Wrench Wench

"Huh. I never thought I could be jealous of a wrench."

"I just said that you're pretty. Even when you're covered in... engine grease, you're... No, especially, especially when you're covered in engine grease."

— Simon Tam to Kaylee, Firefly

Mechanical inclinations have traditionally been the forte of men, but the Wrench Wench is a girl who proves the former idea is definitely wrong. She will always be skilled and confident about her own work, as well as Curious as a Monkey in the presence of new and interesting machines — or Constantly Curious, if inspection is impossible. She is usually self-confident enough to not need a Beautiful All Along plot, but will probably have at least one She Cleans Up Nicely moment, even though she is often an Unkempt Beauty anyway.

Often a Ms. Fix It and The Blacksmith, a Wrench Wench might have Machine Empathy and can diagnose problems just by listening to the motor. Her tools extend to pure electronic devices, but she is also likely to be found with a blowtorch and ratchet set. When her talents go beyond mere fixing things to outright creating machinery, she is a Gadgeteer Genius. If it is computers and the Internet instead of mechanics, she is a Hackette.

Contrast to Science Hero's Babe Assistant, who is much less technically competent. The Hood Ornament Hottie is a related trope, where the woman may be dressed or posed as if she was the mechanic, but actually is simply intended to be Eye Candy. However, a genuine Wrench Wench is equal to The Engineer. In settings where she works for scientific departments, she will be a Science Hero.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Josephine the Plumber: the great spokeswoman for female wrench-wielding empowerment that Gen X kids grew up with, played by Jane Withers. Picture Progressive Insurance's Flo, minus the makeup and hairdo, plus grease-stained overalls.
• An ad for Kohler plumbing products features a man spotting a rather attractive lady plumber down the street. He quickly runs into his house and starts flushing random household objects down his toilet, trying to get it to clog, before realizing he has a clog-resistant Kohler toilet. Then his wife catches him pouring dry dog food into the toilet and asks him what he's doing.
• A two-minute video ad for the mobile application "Xero Touch" stars a charming mid-thirties-looking wrench wench, who monologues to the viewer as she goes about her workday, explaining how much the app helps her keep track of what she earns and spends, as her charts materialize on-screen...while, of course, being gritty and cute.

Anime & Manga

• Air Gear has a whole team of wrench wenches: the Tool Toul To.◊
• Miyuki Ayukawa from Basquash! is mechanic of the humongous mechas in the show.
• Burn Up W/Excess: Nanvel Candlestick is quirky but a genius inventor and still as busty as most of her squad.
• Bulma, the beautiful heiress of Capsule Corporation from Dragon Ball. She is pretty handy with gadgets, having repaired spaceships and androids with her father, invented a time machine for her son Trunks, etc.
• Leona Ozaki of Dominion Tank Police. Built her mini-tank, "Bonaparte" from the wreckage of the squad leader's Awesome, but Impractical super-tank.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Winry Rockbell (pictured above). Winry made her first automail when she was eleven years old, and her weapon of choice is a wrench. You never see her covered in grease though, since automail construction is very fine work and actually more a medical profession. BUT watch your mechanical possessions in her presence; she goes gaga at any opportunity to take something apart to figure out how it works.
  • Winry's grandmother, Pinako, is also one of these. Especially when she was young. Dominic LeCoulte still quakes in fear of her.
• Miki Jounouchi from Future GPX Cyber Formula is a tomboy and chief mechanic for her racing team. She once takes out the damaged turbine engine from Super Asurada AKF-11 while it is still hot and injures her hands for doing that.
• Hozuki from Galilei Donna actually carries wrenches around with her. And uses them to build some pretty crazy stuff, most notably an airship shaped like a goldfish.
• The Ooarai Girls High School Automotive Club in the anime Girls und Panzer is made up of four highly skilled teen girl mechanics who not only work on cars but also maintain the school's motley collection of WWII tanks. In the later episodes, they get to crew the notoriously cantankerous Porsche Tiger tank, doing as well as warriors as they did as wrench wenches. Their skills are useful even during the final match when Porsche engine overheats. One of the crew fixed the problem while riding on the armor at full speed. Hell, they even overcharged the engine to keep up with the rest of the team and destroy the bridge to delay opponent's reinforcements.
• Gundam:
  • Rain Mikamura from G Gundam serves as the mechanic for the main character's Humongous Mecha.
  • Hilde Schbeiker from Gundam Wing, who has her own scrapyard and is quite proficient with computers.
  • Nika Nanaura from Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury is a student in the mechanical department, and customised Chuchu's Demi Trainer herself.
• Rally Vincent in Gunsmith Cats is a gunsmith after all, and she's shown teaching May in the manga. She's never shown working on her own cars though, though she does wank over its capabilities at times.
• Kana in Haibane Renmei is a tomboy who works in a clocktower and loves to work on machines.
• Ikuyo in Hanaukyō Maid Team is the hand maid of the main character's Maid Corps and invents all sorts of inventions for the main character, which unfortunately have a tendency to explode or malfunction.
• Mars in Heaven's Design Team is the engineer who makes all the designers' animal ideas a reality, and points out flaws in their designs. She also carries around a lot of tools, including a wrench.
• Chinatsu from Jormungand is a villainous example. When she's not gunning people down as part of her hitman duties, she apparently likes to build complex mechanical torture devices... including one designed to shoot a bound captive in the knee. In the same spot. 27 times.
• Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress has Yukina who's good at working machines such as the train.
• While it's not a major part of her character, Hayasaka from Kaguya-sama: Love Is War is shown to have a passion for computer engineering, as she built her own PC and several Shoe Phones. And that's not even gettting into that one time where she took Kaguya shopping for a new cell phone and just started geeking out over its specs in the middle of the store.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Nanoha's Shrinking Violet friend Suzuka mentions in the very first episode of the first season that she wants to study engineering when she grows up, since her parents own companies in both construction and heavy industry.
  • Alto of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS is a mechanic in addition to a helicopter pilot. StrikerS Sound Stage X reveals that she also spends her spare time restoring vintage cars.
• Presea from Magic Knight Rayearth is a skilled Master Smith.
• Mei Hatsume from My Hero Academia. A member of the Support Course at UA Academy (as opposed to the Hero Course that the main character is in) she is a Ditzy Genius who is focused on (read obsessed with) constantly engineering new support items, which she refers to as her "babies", to help heroes in their crimefighting activities. And she is a total maniac when it comes to inventing; in less than a year, she's left a corner of the Development Studio full of the prototypes and gadgets she's made.
• Pokémon Horizons: The Series: Orla is the Brave Asagi's engineer, and Episode 18 reveals she actually built it up from Ludlow's boat, turning it into an airship at Friede's request to travel all over the world.
• Fio Piccolo from Porco Rosso — who turns out to be the talented heiress of four generations of female aircraft builders. The entire workforce of Piccolo Aviation are women, since the men are all abroad looking for work.
• "G-3" Jun from Science Ninja Team Gatchaman is the team's expert in electronics and explosives.
• Jane Buxton, in Secret of Cerulean Sand, attempts to follow her brother's tracks by building several flying machines and succeed in the end.
• Charlotte E. Yeager from Strike Witches. Before joining the witches she worked on motorcycles and airplanes, consequentially her striker unit is heavily modified. Even after joining the witches she spends her spare time in the machine shop and making further modifications to her striker unit.
• Leyte in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is the chief mechanic for team Dai-Gurren and is responsible for the majority of the upgrades to the mechs and the battleship.
• Parfet Balblair from Vandread is the chief engineer of her crew of all female Space Pirates.
• Rikako Ota from Wangan Midnight, the daughter of RGO shop owner Kazuo Ota. She could dismantle and rebuilt a whole engine by herself down to the crankshaft, and is in fact slated to inherit her father's shop.
• Miyuki Kobayakawa of You're Under Arrest! practically built her mini patrol car from the ground up, and maintains Natsumi's motorcycles.

