Changing Tires
(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)
In late June, just after my car got through its annual MOT, it got a puncture in a tire. I pumped it up and took it to a mechanic to get the tire patched.
Friday night it got another one. This time the hole was so big, it was hard to pump enough air in it to limp half a mile more to our driveway. My wife and I could hear air hissing out. It wasn’t patchable. Saturday morning I put the spare on and went to town for a new tire.
One of our friends nearby had a flat tire on Friday too.
Then on Sunday, my wife went into town for her weekly appointment to take a guide dog for a recreational walk. Guide dogs need breaks too. After their walk, my wife found one of her tires flat. She had to get to a birthday visit with a sister, so I picked her up, took her there, and went back to her car to change the afflicted tire.
When I joined the birthday visit, in conversation I learned that my wife and her sister have never changed a tire. They know most of the steps, in theory, but not quite all the steps necessary in reality.
Sometime before the turn of the seasons, we should have a little family workshop. Some of our niblings are getting old enough to participate, so it need not be just adults. We should take off a tire, put the spare in its place, then swap it back. Waiting for a roadside assistance service to show up can be worse than inconvenient. It can be dangerous, especially for a woman at night.
On Friday I could have taken the few minutes to mount my spare tire right away. We had gotten as far as our own village. It’s a reasonably safe place. But if the tire could be pumped up enough to limp another half mile, that was quicker and safer, so that’s what I did.
Come to think of it, our little workshop could include a bit more than changing a tire. A little knowledge can go a long way for not only safety but also fending off the occasional encounter with a mechanic who thinks women are too stupid to recognize a rip-off.
My father didn’t teach me about servicing cars. He was amazingly capable. He built the custom wall units in the living room. He did wiring. He did many types of work very well. To his frustration, tinkering with cars simply was not one of them.
I had to learn after I finished university and ended up at the Johnson Space Center. Many people in the space program back then were military veterans with military pensions and a passion for program. Our salaries were maybe a quarter to half what we could have gotten in private industry. For the veterans, their military pension combined with their salary for a good income. For me, the budget was tight. I couldn’t afford to pay a mechanic to do all my car maintenance.
With the car manufacturer’s service manual and a lot of swearing, I did what I could and only took my car to a mechanic when it needed work I couldn’t handle. This means I changed the oil and filter. Did tune-ups. Replaced brake pads, shock absorbers, the master cylinder in the braking system. Replaced the thermostat for the air conditioner, which was in the most absurdly hard to reach place possible. Got a coworker to lend me a vacuum pump and coach me through tearing apart my blown air conditioning system to replace the dryer/conditioner unit, then vacuum out the air and put in new coolant.
From then on, I did my own routine servicing for the house air conditioner too. I also had a secondhand lawn mower so cantankerous that it seemed to need an overhaul every other time I used it. I got a lot of practice dealing with machinery.
Eventually I became able to pay mechanics to service my car, but having some idea what it takes to do that has been priceless. It helps me recognize which mechanics are exceptionally good, which are fine for ordinary work but not for solving tricky problems, and which are crooked.
For example, there’s a particular mechanics’ shop in town that I won’t try again. A neighbor once recommended them. The first time I tried them, it was just for a roadworthiness check ahead of a contract at a site across the country. They tried to convince me that my car was a write-off because it had some rust underneath. While laughing that off, I took the opportunity to let them know about my background.
The next time I tried them, the clutch was failing. They told me a sad story. My old diesel Vauxhall Corsa (I drive something better now but a nice car doesn’t belong at a steel mill) had an exotic hybrid hydraulic and cable clutch system. The part that needed to be replaced was tucked away above a big chunk of equipment that would have to be taken out to get to it. The bill would be over £400.
I wasn’t familiar with the Corsa’s design details, but this sounded absurd so I walked out. With a little tinkering under the hood (where I could only see a cable in the clutch system), I got the car to work just enough to get me across the country to the steel mill where I needed to be on Monday morning.
The Corsa had a very simple cable clutch system. It needed a £35 part with an hour and a half of labor.
So I am a big fan of everyone knowing how to change a tire, not just in theory but in real life. I’m not so extreme that I think everyone should do as much automotive maintenance as I used to have to do, but I believe it’s good to have a basic understanding of what’s going on in a car. How do you know when the wheels need balancing or realignment? How can you tell if the front wheels aren’t directly in front of the back wheels? (Hint: Unlike what our local tire dealer believes, you don’t need fancy equipment. You only need a ball of string.) How can you check fluid levels? And so on.
In the visit on Sunday, we talked about these as life skills. Someone said this should be taught to kids in school. It would be nice if schools taught these skills. They don’t, so we should teach each other.
Understanding the way things work makes life more navigable when something goes wrong.