[talldatethrow]

I'm about as diy shade tree mechanic as it gets. Every car my extended family owns is over 200k miles, and we havent paid for a mechanic in over 25 years. I do it all, from general maintenance to swapping or rebuilding an automatic transmission.

A motorcycle actually taught me my main lesson of maintenance: sometimes it's just better to leave a well working system alone instead of servicing it for fun. I once did a task that was 2x behind schedule, and while doing so exposed a problem that almost caused it to fail hard the following weeks commute. If I had done that before a long trip, it would have been a serious problem.

I told this story to a prior air force mechanic and he laughed. He told me the military learned long ago that there is a limit to preemptive maintenance such that the likelyhood of problems from human error and just chance overshadows the benefit of the preemptive maintenance. I now no longer do any "might as well!" maintenance at all, and never do major maintenance before a trip without a good chunk of time prior devoted to road testing the vehicle again before the trip.