So we recently decided that we would be keeping both cars even after we move into the city since nicole doesn’t yet know where her job is going to be at. Unfortunately this means that a lot of the car maintenance that i have been putting off for the past few months now needs to be done. One of the things that might be due to be done was a brake pad replacement. Having a mechanic inspect your breaks cost about $50 and I think is kind of expensive since all they need to do is put the car on a rack and take off a tire to look at the pads. When you’re having your tires rotated is another good time to do a brake inspection since the tires are coming off anyway but many places won’t tell you if you need the work done even if they’ve done 99% of the work as part of another job.
So this evening since i got home early for work I decided I would rotate my tires myself since they needed to be done and I could get a good look at my brakes. This isn’t a terribly difficult task and i’ve done it before and takes me about an hour. Things were going pretty well and i got the first three tires changed no problem and just needed to put the last tire back on in place of the spare that I had on. When it came time to pull the spare off it refused to come off. Now here is where I did something stupid. Instead of trying to figure out what was causing it to be stuck I started to pull really hard on it. Guess what happened? Yup you guessed it, I pulled too hard and managed to cause the car to fall off of the dinky little jack i had it on. When this happened the wheel well I was working on shifted about a foot down and the car crashed into my arm. This hurt like you wouldn’t believe. I got very lucky in that I managed not to break anything and am a proud owner of a very swollen forearm. On the upside I got really lucky in managing not to permanently damage my car and the stuck wheel came unstuck so i could put my tire back on and go back inside to lick my wounds.
It’s a good thing i’m a software developer cause clearly I make a piss poor car mechanic. I managed to screw up prob one of the simplest tasks that most people can do. My arm is nice and puff and by tomorrow morning i’m sure i’m going to have a nice bruise going on. Right now that $50 brake inspection plus $20 tire rotation is looking mighty cheap…..
On a side note this weekend while digitizing our files i found a maintenance receipt that listed my car millage as 43,000 miles. Since my car now has +140K miles it means i’ve driven my car over a hundred thousand miles which i found to be pretty impressive. Considering this is the first car I ever bought it’s lasted me for quite awhile and is still in pretty good shape.
