Well, for one thing, the engine compartments are immensely crowded and
everything useful is hidden under some plastic junk that you have to remove
before you can do anything (1/2 hour wasted right there). Then there are a
billion unlabelled interconnected hoses under that. Many components are not
designed to be owner maintained and require engine removal for access
(sometimes even the spark plugs!). You might be able to test timing, etc,
but how to you adjust it? You can't, it's all controlled by some chip. Try
accessing something behind the dashboard of a car built after 1980 -- you'd
need a trained garter snake to reach anything. Putting in a stereo can be a
multi-day task. But the worst part are the factory service manuals. They
aren't written in a way that describes how to do any particular job -- they
are just a massive cross-referenced collection of individual steps, meant as
a checklist for a trained technician, not a DIY'er, chock full of obscure
acronyms and calls for special tools. And 3/4 of the content concerns the
air bag and seat belt safety interlocks. Oh, and then there are the
super-cheesy bottom-line-based-engineering cop-outs that make you not want
to work on them merely from an esthetic standpoint -- like the one-time-use
hub nuts made of incredibly thin stamped metal. Ugh!
Sorry for the rant, but I made the mistake of thinking I could work on my
wife's Geo Metro -- that would be simple, right? Not! Just nasty, ugly, and
ultimately unsatisfying. But YMMV...
on 5/31/01 5:25 AM, Brinkman, Gerardo V at
GB127167@exchange.DAYTONOH.NCR.com wrote:
> Sooooo - why is it so difficult to work on modern cars ?
>
> gerry
--
Max Heim
'66 MGB GHN3L76149
If you're near Mountain View, CA,
it's the red one with the silver bootlid.
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