Asian Animation

• In Guardian Fairy Michel, Kim is an expert pilot and good at fixing broken machines.
• In the Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf season Flying Island: The Sky Adventure, inventing is one of Hope's specialties. She's built a giant mech suit, for one, and tries to help deliver weather fruits with remote-controlled mechanical wings also of her own making. She does have a bad track record when it comes to her inventions interrupting other people, though, making the other weather factory employees afraid of what her mechanical wings might mess up until Hope increases their accuracy by having them programmed to autopilot their way to people's houses to make deliveries.

Comic Books

• Betty Cooper, from Archie Comics, is absurdly talented with auto repair and other forms of masculine expertise. This makes her either more or less attractive to the boys, depending on the story. In the reboot she is basically her boyfriend's mechanic, and Archie is clueless about that sort of stuff.
• Batman: Thrillkiller, Barbara fixes her own car.
• Chassis was more of driver, but she certainly knew her way around the underside of a bonnet.
• Dan In Space has Joules, who's job is to fix Dan's ship whenever it gets damaged.
• Agent Boysenberry in Disney Ducks Comic Universe (the "Tamers of Nonhuman Threats" subseries featured in various Disney titles). As a mechanic, she is often sent out as a third partner to Donald Duck and Fethry, with assignments to reprogram, recalibrate, or sabotage machinery they interact with.
• In Drowntown, Izzy seems to do maintenance on the water bikes used in the courier business she shares with Gina (and Gina might as well). That doesn't mean she actually likes working on machines, though — unlike Gina, she'd get out of the business if there were something with more money and glamour available.
• The ElfQuest title "Rebels" has Chandra. One example: she and Scorch take apart part of a top-secret space engine -and put it back together within twenty minutes.^note A military ramship is excellent motivation
• In Ghostopolis, Claire loves fixing and building vehicles (she builds her own Plasmapod), to the point that her ghost haunts a garage.
• Courtney "Cover Girl" Krieger from G.I. Joe was a former high-fashion model who enlisted and became a missile-tank driver. Who then trained to do all the upkeep and repair work on her own vehicle.
• Maggie Chascarrillo, a.k.a. Maggie the Mechanic, from Jaime Hernandez's half of Love and Rockets. She works on various machines regularly.
• Nautica from The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye is a female Autobot quantum mechanic (though she has interest in other subjects such as history or cartography) from Caminus who is usually seen carrying her wrench around.
• "Ma" Hunkel, the original Red Tornado from the Golden Age of The DCU, worked as a riveter during WWII. All that heavy labor probably helped with her right hook.
• "Rosie The Riveter" by underground artist Trina Robbins.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): Dr. Robotnik's White Sheep niece Hope can often be found in work overalls, repairing vehicles for the Guardian Unit of Nations.
• Star Wars: Legacy: Delilah Blue serves as the engineer of the Mynock, keeping the ship running smoothly when she's not serving as the female lead of the series.
• Pash Davane in Star Wars (Marvel 2015) was an Amazonian Beauty and Fiery Redhead who worked as an engineer until her industry was destroyed in the Civil War, forcing her to find work as a laborer.
• Sharri Barrnett from Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool is the computer-programming version of this trope.
• Rogue from X-Men is shown repairing both motorcycles and the Blackbird, and she even once worked as a mechanic.

