I've only learned the joys of working on one's vehicle in the past 4 years since I've started riding and maintaining the ever-growing fleet of motorcycles. I never used to like putting my cars in the hands of some random shop -- but back then I didn't have much of a choice. Now the choice is: use some under-paid, over-worked dude who couldn't give a rat's *** about my vehicle, OR... save a bunch of money, learn something new and have the satisfaction of a job well done? Not a hard choice. The saved money can't really be considered as an advantage though as that tends to fund my "tool habit."
That reminds me of a time I was working on this truck that *wasn't* fun. As my friend Peter once put it succinctly, "The enjoyment of working on a car is inversely proportional to how much it *needs* to be worked on."
At first I was just going through my new-to-me truck and doing regular maintenance stuff that I didn't think it had had done yet. Although I'd never done it, draining and refilling the rear diff seemed simple enough so that was one of the first ones I tackled. It was going great until I got it RTVd and all buttoned back up. The fill bolt wouldn't come loose. Whoops. It dawned on me pretty quickly I probably should have checked that before draining the damn thing. Lesson learned. Ok...
First up, I go through what I've learned from working on bikes: thread penetrant, heating with a torch and smacking it with a hammer. Nothing! I put a cheater on the chinese crap 3/8 socket wrench I'm using and started kicking the snot out of it. Destroyed that socket wrench... Next I got out a big 1/2" breaker bar I had recently gotten for something else and put 1/2" to 3/8" adapter on it from the same chinese Kragen set. Snapped the adapter apart, too. By this point the square hole was now a circular hole. Grrr. More hammering, more torch, more thread penetrant. Nothing is working. After about 2 hours of what amounted to banging my head against the wall I found another method I could try from reading on ford-trucks.com. Weld a 3/8" socket extension into the plug.
It took awhile to get set up since the TIG machine was one of those recent "tool habit" purchases and everything was still setup statically in the garage. Once I got it all going it ended up working like a charm. Awesome! Even though I was really frustrated for most of that project I did learn a few new lessons on wrenching and the got great feeling of solving a tough problem.
# broken 1/2" -> 3/8" adapter
# I'm lucky my fiancé got me some intro welding classes for my bday last year -- wouldn't have the limited skills or equipment to have done this otherwise
# extension welded to plug; I've assumed that is red lock-tite there in the threads and that the heat from welding did all the work
