DIY Professionals

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Hey y'all, I'm new here and have been reading a lot of great threads in prep for tinkering with my new Jeep. I am in awe of how you all do these electrical, mechanical, and structural projects on your rides.

So I thought it would be cool to have a thread where you could share how you became proficient at these specialties and maybe it could help others find people who are particularly good at certain types of work for their own projects. So was it through pure tinkering/trial and error, was it your profession, handed down knowledge, etc...?

Personally I love learning new things and challenging myself and whatever I have done has been out of passion. I have no engineering background so this is all new to me.

And in advance thanks for sharing!
 
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I learned by doing. I started with 2-stroke motorcycles. A few years later I changed the timing chain on my wife's car (had to - no money). The more I did, the more confidence I had. Best of all, I could do stuff on my own schedule in my own yard. When I was 20, it was about finding a good service manual. Now almost everything is on the internet. Important to most projects is having the right tools. Tool availability is a lot better now since most auto part stores share tools.
 
Anything I know about working on cars I owe to my dad teaching me when I was a kid. That and the fact that having my parents buy me a car when I was 16, my friends and I were ALWAYS under that thing working on it in some way or another.

In addition, 4 years of shop class in high school taught me a lot as well!
 
I learned at a very early age that nearly anything can be taken apart. And more importantly, that things can be put back together if you pay attention to what you are doing. The more you pay attention, the more often a past experience can carry over to another new experience.
 
I learned by being a young Airman in the USAF and not having a lot of money to spare. My first car was a ‘79 Mercury Cougar that I bought from my parents after going into the service. The water pump went out in it and I didn’t know how to fix it. At that time the base service station had a garage and it took what little I had to get it fixed. It was at that point that I told myself that I need to learn to fix my own shit. After that, I tried to learn all I could from friend, supervisors and most importantly, my dad. I made many many phone calls over the years describing to him symptoms, noises and how the vehicle was feeling. Most of the time he was able to narrow it down for me. To his credit, he tried to get me to help him a lot before when I was in high school. I did some, but I was more interested in hanging out with my friends and doing stuff, especially as it got closer to the time for me to leave for the military.
 
Growing up the family businesses were Auto Body and running construction equipment. When I totaled my first car at 16 my step father just pointed me to a parts car and told me to get to work fixing my broken up car. Following that I was a broke enlisted Soldier with a family and a string of $500 cars, had to keep them going. Now that I can afford to have a shop fix modern car issues my Jeep is my project, my break from being connected.
 
Growing up in the 80's and 90's, MacGyver was the man! Also, buying a 66 Mustang as a first car was a huge crash course in auto repair. It looked pretty, but it was mostly original and dry rotted. It didn't help that they opened a CJ pony parts less than 20 miles from my house. The used car lot I bought it from told me the motor and transmission were rebuilt and his sister drove it to school daily ( no power steering or power brakes....right. I was an idiot! ). I worked from the time I was 15 so I would just dump money into the car. It looked pretty, but out of necessity I had to fix it because I couldn't afford the parts and the repair service. I bought a Chilton's and pretty much had at it. I'm a desk jockey by day, but by the weekend I'm a wrenching warrior!

92867
 
...... I bought a Chilton's and pretty much had at it...

View attachment 92867MacGyver, a Chiltons or Haynes and a junkyard are the shade tree mechanics best friend.
[/QUOTE]
Growing up in the 80's and 90's, MacGyver was the man! Also, buying a 66 Mustang as a first car was a huge crash course in auto repair. It looked pretty, but it was mostly original and dry rotted. It didn't help that they opened a CJ pony parts less than 20 miles from my house. The used car lot I bought it from told me the motor and transmission were rebuilt and his sister drove it to school daily ( no power steering or power brakes....right. I was an idiot! ). I worked from the time I was 15 so I would just dump money into the car. It looked pretty, but out of necessity I had to fix it because I couldn't afford the parts and the repair service. I bought a Chilton's and pretty much had at it. I'm a desk jockey by day, but by the weekend I'm a wrenching warrior!

View attachment 92867
MacGyver, a chiltons, and a junk yard are a shade tree mechanic’s (remember the Shade Tree Mechanic?) best friend.
 
