I would love to learn how to rebuild an engine. I think it would be an excellent educational experience. But it’s also not to be taken lightly, as it requires space and several very specialized tools, such as an engine stand and a valve spring compressor, to name just a few.
It has occurred to me that once I move out of state and into an apartment, it would be nice to rent a two-car garage if they are available. I only have one car, but the extra space would make working on my car a lot easier and would also give me the space to mount a copy of my engine on an engine stand and treat the rebuild like a hobby, where I spend time every now and then going through the tedious process.
But this also raises some interesting concerns. Back at my old apartment, a garage space was about $75/month. I’m guessing that $100/month is closer to the going rate these days. If I were renting an extra garage space at $100/month, after 2 or 3 years the cost would break even with actually paying a shop to rebuild my engine. What this means is that learning how to rebuild an engine actually costs you money because the space needed to perform the engine rebuild costs money. And if you owned a house instead of renting, you would have to consider the cost of having a one car garage vs a two car garage if you wanted the extra space just for this (a cost to be considered whether you want to rebuild an engine or not – space always has a cost).
So in this sense, you really have to start questioning the ROI. If you develop the skill of rebuilding an engine, how much does it cost you to learn that skill verses how much money you can save by utilizing that skill? And how many engines do you plan on rebuilding over the course of your life?
See, this is where my personal preference for learning how to work on cars and my general recommendation that others learn too hits a wall, and it’s one of the areas in which I realize I’ve been wrong. Working on your car does not turn expensive repairs into free repairs, it simply has the potential to reduce the overal cost, but the keyword is “potential”.
Paying for all of those tools and all of that space in exchange for a skill you might only use once or twice in your life probably isn’t worth it. I’m not saying everyone has a spare $2,500-$4,000 on hand for the average cost of a rebuild, but if you don’t even have $1,000 on hand and the skill, you don’t have enough to do it yourself, either.
I’m in the weird situation where my timing chain cover is leaking a bit, and getting worse, but paying someone to change that for me would probably cost around $1,000, whereas for some sweat equity, I could buy a rebuilt engine for $1,700 or so and drop it in myself. I’m still convinced that learning how to swap an engine or a transmission has a much higher ROI than rebuilding one. You still don’t want to screw it up, but for less than double the price of the chain cover gasket, I could get a whole new engine, which is pretty appealing to the perfectionist corners of my mind.
But honestly, the engine itself isn’t yet dripping any oil, so it’s not even a big concern right now, it’s just one of those things occasionally roaming the back of my mind. How do I want to solve this issue? But I simply have to face the fact that learning how to rebuild an engine isn’t very economical.
Which isn’t to say I don’t want to learn how to do it, though.
How far should we take our hobbies? If you really enjoy something then it’s worth spending some money on, but if you simply want to learn a skill, what is the cost of developing that skill? How do you know if it’s worth it?
I really don’t know.