ORIGINAL: roddylennox
I think if you do not plan to keep your car for very long, then it would be less justifiable to do the work yourself, however if you plan to keep your car for a long time, then any amount that it may lose in value would be far offset by the thousands of pounds in labour charges that you would save. The key issue is knowing that you are 100% competent to undertake any particular task. I have 20+ years' experience and have done a fair bit on cars over the years, viewing it as an enjoyable hobby in itself.
CAN be enjoyable if things do not go wrong and you spend forever correcting it.
I always keep every receipt, also have a detailed spreadsheet of the entire car's history and the dozens of jobs that I have done since I got it, and also have a Microsoft Word pro forma with the entire service history on it which I sign and date for each year (with a tick beside each service item completed). Okay, this could be questioned, however it is important to bear in mind some comments that I read from Peter Morgan recently. He advised that with older (classic) 911s, the service history is perhaps less important than what you find during your test drive and thorough inspection of the car. In other words, a 20-year-old car with 140,000 miles on the clock is pretty likely to have had its oil changed regularly if the test drive reveals no signs of excessive oil or smoking and if there is a nice clean oil on the dipstick.
I also document mine with digital photo and write out the procedure in word format. I can even direct them to the internet site that has my DIY article.
One further caveat - this is my view on my lowly 993 Carrera, but if I had a more valuable car (such as a turbo, RS etc - chance would be a fine thing!) then I would definitely have the car serviced to keep the service book up-to-date. Just my opinion, but there will be thousands who no doubt disagree. I don't believe that any amount that I might lose with the above approach would be horrendous, because the value of pretty well all of these cars (993 Carreras) does not go below high teens. It won't be long before I start saving substantial amounts of money.
Err, my car is a genuine RS - I took it to an indie - wasn't careful enough in handling my car, his workers were touching customer's beige leather with greasy hands leaving grease marks. At the OPC, the most experienced mechanic didn't know where my bonnet stay was! Parked outside where loads of small stones were on the road where other cars drove at speeds which kicked up the stones...... I'm afraid they don't look after the car the way I do so no more OPC or indies for routine maintenance work. I changed my spark plugs and changed some of the bolts to stainless ones and you won't be able to do that if you took it to a mechanic. The only time I would contemplate taking my car somwhere is if the engine needed rebuilding or the gearbox needed rebuilding i.e. something I would not be confident enough in doing myself. However, if I get bored, I may tear down the engine some day [
]
Harry
