My husband and I both know next to nothing about car repair and maintenance. I'm not even entirely sure about WHAT we need to do to keep our cars in good shape (as opposed to stuff that is just a waste of money for a junky car), let alone how to do some of those things ourselves.
What advice would you give to us if we wanted to start learning how to take care of our cars ourselves? Any resources you can recommend? I plan to start soon by having someone teach me how to change the oil, and by checking my tire pressure more frequently. Not sure how to proceed after that.
What car do you drive, and what do you know of it's history? I'm going to assume 90s or early 2000s and fuel injected, just because that's a pretty safe assumption right now.
The biggest thing is to just start doing it. Cars are a large collection of simple mechanical systems connected together. No single system is that complicated (and, if it is, it's probably computerized, and probably tells you exactly what's wrong).
The first thing you'll need is a basic set of tools. A "50 part socket set" or something should be fine. Buy specialized tools/goofy sockets/etc as you need them. As noted by someone else, you can usually rent the truly weird stuff, but you shouldn't need any of that for basic auto maintenance.
A work lamp is also nice. You can go oldschool with an incandescent bulb on a drop cord, or you can get a fancy battery powered, magnetic, bendy, LED work light. A bright LED flashlight can also be useful for finding things in the engine bay.
As far as resources go, buy a Chilton's or Haynes manual that suits your car. Your local auto shop should have them. Otherwise, use eBay or Amazon. The next place to look is YouTube. It turns out there are literally thousands of videos on YouTube of people showing how to do car maintenance. Find videos that refer to your model year and start watching. Some of them are really very good.
Beyond that... seriously, just dive in. Watch a video, read the steps in the manual, and go at it.
If you have a friend who works on cars, it's very useful to have them around for the first few jobs. The vast majority of car guys out there can be bribed easily with a six pack of moderate to decent quality beer and the promise of not having to do any actual work. Occasionally, they may request pizza or a sandwich while they're at it for a long project. Feed them. I have no idea what car gals prefer...
If you don't know any car people... good luck? :/ They're harder and harder to find lately, it seems. I'm not really sure why. I guess modern cars being more reliable means you can safely ignore them a lot longer?
You sort of imply that your car hasn't had much maintenance done on it recently. An entirely incomplete list of things you might want to do on such a vehicle is below. It's a few hundred in parts (total) and a good number of hours of labor, but it resets the timer, as it were, on a lot of wear items.
- Change the oil and the oil filter.
- Change the air filter for the engine.
- Change the spark plugs. If the car has over 150k miles, change the spark plug wires. If you have a distributor, change the cap and rotor.
- Check your brake pad wear. If any of the pads are badly worn, replace them.
- Change your oxygen sensor. This ranges from "easy" to "truly a pain in the @$$," but often pays off in fuel savings later. If you have a fancy wideband sensor (that costs $150 instead of $20), you might not need to do this, but if it's a cheap O2 sensor (single wire type), replace it.
- Bleed your brakes. It's a bit messy, but brake fluid absorbs water, and can corrode your brake calipers.
- Adjust your rear drum brakes, if they need adjustment. This went out of style in the late 80s, and was replaced with "auto-adjusting" systems that never work.
And then pretty much go from there. When you find yourself rebuilding engines, you've arrived.
If your car is newer than 1996, it has OBDII support (OnBoard Diagnostics). This, combined with a code reader, means that if your car has a check engine light, it will literally tell you what it's unhappy with. You can get the codes read at most auto shops, you can buy a reader yourself, or, my favorite, you can buy a bluetooth OBDII dongle and use an Android phone or tablet to read codes, reset codes, monitor operating parameters, etc.
Anyway, hopefully that helps a little bit.