My friend that had the VW Beetle needed his brake pads replaced and an oil change.  The oil change was simple and standard, although getting the oil filter out of a Mazda6 is a pain in the rear.  We changed his front two, because those are the ones he said needed to be replaced.  I checked the back brakes and realized that on one side he had worn through the pad into the backing.  We had to replace the rotor on one side.  Not too big a deal, just a little more $$$.  It was fun, and didn't take but a few hours this weekend.  Always fun to teach someone else how to do their own maintenance.

My father-in-law has a crack in his Suburban.  Taking it out and repairing the crack is so much easier than removing the radiator from the VW Beetle.  The downside to the repair is the location.  The crack runs perpendicular to the support ridges along the end cap.  This makes a patch job a little more tricky trying to ensure an even seal across each ridge.  Because of the location it may need a new end cap, or new radiator.  A new end cap runs about $120 where as an entirely new radiator is around $180....Hard to do a fix for 2/3 the cost of a new one, especially considering how old the radiator is now.  Budget constraints will determine if we go with a new one, or just an end cap.
Here are a few pictures of the radiator removed, the patch and it all put back together

So my friend's wife has an older beetle with well over 100K miles on it, and it's starting to show.  A couple months ago we replaced the spark plugs.  Shortly after that they bottomed out going into a parking lot and broke a chunk out of the radiator.  He finally bought the new radiator and we put it in today.  Replacing a radiator isn't that hard, getting to it on a VW Beetle is a pain in the neck.  But we got it done, and the car runs without any problems that it didn't start with. 

This was putting the final screws securing the fan housing to the radiator.  This was the easy part.  Putting the front bumper on, all 70 or so screws, was the hard part.

This was the old radiator we pulled out.  You can easily see the chunk missing out of the side of it.