Originally Posted by masraum
I'm thinking mostly about cars, but really this applies to lots of things, your home, motorcycles, lawn equipment, aircraft, pool equipment, maybe even computer equipment, etc....
How much preventative maintenance do you do?
How would that change if you do the maintenance yourself or if you have to pay a mechanic or someone else to do the maintenance for you?
I've always done as much of my own work as possible whether that's on vehicles or our old home or whatever. It's often hard to find a mechanic, plumber, electrician, etc.... that you can trust to do the work correctly and not rip you off either with a crazy bill or unnecessary work in the process so that's one of the main reasons to do the work yourself besides the sense of accomplishment and money savings.
We sold our home and moved into an apt in town. We bought my boxster and it is our only car. Part of that was the missus stipulating that the car be kept in tip top shape, the theory being 1 With the reduced expenses, we can afford to pay someone else to do the work and 2 since it is our only car, we want and need it to be in great shape.
We bought the car 5 years ago with 21k miles, and it was CPO. In that time, I've put a little less than 5k miles a year on the car (no more long commute since we live in town). The car got front brakes about 1.5 years ago, it's had new tires and oil changes, but that's it.
I will be picking it up from one of the top rated Porsche specific Indie shops today. I have been putting off taking it in for regular maintenance and it's 40k mile checkup for a few months, but last Sat, the high pressure relief valve on the AC let go (major "smoke" through the AC vents, looked for a min like something was burning behind the dash, pretty big pucker moment, fortunately the smell was wrong for an electrical fire). That was the catalyst to drop the car off. The AC fix was <$250. I asked them to also change the oil and check things out. I'd gotten an occasional squeal when turning the steering wheel slowly at low speeds, and started to notice squeaks when hitting bumps at low speed or going over speed bumps. I'd noticed that one of the CV boots looked like it might have a small crack because I could see a line of grease that'd been flung out.
The CV boot ended up being R&R of that axle ($1000). The reason for the full replacement vs just a boot replacement was that by the time they had pulled everything apart and put it back together for one of the boots, the labor would have eaten up a big part of the cost of a new axle and one of the boots would still be old, so while a little more expensive, it's better just to replace the whole thing. OK, I buy that, assuming it's not just a slap dash job of slapping the new boot on and they do a full clean and inspect and repack job on the old joint.
40k mile maintenance includes plugs, not because they are necessarily bad, but also just to make sure they come out every once in a while and don't end up stuck which makes sense to me for an 11 year old car. Then, while doing the plugs, they recommend replacing the coils ($80 ea) because the ozone and heat makes the plastic and rubber bits brittle, so a replacement while not necessary is recommended. I can see that too, especially assuming these are coil on plug.
Then the squeaks in the suspension ended up being the strut top mounts and the strut top bearings. The struts themselves are fine, but to get rid of the noise (which is a very early sign that things are starting to get old) those things need to be replaced. The parts themselves aren't expensive, but the labor to get to them and put everything back together for all four corners is I think about 10 hours if you include the required alignment.
The missus and I were expecting the AC to be pricey (because AC work usually is) and it was just about the cheapest thing we had done. The missus nearly choked on the grand total, and I must admit, it was pretty hard for me to swallow as well. Fortunately, I'm pretty confident that this place is honest and does good work.
They get unanimously good recommendations by the PCA. When I dropped the car off they had everything from an old 356 speedster to a new GT3 and a bunch of 70s and 80s bellows bumper cars and a few front engined water pumpers including a '95 928 GTS with a manual trans. There was also a pretty smokin' hot ferrari in the shop. One of the guys has built a hotrod original mini. The owner has a 993 as a daily driver.
I have in the past on a couple of miatas done the timing belt and a few "while you're in there" things like the water pump, maybe thermostat, some gaskets and hoses. I've never done anything like "replace the coils while you're replacing the plugs".
I do get replacing the axle, and have done that in the past, but that was when I could get the entire axle for $100 or $200 and the boot and associated labor was going to be a pain in the rear. The axle wasn't $1000.
The bill hurts, but it will be nice to know that a lot of that isn't likely to go bad any time soon. Hopefully, the water pump doesn't decide to go in a month or two.
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