"Refitting is the reverse of removal." Six short words. Four bloody hours in the garage.

True, but when working with cars you're only one tiny issue away from losing your entire weekend.

An example: "Undo bolts 1, 2 and 3 and remove the wheel hub assembly".

Except bolt 1 has a head that's one size, a nut that's another, and both are pretty inaccessible. And they're stiff with age. Much swearing, WD20 and a couple of dodgy extensions on a spanner / socket wrench later, bolt 1 concedes defeat. Half an hour down.

Bolt 2 lulls you into a false sense of superiority. It takes 2 minutes and a manly amount of effort to remove.

Bolt 3 is stuck. Seized. Welded by time, corrosion and dirt to it's nut. It sneers at WD40, ignores several (dozen) stiff whacks with a hammer and it's set into a rubber bushing so I can't take a blowtorch anywhere near it. I've got one spanner on the nut and wedged against the suspension and the other sitting against a jack. The car is lifting before the spanner even budges.

Two days of throwing hour after hour at trying to defeat one sodding bolt.

Eventually, I measure the bushing and bolt. I order a new one of each, then take an angle grinder to the bolt. The (now half-melted) bushing gets fully melted / burned with the blowtorch, then hammered out with a bit of dowel and a hammer. The new bushing and bolt are then fitted.

"Undo bolts 1, 2 and 3", my arse.

Yes, I might be slightly bitter about promising to fix the SO's 4x4 and end up spending days of effort just to look (possibly rightly) incompetent.

Or they show a photo of a bolt head, but no clue where it is located.....

Might be worth using Plus Gas rather than Water Dispersant.

Plus-Gas - There's a name I've not seen in many a year.

Penetrating oil (hehe) is the correct product for loosening rusted nuts | bolts | screws.

Protip - WD is up to version WD-40

Pfff.

WD-40 is what the new-fangled kids use. Back in my day, we used WD-20 and we were grateful for it.

Also, at least I didn't make the same typo later on in my comment :D

...

and gravity, which was a helpful assistant during removal, has now become a surly hindrance.

Similarly, springs have retained their desire to jump out of position whenever you touch their cover plate. Handy during removal but not quite as funny during re-assembly.

Someone asked me to have a look at their Timex digital watch once, which was playing up, and I thought it probably needed a new battery. Timex were renowned for their 'black box' stuff anyway, so I wasn't expecting it to be easy.

I prized off the back plate only to discover there were - for reasons I'll never understand - four tiny (and I mean tiny) black springs, which leapt out everywhere on to a dark patterned carpet.

I only ever found three of them.

Oh but Haynes (and Chiltons) fucking KNEW nested function calls!!

*Replace starter motor

See "Remove throttle bodies"

* Remove throttle bodies

See "Remove airbox"

* Remove airbox

See "Remove left fairing"

See "Remove right fairing"

See "Remove air horn"

* Remove air horn

See "Remove engine"

One of the commonest results of people purchasing a Haynes manual, is the sucking of teeth done by a professional mechanic as he surveys your even less functional machine since you bought the manual.

Then he/she will utter something like "I dunno where you went wrong but that's gonna take a bit o' fixing"

This week my mate's wife dropped off her sewing machine for me to look at as she thought the motor had seized.

I had to take all the covers off in a weird sequence and finally found a square sectioned coil spring clutch that had slipped one end, fixed that and it went back together in five minutes, couldn't find a left over screw either.

Now I am convinced when she tries it out, it's going to go critical and take out the entire village.

Haynes manuals also leave out step 0.

Pray to/sacrifice to {deity} that some lazy arse mechanic didn't overtighten every single nut and bolt by using a pneumatic impact wrench the last time any work was done in it.

One of the prior mechanics to work on the beast I ranted about upthread decided to solve a leak with lead flashing more commonly used for roofing and expanding foam. Oh, and it didn't fix the leak.

I am now never going to find out what's under the wing of that car.