Fan Works

• Both Daisy and Rosalina are presented as having mechanic skills in The 3 Little Princesses. With Rosalina it is certainly justified because she has no one else to help with the observatory. When Peach and Rosalina meet the latter isn't even wearing her typical dress, instead she's wearing a dirty mechanic uniform while fixing her observatory.
• Cowlick from the Blooming Moon Chronicles is one, with her extensive labs in which she usually creates weapons for the protagonists. This also applies to her apprentice, Apple Bloom.
• Code Geass: Paladins of Voltron: Like Grandfather, Like Granddaughter it seems — Milly's the one who takes on Hunk's role when the group meets Rolo's crew.
• In the Coreline story Coreline Invasion Of Portland, Aegis agent Jennifer “Chrome” Swann is introduced repairing an Aegis vehicle, and the story established she worked as a mechanic before she gained her powers and joined Aegis.
• Sky Bolt from The Dusk Guard Saga works as an engineer for an airship company. She is a compassionate tinkerer, working on improving deep water pumping in her spare time, among dozens of other projects. Her latest design, The Alicorn, had to be reverse-engineered, because nobody understood how it worked exactly, and so she would have been the only one able to maintain it.
• The first time the titular character rides in Giles's car in Faith: The Vampire Slayer, she figures out most of what's wrong with it and later replaces its engine herself while advising him to get new shocks installed. All despite only having a freshman level education.
• The Naked Jedi: Sarza, the titular naked Jedi, singlehandedly repairs her parents' ruined shuttlecraft, constructs her own lightsaber, and assembles Essex over the course of the first story. Her Artisan specialization gives her the "Mental Tools" talent, which ignores any penalties for not having the proper tools for a given Mechanics check, and she has the Manipulate Force Power and the upgrade that allows her to add Force Dice up to her Force Rating to Mechanics checks, spending Force Points on Sucess or Advantage.
• Olga Romanoff, an Air Policewoman in Ankh-Morpork, is also a largely self-taught broomstick technomancer who stands apart from other witches in that she knows what makes one go and is prepared to roll up her sleeves and really work on souping up the standard model. She and her friend and fellow flight technomancer Irena Politek operate a hangar full of customised broomsticks in City Watch service. Working with Dwarf brothers the Messers Schmidt and Zlobenian dwarf Mig Oyeff, they currently fly ME-109's and the MIG-21 broomsticks. Their prototype ME Schmidt 262 is going to be revolutionary. The girls appear in The Price of Flight and other tales in the Discworld Expanded Universe.
  • In the fic Strandpiel, the youngest daughter of Ponder Stibbons and Johanna-Smith-Rhodes turns out to be skilled with her hands. A gifted artist and musician, she is prone to do things like dismantle the valves of a Quirmian Horn just to see how it works. And then reassemble it again afterwards. Given a defective crossbow to examine by her Assassin mother ^note Her mother uses it as a test on Assassin students to see if they can spot where the fault is and then put it right. Ruth glances at it, identifies the fault in seconds, and then suggests a fix that will put it right properly. Given the idea by her older sister, she then designs the Discworld's first acoustic bass guitar, from first principles. she then works out how to use Magitek to add amplification.
• Sofia from The Glaceon and the Shadow carries a lot of tools with her and uses them to create all kinds of contraptions. Some of them are nearly, or completely useless, such as a hat she created to disguise herself as a duck or a contraption involving forks scratching on plates and a cone to magnify their sound at an enemy. Others, like her flying machine, work very well.
• In The SuperStarr Chronicles, Lila Cheney is shown to be this when she and Toad work together to repair the crashed spaceship that brought her and her friends to Earth.
• Tsuuma^note The Bit Character that appears in Viral's dream in the original is this in Tengen Toppa Gurren Solvernia, Viral's personal mechanic and personal snarker.
• From the Triptych Continuum, we have Ratchette. She runs Ponyville's fixit shop, doing minor to moderate repairs on devices and conveniences — which is all she's generally capable of: adjustments on the physical elements can be managed, but fixing the spells themselves is impossible for a pegasus. Her mark seems to give her the (occasional) ability to diagnose problems on contact — something she can't bring herself to tell anypony about — and she does clean up rather nicely, although one angry non-customer describes her as needing five baths just to reach "dirty". Her capabilities and limitations are given some exploration in Mechanical Aptitude.
• Two cases in the Kim Possible fic Vacation from the Norm;
  • Bonnie Rockwaller. After she married Senor Senor Jr. her new father-in-law Senor Senor Sr. indulged her interest in restoring cars and motorcycles, which contributed to Bonnie's Taking a Level in Kindness, as well as the Senors' Heel–Face Turn. When SSS, SSJ and Bonnie formed a new team of heroes called The Upperclassmen, Bonnie took on the codename "The Mechanic".
  • Yori is also knowledgeable about cars and has done some restoration of her own. This is one of the reasons she and a reformed Motor Ed become a couple.

Films — Animated

• Audrey from Atlantis: The Lost Empire is chief mechanic of a huge submarine despite being a teenager, and loves machinery in general. Although she's never actually seen repairing anything mechanical on-screen (the most technical work she is shown doing is turning a valve and tightening a nut, tasks anyone with with a pair of functioning hands and a wrench can accomplish, and the one time her set of skills is directly needed, Milo ends up doing the job instead).
• The Brave Little Toaster: Rob's girlfriend Chris apparently is a car mechanic, or at least knows how to work on them. She spends the time at the junkyard looking for rare auto parts.
• As bizarre as it may sound, Disney seems to be taking Tinker Bell, of all characters, in this direction with her CGI Disney Fairies movies. The reasoning is actually fairly logical — why else would she be named Tinker Bell? Plus, the novel Peter Pan is based on states that Tinker Bell is a tinker who mends the pots and pans; it's not like Disney pulled this out of nowhere.
• Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius: Jimmy Neutron's mother is seen working under the family car at one point. She also pointed out a flaw in one of Jimmy's inventions and explains it in full Techno Babble. It turns out she was very right.
• Victoria Wright, the heroine of The Steam Engines of Oz, is a young mechanic who works keeping the eponymous steam engines of Oz running.

