Engineering Lessons Learned Via the Challenge of Automotive Maintenance
I changed my spark plugs, temporarily killing my car–with no "undo" button–to make improvements. This is the precarious path that engineers must walk.
No, you don’t have to change spark plugs to be an engineer. You don’t even have to be into cars per se. You do, however, have to be willing to do something that could be disastrous if you fail in order to move the state of the art forward–or at least the state of your situation.
During my decade-or-so in manufacturing, there were many, many times where I had to willingly break a machine in order to improve its function by way of upgrades or preventive maintenance, often on a strict timeline. While there was always some sense of dread before starting the break-improve cycle, it was also a bit of a rush. In my last engineering-for-a-company role, I was effectively in charge of a dozen or so people during preventive improvement events, all looking to me to meet a tight production deadline. The weight of potential lost time, production, and ultimately money, were on my head if things went awry.1
Why Do Your Own Automotive Maintenance?
Performing your own car maintenance is a similar pursuit in many ways. While you’re only affecting yourself and/or the small group of people that depend on this functional conveyance, once you get into the task there is no undo button. While there’s no production supervisior breathing down your neck, if you can’t get to work, school, or the store the consequences are still significant.
But why would you do car maintenance when you can just 💰 pay someone? After all, your time certainly has some value, and what if you make a mistake?
In my mind there are a few legitimate reasons: First, there is a very good chance you’ll save money in the process, perhaps even more per hour than you’d make at your normal job.2 Secondly doing car maintenance helps you develop confidence in yourself. With this small challenging task conqured, you know you can take on and complete more difficult tasks in high-pressure situations–a skill that can be transferred to a wide range of pursuits.
You’ll also learn something about your car, and maintenance in general, which is valuable, but probably less so than the fact that you will have more of an “I can do it” attitude after going through such processes. Finally, I’ve been asked whether I do car maintenance in at least one engineering interview. Best to be able to answer yes3 if the interviewer wants to know if you are comfortable under the hood.
Achievable Challenges Now; Incredible Obstacles Later
Consider a baby’s troubleshooting process: something is wrong, cry, mom (usually) or dad (maybe) will fix it. Babies can figure out hungry/bottle, but something more complicated, like tired/sleep, is a more nebulous concept until at least the teenage years.
On the job, and in automotive pursuits, taking that first machine down is an incredibly scary proposition. However, you eventually get through it if you just start and keep going, gaining confidence when the job is done. At some point your younger self would hopefully find your current abilities as a more mature adult to be incredible.
It’s not that you went through a single metamorphosis, you’ve simply improved bit by bit via challenge after challenge. I heard it said that if you improve yourself 1% a day by the end of the year you’re 365% as strong. That’s not really true. If you improve 1% per day, the math works out to more like 37 times as strong, i.e. 3700%.4
While you’re not literally going to be 37 times as good at something a year from now as you are today, I bet you’ll be much, much better if you keep at it. Now that I’ve done it, I’m 100% sure I could change the plugs in my Acura again. I’m 90% sure I can change the plugs in my minivan, which will hopefully happen in the coming weeks and/or months.5
While I don’t know that I ever will do so, the formerly insane-sounding task of swapping out an engine all of a sudden seems extremely challenging… but not entirely impossible.
A Universal Challenge for Top Professionals?
I approach my writing here as an engineer, but the idea of breaking something to make it better can be applied in a number of scenarios. Home renovations come to mind, where a broken kitchen or bath is inconvenient and eventually… very inconvenient. This would even apply to starting a new business, as you break your working stream of income for a potentially much better one. Based on my relatively limited experience with these scenarios, either proposition is still terrifying, but much less so than before I’d owned a house or my own (very small) business.
The other area where this sort of disable-to-enable paradigm applies would be in the medical profession, where doctors routinely put patients to “sleep” via anesthesia. The idea that you’re causing grave immediate danger to a person with the hope that his life will be markedly improved in the long run has to be both a source of immense pride in your successes, as well as anguish at the inevitable failures.6
Just as the engineer must meet tight timelines to avoid a chewing out from production, doctors must meet timelines to avoid damage to patients, and in order to treat as many patients as possible. New spark plugs must be installed to get the people where they need to go!
