My brother and I call this ‘shaving weight’. 
I was once working on my girlfriends car and I sent her to Napa for blinker fluid.
Wow. I love pizza and beer!
I was reinstalling a coilpack on a LS1 Corvette with the owner leaning over my shoulder when the head of the tiny bolt sheared off. It was one of 8 fasteners, in the middle of the group, and not really critical.
He looked at me, I looked at him.
I said “Hey! what’s that over THERE?” pointing over his shoulder.
When he turned around I pitched the dead soldier over my shoulder and we laughed it off and kept working.
Not really a car thing, but I love this anyway: my brother is an aircraft mechanic. He likes to screw with the pilots by giving them a handful of miscellaneous bolts and such and telling them, “I couldn’t figure out where these went. Can you just keep them with the plane?” This is especially likely to happen if the pilot is an arrogant ass.
(Yes, he is just kidding.)
If one has (or had) a passbook savings account, never, ever keep said passbook in the car’s glove compartment. Sure it’s convenient. Sure it’s unlikely that anyone will break into a '77 Dodge Aspen Wagon (wood frame), because it’s too lame for anyone to believe it has anything of value in it.
But the glove compartment has eyes. And it can read. And it will let the rest of the parts in the car know when it’s time for something else to die, because the schmuck can now afford to repair it.
This is why i try to spend money that I get. I feel that if I have the money something will break that I need to repair. If I have no money I will just continue getting by. Of course, it helps that I have a Toyota.
Speaking as a shade-tree mechanic extraordinaire and driver of many horrid beaters, having a low mileage car is a particularly great form of bliss.
Hell… I haven’t even bought a car with twice as many miles as my current pickup has, and I’ve already put 25000 miles on it.
It’s kind of a strange feeling to just drive it, and occasionally check and change the oil and various filters, and check the tire pressure without worrying about anything else.
Probably the oddest thing is the relative silence that my current pickup emits. No rattles, chirps, etc…
OTOH, I pay $360 per month for this privilege. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it.
Look Phouka do you want of these lame-o shade tree types working on your car, or do you want a pro?
So how you doin?
or maybe I should say
How’s your car doin?
I wonder the same thing sometimes… but when Saturday morning rolls around and I find myself not skinning my knuckles in the driveway while up to my elbows in grease, I’m reminded of the answer.
You could maybe do a professional job by acting like a professional mechanic.
This means sucking on your teeth,shaking your head doubtfully and then saying “This is going to be a big job,its going to cost a lot of money”
Then you park it on the garage forecourt for several weeks and dont even look at it .
That’s quite a premium for the privilege. I have beater Nissan pickup, a beater Camry, and nice Buell.
Three forms of transport for under $5000. Repairs can be put off until nicer weather arrives.
Whatever you do, don’t let out on-line that you have the same policy for fixing your computer.
And I wonder if this was threadspotted because of this comic coming out: xkcd: Success
(it’s about computers, not cars, but the same progression applies.)
Rick, do you mind of i have a t-shirt printed with that statement? 
Knock yourself out. If you do, I will take one also. (I’ll pay for mine of course) send me an e mail.
My general variant of the statement is “Mr. Murphy is the hand you’re not paying attention to.”
The sleeve you snag on the circuit boards… The hand you use to prop yourself up when you shift position and… er… knock the bolts all over the inside of the cabinet…
What amazes me about modern cars is the clever way they’re designed so that everything is only accessible with your left hand. How do they do that?
Musta
a)Been designed by one of us evil lefties, or
b)You know how water goes down the toilet the wrong way down-under? Same thing with auto-design.
Murphy’s Laws of Motorcycle Repair:
[ul]
[li]Your motorcycle never needs easy repairs.[/li][li]Hard repairs require you to completely disassemble the motorcycle and then convert all the parts into their constituent elements (or at least it seems that way).[/li][li]Motorcycles are actually made completely from random screws. This explains the random screws I find inside mine.[/li][li]A motorcycle is a car engine compressed into a small suitcase and attached to two wheels.[/li][li]A corollary: replacing bulbs is impossible. Don’t bother.[/li][li]Variation of Murphy’s law of CRTs: a motorcycle’s $400 wiring harness will melt, thus preventing a $1 fuse from blowing.[/li][li]All motorcycles are painted in colored grease.[/li][li]The more expensive the motorcycle, the more different types of screws it uses.[/li][li]German motorcycles are proof that German motorcycle design engineers are from another planet.[/li][li]Every new repair requires you to buy an additional tool. This effect increases monotonically without limit, so eventually you are forced to stop repairing your motorcycle to avoid creating a black hole.[/li][li]All motorcycles contain a warp in the space-time continuum. This warp is specially designed to attract screws, which then disappear only to re-appear several years later while you are working on something else.[/li][li]For all repair projects involving n parts, the project ends with either x parts where x < *n[/n], or y parts where y > *n[/n]. Einstein theorized that if a repair project ends with exactly the same number of parts that it started with, the universe will collapse.[/li][li]Murphy was an optimist.[/li][/ul]
The horn went out on my 1993 Mazda 626 a few years back. Other horns would proudly sound off with a hearty “BEEEEP!” and mine would just go “snorfle.”
I took it to a mechanic. He started poking around the transmission.
I said, “Hey, I told you what the problem is. There’s nothing wrong with the transmission.”
He said, “The first rule of auto repair is: First do no horn.”
I finally got the hang of maintaining a 1984 yamaha this year.
I replaced it.