Films — Live-Action

• A.W.O.L.: Joey studies auto repair in the Army, so she can service not only the Army's vehicles but later cars professionally on leaving.
• Monique in Better Off Dead, who fixed Lane's Camaro that would otherwise keep catching rust.
• Corky, played by Gina Gershon in the Wachowskis' Bound (1996), is a handywoman whose romance with Violet (Jennifer Tilly) begins with wielding a wrench for her.
  Corky: You dropped that earring down the sink on purpose, didn't you?
• Downplayed in Cosmic Sin (2021). Ardene is called a "wrench" but this is explained as being a slang term for engineer. She's not an Unkempt Beauty but a military technician who Got Volunteered for the mission to maintain the Q-Bomb.
• Crimes of the Future (2022): Berst and Dani are two female assassins with the cover of being technicians. The two almost always dress in coveralls, and kill their targets with power drills to the head.
• Firehouse Dog: Pep is the only woman who works in the Dogpatch unit, and she’s the firehouse’s mechanic. She’s competitive about the speed of their fire truck in comparison to the other units, and she’s the most excited when the firehouse gets a shiny new engine.
• Alex (Jennifer Beals), the main character from Flashdance. She works part time as a welder in a steel mill.
• Rey in The Force Awakens is shown to be skilled with mechanics.
• In Forty Guns, Louvenia Spangler is an expert gunsmith. This is a large part of what makes Wes (The Gunslinger) fall in love with her.
• Future World (2018): Lei is a woman who's a very skilled mechanic. She wears blue-gray coveralls and expertly patches up Ash's damaged torso.
• A very rare example from a 1930s film, Heat Lightning: Olga is a car mechanic and a damn good one.
• Pavla in Invincible, a Russian film set in World War Two. She is an expert tank mechanic who ends up driving a tank in combat, because of events.
• Kimi:
  • Angela shows some traits of this. She diagnoses what the remodeling crew upstairs is doing wrong just by the noise of it and quickly offers spot-on advices on the matter, leaving her neighbor wondering if she is "in the trade". Later, she easily fixes an Internet cabling issue.
  • She's also very familiar with nail guns, considering how quickly she McGyvers a weapon by duct-taping the safety switch and how well she handles it.
• June, a car refurbisher, in Knight and Day.
• Kate the blacksmith from A Knight's Tale is the 14th-century version.
• Mellie Logan in Logan Lucky. Not only is she the Caper Crew's Badass Driver, she knows her ways around the mechanics of vehicles as well. When Joe questions the dimensions of canopies she designed to fit under the van for their Underside Ride, her brother Clyde replies simply "Mellie knows her trucks".
  • Mellie's preteen niece Sadie also counts. She's a beauty pageant contest who helps him fix a car, knowing what wrenches to hand him.
• Mary in The Muppets (2011) is very good at working with cars and electricity.
• Lisa from My Cousin Vinny, whose insane (or rather "dead-on-balls accurate") knowledge of cars saves the defendants in the murder trial.
• Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth (1991) gives us L.A. cab driver/aspiring mechanic Corky, played by Winona Ryder. When she picks up movie exec (Gena Rowlands) who is impressed by Corky and wants to make her a movie star, Corky turns her down, staying true to her unassuming tomboy working-class self.
• Another Robert Rodriguez example: In Sin City, Nancy tells John Hartigan "Nobody but me can keep this heap running".
• Pee-wee's Big Adventure Dottie, Pee-wee's Love Interest, works at a bike shop and is noted to be great at repairing them. Pee-wee's Cool Bike is implied to have at least in part been built by her.
• Jaylah, in Star Trek Beyond, turns a 100-year-old Federation ship into her home and gets most of its systems working on her own, even though she doesn't have any formal engineering training. Kirk is so impressed with her work that he ultimately arranges for her to be admitted into Starfleet Academy.
• Kay and Hazel, the female leads in Swing Shift, both become wrench wenches after joining a munitions facility during World War II.
• Tank Girl: Jet Girl is content to work on the vehicles of the villainous Water And Power before being driven out by some rather extreme sexual harassment. She gets caught up in the madcap adventures of the eponymous protagonist and eventually comes out of her shell serving as the main sidekick in both the comics and the movie.
• In They Live by Night, Keechie helps run her father's gas station (and, given he is The Alcoholic, she probably does the bulk of the work), and spends the early part of the film dressed in greasy coveralls.
• Transformers Film Series:
  • Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox) in the first two live-action Transformers films is extremely good with cars but hides it from her boyfriend and friends to remain popular.
    Mikaela: Guys don't like it when you know more about cars than they do.
  • Charlie Watson (Hailee Steinfeld) from Bumblebee is hugely into car repair and used to fix cars with her father before he passed away. However, at the end of the film, she finishes the last car she and her father started working on before his death.
• Diane from Voyage of the Rock Aliens is good with machinery and wears her tool belt everywhere. She's even kind enough to fix the psycho killer's chainsaw when it jams. Unlike most examples, she's quite feminine otherwise.
• Werewolves Within: Gwen is a mechanic who runs the town's garage, and she's a tough, self-confident person who was introduced wearing coveralls berating her husband over showing up late for work.

Literature

• In Adrian Mole The Wilderness Years, Adrian's girlfriend Bianca is a fully qualified hydraulic engineer. Although confident in her ability, she does not manage to find work because she is female. Adrian asks her to fix his shower as soon as he finds out, but with his Straw Misogynist tendencies, he does not really appreciate her ability, and is coldly indifferent when she points out engineering "miracles" to him, such as London's Tower Bridge, and St Pancras station (one of the largest unsupported arches in the world).
• Indira Fenstermacher, the former space station engineer in Alien in a Small Town.
• Elinor M Brent-Dyer's Chalet School series has Jacynth 'Jack' Lambert, a tomboy who loves carpentry and all things mechanical, and wants to own her own garage. Bear in mind that the books where Jack appears were written during the '50s, when mechanic work was a very unusual career for a woman. This actually becomes a plot point in Jane and the Chalet School when she and Jane Carew get into a fight, because Jack is jealous that Jane gets to wash the teachers' car instead of her.
• Linh Cinder, the main character of Marissa Meyer's The Lunar Chronicles, is the best mechanic in New Beijing.
• Several Techpriests from the Ciaphas Cain stories qualify. Felecia Tayber (Death or Glory) and Mazarin (Caves of Ice) are both Techpriests who primarily serve as Enginseers, repairing various pieces of equipment. Kildhar (The Greater Good) is more focused on the biological and administrative sides of things, although since she is a Techpriest is can be assumed that she does know her way around a wrench.
• The Cinder Spires: Gwen, much to everyone's surprise, since no-one expects a five-foot, doll-faced daughter of high nobility to know her way around airship power cores. It becomes more clear when she explains that her family manufactures said power cores, and that she has spent enough time on the floor that she can recognize not only make and model but individual units at a glance.
• Samella Connel from Douglas Hill's Col Sec Trilogy, although her particular talent seems to be mostly with computer hardware and programming.
• Robert A. Heinlein story "Delilah and the Space Rigger" has the first female technician building a space station. Her boss objects to a woman in space; fretfully sending her on a shift, he tells her to pay attention to the foreman, as he's a good man and knows his stuff. She replies, "I know- I trained him".
• Second Lieutenant Cynthia Robbins of The Flight Engineer trilogy. In addition to being second-in-command of Invincible's fighter maintenance crew she developed an advanced prosthetic hand for her boss, Commander Peter Raeder, that led to him being able to fly again.
• The aptly-named Free Wrench has Amanita Graus as the story's protagonist.
• The Han Solo Trilogy: Salla Zend is a very skilled female mechanic on Nar Shaddaa, whom Han meets when he needs to get his ship repaired (her boss owns a repair lot). Prior to that she had worked as a ship's engineer.
• The Heroes of Olympus:
  • Leo's mom, Esperanza Valdez, was a mechanic and fell in love with the god of forges, Hephaestus. She received a college degree in mechanical engineering but never received a job in that field because because she was never taken seriously as a mechanic since she was a woman.
  • Nyssa was a daughter of Hephaestus. She was leader of the cabin of Hephaestus' children. As a child of this god, she could manipulate machines, as well as being an expert mechanic and builder. She could also sense machines, mechanic or metal and identify machinery types by a touch.
• David Weber's Honor Harrington has a couple of one-step-removed examples. Havenite Admiral Shannon Foraker heads the R&D group which has been so successful at making up the huge technology gap between Haven and Manticore, which existed primarily because of Admiral Sonja Hemphill. Details are not available in either case as to how much they specifically got their own hands dirty, but both women are frequently stated to be the primary drivers of the weapons which put both of their nations significantly in advance of every other group in the galaxy. And as of Uncompromising Honor, they are working directly together — and more or less became instant best friends at first sight. The Mesan Alignment better watch out, as right now the only advantage they have is in bio-chem (the genetics based programming attacks) and the streak drive, and Shannon and Sonja are fully aware of the capabilities of both of them.
• Linda Connor, from Swedish SF author Anders Blixt's dieselpunk spy adventure Iskriget (The Ice War), is a trained mechanic with a solid professional reputation in her home town. She "saves the day" with her skills at several occasions during the story. She usually wears workmen's clothes and has a male haircut, both for purely practical reasons.
• The Mark of the Dragonfly: Piper works as a machinist, and is one of the best in her scrap town. Jeyne is the head engineer on the 401 train.
• Mercy Thompson, a.k.a. Mercedes the Volkswagen mechanic. She got started at 16 when she was sent to do community service fixing up cars, and now she owns and runs her own garage.
• Fae is the head mechanic in The Osmerian Conflict, and is almost always found in either the hanger or the electronics room doing some form of maintenance or mechanical checks.
• Murielle in Our Bloody Pearl. She regularly wears tools in her hair.
• In Outlander Leander, Tenore installs and repairs nearly everything in the Wind Queen's theater. She's even introduced at the top of a ladder, replacing a bulb and covered in dust. Though she gets caught up in her work, it's revealed later that people often gossip around her because they forget she's there, and she does listen in.
• Tania, Nathaniel Cade's on/off vampiric girlfriend in the President's Vampire series is one of these; apparently she grew up with seven brothers, and thus never subscribed to the philosophy women are useless with anything mechanical. This proves a useful skill in the second novel when she re-configures the Black Site's fire suppression system to spray methane gas, allowing Cade to set off an explosion to destroy the site and its monstrous occupants.
• As both she and her father are highly ranked engineers, Laeshana from The Quest of the Unaligned has traces of this.
• Nadia Chernyshevski of the Red Mars Trilogy was a nuclear engineer in Siberia before her job building mankind's first base on Mars. Her skills in solving technological problems earned her the nickname "Universal Solvent".
• Red Moon Rising: Rae is good at engineering, and builds a prosthetic arm at one point.
• This is Lizzie's character in Spider Circus, technically she's called a 'wiredancer.'
• Ellie Linton, from The Tomorrow Series, is quite competent at fixing machinery, which, considering that she's a ranch-raised country girl, is Truth in Television.
• The main character of C. E. Murphy's Urban Shaman trilogy is one of these, being a dedicated car enthusiast who restored a 1969 Mustang all by herself, and worked as a mechanic for the Seattle Police Dept. She even continues to use the idea of fixing a car to work her healing magics (fixing a broken windshield, replacing a flat tire, using windshield wipers to clear her vision, etc.).
• Although Alice has spent most of her life studying sorcery her real gift is with watches and mechanical things, including her creating The Witch Watch.