What can we do to make these challenges less… challenging? A few thoughts:
Prepare to Avoid Failure
Before I changed my spark plugs, I looked at a few YouTube videos on the subject. I also talked to a few friends about the procedure. After another incident where I changed my alternator in an Autozone parking lot, I organized my tools and ensured that I had the correct socket and extensions to get this job done. All things considered, it went pretty well. (I got this wrench roll later, which is pretty neat, though the straps don’t pull as tight as I would like).
Two other tips: take lots of pictures during the process7. This is extremely helpful when trying to reassemble things. I also laid down a drop cloth over my driveway and positioned my front tires under it. This was much better than working on bare concrete!
Arrange Tasks To Save Effort
I.e. the hard part isn’t the job itself, it’s preparing for it and cleaning up. When you’re taking on a difficult task like this, it’s easy to get consumed in the immediate challenge. However, you should also consider the opportunities that a task gives you.
In the case of replacing my spark plugs I cleaned up that area of my car, though perhaps I should have considered replacing the coil assemblies that connect to the plugs as well. Or maybe it would have been a good time to check the fluid levels and/or change the oil.
Much of the labor in automotive maintenance is actually getting to the location of the thing in question. Once you do that labor, replacing the actual component(s) is actually pretty easy. This is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that the front three spark plugs are visible and easy to extract, but the back plugs require some careful hand movements, as well as the removal of a support bar, for access.
Keep Taking on Challenges!
If you take on that difficult challenge today, perhaps tomorrow that impossible challenge will simply be very difficult. With experience, and perhaps a bit of internal debate, you’ll be ready to temporarily disable that (metaphorical or actual) machine in order to bring it back better and stronger.
As Morpheus said in The Matrix there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. In the same way, there’s a huge difference between knowing what spark plugs do and actually changing them out with your own hands, intellect, and perseverance. Walk the path!
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Addendum/Footnotes:
My boss would also probably take some heat over this too I suspect. He generally left me to handle things, but was very competent and could back me up as needed. That’s exactly what you want in a boss in this situation, but don’t expect that always to be the case in life or engineering.
Consider also that you are paying the mechanic in after-tax dollars versus your “free” labor, so you could actually take a bit longer than the mechanic times your hourly rate and still come out ahead. OTOH, you may have to purchase a specialty tool or two for the job.
It seems like the interviewer asked if I changed my own oil. Which I actually never have, but I could kind of sidestep with tales of other hands-on car things I’d done. That being said, seems like I wasn’t offered the job.
Perhaps you could argue your first day is an infinite improvement over the level zero you were before, but beyond that, skills generally follow the pattern of a massive improvement followed by a significant leveling off, similar to how my YouTube videos typically seem to perform:
E.g. I’m an astronomically better guitar player than I was a year ago when I started, but I will never make the same sort of skill gains/time again.
Also related, I once heard a piece of folk wisdom/tale that if you lift a calf when it’s born and keep lifting it each day as it gets older, eventually you’ll be able to lift a cow. I’m guessing this works for a few weeks, then becomes impossible as the cow’s mass gain increases. Something like the difference between exponentiation (the cow) and multiplication (your muscles).
It hasn’t.
Of course, physicians are generally overworked and do certain procedures over and over and over, so the thought process could be more akin to a trained mechanic who does a task over and over again, as opposed to someone attempting a spark plug swap for the second time… Actually, if I have to have surgery, best for it to be something the doctor can just about do in his sleep.
Also, we call it putting someone to “sleep,” but having been through myself this it’s more like you’re transported a few hours into the future. It almost makes you ponder the nature of consciousness and the soul and… did you just die and come back as a copy of your former self? While we can control such phenomena (as in society, not me personally), I’m not sure we truly understand what is going on.
If a surgeon is taking lots of pictures during a routine procedure for future reference, I would maybe avoid him.