What have you learned in your old age that you feel should be taught to high school students?

Don't ever try to siphon gasoline with a vacuum cleaner.

My neighbor down the street attempted this and although surprisingly he was uninjured, the car and garage were a total loss.

--scott

Car repair is a difficult question. Certainly how to change a tire and replenish the fluids. I do my own oil changes but when I'm looking at cars I make sure the filter and drain plug are accessible. This may not be the case for some cars.

What should be a simple task like changing a burned out bulb may require a youtube video these days. Counting the bikes I have three carburetted vehicles but I'm not sure rebuilding a Carter or Mikuni is useful. Diagnosing problems with the ignition system may be obsolete. The Toyota doesn't even have ignition wires.

In many cases it's replace not repair. One of the Suzuki bikes has a fairly conventional engine design but when it failed to start the trail lead to the ECM. At that point you get on the net and hunt down a new one. Not much you can do with a brick.

Except for the Harley I haven't had to mess around with brakes in 20 years and even them it was just new pads.

I've got a wealth of knowledge and even the tools to deal with a 197 Chevy Malibu but most of that is ancient history.

As for home repair, wiring, plumbing, general carpentry, and roof repairing wouldn't hurt. For the latter, I recently learned cats can climb aluminum ladders but can't go down them for sour owl shit. Damn cat just had to see what I was doing.

I grew up in an older house so my first important lesson was nothing is square or plumb. Plan on improvising.

That you can save a ton of money by learning to fix things yourself. We didn't have the benefit of youtube videos for just about anything that's broken -- we had to learn it the hard way.

My junior high (middle school now) required everyone, regardless of sex, to take a semester of shop and one of home ec. Neither gave us any actual useful knowledge (I made a wooden number thing for our house and some really nasty chipped beef on toast), other than that we could actually use tools and machinery to accomplish tasks. Good enough.

I'm from SoCal. What are "frozen pipes"?

I would suggest "car understanding" more than perhaps "car repair", where I would propose we teach all our high school kids the basics of the various systems (cooling system, drive train, lubrication system, suspension system, heater and air conditioning system, electrical system, etc.).

I would suggest every child be provided an understanding of electrical things such as electrical power generation & distribution, Kirchhoff's laws, basic circuits such as those found inside the home, basic electrical items such as those found in the home, the use of a DMM/VOM, etc.

The work is in debugging so I would suggest perhaps the children be provided with the basic debugging skills of (a) understanding how the system works and then (b) breaking the system down into testable components, and then finally (c) isolating the broken component prior to replacement.

The replacement part of that task is the simplest of all in most cases.

I don't know if I'd teach them to do brakes even as brake pads, rotors, and calipers are easy to replace (drums & shoes a bit harder but not by much).

But I'd teach them how the braking system works in a car which could save their lives if they use that knowledge wisely over their next 60 years.

I'd suggest a basic home systems understanding which might contain the plumbing systems, the heating systems, the cooling systems, etc.

The entire class would be only a semester or two at most as the kids already are filled with other classes but it would seem to be useful to all of them even if only a few care about it at the time it would be taught to them.

Actually that's a good idea to teach them how to _measure_ things using common measurement tools (plumb bobs, snapping lines, squaring corners).

When I was a fresman or sophomore in HS, my brother brought home Motor's Auto Repair and told me to read it. I didn't read the parts about repairing specific makes but I read all the rest except transmissions, and that was a couople hundred pages iirc.

Thatn's good.

That same radio show I told you about, about middle income women not knowing how to use left-overs, said that a lot of people in the depression ate chipped beef on toast.

Yes. Only one of my projects, in 2 years, was useful.

Our junior high only required the boys, 7th grade, wood and a little electical shop**, 8th grade metal and a little printing.

**During the electic shop test, he asked why don't birds sitting on power lines get electrocuted. I got it right, but he marked me wrong. He said it was because the wires are insulated.

I made a shoe rack with square rods. My mother didn't like the round rods they sold because the shoes fell off. She also wanted holes at the ends for more air circulation -- I was going to make them the shape of shoes -- but she didn't get the holes. She used it for 39 years and since then I've used it. (Sort of. I store shoes on it and wear the same shoes every day.) The one part that required skill, getting the S-curve at the top of each end to match, I was going to make the S-curve in between the two pieces with a jig saw so that they came out the same. Instead of telling me to do it, he got impatient, cut the pieces along a diagonal, put one on top of the other, and cut both curves at the same time with a band saw.

In print shop everyone had to bring in a recipe (from his mother) and we set the type and printed enough for iirc everyone taking print shop that year, so we got a set of 3x5 cards with recipes to take home.

I was going to make a center punch, but I only got the knurling half-way done, and none of the tapering. I'm sure I still have it. I use it as a drift sometimes.

Oh yeah, senior year of HS, instead of taking 4th year Latin, Virgil, I took auto-shop. Somehow I ended up on the best team. One guy actually had maybe a hotrod, or maybe his father had a service station, and the other guy seemed pretty smart too. Was going to be a chef. We took apart an engine, but if we ever got it back together I don't know for sure. Seniors got out of school a week or two early.

A friend bought a new townhouse in suburband DC, the Virginia side near Dulles Airport, and the first winter a pipe in the kitchen froze and burst. It was in an outside wall and the insulation was on the wrong side of it.