Live-Action TV

• Raven Reyes of The 100. She came to Earth after the original 100, only to find her boyfriend Finn was with the show's protagonist, Clarke. Despite this, her tech expertise help Clarke establish contact with The Arc and is essential in the battle against the Grounders.
• Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger has Ranru/AbareYellow, who gave up a career as an Idol Singer to pursue her dream of becoming a mechanic.
• Lacy Rand in Caprica turns out to be one of these, helping one of the other Soldiers of the One (who is apparently now her Love Interest) fix a motorcycle engine.
• The Cold Case episode "Factory Girls" featured a troop of these building planes to be used in World War 2.
• Cowboy Bebop (2021). In "Binary Two-Step", a lesbian spacecraft mechanic succeeds in seducing Faye Valentine, but is unsuccessful in getting Jet Black to pay for proper parts for the BeBop.
• In CSI, both Sara and Catherine have their moments doing experiments or processing a car. It actually became something of a Running Gag in Television Without Pity that Sara delighted in tearing vehicles apart.
• In Degrassi Goes Hollywood fashion model Mia, who tags along on the journey to L.A., later ends up helping fix the broken down bus with her expensive leggings, saying it was an old trick her mom taught her.
• Doctor Who:
  • Gia Kelly in "The Seeds of Death" is the electronics-expert variant; she's the world's greatest expert on the planet-wide teleportation system, and also makes field repairs to an improvised Death Ray.
  • Rachel "Ray" Defwydd in "Delta and the Bannermen" is a biker who habitually carries spanners, Allen keys and whatever else she needs to conduct running repairs.
  • The Thirteenth Doctor's first episode puts her in a Sheffield garage gleefully cobbling together a new sonic screwdriver.
• The Dukes of Hazzard:
  • Bar waitress Daisy is occasionally shown to be good at helping with car repairs, although the others rarely need her to.
  • Frankie from "Luke’s Love Story" is a pretty but easily offended mechanic who works for a female race car driver and prefers shop talk over flirting.
  • "Arrest Jesse Duke" features four female auto parts store owners who get their inventory by swiftly field stripping cars with flat tires (which they pop with air rifles) while the owners are hitchhiking to town to get tow trucks.
• The Expanse's Naomi Nagata. She gets annoyed when she's on a ship that's already in perfect shape and needs no tuning or repair.
• Bade Uysal of Ezel is a Wrench Wench of The Blacksmith variety. Although she dabbles in a variety of arts as a student, her passion appears to lie in welding and (especially) sculpting, which she does at the workshop.
• In Hardball, 'Auntie' Mahaki is a mechanic who specializes in restoring and customizing hot rods. Salwa is in awe of her, and Jerry seems to be a little bit smitten.
• Farscape:
  • Gilina Renaez is a technical specialist for the private army she works for.
  • Also Furlow, although she is far from beautiful, is Affably Evil, runs an Honest John's Dealership, and has Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
• Sister Steve, the streetwise nun in the Father Dowling Mysteries knows how to hotwire a car. That's because of her youth in a rough neighborhood.
• Firefly: Kaylee joined the crew after the captain walked in on her having sex with the ship's mechanic in the engine room, diagnosed the engine's problem that kept the ship grounded (and its mechanic stumped), and fixing it within seconds. Mal immediately fired his mechanic and hired her. Whatever crazy thing needs to be done like severing the nacelle safeties to do a Crazy Ivan, disabling charges attached to the external hull, or removing the pulse locator, she is up to it.
• The Flying Doctors had Emma Plimpton, who fixed everything in Cooper's Crossing that wasn't an aeroplane.
• Daphne Moon in Frasier, which extends to carpentry. She's The Lad-ette because she grew up with eight brothers, all of whom but one were rowdy Oop North types.
• In one episode of Home Improvement, car enthusiast Tim gets a new mechanic who is one of these, which leads to him becoming slightly attracted to her. Of course, the fact that she's played by Jenny McCarthy doesn't hurt, either.
• Dr. Bonnie Barstow of Knight Rider. She maintains KITT.
• The Last Ship has Commander Andrea Garnett, the Executive Officer of the titular ship, who was originally the Chief Engineer. Even after her promotion, she still performs engineering duties when required and her expertise is the reason she and the others kidnapped by pirates are rescued.
• Juliette Burke in the 5th season of Lost (in Dharmaville) works as an auto mechanic.
• Theora Jones of Max Headroom is of the high-tech variety rather than the grease-monkey variety.
• Peli Motto from The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett is an older example than most. She and her crew of pit droids are spacecraft mechanics on the harsh desert world of Tatooine.
• Tabby, from MonsterWarriors. Invents all manner of weaponry, and makes the Monster Mobile go, all with household waste.
• All the girls on Mythbusters. The most famous, Kari Byron, is actually a lighter example than the other two, being an artist by training. Scottie Chapman from the earlier seasons is a much straighter example, being a welder and metal worker. Jessi Combs, who filled in for Kari when she was on maternity leave, is a metal fabricator.
• Abby Sciuto on NCIS falls into this category, especially when the team is investigating a vehicle-involved crime. Off with the white lab coat, on with the bright red mechanic's coveralls.
• Power Rangers:
  • Ashley Hammond in the Power Rangers Turbo episode "The Turn of the Wretched Wrench".
  • The series has had several sexy scientists down the years, but it wasn't until Power Rangers Operation Overdrive's Ronny that it got a Wrench Wench to balance things out. Her tendency for practically fondling new weaponry with an awed smile on her face makes one wonder how the show stayed TV-Y7. Of course, she had to be the first to test out any new gadget. And apparently, being a race car driver who can work on her own cars has makes her qualified to work on giant robots. One of the aforementioned scientists was Operation Overdrive's own Pink Ranger, providing the show with a double-dose of geek girls.
  • Gemma in Power Rangers RPM combines Wrench Wench with Hackette and a fetish for explosions.
• Sanctuary has Dr. Helen Magnus. Very obvious in episode 21, where they get stuck in an old oil rig and need to MacGyver their way out.
• The Audiobooks for The Sarah Jane Adventures make this into Sky's way to assist the team, in a much cuter and less fanservicey way. Her ability to sense and understand energy being part of it, but she just understands machinery.
• Happy Quinn, the "mechanical prodigy" on Scorpion.
• Maria from Sesame Street runs the local garage with her husband.
• When the family starts fixing up a car for Matt in season 3 of 7th Heaven, it's boy-crazy Lucy who is shown to be an idiot savant when it comes to cars.
• Given her heritage, Marti in Slingers would be expected to be technically skilled, and so far she's demonstrated a definite affinity with spaceship power systems (and the disabling thereof).
• Stargate SG-1 has Samantha Carter, who's not only the show's Omnidisciplinary Scientist but also builds Naquada reactors in her office/workshop in her spare time. One scene showed her working closely with a mechanical object very intently. With her, it is likely an alien device of some kind. The camera pulls back to reveal she was tuning up her bike.
• B'Elanna Torres from Star Trek: Voyager. Although Star Trek engine rooms tend to be cleaner than a modern-day operating theatre, she does still manage to get covered in dirt and grease on a fairly regular basis.
• In the That '70s Show episode "Career Day", Jackie, who's a rich, spoiled Valley Girl type teen shows unexpected yet great skill in fixing cars.
• Bella Banks in Young Americans. She is a high school student who works as a mechanic at her dad's auto repair shop.

