Conrad Waddington was on to something - up to a point.
When we had our small fleet of BMWs (four, no less) I frequented many discussion groups related to those cars. And like clockwork, I would see two kinds of postings, which I later realized were shills for parts sellers. The first were along the lines of, "I just bought a four-door 318i, automatic, four cylinder, what should I upgrade first?"
Of course, the correct answer would be, "nothing, it is the lamest BMW they sell, and no amount of supercharging or nitrous is going to make it a race car. Just drive it and save up for that M3 you always wanted!" But that was not the answer you would see - there would be postings exhorting these kids (and they were just grown-up kids) to plunk down a couple of grand on a supercharging or turbocharging "kit" of dubious quality, that would shorten engine life and still make less horsepower than the smallest six cylinder engine available. Not only that, they would be throwing a couple of grand at a car worth... a couple of grand at best.
But you can't blame the parts sellers for shilling on discussion groups - that's how they sell this half-assed deer-whistle shit (strut tower braces? Give me a break!). They rely on online peer pressure to sell it. And they provide this with additional shill accounts which promote these schemes and shout down any dissenters.
That was back in the day before social media. Social media makes it far worse, as postings can be "upvoted" and "downvoted" and as a result, what appears to be popular can be readily manufactured using bots. Or, often people are just idiots and the most inane comments (and poor puns) are voted to the top, while real quality information disappears into oblivion.
OK, you say, I'm not a boy-racer who is going to empty his wallet on a loud exhaust system or some half-assed suspension lowering kit. They've got a scheme for you as well. If you go on these discussion groups, they will exhort you to replace parts on your car because they are "notorious" for failing and will leave you stranded somewhere on a dark and lonely night, or cause the engine to overheat and warp the heads or worse. You'd better replace that water pump, buddy, they're a time bomb waiting to go off!
Maybe. Maybe not. You do read horror stories about plastic cap radiators cracking (or expansion tanks) or water pumps leaking (but not exploding so much). The real problem is when people keep driving the car as it overheats, taking a small problem and turning it into a huge one. It is similar to the problems BMW had with its GM-made transmissions (from France, no less, what could possibly go wrong?). With no dipstick, you could not check the fluid level, so they would leak, over time, and then run low on fluid and people would keep driving them, even as the transmission check light comes on, until the car skids to a halt as the planetary gears shatter into a mess of broken teeth.
So, do you perform preventative maintenance to avoid these sort of problems? Or do you run the vehicle until the part in question fails, and then fix it?
The problem is not as easy as it first appears. Conrad Waddington discovered, during World War II, that every time a B-24 was taken out of service for preventative maintenance, it would again be out of service shortly thereafter, for corrective maintenance, as the mechanic stripped out a spark plug or forgot to replace a part he removed or whatever. Every time you turn a wrench on a car, you wear on the parts of the car. You can only take something apart so many times before you end up having to replace it.
So Waddington extended the service intervals on these planes (used for coastal patrols, looking for submarines) and a funny thing happened - reliability increased. Now, I suppose, on a four-engine bomber, if you lose an engine, you can fly back to base and land safely. But there are other systems which are more critical - if they fail, no one flies back, as Alaska Air discovered when they skipped maintenance of the jack-screw (acme nut) on the tailplane of their MD-80's.
But other times, "leave well enough alone" is often a better approach. In the BMW world, these online parts sellers would often exhort readers to change spark plugs to a whoop-de-do brand (Bosch platinum, for example) or to flush coolant. In the old days of cast-iron engines and Prestone antifreeze, this was routine maintenance. Today, many manufacturers recommend changing these only every 100,000 miles or so. High-energy ignition and fuel injection mean spark plugs no longer foul so easily. And modern chemistry and sealed cooling systems mean that antifreeze can last a decade.
What's worse is that if you apply "old school" thought to a modern car, it can backfire. Those fancy high-performance plugs can be too cold and cause misfire - often mystifying the user, who assumed they would provide better performance. What's worse, is that with aluminum cylinder heads, it is pretty easy to snap off a spark plug, trying to remove it, which may mean having to remove the cylinder head to tap out the hole (the old-school helicoil technique isn't as popular with aluminum engines). Sometimes it is best to leave well enough alone.
