As some of you may remember, I purchased my first car, the Codymobile, last year (with some help from you folks). See the thread on it, with some photos:
here.
I love the car.. It's a very low mileage car -- not driven often by the first and previous owner, and driven even less by me (2008 Suzuki SX4 AWD, with only 22k miles).
It's in good shape, but I have no idea if the previous owner did any fluid changes, etc.
I'm not a car person, but because I want to spend more time bonding with the car and because I like tinkering with things and learning how to do things, I'm thinking I may invest in some tools and do everything I can do (change oil, transmission fluid, spark plugs, coolant, transfer case oil, break fluid, etc.).
There are some great videos on youtube that show how to do most things for my car, so I can follow those for most things.
Currently I'm thinking about buying some (rhino) ramps for getting it up to work on.
Any other thoughts? Am I crazy for trying to do this stuff myself?
Cost wise, I suspect I won't save much money doing this stuff myself -- mainly because I'll be spending all of this money on tools that I will only ever use once or twice (given how infrequently I drive the car, this may be my one and only change of these fluids before i die of old age). On the other hand I am (rightly or wrongly?) completely paranoid about mechanics not doing a proper job in changing these fluids and not using quality materials -- especially when the customer is bringing in a car that probably doesn't need these fluids replaced
I also want to take a moment here and post some links to some great DIY car maintenance books that I've read recently -- most of which are available very cheap used on amazon.com:
(side note -- two of my top 3 books are written by women)
And some great youtube video sources:
Recent Posts
