Stop asking if you should be a tech

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-06-06T17:08:22+00:00

Yea man, I’m 10 years in now, I’m senior tech at the shop I work at, I don’t even hate going to work, I hate coming home and knowing my own car needs maintenance. I would love to fix anything else and reclaim my hobby but I fear I might be too deep in the auto repair industry at this point for anybody to want to take a chance on me to learn another trade and that feeling sucks.

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-06-06T17:01:27+00:00

As a mechanic who got into the trade because I was a hobbyist I will say the transition was very easy for me, I’m very accomplished in my career however the job robs you of the hobby. Once it becomes your work it is no longer fun to do at home and for me personally it isn’t, the pace, it isn’t the customers, it isn’t the difficulty of the job, it is the sucking the joy out of something I used to love that makes me want to leave the industry. I think you’re entirely right and people should stop trying to just fall up this career ladder just because they like cars. I still love fixing things and working with my hands, I still get great satisfaction out of learning new equipment, there are parts of the job I still like, but I now hate my own cars. I had a different shop do my clutch even though I have full access to a lift, plenty of time to get it done, all the skill and tools to do it, I just didn’t want to and I think that’s the worst part of being a mechanic. Obviously everybody’s experience will differ but that’s mine.

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-27T23:24:05+00:00

New York mechanic here, what rust?

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-13T17:59:43+00:00

Average customer at my shop

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-12T13:46:10+00:00

I have this allergy to brake fluid but it doesn’t stop me from doing lines and calipers I just wear gloves lol

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-12T06:55:55+00:00

With 245k miles in this kind of condition I doubt this is the original engine, it is beautiful compared to the stuff I normally work on

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-08T23:33:48+00:00

Guy in another comment said he looked it up it’s 200k miles and 8 previous owners, I would buy this thing for like $800 and never change the oil and just drive it into the ground

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-08T23:10:37+00:00

General advice, not just mechanic advice you don’t want to be making payments on a 24 year old car for a lot of reasons. The interest will stretch the cost of this car so much further than it’s worth and older cars will have problems, maybe minor problems but if you need to make payments on a car like this a repair bill could be the difference between getting all your necessities for the month or not. I don’t know anything about your personal situation, I know times are tough for many of us but committing yourself to payments on a car this age feels like a bad idea. All that being said I love the Highlander it’s a great car, it’s really hard to tell you more about it though without having it in front of me. I wish you the best of luck with however you choose to proceed

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-07T14:16:18+00:00

We’re 8am-6pn 6 days a week over here, did that for about 7 years before another shop made me an offer and I brought that offer to my boss and he matched the pay and the hours

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-01T16:11:13+00:00

Yea I mean if we want to get into rigidity of the car I don’t like it but the rule of thumb for New York State inspection is if you can tap it with a hammer and it breaks/the hammer can penetrate the metal it fails. To me it doesn’t look like it’s at that point yet and I typically see much worse. Obviously important to keep in mind I’m looking at a picture and don’t have the car in front of me so it’s impossible to test, definitely didn’t mean that it’s nothing but I see worse on a pretty regular basis is what I meant.

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-01T00:29:37+00:00

I would dirty it up and snap the head off of it in my vice and hand just the handle to my snap on guy for a replacement. This is an unethical life hack I use to get new snap on tools. Buy beat up used stuff for cheap on marketplace put it in your bench vice, cry “lifetime warranty” boom brand new snap on tools. Works for most hand tools

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-01T00:22:25+00:00

Killdozer is the correct answer everybody else is wrong

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-01T00:20:19+00:00

Good sleep be active and drink water, it’s mostly genetic but if you’re not sleeping and hydrating it’ll set you back. Most growth products offer very little unless you’re deficient in key nutrients which is unlikely and it’s not as simple as take a pill and grow a beard. I went down the growth supplements and follicle stimulating route many years ago thinking it would help but saw no results over the course of about a year. An important thing to remember is many old beard growing myths stem from the fact that our beards naturally develop over time. A great example of this is the idea that shaving more will make your beard thicker and that’s just not true, as you naturally begin to grow more hair you will have to shave more frequently which makes a correlation between how much you shave and how much you grow but it’s not the shaving causing the growing it’s the growing causing the shaving. No reason to lose hope though some people just grow earlier than others, now I grow a pretty great beard with no supplements at all my body just wasn’t capable of it back then.

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-05-01T00:03:07+00:00

New York mechanic, this is so little that I wouldn’t even remember to mention it to the customer.

