"Doing It Yourself" has become a way of life for me. I grew up with lots of tools arround me and I have made sure that my children has done the same. Houses, cars, motorcycles, aircrafts, tools, electrical machines. There is not much that I have not worked on over the years. Having fun, saving money, understanding technology are just a few of the rewards it brings.
There are however a number of stumblestones on the way. Some you learn about through mistakes and others you learn about through good advice from others. The purpose of this doucument is to help you with such good advice. And most importantly: if you have a good tip that is not mentioned in this article, please send me a mail about it.
The first advice is a warning about safety and risk: Be aware that you carry
the full responsibility yourself for any mistakes and mishaps in relation to your own DIY work
. There is nobody except yourself to pay any extra
costs and there is no warranty. In certain cases your DIY work might cause the manufactures warranty
to be lost. So consider this carefully before you begin, and keep it in mind whenever you might get
tempted to do second class work.
On the other hand there is a very positive side to the DIY work: You know with certainty what
have been done and how well it was done.
This document is still neither comprehencive nor complete, but as time allows, I expect to let it grow. Although having focus on motorcycles and cars, the contents is applicable on many other DIY areas, as it is always just about how the physical world arround us behaves.
Always buy the right tool for the job and buy expencive high quality tools rather than cheap
unknown brands. Many of my tools were bought more than 30 years ago and are still in perfect
condition! 
You will need the following tools for mc and car work (most important mentioned first):
In case the terms I used in the above list are not all correct, please have a look on the image here below which gives examples on most of the items.
Keep your tools dry and covered with a thin layer of oil. The oil will usually be applied when you work with the tool, but if not, then smear oil on with a rag and dry most of it off again with another rag.
You will need the following consumables for mc and car work:
Have you ever spent hours trying to unmount a corroded bolt, nut or other steel part. Have you
broken a bolt or destroyed the bolt head so your tools can no longer get a hold
. This does´nt have to be so, at least not if you
follow the following simple advice:
Apply copper-grease or normal grease on all threads and mating surfaces before you mount steel parts, Only exceptions are in special cases like when a special locking compound is required or some other circumstance dictates not to do it. Grease protects against corrosion and reduces friction when you later need to unmount. The copper in cobber grease is especially effective on high temperature parts like on the exhaust. It takes only a few seconds extra to apply the grease, and you will save hours and spare parts when you five years later needs to do maintenance on that spot again. When mounting parts on the underside of e.g. a car I also apply a good amount of grease on all bolts, nuts and threads after assembly is finished.
What to do then if the parts are stuck together due to corrosion because someone (you) forgot to follow the above advice? There are a number of things which can help you: The right tool, vibration, temperature, oil, force and deliberate destructive action. You can use the methods in combination, but for simplicity, let's take them one-by-one:
.
Each strike sends mechanical shock waves down along the bolt cracking the iron oxide.
Next use a pneumatic spanner with a hexagonal top. Or - if you do not have a pneumatic
spanner - simply use a hammer on the manual spanner (be sure to hit it in the correct
direction though). Again it is the vibrations (sound waves) which will do the job.
A chisel is often a surpricingly effective tool when you do bodywork on e.g. a car.
The image below left shows metal parts cut off with a sharp chisel while doing body-work
on my car. A rusty console had to be replaced with a new one and was impossible to
reach with any other kind of tool. But keep the chisel sharp. I had to sharpen it
5 times before the console was removed.
The nut shown below right was cut off with a chisel, beacause I could not get access with
a top spanner.
You do not need to spend money on special hand cleaning stuf, because you most likely already have that available in your house. Simply dig a small amount of used coffee grains from your coffee machine up in your dirty hand, add a little dish washing soap and rub your dirty hands in that while also adding a little water.
When cleaning a brush with e.g. turpentine, the procedure described below will save you a lot of money and keep polution of the envionment to a minimum:
Always poor used terpentine into a bottle marked as USED (on the photo you can
see the Danish word BRUGT).
After a few days, the paint particles will have settled to the bottom of bottle, and then it
is magically possible to reuse the turpentine the next time you need to clean a brush if you
do as follows:
You will notice that only a very small portion of clean turpentine is used each time you clean a brush, and you only rarely have any turpentine to dispose of.
Finished for now, but to be expanded some time in the future.
© Copyright 2009 FireBladerDk - Last updated 2020-08-07