Rating auto repair difficulty

Accurate diagnosticians are the highest tier of mechanics. You have to have seen a lot of shit to be one. Home mechanics have to research and study many hours sometimes to figure their vehicles' problems.

twice as long as half its length

I did mine over the summer. Just follow the FSM and you'll be fine.

Porsche 928
*Clutch swap

Where do spark plugs rank? What about coolant flush?

>spark plugs

Incredibly easy for most cars

>coolant flush

Also very easy.

did a spark plug and ignition wire/coil service on an 03 dodge ram. They dont give you shit for which wire goes to what coil/spark so you have to take one out at a time and the wires need to be organized in a specific manner or else theres interference. I'd say it varies from vehicle

I have a manual 928, it's an early 928 so it's got the twin disct set up.
Easiest fucking clutch I've ever done.

>Remove starter
>Remove slave
>Drop bellhousing
>Remove two allen head bolts on the shaft coupler
>Slide coupler into torque tube
>Remove pilot shaft (Can be stuck, use vice grips and an air hammer, the shaft is hardened steel, you cannot hurt it)
>Undo bolts on the pressure plate
>Everything falls off
>Undo bolts on the fly wheel
>Hear machine shop bitch about tiny fly wheel singing
>Pull pilot bearing (No room for a slide hammer, use a nut style puller)
>Tappy tap new pilot bearing in
>Put fly wheel up and torque to something like 60ftlbs
>Put giant mess of clutches and plates up at one time on your back in the dark
>bolt pressure plate
>Slide coupler and bolt it on
>replace cover, starter, and slave
>tada

Oh and the clutch fork, which is ez pz and only held in by friction in a ball cup up top, just use a long screwdriver to pry it off.

*****************anything suspension related on old rusty car

Drill/sheer the bolts that wont play nice and install new hardware. Oh wow that was SO hard

Where do you get this "New Hardware" my friend?
Home depot?
Dank.
Only car of mine I'll put homedepot bolts on is my jeep. And mostly to delete their fucking retarded torks head bolts.
Why the fuck were American obsessed with torks in the 80's?

The heads strip, the tools twirl.
Fucking JUNK.
If you want to make female fasteners then just make them take 1/4" 3/8" or 1/2" squares.

Idk,maybe from the oem manufacturer? Or if thats not an option, go online and buy some high quality shit of literally any possible configuration possible? Youre making it sound like HARDWARE is difficult to find as if its some sort of botique shit specific to your car and nothing else on planet earth.

Just mark each ignition coil with its corresponding location before you start, easy peasy.

If your car is over 10 years old you're SOL on OEM hardware.
And yes, hardware is extremely application specific.
Most suspension bolts have extremely tight tolerances and are application specific.
Shoulders, lengths, diameters, and loads ratings are hugely important in suspension components.
Go to the junkyard and just start tearing suspensions apart if you want, you won't find one easy to find bolt.

Also there's nothing I want more than to tear my car apart, then go inside, shop for bolts, and have my car apart for weeks while I wait for my bolts to arrive.

Hearing about "engine rebuilds" done by the DIY crowd is usually a total joke.

How does one line bore in a home garage? Or properly deck an aluminum head? Or grind valves (lapping compound GTFO)? You can't. One can toss in rings and scuff the cylinders, but a proper rebuild is a lot more than that. Hell, I have yet to hear of any home mechanic or DIY type buying a proper bore gauge to actually check the bore to .001 like you're supposed to.

I don't bother with intermittent can-bus, dealer can waste their time for no money/no repair authorization. Replicate-able CAN is bad input/output or dead module. Driveability and CEL is my preference, as I generally enjoy it. A scope is a big part of that. I like fixing things that have been to multiple shops.

Parts changing is a bit of a misnomer. A 2000-ish 4wd manual RAV4 is an 18 hour clutch job, full cradle drop, not slapping it together per-say. I beat book, but didn't care for it. Melting out bolts, extracting rusted studs, etc. is typically outside what I call parts changing.

