"Ralph Mowery" wrote in message
...
In article ,
says...

You don't need 4 years but you need more than the old days.

That?s very arguable indeed given that there is very little
to do on modern cars now, just change the oil, redo the
brake pads etc as required, change the plugs etc. Even
with fault finding, its much easier to do now with the
OBD2 telling you which sensor has failed quite a bit
of the time and no timing etc to do anymore.

Makes no sense to require formal qualifications.

Sometimes I don't know about that. It took a dealer mechanic
about 3 weeks just to find the mass air sensor (think that was
the part) was causing my Toyota to run very rough.

There will always be curly ones, but that's a separate issue
to whether it makes any sense for the state to require 4 years
of formal training before you can work on any cars etc.

In fact a mate of mine who has no formal training past
high school and who was a right little brat in high school
spends all his time as a mechanic buys used Mercs off
ebay, fixes the faults other mechanics havent been
able to fix and sells them for twice what he paid.

I had replaced the simple things like the plugs, wires,
fuel filter. The Autozone or some other parts place
had a chart that mentioned that, but as it was about
a $ 500 part I wanted to make sure that was what it
needed. This was on a 1991 so it probably did not
have the OBD2 to tell what sensor was bad.

Sure, but any decent mechanic wouldn't have
had to try things are random like you did.

It took so long that I even emailed
the Toyota headquarters about that.

Sure, there will always be curly ones, but clearly
the formal training didn't help that mechanic.