I'm looking at the MacGyver timeline and wondering when he really had time to learn so much about cars/engines. It's no small task to remove and weld a piston rod (Trumbo's World), knowing an absent distributor cap will incapacitate a car (The Endangered), or understanding the inner electrical workings behind the dash of a car (Numerous episodes, The Eraser, The Prodigal, Three for the Road, etc).

My point is, over the last four or five years I have spent a lot of time working on cars and I just now feel I know my way around a car pretty well, and I am doing pretty bad in college (as in, I should be a senior and I'm a sophomore - I blame cars and the internet ) while Mac was an outstanding physics student, meaning he probably didn't misspend his college years wrenching like I have . So, where on Mac's resume do you think all of his car work and knowledge came from?

Oh yeah, he said he had replaced his generator (older version of an alternator) in The Visitors, he knew a thing or two about inner tubes in Harry's Will, in Three for the Road he did some pretty impressive deeds with a car (like pulling an exhaust pipe off- yeah, I've never been that lucky when I needed to take one off haha). In Hellfire he had a decent understanding of the truck's carburetor/throttle body and how to substitute a spring, an overnight race car build in Collision Course, and it seems like there are numerous other instances I am missing- oh yeah, welding a spark plug in Cease Fire and knowing roughly how to gap it- having to know how a spark plug works to even know how to recreate it with a nail. Anyway I just have to wonder how he worked in all that car knowledge in his younger years while he was otherwise occupied with the war, college, and various careers. And before we write it off that he learned it in the racing arena, its notable drivers often know little about mechanic work, believe it or not. You have a team dedicated to that while the driver focuses mostly on nuances of driving technique and shift points and so on. Yes, they would be familiar with how a car works roughly, but hanging out in the pits probably wouldn't have instilled him with years worth of knowledge.

Mac had what tvtropes.com refers to as an "Expansion Pack Past" -- that is, over the seasons, they tossed so many different items into the potluck goulash of his backstory that there aren't enough years available to accommodate all the experiences, not to mention all the girlfriends.

That said, one thing I don't find implausible is the cars. Most guys who grew up in that era, who had any mechanical aptitude at all, found plenty of opportunity to learn automobile mechanics starting pretty much as soon as they were big enough to pick up a wrench. Mac would have had a dozen mentors on any given street in his small town. It was ubiquitous; my own father did a lot of his own car repairs -- and he was a nuclear physicist. (He was a better physicist than a mechanic, to tell the truth.) In the course of a childhood and youth that isn't spent in front of the TV or the computer, there's quite a lot of time in which to pick up a wide range of skills.

I didn't learn much car mechanics from my father (I was a lot better at picking up physics!), but my sister certainly did; she's provided me with necessary automotive details for several plot points so far. And she picked it up in the course of a life that also included going to college, picking up a good many other skills, pursuing careers, etc.

yeah I agree with MacBeth. MacGyver grow up in a era without TV and computers/video games, so he would have probably spent a lot of week-ends and after school playing around with cars,tractors and other mechanical stuff with his father and grand-father.

It's also highly probably that he took engineering classes in high-school and maybe even collage.

I have to say though that the time line doesn't look unrealistically cluttered.

And don't forget what Mac himself told us about his first 'set of wheels', in the opening gambit of Golden Triangle:
'I spent a lot of time in hubcap heaven, piecing together that first car.'

I reckon you get to learn a lot about car mechanics that way.

Oh that's true, I totally forgot about that!