rev up your engines, today I'm going to talk about some of the biggest mistakes I've
ever made as the mechanic fixing cars, now it may be a cliche that you learn
from your mistakes, but like many cliches there's a lot of truth in the saying, now
I've been fixing cars by myself for the last 50 years, and I fixed thousands of
cars, but I'll tell you the ones that I remember the most in depth were the ones
that I made mistakes on, so I never make that same mistake again, now one of the
biggest mistakes I've ever made, had to do with fixing a Porsche, but not this
Porsche, it was a 911 turbo charged Porsche, and it had a leaking intake
manifold gasket, it was one of the early ones that had plastic intake manifolds,
and just like many of you, I'm a DIY guy who does it all by myself, I don't have
a ton of really specialized equipment, so I attempted to do it on the car by
just opening the back and working on the engine from the top, needless to say it
took many, many hours, but I finally got it back on and got the car running again, it
was a really gigantic pain, but then a few months later I was at a Porsche
dealer talking to a German friend of mine who was a mechanic there, and I told
him what I'd done and he said, Scotty why did you even try that, he said he didn't
even think that was possible, because at the dealer they just got their engine
hoisting machine and they would take the engine out of the car, drop it off, work
on it on the ground and then put it all back in again, so I said but Hans didn't
that cost a lot of money and he said of course it did, if somebody wants to drive
one of these Porsches, they better be prepared to pay to the nose to fix it
and the lesson at least for me and most do-it-yourself guys is, I'll never do
another one of those jobs on a 911, is they're going to have complicated jobs that
require very special equipment, don't try to do the job, it's not worth the hassle
now the next big mistake I made was when I was younger, the first car I
bought I only paid 500 bucks and part of it was smashed up, so I fixed the
bodywork, but then I decided I was going to paint the whole car, and man was that a
mistake, now it was a red car and I did paint the whole thing, so at least
now it was all one color, but it really only look good after it rained when the
water all beaded up, because once it was dry if you look close
at a lot of parts, you can see orange peels all over the place where the paint
wasn't evenly put on, so I don't advise anybody to paint their entire car, you
need a paint booth, you need a really good environment that doesn't have dust
and too much humidity, it's something that's best left to a pro, another big
mistake is, I'd buy tools only to find that I hardly ever used them or I didn't
even use them at all, now yes you want good jack stands, good Jack's, a decent
scan tool, when it comes to really specialty equipment, a lot of times it
doesn't make sense for you to buy that kind of stuff, now if you scan through
all these tools I have amassed over 50 years, I know I was cleaning up the other
day and I found some tools that I got and I never even used them, that money was
all wasted, I mean now I'm in a different situation, companies are always sending
me tools because they want me to use them in my videos, so I'll try anything
out since I'm not buying it, and if they are good tools at a good price I'll talk
about it here on my youtube channel, but you're not going to see Scotty forking out
his hard-earned money to buy tools that he's never going to use or only use once
or twice, as an example if you're going to do some lightweight heating, you can get a
propane torch to heat up metal parts to get them hot to take them apart, it'll cost
hardly anything at all, but you might do a lot of heavy thinking before you buy even a
small welding kit like this, for four to five hundred dollars, you may not be
using it all that much, or heck maybe a bunch of your friends could get together
and you each throw in 40 bucks or 50 bucks, and then you can share it you're
not using it all the time and it comes in pretty handy for some serious problems
when metal is really stuck, the last biggest mistake I ever made has to do
with car batteries, I was always trying to save my customers money, so years ago
I was always going out and buying cheapest batteries I could get my hands on
to save them money, but lo and behold that bit me in the behind many times, sometimes
six months later they'd be back and the battery was dead, or a year later even
though it was like a four year battery, don't go out and buy the cheapest
batteries you get your hands on, especially with
complex modern cars, everything's electronic, if the battery is weak you're
not getting enough power, the car can go bananas, buy good quality batteries sure
you're going to pay a little bit more, but hey if you amortize it over the years
that you owned it, you're only talking about pennies a day, so now you know some
of the biggest mistakes I've ever made fixing cars, and if you're like me and
your work by yourself, hey you want to save money but you don't want to do
things wrong, and now heck you don't even have to make the mistake yourself, you
can learn from my mistakes, so you'll never make that mistake yourself, so if
you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring
that Bell!