Yeah i guess youre just a fucking retard if you dick around in junkyards looking for a shitty rusty bolt to replace your shitty rusty bolt. That and the fact you think it takes "weeks" for shit to arrive in the mail - its not hard, youre just fucking dumb. You can find any bolt of any size ever online like nigga its 2018 apply yourself. Im sorry your suspension job sucked but saying its the hardest job ever is plain stupidity.

Never done one eh? 2 plugs per cyl (hemis) then each coil runs a slave system of two wires that run to a paired cyl. Wires run under a retarded intake manifold design, and need to be clipped into a special holder,. Pays 3 hours or so IIRC. Fuckin gay

He has a point. Someone owns only one car. Control arm bolt shears, 2 day shipping, plus extraction. Huge headache for typical DIY guy. FWIW: Dealers can usually get bolts. They're expensive, but I'll buy them ahead of time and keep the old ones in the bolts-box.

Never done one on a dodge ram specifically (because I live in bongladesh and we don't get them over here), but in general spark plug changes are a pretty easy job on most engines, but a tippex pen to mark things and a camera to take pics before you start generally makes things a lot easier if you're not 100% sure on what you're doing.

There's more to a suspension bolt, like a control arm bolt, pretty much any bolt that goes through a bushing is going to be a very very specific bolt.
Any bolt that is dealing with any load other than clamping is a specific bolt.

Sure you can go online and buy a bolt X long with Y threads in Z grade.
But can you get a multi stepped shouldered bolt that's 6 inches long with X threads for 1" of it on a flange head bolt in grade 8 tomorrow?
Nah, best you can do is get a bolt, turn it down by yourself then die the threads into it, which is going to be hell on that bolt.

This is very true. Forums are a nice source for the DIY mechanic like most of the posters on this board. True mechanics are fucking wizards. I was learning to fix and rebuild auto trans and the teacher of the class gave me a E4OD trans out of an F250. He said he test drove the car and hes 99% sure the problem was the rear sprag. Sure enough i tore down the tranny and the rear sprag was grenaded

spending 3 hours hammering on a pickle fork trying to bust a ball joint underneath a car on a hot as fuck day**********

Pickle forks are a last resort
You should be able to do the old tappy tappy tap on the female bit and maybe a few light taps on a nut on the ball joint and it should come out.
When they don't, use an air hammer with a pickle fork. 1,000 light taps are less damaging than 2 heavy hits, and they're also a shit ton more effective. While also being a million times easier.

>Pickle forks are a last resort
me busting out a torch was my last resort m8. I can't even begin to describe to you the nightmares of getting this ball joint off. There was damn near nothing short of an artillery strike that was gonna get that shit opened up.

Do you live in the ocean?

Don't even fucking complain, bucko. At least you have a shaft coupler.
The clutch job in my 944 went more like:
>stupid fucking rubber clutch shock absorber shredded
>drop exhaust from the headers back
>take off 8 12 point coroded cheesehead bolts to disconnect the CV'S from the transaxle
>smash hand into a 2×3 inch hole on the transmission bell to undo some allenhead wrenches on the coupler to the torque tube
>slide coupler off
>wrangle shift bar off
>drop the tranny
>disconnect the entire fucking torque tube from the bellhousing
>slide it back. This gives you literally 1 inch of room to pull the bellhousing off (pic related is as far back as I could physically move the driveshaft)
>slide hammer shift fork pin out
>wrangle the bellhousing out around the torque tube
>this takes hours to get right because it's so tightly packed
>wrangle the clutch and springpack into bellhousing
>do the whole fucking mess in reverse.
Later that year, I swapped my NA engine for an S2. That was probably 10x easier than the clutch change. What I wouldn't have given to have the coupler that the 928's have.

I live kinda near the coast but I have no explanation other than FERD as to why that was happening

>****************************************finding that fucking rattle

For spark plugs, the hardest part is knowing how to use a torque wrench.

