I Rented A Garage With A Lift For Three Hours, And It Was Absolutely Worth It
Following a recent move to a city apartment without a garage, I find myself in a similar predicament to many other car-owning apartment-dwelling Americans; Where the fuck do I work on my car? I still have all of my tools and jacks, and I’ve definitely done maintenance (up to and including engine swaps) jobs out in the open before, but I’m old and it’s hot. So I booked some rental time at a local DIY auto repair shop called Wingman Garage. This place rules, and I will definitely use them again in the future.
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Our Porsche Cayenne Diesel was overdue for an oil change, and the dealership charges over $500 for that job alone. It also had some squeaky front brakes that I wanted to replace and figured I’d buy the rears anyway. We’ve had this car since December, and I wanted to give it a look-over myself, so I needed a way to get it up on a lift. Thankfully a friend recommended Wingman, and I got myself booked in for a much-needed wrench session.
Photo: Bradley Brownell
Armed with an oil change kit and a fresh Powerstop pad-and-rotor set from ECS Tuning, I headed down to Wingman on a Wednesday morning to get under the truck and get it back in tip-top shape. I rolled in as the shop opened and marveled at all the space I’d be borrowing. There are three lifts in the shop up for grabs, each outfitted with its own toolbox, workbench, air supply, vacuum, and mini fabrication station. With extra sets of pretty much every automotive tool you can think of, Wingman is better equipped than any home garage I’ve ever worked in.
The only thing you can’t do on your own is operate the lifts, presumably for insurance purposes, but that’s a short task that Wingman does for you. Once the car was up in the air I was given free rein, more or less, of the space. The oil change went like a breeze, and even better than normal because I didn’t need to find a place to dispose of the old oil afterward.
I was a little surprised to see the brake calipers were held on with a beefy triple square bolt. I hadn’t looked into what tools would be needed for this job before digging in, but if I’d done this job at home, I’d have been stuck running to the hardware store for a tool I’d use once and probably lose before I got around to replacing these pads again. Thankfully Wingman had a full set of large triple square sockets, and it didn’t slow me down for even a minute.
Photo: Bradley Brownell
The front brakes hadn’t worn down to the factory-equipped brake pad wear sensors yet, but the rotors were pretty severely grooved (as you can see), and the pads were pretty low, so I swapped all the new stuff on. While the car was in the air, I inspected the rear brakes and they still had plenty of material and showed little signs of wear at nearly 90,000 miles, so I left them alone. I’ll shelve the rear brakes for a future job, saving me some time and money in the long run.
I completed everything I needed to do, and checked out after two and a half hours. The shop space rents by the hour, so my partial hour still counted as a whole hour, but they gave me a first-timers discount because of the friend’s referral, and it worked out to just $99 for a three-hour slot.
Was it worth it? Well, considering I spent about $600 for the oil change kit and brakes, and $99 for the space, my bill at the Porsche dealer for the same work would have been significantly higher. Buying the parts aftermarket instead of through the dealer saved me quite a lot of cash, but doing the work myself definitely made a monetary impact. Was it still expensive as hell? Yeah, it’s a Porsche. It was totally worth it for me to do the work myself.
If you’re in the Cleveland/Akron/Canton area, and you need a lift for a few hours, call up Wingman. What a great space!
