Reply to I saved $1,600 in 3 hours yesterday doing car repairs myself! AMA!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The reason brake jobs are expensive is insurance. Most other work that a shop does on a car, and if they mess up, no one gets hurt, you just get stranded on the side of the road. Not so if they mess up the brakes.

My uncle used to own a shop and refused to do brake jobs -- the increase in his insurance wasn't worth it.[/quote]

There’s no reasonable failure of brake pads. It’s not like you can put it in sideways, or that they just stop working. Brake lines and fluid are the mechanism of brake failure. You don’t need to open the hydraulic system to do a brake job, so I don’t understand why it would increase insurance. [/quote]

+1, I don't buy that answer.  Brakes are the obvious thing to a layman that a mechanic could mess up, but they are hardly the only thing:

- Ever seen an entire wheel fly off a vehicle at 70mph because someone forgot to tighten the lugs?  I have.  There are videos of this all over the internet.

- Mess up a steering job and someone could lose the ability to steer at speed.  Probably not as bad as brakes, but pretty close.

- Fuel system work.  Leaking fuel systems can cause the car to catch on fire.  Nuff' said.

- Screwing up suspension work could result in the car losing suspension geometry at speed if something fails.  I'm talking about stuff like control arms.

I also agree with the PP that it is kind of hard to catastrophically mess up a brake job.  I guess maybe you could put a single pad in backwards for one wheel or something.  Not properly tightening lugs, but that's not isolated to brake jobs.  Maybe not properly tightening the caliper retaining bolts to the wheel hub, not routing the line correctly so that it rubs and wears through, or not supporting the calipers and letting them hang by the line while doing rotors.

But agree that the hydraulics are 99.99% of the time the failure point on a brake job.

I've had brakes fail on me before (lines burst, it was not on a car that I had ever worked on) and it's no fun.  Everyone should know what to do in the event their brakes go out at speed.

I think the practical risks of doing your own wrenching are much more around breaking your car and having to pay big $$$ to fix a mistake than they are around safety.  I once stripped the threads on a frame attachment point for my control arm, and had to retap the hole at like 2am.  That was no fun.[/quote]

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