Hands on.

Sitting in the garage office waiting for my car to be processed through its annual MOT one listens to the banter of the mechanics and their mates who come around to spin their time. This is not your usual 'garage chain' with its "please take a seat sir" front end smoothy. This is what the trade used to be like, a 'one man band', with skills and experience that was not learned through an Apprenticeship but rather through, initially a hands on interest in cars and then the employment by a car trader through who's books came cars of all kinds of make and complexity. Instead of being an expert in one specific brand and a specific instruction manual one became a fault / solution finder imbued by the massive store of 'what we did previously and remembering the same model we had in last month 'the clips down there somewhere'.

The scope of this self taught knowledge always amazes me given the complexity of the car and the enormous scope for designers to invent their own peculiar way of doing something.
The MOT is, like most bureaucratic events a mixture of a good idea, to keep the stock of cars on the road up to some sort of mechanical standard, especially from a safety point of view but it can in the hands of some just be a method of teasing out of Joe public hard earned cash with the MOT pass sometimes obtained by the age old method of leaving it to the next time when perhaps the car will have been sold on.
The garage trade has become more exclusive and the cars more complicated. In line with this the specialised expertise in the form of knowledge about the electronic system now controlling the functions within the car, and a need for knowledge of the equipment needed to interrogate the program's that drive the electronics. Specialisation has not meant a saving to the motorist through self diagnostic fault finding but a reason to charge over the top rates by the mechanic because he can !!

The days when a young chap, and it was always young men, could pull an engine apart, bore out the cylinder head and fit a twin carburettor to boost the engine output. To soup up a car or add stronger suspension springs to firm up the ride and was a right of passage in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Cars had relatively simple combustion engines which fundamentally hadn't changed much over the years and with a set of spanners and the trusty manual one felt confident to tackle the job. It was part of growing up and endowed a sense of it being a bridge between childhood and adulthood since it often involved working with ones dad or an elder brother and inherently acknowledged your being taken on board as a junior member of the tribe.
To turn the ignition key after assembling everything, listen to the roar from the specially tuned exhaust system and wheel the car out onto the highway for a trip to ones mates to show off how clever you had been.