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The way you get good at it is by screwing up several times along the way. So, you’re on the way to being good!

I've never replaced a car battery and wouldn't know how to begin, so you're ahead of me.

what stopped me from being electrocuted but I didn't feel a thing

Sounds like the electricity was going through the wrench and not your hand. The real dangerous electrocutions are where you touch negative with one hand, positive with another, and the electricity goes across your heart on its way to complete the circuit.

But anyway as a certified handy guy who has done installs and modifications of all kinds professionally all of this has happened to me before too. The only way to get good at it is to do it every day, and most people just aren't doing that.

Comrade, I'm going to assume you're young. I'm not. But I can tell you as the handiest person I know, I got here because I never stop fucking around with things over the years. Some of my tools have chunks melted out of them from accidentally shorting a car battery. I've skinned my knuckles, stabbed, electrocuted, burnt, cut, glued, bumped, and bruised myself, and I expect I'll do it again some day but hopefully less often. The difference between us is time spent being stubborn about wanting to know how things work and a lot of times needing to save money. Don't get down on yourself, you changed your battery and that's more than many people will do.

Keep fiddling with things, you'll get there. But also, take your time to think through hazards, it makes it a lot easier. Don't ever rush handy/repair/maintenance work.

I've made many mistakes when fixing my own cars so take it from me it happens. There's this time I put a battery that was too tall in my sister's car because we didn't have the money for the proper battery, shit make sparks with the hood as it welded it. I fixed that with some electrical tape insulating it. There's this most recent mistake where I bored a hole into my new radiator, fixed it with some jb weld few days ago.

Among my friends and family they see me as some sort of mechanic but the sheer volume of fucks ups is pretty massive. Everything runs at least and not being a trained professional I'm doing alright all things considered so be easy on yourself. You didn't get majorly hurt or anything and you learned some important lessons as long as you don't do them twice you're good

Some months back I replaced the alternator in my vehicle. I've been working on cars on and off since I was a teenager in the last century, but I mostly get by from watching videos and reading the manuals. So I watch a bunch of videos, get the alternator out of my vehicle, and then proceed to get the new replacement stuck for like 3 hours when trying to put it in. See, all the videos I watched had a hard time of getting their alternator out, so they had to removing a bracing bar. But not me, I twisted it right through the gap, LIKE A PRO! So when I'm watching these videos and they're all having no problem getting it back in, I'm pulling my hair out wondering what the heck is happening when it suddenly occurs to me how I screwed myself and that damn the bar needs to come out. lol, what should have been a few hour job took me two days. LIKE A PRO!

We all have our fields of knowledge

Do I know anything about car maintenance? No

Do I know how to cook a variety of delicious and nutritious food? Yes

don't be so hard on yourself, most handy people either learn from someone experienced, or the hard way like you did just now

Glad you didn't shock yourself and give you a pat on the back for that. I don't even know my way around cars.

You know more than me. I wish I just stuck to bicycles.

I dunno how people learned 30+ years ago... families passing along info, friends maybe. nobody in my family knows shit, except calling whoever has money and getting them to throw money at poor people until the problem is no longer present.

I left home like about 20 years ago and became curious how to keep my shit from falling apart when some critical machine, appliance or mechanism stopped working and I only had $30 to my name. learned stuff from coworkers, helped them work on their own orojects as an extra pair of hands in exchange for their knowledge. once YouTube became a thing, that's been real good.

I took some adult Ed. "shop" type of class at a local agriculture school. that was riveting. I still watch YouTube videos for stuff though.

its a real pain to sort through all the AI slop though nowadays.

I think as we settle into imperial decline and become intermittently disconnected from various supply chains.... having curiosity and an attitude for tinkering is going to be crucial as communities contract into some kind of neo-mannorialist/resiliency-based whatever the fuck.

my family still doesn't know shit about fuck and they all seem to refuse to learn anything, treating me like I'm some kind of eccentric throwback for trying to muddle my way through problems and understand mechanisms.

I am perennially disappointed and frustrated by their incurious approach to the world.

I find people who want to at least try to understand a problem and explore their DIY options to be kindred spirits and fast friends.

You didn't feel anything because it's only 12V. Be happy it wasn't worse and learn from it!

There are less and less things in the world one can even interface with properly, so there's less and less ways to even be "handy". You were born in the wrong generation to be handy

This is me playing mysummercar. Making mistakes is part of leveling up the skill cape with most things in life so don't worry

Being handy isn't something you just are, it's a skill built up by not getting killed while trying to be handy. First time I tried to fix a plug socket I forgot to turn off the supply at the fuse box and accidentally shorted the wires. First time I tried to fix a broken headphone wire I just ended up with a mess of wire and solder. First time I tried to replace a light socket I found that the building had been wired before current wire colour standardisation and had to call 3 different people to find out what to do.

Today you made at least 3 avoidable mistakes, but you also successfully changed your car battery, and now if you need to do it again you can avoid those mistakes. You might have injured yourself and your pride, but you tried and you succeeded. You can do it again. You are now handy.

I agree with everyone about failing in order to grow, but also you can also look up tutorials on YT and see how to do it before trying it. Learning from your own mistakes is important, but learning from the mistakes of others is even better

At some point a few years back I decided that if something can be done by regular people, I can learn how to do it. Every individual skill starts with several mistakes that would be obvious to a professional, but I'm not one, or at least wasn't. We have an opportunity that no one in history had, though. We have the ability to learn anything from real masters with a simple search. Forums and YouTube have endless information from every kind of craftsman, mechanic, programmer, designer, and engineer willing to give anyone the great advantage of being able to skip the majority of dumb mistakes we would all make. In the last two years I've learned welding, tiling, server programming, flooring, building code, gun making, cabinet building, and anything else that arose and needed done. I just finish milling a pile of rough boards into lumber before checking Lemmy.

You have to start somewhere, and there will always be mistakes, but if the car could end up being an ongoing problem, you just found a reason to learn mechanics.

I put a comment up here the other day describing my first disaster of a brake job. The most important part of that whole process was that I learned from it.

I bet next time you have to do a battery, you will remember NOT to let a wrench short across the two terminals, right? Yeah, you might feel like a dunce right this moment, but you are learning. This is how you get better at being handy. It's not some magical knack that folks are born with, we do it wrong once, remember that mistake, and next time we do a little better.

I'm glad you're okay, friend!

YouTube tutorials can help. Or a knowledgeable friend/family member. Electrical stuff can be quite dangerous, so it's usually good to learn a bit first.

You might want to check if any of your fuses in your car have gone out. They are pretty easy and safe to replace for the most part, once you order the correct part number. And look at your car's manual and if you don't have a physical copy, you should save a bookmark to a PDF or in cloud storage/on your phone!

The feeling goes away over time. Not because you screw up less, but because you just become numb to your fuckups. You also will get better at adapting on the fly so your flubs aren't as big of a setback, which is nice. Just gotta keep at it.