This is the absolute worst.

idk how long but its thicker than your dick

*oil change
**brake job
**suspension replacement
***clutch swap
***engine rebuild
***********************************body work
this is why idgaf about the engine or other broken shit when buying a used car, all I care about is if it looks not shit

>tfw your car is 40 years old and the entire interior is made of rattle

There is only rattle now.

*oil change
**brake job
**suspension replacement
***clutch swap
***engine rebuild
***********************************body work
************************************************************************************************getting an American car to run for more than 5 minutes

*oil change
**brake job
**suspension replacement
***clutch swap
***engine rebuild
***********************************body work
************************************************************************************************getting an American car to run for more than 5 minutes
*************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************the amount of work needed to be done at your job to pay a European car dealer to fix your car

*Oil change
**Alternator swap
***Changing your tires with an old rusty fucking jack that's handcrank and can't support the weight of your pickup

***********clutch swap without a hoist or stand

worst shit ive ever done

Why are we still here? Just to suffer? Every drive, I can feel the fasteners… and the glue… even dampeners. The fitment I’ve lost… the quietness I’ve lost… won’t stop rattling… It’s like they’re all still there. You feel it, too, don’t you?”

That's okay, I'm already a rattle.

I've had a squeak coming from the back of my FJ for months now. I thought it was suspension, then a mouse, then the sub...it just keeps happening.

My only solution is to crank up my music so I can't hear it anymore. I guess that's what I get for buying a truck with a 95% hard plastic interior...

How about stripping the plastics off to check if the rattles are coming from it? Should be that hard to do it without damaging then.

That might be my only option, but it'll have to wait until the weather warms up. I had to change the passenger brake light - meant removing the goddamn sub because they put the access panel BEHIND it.

I'm hoping I will just hit a pothole or something really hard and the squeak will go away...

rattles are comfy desu as long as it isn't plastic

if it isn't plastic it's probably something related to your suspension or drivetrain

nigga that's not comfy...

I had an easier time changing the clutch on my WRX than I did replacing the outer tie rod ends. Those fuckers won't come out of the steering knuckles and they sure as fuck won't go back in kindly. Had to jack up the control arms just to get an angle that let me slide those fuckers back in.

Body work isn't HARD
It's an ART
And it's EXPENSIVE
And it's TIME CONSUMING
And requires SPACE

You can put 30 hours into a single panel and still not be entirely happy with it. But I wouldn't call it hard.

Rotary life:
*Oil change
*Brake job
**Engine rebuild
**Suspension replacement
**Clutch swap
******Making the rev counter work for more than week on OEM tacho (*Easy but expensive way out of problem, buy some custom display motec/haltech/aem)
This is so much true, why bother with all this bodywork repairs,
if it takes so much time effort and still in the end it won't be as stiff as when it cam out of factory.

>Suspension
Glad you ranked that as high as you did.
If you are working in a drive wat,half the battle is placement of jacks and Jack stands. Even with a lift...there is a LOT of stored energy the average poster doesn't care about.
Not on your list...some interior things. Mostly aesthetic,so easy to half ass.

and it will never be the same as it once was.
shit form of art 2bh

I'd call it hard, I've done basic body repair/painting and it's not just as simple as putting in time and following a formula. It's very challenging to have the skill involved with filling, skimming, sanding, leveling, painting, and coating so it looks GOOD.

It's definitely an art, but to those who are artistically inclined it might be easy. To those who aren't (me), it's HARD.

timing belt change on fwd car? where does that rank

Depends on the car. Usually *** to *******.
My sister’s 4-cylinder Camry was pretty easy, but my PT Cruiser is a pain in the cunt. You need to disassemble half of the front end and engine bay just to take the cover off, then it’s a struggle just to get the belt off and back on.

fastenal.com/

My truck is >10yo and I HAVE replaced pretty much every suspension bolt on it (I come from a naval aviation background. I don't like reusing hardware without it being NDI'd). Went though them for anything I couldn't find local.
I suggest calling. They have TONS more stuff than what they list.

******Heater Core
(Not really, but probably the one thing I hate doing the most. Such an enormous pain in the ass in most cars.)

Yeah fuck heater cores.

