Oh man that's brutal. I once paid a guy $500 to fix a leaky pipe and he just put duct tape on it.

Oh man, that's brutal. A long cheater bar and slow pressure has saved me more times than I can count. Also, if you've got one, an impact wrench can sometimes rattle them loose when nothing else works.

Your dad's point about pattern recognition is spot on. Gut feelings aren't random magic, they come from years of experience noticing small details without consciously thinking about it. Writers just skip the boring part because showing someone reading phone records for three hours doesn't make good TV.

Yeah the whole "factory crimps are junk" thing, I mean I've heard that too. Reminds me of this time my buddy's Cummins did something similar on a road trip, we ended up using a piece of fuel hose and two worm clamps to get home. Worked fine for like a year after that.

Because the customer argued against it" yeah that part gets me every time... I had a buddy who built a deck for this guy who insisted skipping the gravel was fine because "his dad never used it." Two winters later the whole thing started shifting and he had to rip up half the posts to redo them properly. The worst part is my buddy tried to warn him but the guy just kept saying he'd done it his way for 30 years... some people just have to learn the hard way I guess.