I'm with Alyssa and Bri. I know what everything under my bonnet is, but other than the washer fluid, I don't touch any of them. If there's a problem, I'd far rather wait and have someone with more experience take a look. I am a little obsessive with topping up my tyre pressure, mostly because my cheap tyres go down a lot with day-to-day use, particularly where I'm living now, which is like the capital city of speed-bumps. I do check my lights are working each month too. I've never learned how to change a tyre, although the garage down the road from me runs short courses in general car maintenance. This thread has reminded me that I must book that some time!

Any of you car gurus know much about gearboxes? My car has had an intermittent gear box fault (it's a manual) for about 6 months now. I've had it looked at twice, although as the damn thing always behaves perfectly as soon as a mechanic is in the vicinity I've haven't been able to get it fixed. Occasionally it will refuse to go into first/second gear. It tends to do this when I've been stuck at lights for a while or have been in crawling traffic. At first I had to restart the car and usually that would do the trick, although now I've grown impatient with it I usually just force the gearstick. Sometimes it'll go weeks without playing up at all, other times it'll do it near on constantly. Mechanic thought it might be sticky gear-pins, but although he had a play around with the gearbox he couldn't find anything particularly wrong. I've searched online for explanations, but as I haven't yet managed to get a mechanic to see it misbehaving, it's difficult to tell exactly what's up with it.