“...the first thing I do is a low speed test in the neighborhood to make sure everything is functional before heading out for longer drives”

“...At least not without someone there to make sure everything is done properly.”

Within a very short period of time I (1) flushed/changed transmission fluid of our van, (2) changed oil and filter, (3) replaced front brake pads, (4) replaced front disk rotors, (5) changed out a broken engine mount of our second car and, within a day or two of right now, will be (6) replacing rear disk pads and rear…

You need to buy a torque wrench that can get up to, say, 125 foot-lbs of torque. The lug nuts are typically 85-ish but some of the bolts of the caliper assembly can be tightened at 120+; tightening that hard in the small working space without a lever arm is...interesting.

“...Also worth mentioning that some older cars may require bleeding of the brake system following the compression of the calibers”

I bought the jack stands (and ramps, for that matter) at the local Walmart a couple miles from my house (bought the jack from Amazon, however), however Amazon has the same ramps and (minimally) very similar jack stands:

I just started all this. First I changed transmission fluid (twice - essentially a flush); that required a couple ramps (or jack stands) and a couple wheel blocks and a big “oil pan” to drop the draining fluid into and a whole bunch of used milk/etc containers to store the fluid and a dinky funnel that fit the trans…

So, okay - I have a couple jack stands and a nice hydraulic jack. I want to jack up both front wheels, insert said jack stands, jack up rear wheels one at a time, and do a standard tire rotation. The procedure seems trivial but I have zero clue where to place the jack to jack up the front wheels when I ALSO have to…

Stepper motor driver with 2n2222A transistors with no stops to a limited-freedom of motion motor - I wonder if the simulation would note some sort of current overload.

Lol! I once hooked up a rather expensive early-version research robot arm to “try it out” and rapidly proceeded to “smoke test” small driver transistors because there were no built-in limit switches to the joint movement - hit end of travel, overload, poof! Soldered in some replacements, tried again - poof! Soldered…