The Basics

The Basics of Home Garage

Before you do anything:

Work Area: You need a place where a vehicle can be left taken apart. The ideal is a spacious, well-lit, heated, ventilated garage with a locking door and a workbench. And a stereo. And maybe a beer fridge. The worst is the side of a busy road, with the wind blowing dirt or even sand around and various annoying nosey parkers trying to be funny. Get your work area sorted out first.

Lines of Supply: You will need a source of spare parts and a source of tools. Tool shopping should be done at a well-stocked local shop where you can see what you’re getting, but spares these days are best bought off the internet. Price competition, reliable third party manufacturers, and abundant information are your friends. Check your reviews and ask around for direct experience.

Tools: Buy as you need them, and buy quality. Go for six-point sockets – these are much less likely to burr rusted nuts than the more common twelves. Also, if a socket won’t properly fit onto a nut, stop the job and go and buy the one that will. A decent set of vernier calipers will help as well.

The main thing to keep in mind here is to avoid buying things for a need that might never arise. This starts happening when you buy it because it’s on sale, or because it’s pretty, or because you start thinking about what you could do with it in the future. Don’t buy like that. Buy a tool because either you need it now, or you’ve made do without it for a while and you keep on wanting it for the job at hand. The best tool you can ever have is spare cash in the bank.

Clean It First: It is much, much easier to work on vehicles when they are clean. Trust me on this, every hour you spend in cleaning it will repay itself twice over later on. Everything gets easier, especially dealing with gaskets and seals.

Be Prepared To Learn: I’ve been at this for around twenty years. I’m still learning. Nobody knows everything. Nobody could. Keeping an open mind and realising that you need to consider your methods is very important here – although one way of getting a job done may work, is it the best way? Be prepared to review and change how you do things as you go.

Manuals: Workshop manuals, parts manuals (especially those with exploded diagrams), tutorials from Youtube, articles on blogs, wherever you find them, get your hands on as much information as you can before you start taking things apart. Then have this information to hand, right in the work area. I have several binders where individual sheets of paper sit inside protective plastic covers – this has turned out to be a good way to avoid greasy fingerprints on my manuals and logs.

Tidy Up: Keep your work area as tidy and as uncluttered as you can, and be prepared to stop a job every now and again in order to tidy tools away. It’s faster. By the stage that you’re having to look for every tool you need, when everything you need to use is buried under something else, it’s well past time to tidy up before starting again. Keep it open and the job goes faster.

Junk: Once it’s junk, throw it out. Take time and do the work to do so. Give it away or sell it. Pay money to throw it away if you have to. Clear space is a tool in its own right. Obstacle courses of junk are liabilities. They make you work harder and can turn a basic job into a nightmare.

Keep Records: Keep a log of vehicle maintenance. I personally don’t worry about logs of expenditure or trip records, but I do find that carefully writing down the work I’ve done leads to ideas, or highlights things I don’t know yet.

Once that’s sorted out – all of it – then you can begin. Here are some specific tips – no particular order – based on experience.

Getting rusted fasteners off. Yep, old bolts rust on. They can be pretty stiff to remove… what happens is that when steel rusts, the oxide layer swells. This forms an effective threadlock. If the thing that the fastener is screwed onto or into rusts as well, then the two oxide layers grow into each other and form a cold weld. This weld can be stronger than the bolt itself, as I found when I snapped a few M6 studs off the car recently.

The first thing to do is to spray the fastener with WD40 or CRC5.56. Then leave it completely alone for at least twelve hours. The reason for the delay is that although the oxide layer is porous, it takes time for the fluid to wick its way through.

Once that’s done, get the very best six point socket you can find onto the fastener, make sure it’s sitting square, and get the breaker bar out. Grunt time. Use a soft-faced hammer on the handle of the breaker bar as well if you have to.

Screws are a similar story – use the best screwdriver available (or use an impact driver if you have one). Before unscrewing, you can tap the head of the screw down with a hammer to break the rust around the thread. You can use a wrench on the shaft of the screwdriver for more torque if the shaft has flats.

Once the rusted fastener is off, throw it away. It’ll rust itself straight back on again in five minutes if you re-use it.

Getting rounded or burred fasteners off. First: avoid. Get the wrench on straight and true before you apply torque. If it’s already burred beyond a socket, try using vice-grips clamped on so tight that they leave lines carved into the metal. If that doesn’t work, file or grind flats into what’s left of it and try using a crescent wrench. Hopeless cases will have to be cut off, ground off, or drilled out, and then (if you’re lucky) it will be possible to use a re-tap the thread or use a thread repair coil on the gaping hole where a screw used to be. I’ve never used E-Z-Outs, so can’t comment on them.

Once the burred fastener is off, throw it away. Really. They’re even worse than rusted ones. Messed up fasteners don’t heal, and you might have to take whatever it is apart again.

