How do you know you would enjoy being a mechanic?
I don't. Not one bit. It's gamble.
As someone who worked in a tool wielding career myself, I get the temptation and attitude that it would be more satisfying to spend the day using tools instead of doing paperwork. I get it, I really do, that's why I left paperwork to handle tools. I spent a lot of money training to be a professional tool user.
However, handling tools all day comes with its own tedious hell if you don't actually have the psychology for it, and it's impossible to tell if you do until you try.
I LOVE working with my hands. Really, I was born to do it, teachers when I was 5 years old started commenting on my dexterity and skill handling tools. I truly, truly love it, it puts me right into flow state.
What I HATE HATE HATE is feeling constantly rushed when working with tools. That fucks with my flow state and makes the whole process feel like torture. That's what a lot of tool working jobs are like, because when your labour is your product, then your value comes down to how quickly you can do that labour. It's the same way that I love cooking, but hated being a chef.
When there's pressure to speed up labour, there's then often institutional pressure to cut corners, even if it isn't explicit, the tool-jockeys who do cut corners tend to be rewarded because they appear faster. It can be infuriating.
I was lucky, being born to do this, I actually did become abnormally fast. After about 3 years, I got so fast that I was able to work at what for me was an incredibly leisurely pace while pumping out more work that my much harder working colleagues.
After about 5 years, I was bored out of my skull. Doing the same range of tool using tasks day in and day out started feeling like my brain was rotting. I started deeply envying people like my DH, who basically gets paid 6 figures for his thoughts. If I had to spend another 10 hour day cutting endless 6 degree angles, I was going to lose my mind.
I started intensely craving more meaning in my work. It felt pointless doing work that was totally non individual. Anyone else trained to do it could do it. Sure, I could do it a lot faster, which made my life easier, but still, I could only get so good and I had gotten there years before. I was stagnating.
So I invested a bunch more money to train in a area that very few of my colleagues worked in, that required a lot of thinking work along with the tool work.
That was great for awhile, I didn't switch over completely, I just started slowly doing more and more of the new type of work I was qualified to do, still working with my hands.
Then...fuck.
Then I got injured from chronic strain of doing the job. I spent an entire year getting as much medical help as possible, but the ongoing pain started making it impossible for me to do my job without wanting to die. An entire year, dropping to very part time, modifying duties, nothing worked. I could not use tools anymore professionally.
So I retired. I retired just in time to make my last student loan payment. So the entire gamble, for me, was pointless from a financial standpoint.
Now, that's just my personal story. Yours may be very very different, but it's a good perspective to think about when romanticizing working with your hands as somehow a more satisfying alternative to working on a computer.
Maybe it is the right move for you, but I wouldn't rush too quickly into a grass-is-greener kind of situation when you have no idea if it's what you need to be happy.