Pherdinand said:
do you repair your own shoes?
Yes, I mended broken seams on sailing shoes and repaired lashes on sandals a couple of times
do you make toys for your kids?
No kids of my own, but did that for my brothers and sisters kids
do you pick up a screw on the street, saying, it might be just good for something?
No
do you make your own, personalized postcards when there's someone with a birthday, or for christmas or whatever?
Yes
do you make your own lures for fishing?
I learned that from my father but don't do any fishing, so no
do you upgrade yourself your computer by changing things inside?
Yes, and others as well, that's part of my job
do you make your furnitures yourself?
I built my own bed once, built my own desk and made a few lamps
Everything else is from IKEA
🙂
do you raise yourself a pig for a year, then butcher it and produce sausage, etcetera?
Not in the last 15 years, but my sister is a farmer
do you bake your own bread? do you gather the wood for the oven to bake the bread?
Baking bread in an electrical or gas oven is hard enough, maintaining the required temperatures in a wood oven is way beyond my skills.
But I have one of those modern contraptions which are somewhere between an open fireplace and a stove, I can burn almost anything in it but usualy use wood.
I once lived in a very rural place where two stoves where the only way of heating and I used briquette and wood.
do you sharpen your knives at home?
Of course!
do you make your own cloth from wool or whatever raw material?
No
do you keep chicken and wait for them to lay that damn egg?
Not anymore, but see the pig question above.
etcetera
It's all easy and doable by anyone. But you can't do all these yourself [and have a job as well]. Everyone is doing SOMETHING on his own, instead of running to a specialist. Some people prefer other things than maintainance of a car; most of us are willing to pay for the "luxury" of not doing what we don't like, if there's someone who can do it for us.
I did maintenance on my cars and motorcycles when I lived in the country, now I don't have the space to do it, else I'd set up a darkroom
🙂.
I once rebuilt a VW beatle engine and the engine of my Yamaha SR500, which grew to 600ccm thanks to a Porsche piston and cylinder. Some work had to be done by specialists due to the lack of propper tools and I wouldn't have known how to operate the tools anyways.
I rebuilt the starter of my Mini 1275GT with parts from an electric drill, repaired carburators, alternators, ignition distributors, changed brake pads on drum and disk brakes and much more.
But on todays cars I can't even change a light bulb, ok, some of them. The Xenon headlights are on 25,000 Volts and that is nothing I would mess around with.
The engine compartment is so packed with a supercharger and intercooler that I'm happy to find the oil dipstick and the cap where I fill up the oil. From a quick glance, my modern Mini has no spark plugs and I won't mess with the brakes of a car capable of 140 mph.
I don't have to look after tire presure, the car does it for me, I don't have to check cooling water or the water to clean the headlights and windscreen, the car does it for me. It checks most parameters and shows a warning if anything is wrong.
When I think back to the end of the eighties, my fathers Porsche had all the belts but no tools. It wasn't expected from a Porsche driver that he can change the fan belt but it was expected that the ADAC mechanic didn't have the right belt.
Then the procedure to change the sparkplugs on a 911 Turbo began with getting the engine out of the car!