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Well here's my mechanical autobiography...

I spent parts of my youth being drawn to tinkering and always wanting to build rather than buy. I had very little success with that path, but the desire was strong. Almost all the males in my family worked on stuff out of necessity, but they all had stories that intrigued me from their youth whether it be in a war zone for necessity or as a part of just what you did, or for going fast and destroying stuff just for fun.

In my late teens, once I started driving I was around a local airport quite a bit and I was around people that were very good at tinkering and actually fixing things, which seemed amazing to me. I discovered that going fast was fun too and it seemed useful when chasing girls. I went through a handful of projects and started getting into motorcycles (bought my first motorcycle, not running, by saving up from selling plasma for months and stayed sick most of that time. With some help I did get it running) and then while in college started working in auto shops as a technician. I was pre med at the time, but besides the chemistry labs spent more time reading about fabrication and welding and aspired to be a Green Beret when I would finally finish school. The not studying caught up to me and I was going to have to barely graduate with a Biology degree and hope the military would be a career or I decided to switch to Mechanical Engineering and delay my enlistment (though I did drop out for a semester intending to go ahead and join the Army).

After a couple of years of Calculus, I finally started learning stuff, but after a lot of road rash mixed with mental fatigue from constant technical information (and a lot of traffic violations and court dates) got bored and just tried to get outside on foot or rock climbing with shoes, not tires, as often as possible. Before graduating I got hurt and the Army was no longer an option, but my desire to get outside took off. Race cars were of no interest anymore, but getting off-road drew me to Jeeps and trucks. Before graduating college, started working for the college supporting energy research, which meant mostly fabrication, welding, and machining and trying to get the function back in my leg on the side. Ignited by physical therapy, I kept pushing and pushing and putting up a lot of miles vertically from climbing or horizontally from running, swimming, hiking and a few biking. Hunting and shooting became massive hobbies and I was making some of my own gear on most of that stuff except for the climbing gear.

After a bit I started getting more active in helping on the family farm and working on equipment (I'm very green in this aspect and I'm used to having all brand new parts rather than cobbling stuff together) and got a job close to home (sometimes overseas though) doing all kinds of different engineering projects and managing/overseeing/designing a lot fabrications for industrial/manufacturing purposes and a lot of custom extremely heavy machining as an engineer and not an operator. I stay loaded at work and stay in a constant state of trying to learn more especially from techniques that are vanishing in our high tech manufacturing environments. My off-road projects seem endless and compensate quite a bit from not being able to get out as much as I'd prefer, but I feel pretty confident in most mechanical stuff. My electrical ability is my biggest weakness and I still want to setup some gears. I'm around gears almost daily, but the scale is massively different and my job keeps me tied to a desk most of the time.
 
I bought a YJ that needed a ton of basic maintenance. Then I bought a TJ that needed a good amount of basic maintenance. Then I had enough extra funds to start buying parts for the TJ but couldn't afford the labor to have someone else do it. YouTube and this forum are great resources. Not to mention a good amount of trial and error.

It also helps that I enjoy working on the jeep. I always smile when I'm halfway through a big project and the wife comes out and thinks I'm working part time at the chop shop because half the jeep is sitting in a pile waiting to be put back together.
 