Music

• The video for the Dandy Warhols' "Bohemian Like You" features a guy ogling a girl who's wearing greasy overalls and fixing a car. While he's talking to her, he visualises her without the overalls. In the interests of fairness, later on when he's working in a bar, a girl does the exact same thing to him.
• The Beach Boys' "Car Crazy Cutie" is an ode to a woman who shares her beau's enthusiasm for automobiles:

  Well, my steady little doll is a real live beauty

  And everybody knows she's a car-crazy cutie

  She's hip to everything, man, from customs to rails

  And axle grease embedded 'neath her fingernails!

• The entire first verse from Felt's "Dirty Girl" is about this. Lines include "Standin' there holding that drippin' dipstick/With a firm grip, yet so delicate/And the way you took that orange oil rag and wiped it clean/Its guaranteed to get repeated in my dreams" and "Got so lost in your smile when you asked me what the mileage was".
• The music video for Girls Aloud's "Long Hot Summer" is set in a mechanic's shop with the girls sporting boiler suits and working on cars.
• In The Protomen (a rock opera based on the Mega Man (Classic) series), Dr. Light's lover works in a factory. Keeping her safe from a dangerous job is part of his motivation for creating the robots central to the series. Of course, Dr. Wily has other plans.
• The video for "The Way You Move" by OutKast is set in a garage featuring ridiculously hot and scantily-clad women.
• In her music video to "Why don't you love me", Beyoncé is playing a woman fixing a car wearing a crop top and daisy dukes.

Professional Wrestling

• During WOW Women of Wrestling's run in the early 2000s, they had a woman on the roster named Wendy Wheels who had a mechanic gimmick.

Roleplay

• Shannon Grimton of Dino Attack RPG studied to be an engineer and used her knowledge to personally modify her wheelchair into a Super Wheelchair.

Tabletop Games

• Tiana, Ship's Caretaker from Magic: The Gathering is both this and a Guardian Angel. Yes way.
• Arkham Horror 3^rd Edition: The mechanic Daniela Reyes is a well-rounded everywoman who uses a wrench as a weapon.

Theatre

• Natalie from All Shook Up is a tomboyish mechanic; she introduces herself to Chad, the town roustabout (and her new crush) by offering to fix his motorcycle.

Toys

• The toyline GoldieBlox is aimed at young girls and features the titular character Goldie, a girl builder, engineer, mechanic and inventor, and has a construction kit.