Keep a stock of fasteners. I’ve found that the temptation to put a bad fastener back on disappears completely if you have a replacement to hand. The hardware shop is good for short numbers. If you’re after more than a handful, internet warehouses like RadioSpares or Element14 do bags of 100 for half the price of OTC shops, with the same quality or better. Keep tabs on what you’re using and drop some money on a range of fasteners so that you have a spares bank ready and waiting.

If the manual says to use Loctite, use Loctite. Don’t think that a lock washer, or just tightening the bolt up good and hard, is going to work. There’s good reason this stuff is specified and even though it might be a hassle and a delay, go and get the correct grade of Loctite and use it. I had to have a motorcycle trucked home once because I ignored this, don’t let it happen to you.

Keep a stock of lubricants. A can of CRC5.56 and the top-up oils for my bike and car are the basics, and it’s amazing how many jobs can be sorted out with that combination of lubricants. I bought a tube of bearing grease about twenty years ago. It’s still with me and still being used. Beyond that, it’s best to buy purely as you need.

Keep a stock of rags. Old clothes and towels are a great source of workshop rags. It is possible to buy these, but it’s usually at a high price. Rags are for more than just cleaning dirt and oil off – they’re good for stuffing into holes so that loose bolts don’t fall into crank cases, or wrapping around individual parts before transport.

Get a high-quality bike floor pump with a pressure gauge. This is about the only individual tool I’d recommend you buy – frankly I think one of these should be in every garage, full stop. It’s that good. It takes all of ten minutes to go around the car and the bike with mine every fortnight, and the pump paid for itself in fuel and tyre savings in just a couple of months.

Get permanent mains-powered lighting. This sounds obvious, but it’s surprising how many garages out there don’t have this. It’ll take a day or so to set up and it will justify the expense and the effort the first time you use it.

Paint or line your garage walls and floor. The typical garage in New Zealand has an unpainted, unscrubbed concrete floor and one-layer walls held up with exposed timber joists. The roof is the same, with black builder’s paper as the normal interior surface. This means that the place is a black hole, literally. No matter how many lights you put up, you’ll be peering into the shadows for every job.

An old photographer’s trick is to work in a white-painted room with rounded corners. This provides soft, shadowless light over the full sphere of illumination. Getting your work area set up this way will take a couple of days, but it will absolutely transform the working experience.

Mopping up spills. Kitty litter (or sawdust) and a brush and pan is what works best on concrete floors, particularly if you’re dealing with oil or brake fluid.

Drying things. Get a domestic dehumidifier and put it into a closed room with whatever you want dried. There’s no fire or damage risk, like there is with a fan heater or similar, and the electricity bill is a lot lower. It will take a little while to work, but it’ll dry right into the corners of the room. For the best effect, aim the dehumidifier’s fan at whatever you’re drying out.

Buy towels. Specifically, white, fluffy bath towels. These are brilliant for placing under vehicles to collect dropped screws (amazing how these scoot into corners when dropped on concrete), protecting paintwork on vehicles, and for throwing a bit more light into the undersides of things.

They are also an absolute must if doing delicate disassembly of items like cameras. Go for something relatively cheap and don’t worry about oil stains and dirt. Treat these as relatively cheap consumable items, just make sure you work with something different to what you use in the house.

Go to a safety shop. The items that you will need, time and time again, are safety glasses, work gloves, overalls, earplugs or earmuffs, and possibly respirator masks. Vehicles come and go. Bodies don’t. If you screw yourself up doing a job, it’ll stay with you for a long, long time… it’s a lot cheaper and better to just buy the gear and have it to hand for when you need it.

Wash your car or bike battery once a year. Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous. The reason for this is that dirt has a habit of settling on the casing. It doesn’t take much electrolyte getting past the battery seals – or even just salt on the wind and atmospheric humidity – to make a very slightly conductive direct short circuit on the battery itself. This trickle discharge won’t kill your battery unless it really is filthy, but it will shorten the battery life. On a similar note, if you ever dismount a battery and set it down, never leave it on concrete. Set it aside on wood instead. Concrete is surprisingly conductive and will flatten a lead acid cell to the point of permanent damage in a few weeks.

Test your car or bike battery once a year. The way to do this is to have a dc voltmeter on the terminals when you start the engine. A good cell will maintain a high fraction of its no-discharge voltage while under maximum loading. A bad cell won’t. Typical figures I’ve found doing this test are 12 – 14V while running, 11 to 13V cold, 8 – 10V while cranking, and 6V or less indicating that the battery is nearing the end of its life.

The reason for taking this precaution is that when a battery finally dies, you’ll have one or two dodgy starts where it-just-makes-it… and after that it won’t. It’ll turn the motor over but there won’t be enough oomph left for a decent spark, then turning the motor over takes what little charge is still being stored in the battery, and after that you’re walking. Avoid.