I'm sounding more like a Boomer every day: yesterday my car's clutch dropped to the floor and wouldn't return on its own-- and even depressed, any attempt to go into gear was met with wafting clutch odor. I went into the house and did five minutes of reading: clutch slave cylinder.

As it turns out, in the first few model years, the master and slave cylinders were housed outside of the clutch body housing-- what's apparently referred to as the "bell house casing". What this means is that you can lift the car and easily replace these pieces, as they're out in the open.

By the car's third model year, those components had been moved inside the "bell house casing", making the job take orders of magnitude longer to perform. On top of that, in just the second model year, the physical throttle body mechanism was replaced with "drive by wire", along with probably countless other "DYI"-unfriendly alterations.

Sure enough, I walked back out to the car, located the clutch fluid reservoir, and... empty. Which means air then got sucked into the line, causing a total loss of pressure. Only because this looks so relatively trivial to do, I got the confidence to order about four hundred dollars' worth of tools and parts.

The tools took up almost all of that cost-- but they were one-time and up-front: a hydraulic jack, jack stands, jack stand pads, an LED floor work light, and a few other things. The parts were cheap: sixty bucks for the OEM slave cylinder-- cheaper third-party ones were as low as thirteen dollars, but I wouldn't trust those; a nice steel braided clutch line since I've apparently sprung a leak; and a little tool to help me with the bleeding.

Here is the fun part-- the piece Boomers are always on about: when you push the car's clutch pedal, you literally look beneath the car and can see the rod moving through the slave cylinder. So if I replace it and bleed the line, and it still won't move, then I've got a master cylinder issue. The point here being, it's all mechanical. Similarly, if I push my car's gas pedal, I would physically see the body opening beneath the car.

Everything about cars apparently used to be this way-- and so every job was trivial: something breaks? Well, is it moving? If not, trace it back until you find the problem. Bolt in a new part, and you're done. No computers, no ECUs, nothing hidden away totally beyond vision or reach.

I really like the new Z and other cars like it, but based on what I've discovered about how the venerable 350z was "gimped" over its production life many, many years ago, I'd bet bottom dollar that these new sports cars are going to be almost impossible to self-service-- and that's even after setting aside the privacy concerns and computer complexity (good luck replacing that touch screen when it fails in twelve years).

If this job goes well and I don't wind up needing to get it towed to a mechanic in town, then I'll move on to other things, like replacing brakes. The cool part about it is that if I can become more handy like this, I'll own the subsystems in our various cars-- which means I'll know how they work, and if I start hearing sounds or smelling things, I'll know exactly what's going on, what to replace, and from where to get parts, just like how it's always been with my PC building.

This, versus when someone does the work for you: it's a black box, you write them a check, and you haven't gained any capital-- you're permanently at square zero every single time the car goes funny. It's like renting something versus eventually owning it.