Most things depend on the car.

Changing the battery on a Chrysler Sebring= 45 minute job
Replacing the serpentine belt on a Ford Ranger 3.0l= * 3 minute job

I find taking out the front seats makes dash work much easier

>mfw had to get diff engine gearbox rebuild in the same year
2017 a shit

>But I wouldn't call it hard

>You can put 30 hours into a single panel and still not be entirely happy with it.

>This is easy. You can spend a lot of time working on this and it comes out shit. That is what easy is.

What would you consider "hard" if body work is not hard?

That's my point. They're often just so hard to get at because you gotta unbolt seats and remove most, if not all of the cryptic 3-D plastic jigsaw puzzle that is the modern dashboard. Then, if you manage to get everything back together without breaking some plastic shit you've inevitably introduced a mystery rattle somewhere in there that drives you nuts, but there's no way in hell you're going to go back in there anytime soon.

You ever taken off one of those snap rings?

>How does diy guy do engineering shit

Same way a professional mechanic does. You take it to an engineering shop.

Sounds like someone didn't maintain their driveline.

Or you went fording too deep and got water in everything

Yes. It takes about 3 seconds with the right pliers.

You gotta dig your fingers in there with screw drivers and stuff and they're under tension and they are small and sharp and hurt then they go flying and you lose them, or worse an eye.

This. Mechanics replace parts. If anything needs machining they normally take it to a machine shop.

Yeah. It's usually terrible. But with 3 hours of swearing the first time around I can now change the recirculation door on a Dodge ram in 40 mins with out cutting anything.

>screw drivers and stuff

So, you are using the wrong tools.

That's like buffing paint with a masonry stone.

why is this guy wearing microfiber pants?

They hurt dude.

>They hurt dude.

Not with Comfort Grip™

You ever done the ones without the holes in them?

Usually break out two bird beak pliers or whatever fits depending on the situation.

Those are still a couple minute jobs and are significantly easier than even mild body work

What about when there is dirt and stuff in there and you can't even see where it starts and ends?

Crack another beer and go back doing body work I guess. I can't go back inside the house because Tyrone is servicing my wife and she says I throw him off when I try to lick his balls while he fucks her.

It is not like I am going to get this car on the road anyway so at least I can pretend it looks good rather than trying to slide that greasy CV joint out like Tyrone after he is done with my wife and soon Chad with my daughter.

Shame the car can't run because it needs this thing called a battery to start, or else I'd gas myself.

t. Bodywork fag that can't deal with a simple fucking snap ring

All of that sounds awful degenerate.

It's what happens when you think body work is easy and snap rings are gross

Sign me up for your manly man school asap please.
I'll pay double for extradited manlyness.

Fuck that inside the fender well bullshit

As a body work fag I have no idea how to even leave my cuckshed

This thread is the worst dick waving contest I've seen in a long time.

How would you guys rate the difficulty of replacing a bearing on an EV motor?

Also, the car is a Chevrolet Volt.

>Engine rebuild last
I dont think so. Rebuilding a transmission would top that list surely.

Intermittent CAN is the most frustrating thing ive encountered, right next to NVH like you said.

Sometimes ill get errors where the VGT actuator or something small will drop off but when it comes into the shop everything is perfectly fine. Ship the truck back to the customer and it works fine for about three weeks and then it ends back up with us. Ended up being a broken wire somewhere in the cable making intermittent contact replaced it and havent had a call back since.

Engine rebuild (rotary)
**

still better than some of threads up right now

In a Twingo? Something like **. Porsche 928? **********

getting a rotary to pass emissions ***************

>What I wouldn't have given to have the coupler that the 928's have.

Why didn't Porsche engineers, who designed both cars at pretty much the same time with the same torque tube layout just copy the same design?

Why the fuck is the porsche 928 a fucking meme with you kids.
>Hurr durr a wire from here to there so hard!
928's have the same Bosch electronics, wiring, and connectors as every fucking european car of the time.

928's have a little extra wiring because they were extremely well equipped for their time. But it's not a big fucking deal.