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Important lessons can often be learned while doing humble tasks — lessons that can later apply to everything else in your life.

So it was with my 19 year-old son Alan’s Honda Civic.

He had received it the year before, and while it ran pretty well, there was a nagging engine miss at idle.

He pretty much worked around it, slipping the automatic transmission into Neutral at stoplights so it wouldn’t shake itself to pieces.

But, we both knew something was wrong, and the longer we waited, the worse it was going to get.

I was a good mechanic when I was a kid, so after buying a compression gauge we tested the cylinders and found #3 to be at 40 PSI (pounds per square inch), not the 140 PSI of the others.

I pretty much knew what that meant, given the put-put sound from the tailpipe — a burnt exhaust valve.

I also knew that the $15 part was going to be a bear to install. You need to drain the coolant, pull the head, yank the valve(s), lap the valve seats and install new valves.

Then you’ve got to clean up the gasket surfaces, remount the head, torque everything up properly, put in new antifreeze and start it up.

I was a little apprehensive about doing this in the driveway since it had been 30 years since I had my hands that far inside an engine. But when confronted with the local garage estimate of $1,500, we decided it was worth the time and effort.

Still, I really didn’t think Alan was going to stick with the project and I would be left doing the entire job myself. Not a happy idea, since I knew all too well the most tedious part of the whole thing: cleaning off the old head gasket.

Yes, cleaning the old head gasket seems like a simple thing until you realize it was glued onto the aluminum head 20 years ago at the factory, and if you scrape too hard you’ll scratch the head.

Scrape too little, and just one bit of gasket left behind would ruin the job, forcing you to pull the head and start all over or the engine would blow up. Not a fun thing to have happen.

So after the head was off and we were looking at the greasy mess I gave Alan the job of scraping and cleaning off the head gasket. When he first started scraping there was some complaining.

After all, there were video games to play, and Guitar Hero was a constant pull. As each hour went by he kept asking how much longer it would take.

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