Similarly, flushing coolant was once seen as a way of preventing corrosion. But with today's engines - some with iron blocks and aluminum heads, you have to use a specific type of coolant with distilled water and sometimes a water wetter compound as well (yes, it makes water wetter, go figure) or you may end up creating galvanic corrosion, or cavitation issues (in diesels in particular). Worse yet, you can warp the head if you don't bleed the air from the system, as many cars have the radiator lower than the top of the engine, which means an air pocket can form in the cylinder head when flushing the system. This could cause engine failure.
So you see how this works - you try to be proactive with maintenance and end up causing disaster.
The problem for me, being a technician and engineer and tinkerer (and apparently Asperger's as well) is that I see something that is wearing out and I think, "I need to fix that!" - it is like a compulsion with me. But if I start taking something apart, I realize that I have a greater chance of breaking it than fixing it, and maybe it is best to leave well enough alone. Maybe the device in question is failing - but then again, it may provide a service life beyond that for which I will need it. What's more, while I could fix the portion that is failing, there may be other parts which are also near the end of their design life, which means it "ain't worth fixing."
Just run to failure and then discard (or overhaul at that point).
Of course, there are safety (critical) items that you shouldn't "run to failure" if you can avoid it. For example, tires on your car are a safety critical item. You run them bald, you will get into trouble at the first sign of rain. Even before then, you will likely get stuck somewhere. You can literally see when they need to be replaced and are a wear item. Ditto for brakes. Yet people do wait until the pads are metal-on-metal or get into a wreck, rather than do a brake job.
You can tell when a car battery is reaching the end of its life (often by just how old it is). Yet people will inconvenience themselves with jump-starting, time and time again, rather than plunking down a hundred bucks on a new battery.
So how do you tell what does need to be serviced and what doesn't? Your owner's manual and your local mechanic might help. Believe it or not, the local dealers have told me not to worry about changing transmission fluids and coolants for extended periods - even though they would make money by doing so. The owner's manuals recommend lengthy periods between replacements, which, coming from the 1960's, seem startling. When I grew up, the "spring tuneup" meant new plugs, points, and condensor - the latter two items not even existing on cars today. And in my Dad's era, every fall you replaced your antifreeze. To not do so was madness!
But times have changed, and "leave well enough alone" often makes more sense than "a stitch in time."
Besides, it defeats the whole advantage of modern cars, to over-service them. One nice thing about cars today compared to years gone by is that they do last much longer and need much less maintenance, which is why your local "garage" is now a convenience store. There is no profit in having a "mechanic on duty" as in the old days.
This applies to other kinds of equipment in your life as well. If it ain't broke, don't "fix" it as we used to say in the lab. You could really open up a can of worms trying to make perfect something that is perfectly adequate.
This is not to say you should abuse the equipment in your life, only to take care of it, treat it gently, and don't over-service it.
I tend to look for trouble - and often find it. A friend of mine is a retired MD-11 pilot and I remarked that I would have made a horrible flight engineer back in the days when they had them. I would have said things like, "Did you hear that? That didn't sound right! Sounds like a thrust bearing going bad on #2...." And my friend said, "you're right - I would never fly with you!" Pilots are a special breed, who concentrate on flying the plane and not worrying whether the equipment works or not. "Kick the tires and light the fires" they say, and often they fling their craft all over the sky, in much the same way a teenager drives his Mother's car.
I think there is some sort of happy medium, though. Air crash reports are rife with examples of pilots trying to "fix the plane" rather then just landing the damn thing at the first sign of trouble. On the other hand are pilots who fail to understand how systems work, and rely on everything working perfectly and thus unable to respond when an instrument goes wrong.
I am trying, as I get older, to worry less about equipment, and one sure way to do this is to own less equipment. Having stuff and things is fun and all, but they do require work to maintain and eventually - someday - they have to be scrapped or replaced.
Just as we ourselves will be, someday!
