com or join the Curie Discord community to learn more.
Thank you so much, I am honored.
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That was a lot to take on in a day, great to have a friend with all the big boy toys so you can tinker. That is a heck of a shed he has.
You saved some cash and got to spend a day with a friend doing something hopefully you both like doing, that's a great day.
Yes, his original pole barn was probably bigger than my house, then he added on to it! It is pretty expansive. He keeps all of his work trailers and stuff in there though.