Steve Elliot Are today’s young people mechanically illiterate?

As some 245,000 recent high school graduates in California go off to college, it’s not an academic question. When their bikes break, toilets clog or cars act up, will they have the ability to put things right?

Not necessarily, according to California author Steve Elliott, who witnessed numerous acts of mechanical illiteracy in his own kids and their roommates during their college years.

“I realized something was going on when my daughter, in her sophomore year at UC Santa Barbara, called home because her key wouldn’t work,” Elliott said. “I told her to spray some WD-40 in the lock, and her response was, ‘What’s WD-40?’ She’s a smart young woman, but I knew right then that she wasn’t mechanically prepared to be out on her own.”

And it’s not just her. Nationwide, about 2 million new college freshmen are entering a world many of them haven’t been prepared for.

“Academic requirements are tougher today than ever before, especially for kids planning on college,” Elliott said. “So that doesn’t leave time to take wood shop or auto shop. And today most kids have parents who work at desks in offices, so they’re less likely to learn mechanical basics at home, either.”

But the biggest culprit for what Elliott calls mechanical deficit disorder is an ironic one: better-built products.

“Things used to break, and we expected them to break,” Elliott said. “Cars had points that had to be re-gapped, TVs had tubes that had to be replaced. You knew they’d eventually stop working and you’d have to fix them. Today, that’s not the case. Young people simply don’t expect things to break, so they’re not prepared when they do.”

To fill the mechanical education gap for his own kids, Elliott wrote “The Portable Dad: Fixit Advice for When Dad’s Not Around.” The humorous how-to book is aimed at college students and 20somethings or anyone else who never had the chance to learn basic repair skills. It’s filled with practical advice on how to maintain and fix cars, computers, bicycles and apartments. It also has chapters on moving, painting and taking care of a yard.

“We felt ‘The Portable Dad’ was a very timely book and one that really meets an important national need,” said Seta Bedrossian Zink of Running Press, the book’s publisher. “It’s a book that gives young adults greater independence and their parents greater peace of mind.”

And that was Elliott’s goal in the first place.

“Some people say this stuff should be common sense, but that’s wrong,” Elliott said. “No one is born knowing how often to change their oil or how to fix a flat. These things are learned. I wrote the book to do just that and cover the basics, the things everybody needs to know and do to take care of the stuff they own.”

Elliott grew up in Merced, Calif., and now lives in Avery in the Central Sierra. His children are 24 and 22. His daughter is beginning a master’s program at UC Davis this fall, and his son graduated from UC Berkeley last spring.