It's a lot like an ice cube, but long and thin.

You're right. I didn't even think at the understanding level. My early experience involved repair usually. When the car overheats because the phenolic impeller in the water pump detached from the shaft you learn about cooling systems to say nothing of Chrysler's decision to use a plastic impeller. Chrysler product also taught you not all threads a right handed.

I'd guess the average high school kid knows as much about how a car works as how their iPhone does. It's all magic.

Those are those things that lead to burning the house down when you slither into the crawl space with a propane torch.

SoCal isn't exempt. I forget which year it was but driving east from LA I saw all the irrigation pipes at Rancho Cucamonga had turned into ice sculpture. Even at Vegas the fountains were frozen.

And don't buy the cheap Harbor Freight open ends no matter how pretty they are. I broke one on a drain plug.

An important lesson. We have two elderly Dodge vehicles.

I was a girl in the 50s. My dad owned a couple of screwdrivers, a hammer, a crescent, and a hose that could refill my bicycle tires from the spare in his trunk. I knew NOTHING until I married a guy who grew up having to fix everything -- when his car (gift from his grandma) needed a new tire he picked one up from the vacant lot where people threw old tires. He said he used five tires one day.

I agree, the only relative thing to share is how the basic systems work now. I drive older 90's and back cars, where repair information can be helpful. There are fewer and fewer automotive systems that you can repair at home as cars get newer. Unless someone is working on a classic car, most knowledge gathered over the years will do almost nothing for cars from the past 10 years.

Critical Thinking!

Not just for repair. If you can understand and analyze what you hear and read, you will have a tool useful for life.

-dan z-

That car stuff can be hand buy out Junior year highs school English teacher was more practical. He came into class and said "close the doors" and proceeded to tell us about VD and how to prevent it. Rather progressive in a Catholic school in 1962.

But that is the most important part. If you pull up the data on the scan tool, you can see inside the engine of a modern car with much more detail than you ever could with old cars. But you still need to understand what all those plots mean, and that means understanding how engines work.

Learning on old cars is certainly useful, in that you get to do things like make the mixture leaner or richer and see what happens. Then when you encounter the same conditions on new cars you can say "the plot on the computer says the engine is too lean but the exhaust smells like the engine is too rich... something is wrong with a sensor somewhere."

--scott

It's true, a number of my friends got VD in the back of cars.

--scott

Even tghe Chrysler lugnuts on one side was left handed and the other right handed. Not sure if they are now or not as that was back around

1970 that I worked at Sears changing tires and plugs and simple things.

Now almost all new cars require very little for the first 50 to 100 thousand miles other than an oil change every 5000 t0 10,000 miles. No more than I drive now it is just changed at the state inspection time.

That's where I'm leaning, which means the entire class can be taught inside the classroom like most of the other classes are.

I would think there should be a chapter each on each "thing" kids need to know about (perhaps homes, vehicles, measurements, debugging, PCs, etc.).

In each chapter I would think it could dive down into the "systems" involved such as the cooling system for a car, or the plumbing system for a house or the electrical system for a computer.

Repair starts with debug. Debug ends with isolation of the failed component. But debug starts with understanding the systems & isolation of the failure.

Without understanding of the system, there's no repair possible unless we teach the kids to just throw parts at the problem.

Admittedly, a _lot_ of cars are fixed by people throwing parts at them! :)

My first Chrysler was a New Yorker which, as I recall, had reverse threaded lug bolts on one side, but normally threaded lug bolts on the other.

Nobody told me this. After doing the one side, I wrenched off two or three before I realized "something" was very wrong on the other side.

There were no "warning labels" in those days. :)

This is a good observation, where we could add a systems approach to how basic electronics work also (sci.electronics.repair).

It's always depressing when I hear people say that.

Every single time I hear this I think of people who say they got cold from being cold. It sounds like it would make sense. But it's dead wrong.

I hear these uneducated misconceptions in all sorts of related things, such as people who claim that high test gas gives them better performance in their pinto.

A car, like the human body or a home or even something as simple as a pair of shoes hasn't fundamentally changed one bit since it's initial invention.

Almost _everything_ you learned about cars in the 40's applies to cars in the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, 2000's, 2010's, 2020's, and beyond.

The drive train is the same. The cooling system is the same. The heating and air conditioning systems are the same. The tires/wheels/valves/braking systems are the same.

Just about everything is the same.

What's different then?

We could probably list what's different on a short list but certainly the spark control and timing has changed (anyone want a used dwellmeter unused for decades?)

The fuel delivery has changed at the back end more so than the front end (pumps moved from the engine into the gas tank but that's not a big deal).

Mostly what happened was stuff was added - but not very much of it.

Obviously the pollution control system was _added_ (e.g., EGR systems and catalytic converters and oxygen sensors).

Also the electrical system has added components which are black boxes but which don't change in any meaningful way how the car works.

It could be an interesting topic of what has _fundamentally_ changed such that what you learned in the fifties is no longer useful - because I suspect almost everything we learned about cars & home repair in the fifties is still completely applicable today.

Anyone who says otherwise, IMHO, didn't learn anything way back when. So, of course, if they learned nothing, then none of nothing is usable.