Chad Swiatecki Trending Here’s a riddle that’s especially relevant in a time when the cost of everything is going up: What’s the dollar value of elbow grease? The answer depends on the situation, of course, but in a recent from car-focused creator Matthew Fleshman—who bills himself as The Car Dad (@thecardadstl)—we see a convincing argument for some good old-fashioned hard work and elbow grease being worth somewhere north of $400 an hour. The clip introduces us to Fleshman as he’s preparing to replace the rear right shock on his wife’s 2019 Honda Odyssey minivan. He tells us the asking price for that job at the local dealership was $500, which seems preposterous since we learn Fleshman replaced the park with a new Monroe shock in less than half an hour.
“I did it myself in my garage in under 25 minutes, and that includes making the video,” he said. I ran down to the O’Reilly’s. The OEM replacement was $75.
You’re gonna need a 14 millimeter and a 17 millimeter socket. An impact wrench is helpful, and a breaker bar.” Fleshman’s clip, which has more than 30,000 views, is done in high-speed time lapse style from a few feet away, so we don’t get a terribly detailed look at every step he takes in the replacement work.
And his voiceover only gives us the most essential info since the whole clip is just over 30 seconds long. A jump over to YouTube turns up a of about 15 minutes that shows us in close-up detail how to replace the same rear right shock on .
