Strong preferences can severely limit your opportunities to save money, but a special form of this – perfectionism – has even greater power to limit these opportunities. I would not describe myself as a perfectionist, per se, but I have some “perfection-istic” dispositions, and one of those is in relation to my car.
For the past few years, I’ve written posts on my best and worst purchases for that year. I thought about doing that this year, but there were only a few items on the “best” list, very few on the “worst”, and a ton of gray-zone good-but-not-great purchases, almost all related to my car (and an office chair that I would otherwise love if it hadn’t tried so hard to induce tendonitis in my shoulder). So it was kind of a weird year.
For the first 3 years of owning my car, all I had to do was replace the battery (as preventive maintenance – it was 7 years old!), the outer tie rods, the water pump, and the drive belt tensioner. This was absolute heaven compared to my first car. I even drove this one up to Wyoming for the eclipse! What was this sorcery?
One day I finally realized that there was an awful lot of rebound when driving over bumps, and determined that the struts were very worn out. The car had over 190k miles on it, so it made sense. It had been a long time since I had done anything on the car, so I figured, hey, why not change the struts?
One thing led to the next. I swapped the struts successfully, changing the sway bar end links in the process, and began to notice the rest of the suspension was making noises. It was like everything had aged together gracefully, but with new struts, the ride was stiffer, and the other parts started complaining.
Mostly, I wanted to eliminate the sounds, but also, I felt like I was finally capable of changing everything under there. I remember how awful it felt as a broke college student, paying $400 to have the ball joints on the old Honda changed. The setup on this Toyota was different and seemed much easier. This car had as many miles on it as the Honda did when its ball joints had been going bad, so I figured it might be a good time to change these ones. Moreover, I wondered if it might feel like vindication, confronting something I couldn’t do before and overcoming in glorious triumph.
And so the projects began stacking up.
Working on the car was always more to me than just saving money. It was a matter of personal accomplishment, a decimation of the old identity I had once chosen for myself of ‘academic bookworm’. I still remember the first day I went into an auto parts store knowing exactly what I needed and getting it. It felt like pure bad-assery.
And that’s carried on through the years.
But the problem is that you should still be thinking about the cost of things behind the scenes. While buying quality parts is great and all, the costs add up very fast, and before long you might wake up to find you’ve spent thousands of dollars. Especially strange is when those thousands of dollar weren’t, strictly speaking, necessary – more precautions, or preventive maintenance.
This has never been more clear than with the fiasco involving the Hub Grappler.
In January of 2021, I discovered that my transmission was leaking from the bottom, through a seal that is formed in place between the bell housing and the rest of the transmission. The only way to fix this is to drop the transmission, pull it in half, and reseal it.
I lapsed into panic mode, a relic of the poverty spirit I carried with me from the past, despite having well over $100k set aside. The human mind is a strange thing. In that panic mode, I lost hold of reason. I still had so much I was planning to do on the car, and now this?! Well, what about the wheel bearings? I’d heard some wump wump wumping on really sharp turns, those are usually the bearings, right? How am I going to do everything? How can I get this all done fast? How can I get everything done at one time?
In my desire to do everything I had planned, I decided that spending money to make things easier was better than saving money. In a sense, this was not actually a bad call. I knew from changing a wheel bearing on my dad’s car that because steering knuckles are funky-shaped, pressing hubs out of them using a shop press is difficult and dangerous, and not a straightforward process if you don’t have a boatload of spare parts and adapters lying around. When I discovered that the Hub Grappler existed, which contained everything you needed to remove the hub cleanly and change the bearing with ease, I was sold. The problem was, it cost $450. I was so freaked out about the transmission and so focused on getting all my projects done that I said sure – fuck it. I bought the tool.
But in an odd twist of fate, I ended up not changing the bearings for nearly a year. I had to buy a 1″ wrench to hold one side (~$20), and a 1″ impact socket in order to use my impact wrench on the other side (~$20), and while the test run on a junkyard knuckle was successful (~$60), I learned that my little 2.0Ah battery for the impact would be drained half way through the job, so I bought a 4.0Ah battery to help things along ($80). And then, yeah, I ended up not using it for a year.
I felt…stupid.
But also…it’s like the coolest tool I own. And when I did change the bearings, it made it a breeze. I’m a big fan of OTC’s quality, and while I felt dumb for spending so much on what is essentially a single-application tool, it’s also a one-and-done tool. It just gets the job done, and it will probably outlive me. I just recently bought a slide hammer, which I could potentially have used to get the hubs out, but it’s hit or miss, and a lot of professionals on YouTube talk about how using a slide hammer for removing hubs can really suck sometimes. With this tool, you don’t have to bother with that, it will press the hub out for you.
I also learned a technique for getting the inner race off the hub, and I can’t describe just how satisfying it is when the race pops off successfully, and everything else is in perfect shape. It just feels like a job well done. And that’s what saves this tool from the “worst purchases” list, but it’s still sort of in the gray zone. It was expensive enough that I essentially broke even with the cost difference of paying a shop to do the wheel bearings, and it’s still not 100% clear they needed to be changed. I mean, I feel like a badass for changing them, though, and I probably won’t need to change them ever again, but you can probably understand my conflicted feelings. [But hey, it’s still cheaper than an iPhone 😉 ]
As I’ve described in other posts, I’ve done a bunch of things this past year, replacing seals and gaskets and hoses, as well as larger suspension components.
Was it worth it?
On the one hand, wow, I can replace the entire front suspension. I even figured out that the factory mark on the steering rack indicating the center was actually off by one tooth, and I was able to fix that. I feel really capable, at least for a DIYer, and it’s hard to put a price on that. But make no mistake, I don’t believe that half of what I’ve done to the car has been strictly necessary.
It’s also important to at least think of the Weibull curve, something I learned about from a favorite blog. The cost of maintaining some systems becomes astronomical at the tail end of the curve, which marks its effective end-of-life. These Toyotas are notorious for lasting well into 300k miles, so from that perspective, this car might still have a lot of life in it. But how much more money do I spend? Would I pay to rebuild the transmission? The engine? What happens if the compressor eats itself and damages the whole A/C system? Would I pay a shop to fix that for me?
Maybe?
Some guys put tens of thousands into their cars for racing or show. It’s just their hobby. I think I might have to accept the fact that to some extent, this is a hobby for me. It has the potential to save a lot of money, but it is probably more accurate to say that it carries with it the satisfaction of accomplishment more than it does savings.
One of the key takeaways from this is that I should lay off thinking this is necessarily some massive money-saving endeavor. It can be, but it takes the right constitution, level of interest, and drive, and it still requires a steep investment. I’d still encourage people to spend some time on YouTube and learn how their car works, or pick up a Haynes or Chilton’s manual to understand the parts of their car, as this knowledge can be very powerful and freeing, but doing the work yourself requires quite the upfront investment, and whether it saves you money sometimes relies on factors that might not be in your control or purview (though you might be surprised what you’re capable of).
The other key takeaway is that I still like this stuff. And I think the overall investment has still been worth it, though I think I could save more money if I let go of some of my perfectionist tendencies. That, and opt for a shorter commute so you put fewer miles on your car 😉