Four hours? Is that all? You. Lucky. Bastard! My father decides he wants to do some work on our car because of some odd noise he believes he hears every time he shifts gears. So he grabs my then twelve year old self to be his helper & we begin disassembling the engine. He's got it torn apart so far that there is no way to put it back together in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time, so what does he decide to do? Pester the neighbor to borrow their car so he can go to the auto parts store for a list of stuff he needs. Somehow our neighbor's car that has worked flawlessly for the past decade "mysteriously up's & dies" on him on the way to said store. He has to call a tow truck to have it hauled to a mechanic to get fixed because the neighbor (quite wisely) refuses to let my dad touch it with a barge pole. The car gets towed, the mechanic hired, the owner notified that my dad will pick up the tab (no shit? You did just break it you shithead!), and my dad walks the mile & a half back to the auto parts store to finally buy the parts. He finally comes home, drops the bag of parts on the workbench & says he needs a smoke. He falls asleep with a lit cig in his mouth & sets his shirt on fire. Mom throws a bucket of water on him to both put out the fire & to get his fat ass to get back to work putting HER car back together. Dad wakes spluttering & shouting, demanding to know WTF. Mom points to the cig burn holes in his shirt, points out the scent of burnt chest hair in the air, & tells him to get back to fixing the damned car. He mumbles & grumbles but gets his butt in gear. That was on a Friday. We didn't finish putting it back together again until late Sunday night/very early Monday morning. As in ~4AM kind of early. As in barely before mom is due to leave to go to work bloody Monday morning. Test drive to make sure it's done right? You wish. The test will be mom driving to work. (What ever could possibly go wrong?) So that's what happens because mom has no other choice. And the car shits itself en route such that she winds up having to call a cab to finish the commute. She calls dad from work & tears him a new ass, lets him know where the car can be found, & says that if it's not *actually* fixed by the time she's due to come home, she'll be filing divorce papers when she arrives home. Dad goes & gets the car by calling the tow company & telling them that he needs a ride to the car, so they need to come get him first. (You can believe they added that charge to the bill, yes siree Bob.) Car back home & dad starts tearing it apart to figure out WTF went wrong. Turns out that at least one of the "extra" screws was definitely NOT. Regreased, reseated, & made triple sure to install every last bit. Car starts & runs reasonably well. Dad says he'll take it for a test drive & pick up mom on the way home. Fine by me, I'm sick & fucking tired of messing with it, sick of his face, & if I hear "Hey, hand me that..." one more time I may start slaughtering folks with a tire iron. While dad's out on the test drive the house gets a call. It's the mechanic letting us know that the car is ready. I thank him & go let the neighbor know he can go get his car. He's pulling up in his fixed car when my mom arrives *walking* from the bus stop at the end of the lane. To say she is not happy is an epic understatement. Where's dad & the car? He's with the tow truck driver hauling it to a mechanic. Meanwhile mom is in no mood to cook & I offer to buy us something from the grocery store deli. That brings a smile to her face & she gives me a peck on the cheek. I haul ass to the store to buy food before she decides to use me as a practice dummy for what she intends to do to dad. I return with the food & the two of us eat in relative silence. Mom has gone to bed when dad drives home in the car. The mechanic found serveral issues, fixed them, & charged my dad a premium for the rush job status. "Fix it or my wife will kill me!" is obviously the code for "jack up the price by an order of magnitude". Anyway, had dad bothered to take it to the mechanic in the first place he would have found out that it was just in need of transmission fluid, not a complete tear down, rebuild, second tear down, rebuild, & a third session with the professional to fix the fuckups introduced the first two times through. And my reward for helping the fat fucker do all of this against my will during Summer vacation? He blames it all on me to mom as if throwing me under the bus will save his ass. Mom didn't buy a word of it. I'll never understand why she didn't divorce him as she'd threatened. She did get even though, she gave him her car & forced him to buy her a newer one to replace it. She never let him so much as look at it sideways, nevermind "fixing" anything on it. And folks wonder why I refuse to fix any car? Fuck that noise, take it to the mechanics & let THEM enjoy the headache of that fucking manual!

After all that I'm almost ashamed to admit that there is a car repair manual out there with my name on the cover...

My car-engineering education was sitting on the cold ground by the car, waiting for my father to utter the immortal words 'give me the three-eighths... no, not that one, that's a seven-sixteenths, you idiot' without removing his head from under the car to look at it. How could he tell?

I saw something funny about this a few weeks ago.

It was aimed at 'millennials', and went something along the lines of "You think you're smarter than previous generations? Well, for previous generations, the vehicle handbook told you how to adjust your valves and carburettor. Nowadays, it warns you not to drink the battery acid".

Oh god. Brings back memories of owning a British car that was built in the 1970s.

"Swamped" sounds an awful lot like the closing credits of 'The Fifth Element' to me. It was driving me nuts until I could place it.

