Some people like to save money by doing their own foreign and domestic automotive repair.  While the intentions of the do-it-yourselfer are noble, you really shouldn’t do this unless you really know what you’re doing.  Working on your own car can result in all sorts of catastrophes, such as:

• Not doing something right and risking the safety of yourself and others
• Breaking something and incurring even more repair costs — often more than it would have cost to just get the repair done by a shop in the first place
• Hurting yourself because you don’t really know what you’re doing

Even people who know what they’re doing can make mistakes when working on their own car.  For instance, my dad — an ex-race car driver who had built and maintained his own race car — accidently broke off the nipple or bleed valve on one of the brake calipers when he was doing a minor brake repair on my mom’s car.  Luckily he was almost done bleeding the brake lines, but there is still air in the lines — and in order to fix the problem, he’ll have to replace the entire caliper, a repair that would have been unnecessary otherwise.

This is a prime example of how working on your own car — and making mistakes — can cost you more in the long run.  If my dad had simply taken my mom’s little Toyota to an Asian automotive maintenance shop, he would have spent more money on the repair, but it would have been done right the first time.

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