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Comment by jVinc | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that an iPhone is a lot easier to repair than a car. Sure you need to be careful about the gluing if you want to retain the aesthetics, but replacing the motor in your car is also a pretty extensive operation requiring extremely expensive tooling and if you aren't careful you'll end up hurting the aesthetics just the same. Of cause you could then redo the paint job, but at that point, aren't we really in the realm of cost/tools/effort where doing a decent repair job on an iPhone is still much easier?

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>replacing the motor in your car is also a pretty extensive operation requiring extremely expensive tooling

Well SOMEONE's dad didn't have a small collection of junker vehicles in the yard to pull parts from growing up. Shoot, I know multiple people (including Dad) who rebuilt their Volkswagen Beetle engine in their unlucky girlfriend's living room (yes that unlucky girlfriend is now my mother) with hand tools. If you think working on cars requires expensive tooling, you just don't know enough rednecks! lololol

I remember my mothers look of shock when my hand me down car started back up after three months of engine and transmission parts slowly spreading across the garage floor.

I knew a biker who had a beautiful girlfriend he was thinking of marrying. Every winter he tore his motorcycle apart in the living room and rebuilt it with incremental improvements. His buddy said to him, Will she let you overhaul your bike in the living room every winter? So he asked her. She said, Hell no!

He ended the relationship right then and there.

"Rebuild" is kind of a vague term that doesn't specify exactly what is done and what condition the engine was in.

Have you tried to find a mechanic who will rebuild a worn out engine and give a reasonable warranty on the work in your town? If a local professional can't make that work these days economically, it tells you something.

I see ads for cars that had a "rebuild" a few thousand miles ago and need serious work already.

Its still an absolute bitch even with all the right tools. You get one rusted nut in a tight spot where you can't fit the breaker bar then go ahead and add 4+ hours of cussing and fighting with the car to your job.

> It seems to me that an iPhone is a lot easier to repair than a car.

In my short 55 years on the planet I've heard of 4 friends of friends[1] who died or were badly injured by having cars slip off a jack and fall on them.

[1] AKA friends coworker didn't show up one Monday. Friend recently had to dash across the street to jack a car back off of his neighbor.

Yeah never heard of anyone seriously hurt messing with ordinary consumer electronics. You would think if that were a possibility then UL etc would refuse to certify.

The motor in your car rarely goes bad compared to the oil and brake pads. Those things are purposely made easy to change, and Apple could design their phone so that the failure-prone parts were swappable just as well.

Both of those typically require jacking up the car (and getting under it for the oil change), which strikes me as much more dangerous for a novice than the risk associated with puncturing a phone battery. Never mind the added risk of an amateur doing either of those car jobs incorrectly.

Many cars are designed nowadays for "topside oil changes" (as a factory recommended procedure).

You stick a vacuum line down the dipstick hole, suck out all the oil, replace the filter, fill the oil, put the dipstick back in. I didn't trust it the first time, so I sucked the oil out and then removed the drain plug to see how much oil I was missing; it was less than a shot glass worth.

Brake jobs don't require putting your body under the rotor/hub, making the risk of serious injury low. You could use jackstands, but I generally don't as I don't have my head or limbs in a crush area.

I would love to find a car that I could replace the filter from the top. Easily the most annoying part of the oil change is getting under the car into a position to find the oil filter conveniently located in a dark crevasse against the firewall with just enough space to make it an absolute bitch to get the tool over the filter. Maybe my car just sucks though.

I think most Mercedes and modern Porsche are topside oil filters, probably others now. My wife's CR-V has a backside filter but that can reached from the right side without jacking the car by turning the wheels full left lock.

One tip: To aid removal next time, use Dow DC-4 silicone grease on the filter gasket (rather than motor oil or nothing) and the oil filter gasket just needs a little crush; lots of people over-tighten filters, making them needlessly hard to remove. Contact plus a half turn will put about 1/32" of crush on the gasket which is enough to seal.

I think top-mounted oil filters have been a common feature on German cars for a long time. Even though mine has a top mounted filter, I find changing the oil to be one of the least interesting common DIY car maintenance items. It has big mess potential, requires a stop at a shop anyway to drop off the used oil, and doesn't really save much money.

It seems to me that you have never worked on cars before. (I'm not trying to be mean here it's easier than you think!)

Replacing a motor requires hand tools and a motor lift. That's it. Upgrading or modifying might take special tools like an ECU programmer, but a straight mechanical replacement is just a bunch of screws and bolts.

don't forget the vacuum lines and electrical...

Is it? There are a lot of very small, fiddly components.

Depending on the car, there are quite a few more small fiddly components. Magnitudes more.

I'm not exactly dexterous, and I replaced the screen and battery on my iPhone and it went really well. You need to be a bit slower than you would repairing a car, but I really don't see it as harder.

Yeah, I can see some components as being relatively easy to replace, but I've also seen people trying to swap out components that are soldered on…

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