These days, technology has so permeated our everyday lives that you practically have to spend a lifetime learning if you want to understand the inner workings of each gadget you use. In truth, it simply isn’t practical for most of us. So we pay plumbers, electricians, and handymen to services our homes, IT specialists to keep our computers virus-free and of course, mechanics to care for our transportation. But there are certain people who make it their business to comprehend the cars that get them from point A to point B. They want to know the difference between disc and drum brakes, they’d like to be able to look at a schematic and make sense of it, and above all, they’re keen to get down and dirty in the engine, wrenching away and making their car run better than before. It is for these home mechanics that Garage Buddy was made.

Thanks to On-Board Diagnostics (OBD), caring for your own automobile is not as easy as it once was. A little tinkering could leave you with a fuel-rich mixture or misfiring spark plugs in short order now that everything is controlled by computers. Without the right scan tools you can hardly get a thing done on your car. But you don’t want to shell out the dough for pricy, professional machinery meant to diagnose and correct problems in the engine. You’d rather get your hands in the engine compartment and start tearing things apart to see how they run. A good place to begin is with an older car, for one thing. But you should also download the Garage Buddy app to your iPhone for a mere 99 cents.

There are a lot of features you’re sure to love if transforming yourself into a weekend grease monkey is your idea of a good time. For one thing, Garage Buddy offers all kinds of car-related calculators. If you ever wondered how much horsepower you’ll lose as you go up in elevation, the app can figure it out for you. There are also calculators for tire size, belt size, carburetor flow and so on. There are also a slew of useful conversion charts, tables, and more to help you get the gist of what’s going on in your car without having to understand complex mathematical equations. Would you like to put bigger tires on your car but you don’t want to alter the accuracy of your odometer? Or maybe you want to optimize your carburetor for the size of your engine. Garage Buddy can help you get there.

There’s also a notes section that wrenchaholics will find truly handy since they can record the details of their sessions, including the oil weight that seems to make the engine purr, the measurements they took of spark plug gaps and more. Having this data on hand for future reference can only help to ensure that your car remains in ship shape. Of course, you should know that tinkering with your own car could void warranties or cause problems with your car insurance. But if you enjoy wielding a wrench and other tools in the pursuit of a perfectly tuned automobile, Garage Buddy can help to turn your weekend fun into a productive pursuit.