Nice work Dabsy! I begin to scratch my head when there are 4 leftovers...

Love the ankle bracelet bit too! I wasn't aware France employed that technology, good to know as my address may change to a French local too...

Having leftovers is fine, you just haven't worked out where to put them back yet.

Being 2 screws too short is far worse - a recent laptop hard drive replacement found me in that situation, and I'd crawled around the floor for ages using hands as well as eyes to search for them, before I eventually found that they'd sneaked away and somehow hidden themselves under the tiny folds at the edge of the small cardboard box I'd put them in for the minute it took to swap the drives....

Been seeing far too much of that UI twattery on LinkedIn this week. Makes a change from the virtue signalling twattery I suppose.

1) Get some magnetic parts trays to hold and arrange those screws as you remove them. Or just a couple of small neodymium magnets. These are also handy if your screwdriver is not magnetic, when trying to reinsert a tiny screw into a tiny gap without dropping it. Just stick a magnet to the side of the screwdriver's shaft. Probably best to keep them away from your hard disk though...

2) Robert Rankin explained where those small screws come from in his 1993 Book of Ultimate Truths. The Small Screw Phenomenon is explained [1]thusly .

[1] https://welsh-nutter.co.uk/rune/screw.htm

The Magnetic trays are good, but take it one step further;

Take pictures of the area you're working on, and print those and place over a magnetic sheet.

Draw with a red marker around every screw you replace for that step. And place the removed screw on top of the picture of it.

Also, check out a Wowstick on whatever's your favorite/least hated Chinese shopping site. The 1F+ model has a built-in rechargeable battery, LEDs around the tip, and comes with a magnetiser/demagnetiser thingie.

I bought my first Wowstick after I had to open HP Elitebook 840 G3s... They have literally a DOZEN screws holding the bottom in place.

That actually looks like a pretty useful gadget.

I might invest in one, and put it in the drawer with the digital calliper, multimeter and soldering iron...

Trust me, it's a lifesaver. Or at least a hand-saver.

but as said, get the rechargeable with lights.

The one with 2x AAA batteries is slightly weaker, and the battery terminal design is just hopeless.

Or use an ice tray - just number the compartments.

Like the idea of the print outs

The print outs is because sometimes they use sodding different length and diameter all over the place.

Sure, the bottom may be fastened with M3 screws, but one is 4mm and the rest is 6mm long, and if you install a 6mm in the place of a 4mm, you break something expensive. And I suspect they've designed it like that on purpose.

One of those pill sorters with compartments for the different days works well, and they usually have closable lids.

Thanks for the link. That's my afternoon reading sorted. Working from home, who would have thought it could be so productive.

Love your satire... but.. just like instagrammed picts that show perfection in all its unachievable glory... there are some great guides for dissassembli9ng and then reassembling kit... https://www.ifixit.com/

Of course they make it look easy.. like the diet plans showing how someone can loose 100lbs in a week and look like a hot model afterward....

It is a nice illusion one can hope to aspire to ...

I read the instructions on ifixit.com for doing exactly this surgery and it was something like step 39 before you even got near the battery... luckily I found a local shop that would do it, and for not a lot more than I could buy the battery!

I heartily second the recommendation for iFixit. But I guess there's a bit of the Haynes spirit lurking in every author of a HOWTO guide. Funnily enough, just yesterday my printer decided to leak ink all over the place and I turned to iFixit to find out how to open it up to clean out the gunk. One of the very first steps is to "gently unhook" the retaining arm from the hinged top. After the traditional ten minutes of following the instructions I ended up "gently unhooking" it with the aid of a large flat-bladed screwdriver and some bad language.

Please share with me the link to ifixit’s reassembling guide after changing the battery in a 2012 (Retina) MacBook Pro.

I replaced the screen on my old iPhone 3Gs using a guide on ifixit.com, and step 36 was literally "Complete the previous steps in reverse order to reassemble". Taught me to read the instructions from start to finish before attempting a repair the next time, that's for sure.

I never did find the little plastic bracket that held down the flexi-flat-cable connecting the fingerprint reader to the system board after it flew off behind my desk. TWICE. The first time I disassembled my whole PC setup and removed all the cables before I found the little clip again. The second time I thought something along the lines of "you know, it will probably work without it" (only with a lot more swears).

I moved from that apartment two months ago; almost assumed I'd find the bracket wedged in a corner somewhere when the room was emptied, but alas no.

