Originally Posted By: OneEyeJack
There are a lot of "old ways" of doing things while maintaining a car but they are all being lost by the new generations of replace instead of repair cars and mechanics. When I learned the trade the shop I worked at did everything from rebuilding engines and doing all their own machine work to welding blocks and castings. I welded the crankcase to a 1912 Simplex in 1963 and was able to see the weld holding and doing fine at a car show in 2003. Without the crankcase repair the restoration and return to running condition would have been impossible. It was handled as a standard job but today would be a big deal because those skills are disappearing never to return.
Well, the way I see it is that rebuilding stuff has risen in cost and 100% new has fallen in cost, so mainstream auto businesses will not be remanufacturing as much stuff. However, as long as there are collectible cars, a certain number of those specialists will remain. Ask Jay Leno if his staff is going to run out of specialty welders.
At one time it made sense to machine brake rotors at every pad change unless the rotor is below spec. Now machining a rotor can require so much labor versus replacement, that a new rotor at each pad change makes sense on a very large number of cars.
The economics of CV Axles has changed much sense the early days of FWD cars. At one time, it made sense to quickly put a new dust boot on an old CV joint and hope it works, rather than get a reman CV axle. If it didn't work, the price of labor still justified it. Next, reman CV axles reached a price where people simply installed a reman axle the moment they saw a torn boot. Now 100% new CV axles are extremely competitive in price with reman ones.