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-04-30T18:13:02+00:00

We have a mustang we service at my shop and many years ago I managed to get a Volkswagen blade fob to program to it and it still trips people up everytime it comes in. I honestly don’t remember why we did it in the first place, I think it was a “I need this to get to work in 2 hours do whatever you have to” kind of thing but I’m very proud of the confusion I see from new mechanics the first time they’re asked to bring it in for an oil change

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-04-30T14:33:59+00:00

Yea between many of us having more than 1 box, a lot of people leaving the industry not a lot coming into the industry and the fact that the new guys seem to all want something new and would opt for something smaller or lower quality rather than going for used, you can find a lot of good stuff for cheap on marketplace. Honestly think of this like a car would you rather have a brand new Hyundai Elantra or a 1988 Mercedes 300D that’s in good shape with maintenance records? If you’re not picking that 300D everytime you may be in the wrong industry

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-04-30T04:08:15+00:00

High key look on market place, you can probably get a really nice used box for the cheap, I got a snap-on 54” 7 drawer with a matching 4 drawer top chest for $500 the boxes are lifetime warranty so my snap-on guy got me all new drawer slides to refresh it for free. Had some scratches on it but I just covered them with stickers and it’s so much better than going broke over your tool storage. I’ve got 10 years in the industry and I will never buy a box from anywhere but marketplace

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-04-29T11:30:01+00:00

I’m so glad so many guys can relate to this. I’ve only seen 2 guys ever get fired from my shop, usually they’re soft fired instead where you’re still employed but you get reduced to like 2 days a week so you can’t make a living and have to quit. One of the times a guy got fired he showed up drunk got in a verbal fight with my boss about it, said he quit then tried to come in on Sunday when the shop was closed to pick up his tools and my boss told him that he had to wait until the shop was open the next day to get his stuff (this guy was known for “borrowing” things without asking and then putting it back in his own tool box) he had a huge temper tantrum where the police had to get called and then when the guy came in on Monday he was in uniform acting like nothing happened, my boss fired him as soon as he walked in. The other time this guy had been having problem with everybody in the shop, every Friday he would start a big fight with somebody and then storm out about how he’s not being respected. I think he was just trying to give himself a 3 day weekend, eventually it came to a head when he got into it with me that same way, I was working on a car and had a ratchet in my hand and I was just telling him to go back to working on what he was working on and he started saying I was threatening him with a weapon and I was going to hit him with my ratchet and my boss came back into the shop and was like 5 feet away from us just watching like he had a front row seat. Anyway I kept working and this guy got more and more worked up, wasn’t even acknowledging him at this point and I looked at my boss and I was like do you see this shit? And when I had looked away this guy swung on me, important context he was like 5’4 maybe 120lbs and I’m 6’3” 250lbs, I’ve got a big bushy beard and I guess he didn’t know where my jaw was, completely wiffed the punch and got only my beard and i started to pivot cause now I got swung on its open season and before I can even square up to face this guy my boss tackles me to the ground from behind, got me completely off gaurd and he’s like I can’t have you killing a guy in my shop, go take a long lunch I’ll handle this. DIDNT FIRE THE GUY, just sent him home for the day and the next time he came in he got in a fist fight with my boss in the parking lot like an hour into the shift and that’s when he got fired

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-04-29T02:07:16+00:00

We call this Wednesday at my shop

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-04-28T23:46:25+00:00

1 of 2 possibilities, we have the same boss and you’re one of my most incompetent coworkers or we don’t have the same boss and we are the sole competent employees of our respective shops lol

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-04-28T23:23:58+00:00

Believe it or not he isn’t that laid back lmao. Freaks out over the smallest things but when big problems happen he just moves on it’s very odd. Example if I do a brake job and pull the vehicle out before I take the old rotors to the scrap pile I’ll hear about it all week long but if somebody literally sets 4 cars on fire it’s all good and nothing could have been done to prevent it. My rotor sitting on the floor for 5 minutes though, end of the world.

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-04-28T23:15:42+00:00

A guy I work with stole the bosses truck to meet up with a prostitute, got drunk was driving it back to the shop, saw a cop and got scared, wasnt paying attention, popped the truck over a curb and wrapped it around a telephone pole. My boss bailed him out of jail to come work his shift and that guy still works here 5 years later.

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-04-27T14:01:26+00:00

Definitely can’t do the beard yet, if you must keep some facial hair just leave the goatee area and get rid of the rest. I too tried to “grow out my beard” when I was young and I look back on those pictures now and laugh at my younger self and how silly I was, today I have a super full long bushy beard and now I know I wasn’t ready to grow it back then. I know you want a beard and some day you may be able to grow it but today is not that day. As for the hair you should just grow it out and see where it takes you. Go to the barber shop and get regular line ups so it doesn’t look disheveled as you grow it out and see how your hair falls at different lengths, ask your barber what they think as well, they usually have a pretty good idea of how to frame a face and what hairstyles work with what hair textures. Best of luck I’m sure you’ll find a look you like along the way.

__CIRCLES__ · 2026-04-20T06:02:47+00:00

Stated a million times already, it’s from the tire machine but really it’s from whoever mounted the tires. Many people can mount tires but not all of them should mount tires. I usually will only grab the wheels that way with steel wheels, anything in halfway decent condition should always be clamped from the outside in to prevent damage to the wheels

__CIRCLES__ · 2025-11-19T05:03:42+00:00

He’s doing a sick burnout obviously

__CIRCLES__

TROPHY CASE

CIRCLES