Ok, there I was, waist deep in grenade pins . . .
Seriously though, what now seems like 100 years ago, my father was studying to be a drilling mud engineer. He worked in a small lab that was from the outside considered to be either an over sized camper, or a small box truck. He did not make very much money, and with four of us kids at home, my mother had her hands full. I was the oldest son of three, so while dad chased the drilling rigs, he told me to look out for the others. Dad was about as mechanically inclined as a wad of chewing gum and fixed things with bailing wire and duct tape, but brilliant with a slew of other things. We couldn’t afford to fix things when they broke, or buy new ones. I had no choice but to learn how to fix different things. I would ride my bicycle down to an appliance store that had a guy in the back that would teach me little things, and sometimes gave me used parts. I worked on everybody’s bicycles, lawnmowers, and learned to do some home repairs. When I got to high school, I took shop class. One summer during my senior year, I spent a few days with my dad on a rig. He had told me about a nice creek nearby and suggested I run some trot lines on it to see if I could catch some catfish out of it. While there with him, a guy offered me a job on one of the crews, and I accepted it. I did everything, and lived there at the rig site. I sent my paychecks to my mother. When the rig moved, I moved with it, and years later in 1983 a guy showed up and shut it all down. He said the oilfield had died, and I was out of a job. So after a few weeks finding out nobody was hiring, I joined the Army. With no actual formal training, my skills didn’t mean much, so they assigned my 23 year old butt to the infantry. I earned honor graduate, soldier of the cycle, my own “Iron Mike” trophy, and a slot to jump school. Before too long, almost all my skills became necessary at one point or another and earned me promotions and other schools. I became to go to guy in almost every unit I was in. 10 years later an RPG slammed into a building I was running towards, and I saw my right boot sole directly over my left shoulder. A year after that I came home. A year after that a neighbor offered me a maintenance position at his steel processing plant. 24 years later, after being the plant manager for 14 years I came home again, and once again my skills don’t mean much. I’ve had quite a few vehicles in that time span, and worked on countless others for various reasons. Everything from a Corvette to dirt bikes and four wheelers to boats. I like to make stuff out of nothing.
Now, I have a fourteen year old King Ranch F150 I bought brand new, and a TJ I bought last summer. Neither are race cars, and neither get abused. Instead, they get polished and treated as if they were on a showroom somewhere. My truck just went over 118k, and the Jeep has 180k on it, so I figure I’ll have plenty to wrench on for a while yet.
Today I started to replace a leaking valve cover gasket. I say started because I haven’t taken all the bolts out yet. A nap became a priority, as well as walking the dogs, fixing my neighbors garage door, listening to my youngest daughter tell me about her job, and fixing the drywall in the laundry room where my wife punched a doorknob through the wall by accident, so I’ll get back to it tomorrow, maybe, it’s raining again.
 
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Growing up the son of a career Engineman in the Navy, as far back as I can remember I was under a hood or chassis with dad when ever I could be. Later on took small gas engine course and a diesel tech class when in high school, after that went to a tech school in AZ for automotive. Since then spent a few years hear and there turning wrenches for a living and of course working on my own vehicles. Opened up a tire and service shop with a local gas station owner last year and life decided to throw me a curve in the form of a hernia.... so until that's fixed(can I just use JB weld?) it's just tinkering on my own rigs.
 
Good stuff .

16 years old, wanted a Baja Bug, you know, VWs are sooooo reliable, German made. All I did was work and work on it, had an entire wheel fall off once, CvC axle broke.

It was survival.

All in all , doing project vehicles gave me a sense of accomplishment .
 
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At 53 yrs old, I've owned a variety of cars, trucks, bikes, ATVs, golf carts, boats, motorized skateboards, etc. He who dies with the most toys wins, right? It's a vice, no doubt. And taking care of them is 1/2 the fun/battle. It's been a part of my life since I was 10 or 11 yrs old. My dad taught me things early on, YouTube and Google teach me new things now days. Plus there's been bosses, friends and family in there too.
Learning new shit about Jeeps all the time now days.
 
Grew up in an extended family that always played with cars. We had something of a wrecking yard on our property, which became my own personal playground. I've owned over 300 vehicles myself, which makes me something of an automotive slut. I love the automobile. Always have. Love wrenching on 'em...
 
I think the biggest theme here is family influence and just doing it. That is how I got into wrenching too. I grew up in a family that was DIY to the core. I watched my dad, his father, and his brothers build our house (I was too young at the time to do much except pick up trash). Then one of my uncle's built his house...His crew was the same as my Dad's crew, but I helped a lot on that one. Then another uncle built a house. This was all before I was 18. I also had to work on my own car when I was 15 and 16 under the watchful eye of my dad. I worked in a lumber yard, learned some stuff there. Went to College, worked on FormulaSAE and was a member of the Off Road club. Also helped one of the professors build his house.

DIY is just in my blood. Now, I enjoy being in the barn and creating something. The jeep, my woodshop, and my garden tractors are my outlet. I don't get to do "honest work" at work anymore, so I work with my hands at home.