You just gotta figure out low cost ways of fixing the stuff without paying big for it. Sometimes the ideas will not work out and you are stuck buying the new part there. Time is the biggest factor in most cases, or one car only and have to get it back up and running fast. Why 30 years ago I went to 3 cars running at all times pretty much, it allows for two and a backup and then you got time to fix the one that's down the way you want.
You may well have to destroy part of a part to get inside and what you have to do, the trick is figuring a way to recoup that back low cost wise to give good long service when you are done with the interior repairs.
The OEM (at least Ford) has now turned its' engineers inward looking to redesign now to last only a certain length of time, not forever or even longer lasting like used to be. They used to use a longer lifetime viewpoint but with cars routinely lasting 300K in many cases they now feel forced to shorten the lives in many ways, like 5W-20 oil and parts pre-designed to break at a shorter life than used to be, it figures in with other things that make sense and cover that up like use of plastics and the oil, it saves fuel money and the plastics are lighter to do same. But look closer and if a conspriracy nut like me you clearly see how the thinner oil wears out engines quicker.and the plastic parts break faster to create minor nuisances that then stack up to make owner tired of things breaking and then gets rid of a car that could easily last 2-3 more years. All contrived to control your thinking there. They are trying to mind control us lemmings to do what they want. Look at the much shorter span of time parts are now supplied for most car things, they are NLA often at 5-6 yars now, you can forget that unspoken 10 year parts availability rule now. I couldn't get parts for a Tempo ATX 5 years after it was built, Ford no longer carried them at all. Of course they would sell me an entire transmission. Most smaller parts have disappeared now, they want no less than at least $50 per parts sale now, small stuff can only be gotten by buying bigger subassemblies now costing 10X as much. More of what they've done with the engineers and bean counters now. Plastic parts are often molded with holes or lack of bracing now in the most highly loaded areas to let them break far faster, look at the broken parts close and where they break and usually it becomes very clear what they are doing there now. I buy more than one of the same car to be able to interchange parts and if you do that you can clearly see the cheapening process as later year models of the same car roll out, they will change this or that to lower quality of parts and cost required but also to break faster to up the parts sales. It's all over the cars and gets worse as the model matures. Things that before could be unbolted would end up riveed or metal parts changed to plastic and a previously missing hole molded in to fail it faster to boot. All over the cars, I could find changes like that all over my '88, '92 and '94 Tempos. The two Focus I have now show the same thing, most glaring is the thermostat housing once made of durable bakelite plastic later made of much more flexible ABS and even redesigned on top of that to let the part flex even more to leak much easier. The altered part sends thousands of Foci to an early junkyard grave when they leak water to overheat and damage the otherwise bulletproof zetec engine. How about paying close to $400 to get a simple PCV rubber grommet since it only comes with the entire oil separator assembly? Pretty damn silly. The Focus 2.0 SPI engine has had a major flaw with valveseat dropping since it was a 1.9 in Escorts, they knew it yet never lifted a finger to fix it through all the years of production since the basic engine lasted forever without that, they needed to shorten the life to bring them down faster and again to the scrapyard. A couple of very minor low cost engineering changes would fix that forever but they did NOT wish to fix it. Same with the CD4E ATX used in so many Fords, they went many years not fixing well known major flaws there until it became a major problem like with Mazda version of same trans, there it killed the model 626.
One reason Ford service manuals rotate so much around simply changing one or all parts now, their mechs on the whole are not nearly as well-trained as they used to be. The manuals used to go into how the part actually worked to teach the techs new skills, but with the big exodus of the highest trained ones in the '90s; well, they have never recovered from that. CEO Jacques what's his name started feeding internally for profit increases there since they could not increase the price of cars and never let it be said corporations won't feed on their own when they feel the need to. . Really good mechs used to be able to make $75+K a year there and many were cut back slowly to like $40-$50K and they jumped ship by the hundreds. Globalization has come home to roost paywise and why so much incompetence is now found at the dealerships. They in no way have as many well trained people as they used to, they won't pay for it. Look at the manuals, they show mostly nothing but simple flowcharts now for those that cannot think. Much of the useful stuff is now gone. Manuals from the '70s are often over the average head of the mechs there now, too much work to have to read.
Many dealerships now buying 'lifetime' warranty parts from the aftermarket and prefer to let the customers think they are genuine Ford parts when often they are not. They then charge what the Ford part would have cost. I saw plenty of that as a delivery driver too.
Gotta pay for all that glass in the fancy new showroom somehow.......................