This made me smile.

Way back before computers and IT, when I was still a nipper, my dad was famous throughout the world for having bits left over from assembling flat packs and other kit.

He was the only person in the whole world who would decide he also needed a drill and a saw (and some extra screws, and possibly nails) in order to put the obviously incorrectly manufactured product together.

I remember one time, he'd decided to convert us back to coal because it would be cheaper than gas, and after clearing out the fireplace he spent the better part of a morning trying to assemble the cast iron grate assembly. After exhausting the entire dictionary of naughty words several times over, my mum came in, looked at the instructions, turned over the base plate, and it slotted together perfectly.

The next morning we were all lucky to still be alive, because it turned out part of the flue behind the water tank was blocked with mortar, so there was no updraft, and downstairs was filled with smoke (and probably a lot of carbon monoxide).

Jeez, for an old hand tech you have missed the easy out. Buy a plastic weekly pill case. Seven places to put small screws, a snap cover to keep them in, and an easy to move (if you have to) single piece.

As an old (and I mean from Apple II days), I found that that screw probably belongs somewhere near the edge of the battery. Just forget it, and add it to your collections of small screws, in case you ever need one. (In 15 years of Macs, every so often one goes AWOL. Reach for your extra screws and odds are you'll find one in there.

' And when I say "tiny", some of these screws can only be seen with the aid of an electron microscope.'

Yeah, well, perhaps if you didn't have an electron microscope in your kitchen, you'd have more room to work in. Daft.

You lucky dog you.

Working in bad conditions is a good way to disaster. Building a nice and sweet place to work is worth the effort in the long run.

I was hoping a tribute to Charlie Watts....Cristina Scabbia has a beautiful voice anyway, reminds me the one of [1]Amy Lee

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq4r79_5YlU

I always figure that if it goes together and works without the missing screw, it was redundant anyway.

Both UI's are poor. Also why is the model plugged into the mains?

Use one of those big trays vans have loaves of bread on, or else a smaller traditional 1960s style tray with walls. And marge tubs or small jars with lids. Not an open compartmentalised tray, which invariably gets a knock from the apparatus and sprays the room.

A store UI designer needing opinions from random strangers is inept. But almost all Web, mobile app & OS, desktop OS & programs and physical UI are now terrible. Both arrow buttons and a rotary encoder are bad choices for volume controls, except on tablet and phone edges. Touch buttons and buttons without clear labels are fail on TVs and monitors as is having to access an onscreen menu to select channel, volume, bright or input. Car radios are now terrible.

Voice control is good if you have no limbs, but not suitable in a noisy enviromment or with multiple people.

When you were allowed in with a toolbox to get the parts you needed. And you could use the opportunity to practice removal (and reassembly if it looked tricky).

A bit like a surgeon practising on a cadaver before being let loose on somebody's gran.

With the extra bonus of being able to explain away the leftover bolt as "probably one I picked up in the scrapyard". Mechanics, that is - not surgeons.

I got so many bits from scrap yards, so many my car went from bottom to top of range.

Ohh a rev counter dash!

I like those door pockets!

A rear washwipe!

First mod was engine, found out the second biggest engine had a different gearbox to the smallest.

Long ago, I heard of a fellow who had preceded my boss on a government contract. My employer was in charge of software support, another contractor dealt with hardware. This particular manager decided that he would show his hardware prowess by taking apart and reassembling one of the Data General minicomputer--probably an MV/10000 or MV/8000. All went well enough until he had it put back together, and found that there was one piece left over.

The other contractor met with the government side and demanded the fellow's removal. The government agreed, and the fellow was gone.

So the kitchen table it is – my go-to workbench for spending quality time with my lockdown besties ...

Thank you Mr. Dabbs.

I now feel fuly vindicated/justified.

What little space my kitchen counter has has also been my workbench for years now.

Now that I think of it, seems it's been as many as have passed since my last split-up.

Have a good week-end.

And one on me. --->

O.

Who doesn't GO on holiday with a set of tiny screwdrivers?!

The guy who ends up needing one, and has to buy another small set of small screwdrivers.

Foolish not to have one in your bag ...

https://www.amazon.com/Picquic-PIQ06102-1-Teeny-Turner-Screwdriver/dp/B001QVPHBO/

I used to get mocked a lot for carrying a Leatherman Wave with a bit kit in my laptop bag. Almost always the most vocal of the people mocking who needs to borrow it IME.