Learning?

Get your hands dirty, make many mistakes, make a dick of yourself at numerous car shows and eventually you will learn

When I did it there were bunch which were evening only aimed at people who just wanted to learn about maintaining their own cars. Started at basic servicing through to more advanced stuff. One was even called "women's car awareness and maintenance" which was "check the oil, check the typre pressure" stuff.

bloody heck you're lucky thats still running! COSHH and HSE have pretty much closed down college based painting courses!

My local Freecycle list throws up the odd free car, perhaps yours might too? You might also come up trumps with some freebie tools and Haynes manuals.

freecycle.org

I do night classes, 2 hours on one day a week. I think it cost £130 or something and it has been tremendous value for money, as the bulk of the course was people bringing their own cars in, explaining what they wanted doing and being shown how to do it! For that sort of money, it is worth it solely for being able to get your car up on a ramp at any time you fancy.

We have done loads of stuff, we started with basic servicing, then moved onto things like changing brake discs/pads, fixing accident damage, even some welding practice! I'm by no means up there with the likes of most of you lot, but it helped me gain a lot more confidence working on my cars.

The best thing with something like that is that you always have people at hand to help if things don't go as planned.