I am very lucky at my mechanical skills. I was raised up around heavy equipment, racing dirtbikes, cars, and working on small engines. I can diagnose and almost fix anything mechanical and can diagnose most electrical problems. My dad didn't even have to inspire me to learn about the skill. I wanted to learn. Many times I've seen people trash good equipment with the simplest of problems. Many problems I've seen were "Had they only done proper maintenance." kind of things. When I was racing dirtbikes and cars, we worked on our own stuff. We had to. We couldn't afford to race otherwise. Most small engines are simple and if you do the simplest of maintenance work, most will last for years. Now when it comes to today's cars, the engines are the simple part. It's all the electronic crap that tells the engine what to do that's the headache. With all this EPA required junk nowadays, it makes things so much more complicated than it needs to be. And that's to include most current heavy equipment. Most current technicians can't diagnose what's wrong without a scanner and if the scanner doesn't tell them where to look, they're lost. It's sad that today's generation has lost so much basic knowledge and common sense.
