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Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Find a friend/relative that has some experience to watch while you follow the manual. people like me that grew up passing tools to my father in the 60s, and then did all of my own repairs from age 14 when I got my first car are still around. I still do tuneups/brakes and simple things like heater cores or fan resistors, but I no longer swap engines and may leave some of the computer related work to the real mechanics.
You should have a mechanical aptitude and know your way around tools, or even a simple oil change can result in a frozen up engine.
Friend the only thing for you to do is get hands on experience. I would get an older car and the service manual and "practice" doing repairs. Note If you can not understand the service manual after you read it you need to forget the idea of fixing anything other than real minor things like light bulb replacement and oil changes.With mechanics you either have the aptitude or you don't.. The good news is most people can save real money by understanding how their car works and doing some repairs themselves.
I want to learn about cars and do hands on projects without having to go to automotive schools. Learning things such as changing exhausts, installing turbo/super chargers, changing brakes/suspension (may leave that to specialists), cold air intakes, changing fluids, and adding strut bars/sway bars. Im interested in those things but the colleges I want to enroll to dont offer automotive majors.
So does it require that level of education for me to work on my cars myself safely ?
What kind of cars are you working on? What kind of work do you want to learn to do? I learned most of what I know from reading, then doing.
If you want to mod a car, particularly if you want to do something like a turbo, you will need a different car as a daily driver, if only while you have the car apart doing the mods.
It would be easier if you got an old aircooled Bug or an older pickup as your first project - both of these if you improve what you start with, even if you don't bring it to a high state of perfection, there is a market to sell it into.
All that said if you can find the time, take some community college classes in the areas you are interested in. Best way to learn is essentially as an apprentice, or in such a formal class.
Find the local car clubs or autocross and racing groups. Car nuts are a good group and you can hang out on tech days and learn a lot. Depending on the car, there are different owners groups, but a local autocross group will get you access to a multitude of cars and projects like you mentioned. Show some competence and willingness to help and you'll have plenty of opportunities to work on cars - everyone loves a volunteer.
Go to a local community college book store and see if they have books for their automotive repair classes. Buy those books and read them!
Also get a complete factory service manual or CD-ROM (about $200) for your car. Order from the dealer. Those have about 2000 pages of repair / part replacement / troubleshooting information for one specific year/model car.
Then you can sometimes buy educational materials from a vehicle manufacturer's dealer training web site. There may be books, videos, or tutorials (just a few pages long). For example for GM... https://www.acdelcotds.com/acdelco/action/viewstore
And Bosch has some pretty good books. Search google.com for the words...
automotive bosch book
Cool. I wanted to do mechanical engineering until I saw what math they use, I hate trigonometry but tell me how much does that factor into it. The thought irks me. So ill be cool if i just watch hands on videos and take on certain task myself?
In college, you don't have to deal with trigonometry in the way high school kids do.
OP you could do like I did when I was your age. I got me an older car, took it completely apart, stripped everything off of it took out the engine, tranny, rear end, brakes everything tore them down to their last nut and bolt and then took the time to learn each apart and rebuild it back together.
You could try that and if that doesn't work then maybe go to a mechanics school or a high school that offers auto mechanics.
Cool. I wanted to do mechanical engineering until I saw what math they use, I hate trigonometry but tell me how much does that factor into it. The thought irks me. So ill be cool if i just watch hands on videos and take on certain task myself?
What I was trying to say was, being an ME student was a perk; the analytical thinking process and the access to the knowledge of anything mechanical helped. The main thing is the mechanical aptitude, whether you are mechanically inclined or handy with things. For example, can you take apart a simple device like a flashlight or maybe even a TV remote control and understand how they were put together ? Can you put them properly together after you've taken them apart ? This is largely a "talent" and training (watching) will take it to another level.
BTW, working on suspension and braking systems are much simpler than putting together a made-from-scratch forced induction system.
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