Fix it or Ditch it? A Car Owner's Guide to Rebuilding Parts

We live in a throwaway society. A generation ago, if your starter motor, brakes or even engine be-came tired and worn out, the local mechanic would remove the offending part and fix it. And every gas station mechanic knew how to fix pretty much everything on your car.

Times change. Most mechanics today find it more economical to simply swap in a new or rebuilt part for a faulty one. The parts are readily available at local warehouse distributors, and the prices are reasonable. This practice means they can get your car back into service sooner, and the cost to the consumer is the same or even less. The remanufactured-parts business has boomed. And economies of scale mean these parts are the equal of brand-new parts, at sometimes substantially reduced cost. Everybody wins--sort of. As cars became more complicated, and the systems more complex, swapping in a new part almost always made more sense than figuring out how the old one was supposed to work, spending a couple of hours tweaking it while the repair bay was tied up and then hoping that the time-consuming repair was done correctly.

This may sound like a relatively tidy tale, but there have been some casualties. The job of the neighborhood mechanic has changed as a result of the remanufactured-parts boom. He doesn't need to be a jack-of-all-trades anymore. And he doesn't need to keep as many specialized tools in his shop. For instance, it's often necessary to use a lathe to lightly machine the commutator on a starter motor (and other motors) to restore the commutator or the slip rings to their original roundness. Seen a lathe of any sort at your local auto-repair chain lately? We'd bet not. Out-of-round wear is normal on high-mileage parts, and a rebuilt part will have had its concentricity restored as a matter of course.

I've long advocated spending the money on a new part for those who repair their own cars. Parts used to be cheap enough that it didn't make sense to rebuild stuff like a brake caliper. The cost of two caliper rebuild kits and a set of pads was nearly as much as the price of a pair of calipers with pads already installed, right from the factory.
But the tide is shifting. Though professional mechanics often install new parts, you may be able to save some money--maybe lots of money--by rebuilding certain systems yourself. That goes double for offbeat, antique or performance vehicles. And it may sound odd coming from someone whose racing history has consumed and destroyed a lot of parts (as the pile of Porsche engine cases behind my shop proves), but there's some satisfaction to be had in rescuing a good part and Saving the Planet, one piston at a time. So here's the lowdown on when to fix and when to ditch that broken part.