I told my brother how I was trying to repair the head gasket on an Acura Legend.
My brother just wrote me that he never took me for the car repair type.
Well, I was big into the legos and erector set, and building electronics, so its not a big stretch. The first thing I used to do after buying a car was to buy a Chilton's repair manual for it.
For several years, the first thing I did after buying a vehicle was to replace the battery with a high capacity battery. And then wiring up the car with antennas and ham radios. I had a 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood limo for a while, and for a trip to a ham radio convention, I wired it up with 13 antennas and almost a dozen different radios, a set of radios for a the driver, and a separate set of radios and even computers, for the passenger area. I once bounced a signal off the Russian space station MIR using my mobile radios. I spoke to people in dozens of countries while driving to and from work.
I used to wrench on my motorcycles a lot. Partly out of necessity of trying to save money, and also just because it was fun to tinker. It's easy to get to things on the bikes. I had a lot of mid-70's motorcycles, mainly Hondas, such as the 1974 CB200T two cylinder 200cc motorcycle, my first motorcycle. I had a 50cc Garelli moped before that. Then I got a Yamaha 750 Twin, a 1976 CB750 four cylinder motorcycle with a custom flame paint job that I put special spark plug ends on that would show the sparks. I also had a CB350 Twin. And later a 1983 Goldwing, 1000cc motor. And a 1975 CB450 Four, a really nice four cylinder motorcycle that someone had added an aftermarket oil coiler to it. That bike had 60,000 miles on it, without a head gasket rebuild! That was unheard of in those days, usually they would need that job done at about 30,000 miles. To have a 100,000 mile motorcycle, you had to have something like a BMW. The mid 1970's and early 1980's motorcycles, they were all easy to work on.
One winter when I was living in Dayton in the University of Dayton ghetto, it was too cold to work on a motorcycle outside. So I put down garbage bags on my dining room floor to protect it, and I pulled one of my motorcycles into my dining room, and tore down the engines. I would give a mechanic friend of mine $10 to drop in every couple of days for a few minutes to tell me what the next step was, and I'd spend a couple of days figuring out how to do it. Replaced the rocker arms which were worn out (these push on rods to open the valves in the cylinders in the right sequence), timing chain tensioners, replaced gaskets, and a couple other things. Then I put it all back together. Had him check it out after I finished, and it looked good to go. It ran great. For 50 miles.
At that point, it still ran, but every time I parked it, it started leaving oil, and not just a few drops. Think puddle the size of medium pizza. I call Alan and ask him whats going on. We talk for a bit, and then he asks me, "Did you torque the heads?" I said "Did I what the heads? You're the mechanic, didn't you torque the whatever? You never mentioned that before!"
I knew what that was, but I didn't think about it, and he didn't mention it. I guess he assumed I wouldn't have made such a silly mistake. Torquing the heads means tightening down the bolts that hold the top of the engine to the rest of the engine, not under tightening them, not overtightening them. This gets a consistent amount of pressure across the gasket between the two pieces of metal. You need a special tool for that, and I hadn't bought that tool. If you dont do that, it either warps the head, and/or lets lots of oil escape past the gasket. The engine was going to have to be torn back down again and all the gaskets replaced. I moved to California a while after that, and I gave the motorcycle back to my mechanic. I had bought it from him a year or two before that. I just chalked it up to a fun learning experience....
I used to wrench on my thunderbirds too, simple stuff like basic tune up stuff like replacing spark plug and wires, replacing lots of batteries, switches, tires, replace radios, put in music amps, security systems, replacing distributor caps and coils, spark plugs and wires, fuses, headlights, hoses, brakes, maybe even radiator replacement. Thats all really basic. Nothing in the core of the engine on cars. Never played with transmissions or body work.
I really haven't done very much of this in the last 15 years. The stuff the other day was the deepest I've probably gotten into any car since being in California. The computerization, and emission controls, etc., make it less likely for me to work on cars!
But I believe I can specialize in the niche of doing cheap head gasket repairs and save people a lot of money.