Posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 15:37:52 :
In Reply to: tires are one thing... posted by David N. Lundstrom on Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 14:49:45 :
I'm sure we've also all seen some unbelievably crappy work done on motor vehicles by amateur mechanics, but most guys on this forum think they're competent to do just about anything to a truck, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
It's not like there are only two choices in the world, "Hire a professional" or "Do it wrong yourself and cause a big mess." There's the third option, "Learn what you need to learn and do it right yourself." If the guy hooks up his air compressor wrong, which would be hard since it's a pretty simple connection, the worst that will happen is he'll damage the compressor and blow the circuit breaker. If any of us botches a brake job on our old trucks, we'll quite likely kill somebody, and yet we don't hesitate to do our own brakes.
We live in the age of specialists, which is fine I suppose if everybody has plenty of money to hire exactly the person who's licensed and bonded to do one particular thing, but there's something to be said for being willing to learn how to do a lot of things reasonably well rather than just being an expert in one thing. My grandfather, for example, could build a barn, drive a team, track a cougar, top a spar tree, raise livestock, fix a drag saw, build new skids for a donkey engine, roll his own cigarettes, drive a log truck, or find a missing hunter. The only thing he was "professionally qualified" to do was the high climbing. Some of his carpentering would have given a building inspector fits, but it was good enough for what it had to do, and he sure wouldn't have gotten very far in life if he'd had to hire a "pro" to do everything.
For every handy homeowner who makes a mess of things because he doesn't know what he's doing, there's another one who does a far better job than what's legally required because he cares a lot more about what he's doing and he's not paying himself by the hour. For every botched DIY electrical job (okay, maybe for every two botched DIY jobs), I've seen some spectacular home craftsmanship -- wires run in neatly-labeled bundles, 12 gage wire used on 15 amp circuits, commercial grade outlets and metal boxes all around, more circuits than the code requires, and so on. Likewise with concrete work, framing, or finish carpentry.
Anybody who's competent to rebuild an old truck is competent to at least decide for himself whether or not he knows enough to do any given wiring, plumbing, or carpentry project well enough. I would never say that somebody who's uncomfortable with wiring should do his own wiring, but there's any more magic about electricity than there is about about carburetion or sheet metal work or brakes.
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