Video Games

• In Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, Avril Mead is known to the prisoners of the 444th Squadron (a penal squadron that she is assigned to be the mechanic for) as the 'Scrap Queen', as she's an incredible mechanic who can, with enough airplane pieces from wrecked jets, assemble and improve jet fighters. With some help from her grandfather and his old war buddies, she even salvaged enough pieces from a scrap yard to assemble a working fighter jet that she took off in. (Unfortunately, she took off just as Erusea launched a drone-fighter surprise attack across Osea, one of which was being chased right by her when she was in the sky... and she had neglected to install an IFF that would identify her to the Osean pilots. She was shot down, but survived- and was thrown in jail for her trouble.)
• Aground: The Mechanic in Sunset Haven is a girl named Cass. Justified by her being the daughter of the Mirrows, who, villainy notwithstanding, are brilliant engineers.
• Alan Wake in the American Nightmare expansion has Emma Sloan, a car mechanic in New Springs, Arizona.
• All Points Bulletin has Chiza. She liked boosting cars for joyrides (and not profit) prior to the formation of the Prentiss Tigers. Ophelia is another, entering in a self-modded car into San Paro's biggest race and winning the whole thing. Her brand, Ophelia Customs, produces the premium-shop cars.
• Amanda Ripley of Alien: Isolation at one point manages to repair a motion tracker unit using parts from a children's toy. She also crafts her own medkits, explosives, and electronic decoys from random gubbins and scrap metal parts she finds lying around the station.
• Apex Legends has Rampart who runs a weapons mod shop. She's often working on the big guns, literally.
• Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura allows players to be Gadgeteer Geniuses, eventually building such things as steam-powered robots, staffs that shoot lightning, and a device that can revive the dead.
• Ar nosurge: Ode to an Unborn Star Ion loves tinkering, building stuff and thinks vacuum tubes are the cutest thing ever. However, when she was on Earth her parents did not approve of her going into engineering.
• ARMS: The fittingly-named Mechanica is this at 15 years old. Lacking the required genetic ability to participate in ARMS battles, Mechanica designed a stretchy-armed mech suit from scratch.
• In Artery Gear: Fusion Dean of the Firestor Miners mercenary faction is good at tinkering with spare parts and scraps. She even takes on an apprentice, a young desert girl named Rigid.
• Phoebe from Battleborn is a genius inventor who has created a variety of fantastical tech, a number of which have been inspired by Eldrid tech that seem almost magical in nature. Among her inventions include phasegate tech, which allows her to teleport around the battlefield; her high tech and fashionable Battle Ballgown, which aids her when fighting; and a cybernetic implant which allows her to telekinetically control four of her five rapiers. She's also a skilled roboticist, having been the brains behind her fellow Battleborn Kid Ultra's original design and purpose.
• BattleCry: has Jin, on the Han Republic team, is a Gadgeteer Genius who grew up assisting her inventor father, and so might fall under this, although at the finer, more delicate end (clocks, etc) of the wrench-wielding spectrum.
• Battle Nations: Zoey, who designs most of your buildings (with tank treads, sometimes, which gives an in-game reason to why you can move around buildings in the Edit menu), vehicles, and generally maintains the Outpost's machinery along with Floyd.
• Borderlands
  • Borderlands 2:
    • Ellie. Although she is one of the most obese characters in the game, speaking to other characters and listening to audiologs reveals that there are some people on Pandora who like it that way.
    • The first DLC has Gaige the Mecromancer, a young girl, who built herself a robotic hand after cutting off one of her own. She could have healed the cut, but she wanted to have a cool way to digistruct her home-made combat robot.
  • As we learn in the prequel, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! Mad Moxxi knows her way around a hardware shop too.
  • Borderlands 3: Has Moze who regularly works on Iron Bear, a small mech she pilots to kick ass.
• BrawlStars: Jessie and Pam, who, in the case of the former, overlaps with Gadgeteer Genius.
• Breath of Death VII: Lita is a gearhead who specializes in taking out machines. She's in on the mission to get her hands on abandoned equipment.
• Cargo! The Quest for Gravity has Fawks, the player character whose job it is to build machines to transport creatures called Buddies that help world landmarks stop floating into space.
• Lucca from Chrono Trigger, a machine enthusiast who takes after her father, is one of the earliest video game examples.
• Crash: Mind Over Mutant has Coco Bandicoot serve as one since she's often working on machinery.
• Crescent Prism: Rain is an Engine Knight who specializes in building machines in the middle of battle. Bonus points for wielding wrenches as her weapon.
• Almost every major female character in Cyberpunk 2077 can fix some kind of machines:
  • Judy Alvarez fixed a fire truck she found in a scrapyard when she was a teenager.
  • Panam Palmer comes from a Nomad group called Aldecaldos, who are noted to be very bonded to their vehicles. In the first scene that we meet her, she's fixing a car she borrowed.
  • Claire Russel's hobby is street racing in which she participates with her truck, Beast, that she services herself.
  • Female V, who has the Nomad lifepath chosen, will start the game fixing her truck.
• Danger Girl for the Playstation introduces a Canon Foreigner, the teen genius and expert mechanic JC whose expertise in machinery makes her a valuable member of the Danger Girls, notably in diffusing Time Bombs in an oil rig and hacking into enemy bases.
• DayZ allows the player to be female and to fix vehicles with tools such as a pipe wrench.
• Devil May Cry 5 introduces Nico, a former gunsmith and the mechanic partner (and driver) of Nero responsible for the Devil Breaker system. Some of these arms are simple, like the Overture, which simply lets out electric blasts, and the Rawhide, which is a chain whip that can improve his Wire Snatch, but some can give Nero a Rocket Punch that he can ride on or abilities like turning his pistol into a railgun or even slowing down time itself. Not that surprising for her as she uses pieces of defeated demons to make these for Nero. She also gives Dante Dr. Faust, a literal magic hat that she made based on her father's research that uses red orbs as ammunition.
• In Dicey Dungeons: The Inventor was apparently a cute girl before being forcibly transformed into a dice. As the Gadgeteer Genius among the contestants, one of her starting weapons is a Spanner.
• Evolve:
  • Sunny is one of these, as well as an Action Girl. She built shield drones from old mining equipment, has the capability to build an FTL drive onto a ship if given the right supplies, and carries a mini-nuke grenade launcher.
  • Lennox. Besides designing the mining facilities of Shear and a mobile space station, she built her Thunderchild suit in three days.
• Krusche and Sasha from the EXA_PICO series. Krusche is more focused on ships and weapons, while Sasha is skilled at creating satellites, reflecting plates, and other instruments.
• The Fallout has the player able to be one in pretty much every game.
  • Fallout gives the player the choice of a female character who can level up the repair skill for fixing things such as the water pump in Necropolis for the ghouls.
  • Fallout 2 also gives the player a choice of a female character along with the continuation of using the repair skill which can be used to fix a nuclear reactor in the city of Gecko.
  • Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel: Has the player yet again allows the player to be female and to be able to use the repair skill to fix computers as well as use repair kits on vehicles.
  • Fallout 3 has Moira Brown. You, yourself, qualify as well if you're the female version of the Lone Wanderer and spend up on Repair skill points.
  • Fallout: New Vegas: Veronica has a bit of this going on as well. She can even function as a mobile Workbench that lets you craft items on the spot.
  • Fallout 4 continues the trend with Proctor Ingram, who maintains the Brotherhood Of Steel's Cool Airship the Prydwen, suits of Powered Armor, and is in charge of repairs of Liberty Prime, all without having any legs. She's also capable enough with the Power Armor frame she uses to get around to put up quite a good fight. A female Sole Survivor can also qualify as this.
  • Fallout 76 has pretty much the same setup as Fallout 4 with the workbenches and crafting available to the player.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Jessie from Final Fantasy VII, who also displays a fascination with explosives.
  • Rikku from Final Fantasy X is good with machines, and comes with an ability that lets her One-Hit KO a machine type enemy.
  • In Final Fantasy XV, we are introduced to Cidney, the series's first female incarnation of the famous mechanic, Cid, who we first meet fixing cars at a local gas station. In the playable demo, she is the one who fixes the guys' car when it breaks down in Duscae. Sadly, in the English version, she's renamed Cindy. Apparently, Cidney was too punny? Her grandfather is named Cid in both versions though.
• Fortnite has Jules as a mechanic complete with gloves, a grease stained uniform and many tools!
• Galaxy Angel:
  • The original trilogy has Creta Biscuit, the chief engineer of the Elsior who's often found at the hangar doing maintenance to the Emblem Frames. Aside from her looks, she also has a rather cheery personality and an event in the first game reveals she's a huge fan of young idols.
  • The Galaxy Angel II trilogy brings Coronet Crouxcreme and Maria Stellene, two of the most prominent members of the engineers' staff of the Luxiole. Coronet is often fighting with Croix, the chief engineer, while Maria prefers to spend her time with the Chrono String Engines and doesn't like to talk to anyone except Lily.
• Licca Kusunoki in God Eater fits this to a tee, in charge of maintaining the Far East Branch's God Arcs. complete with oversized gloves and a tendency to hug the protagonist when they do something stupid.
• In the online portion of Grand Theft Auto V the player can get one of these by getting a custom autoshop related to an office.
• Gunparade March Several of the girls, such as Matsuri, perform maintenance on the HWT's.
• Alyx from Half-Life 2 is this and an Action Girl combined in one. Not only is she a good mechanic, she's also a godly hacker.
• The original Ann from Harvest Moon and loves to tinker with machines and invent things, though she isn't always good at it.
  • Ditto in Harvest Moon: Magical Melody.
  • Harvest Moon 64: Being an inventor apparently runs in the family, as her grandson Rick also qualifies.
• Haven (2020): Yu is the engineer of the main couple. She salvaged and repaired the Nest, her personal spacecraft, as a teenager, and is skilled enough to fashion replacement parts for it out of components from drone and spaceship wrecks she and Kay find throughout their new home planet.
• Robin from Iconoclasts is a mechanic in a world where unauthorized mechanical engineering is illegal, and carries an oversized wrench that she uses to twist equally-large bolts and attack enemies.
• Heroes of Newerth includes an engineer class (which allows you to build weapons) which includes female characters such as Engineer Rosie as well as Soaker Rosie.
• Illusions of Loyalty There's a wounded girl in the Castle infirmary who longs to get back up to fix golems, in spite of her cracked skull.
• Keira from the Jak and Daxter series. Tess is one as well, only her specialty is weaponry, not vehicles.
• Maki Kagura from The King of Fighters loved to fix her sister Chizuru's motorcycle as her hobby, as stated in her profile.
• Kya: Dark Lineage In the "Kya's Life" gallery, she and Frank worked together to restore and repair an old car.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Tita Russel is the party's authority on all things having to do with orbal technology, descending from a long line of orbal engineers. By the time of Cold Steel III, her skills have improved to the point where she could qualify as a Gadgeteer Genius like her mother and grandfather, being instrumental to the development of the latest version of the Orbal Gear project.
  • Downplayed by Alisa Reinford from The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel. As the scion of the largest orbal technology manufacturer in Erebonia, she has the technical know-how to troubleshoot malfunctioning orbments and make minor repairs, but she's not quite on the level of being an engineer. Her forte is more on the business side of the company than on the development side.
• The incarnation of Princess Zelda in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is shown to be this through the game's flashback scenes. This character trait takes center stage in the psuedo-prequel Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, where her main weapon for most of the game is the Sheikah Slate, many of her sidequests revolve around her love of research and tinkering, and it's revealed she is the one who built the mini-Guardian Terrako.
• Lake Lori is the local mechanic's daughter and already a bit of a mechanical prodigy herself despite being only fifteen.
• Ophelia is one in Maple Story 2. If your equipment and weapons need enchantment, she's the person to consult.
  • Peachy serves the same purpose but is a downplayed example due to her less tomboyish traits.
• Mad Dash Racing has Betty who evokes this aesthetic, and even carries a giant wrench wit her which she uses as a bludgeon.
• Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam: Unlike in the main series, where she's mostly characterized as just a Genki Girl, Toadette in Paper Jam has the added trait of being a talented mechanic, creating gigantic papercrafts that effectively serve as Humongous Mechas.
• Mass Effect:
  • Tali'Zorah, who's part of an alien race called the quarians. Quarians are the whole race of incredibly skilled engineers. And even among the quarians, she is counted one of the best engineers and geth specialists.
  • Like most character tropes involving the squad, Fem Shep can qualify for this one too — just make her an engineer.
  • They are joined by Samantha Traynor in Mass Effect 3, though she's more the communications officer and spends her time cracking code.
  • As well as Engineer Gabriella Daniels, first introduced in Mass Effect 2, who works in the Normandy's lower deck alongside her coworker, Ken Donnelly.
• Nae Aki in Medarot Spirits; she never was anything near fanservicey, but, in another hand, had Ikki slightly fawning over her. Justified by the fact that she's the granddaughter of Dr. Aki, the modern Medarot inventor. Thing is, if you considers the series' existence at all.
• Mega Man Legends:
  • Roll Casket is a genius mechanic who's in charge of piloting and maintaining her family's airship .
  • Also, Tron Bonne combines this with a fancy for designing robots, although generally she tends to design new electronics more often than fix old motors.
• Eva Navarro of Mercenaries 2: World In Flames. She'll build any number of custom PMC vehicles for you, for a price.
• When Sunny Gurlukovich/Emmerich first appeared in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots she was a shy computer hacking expert with a No Social Skills and a slight stutter, but by the time Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance rolls around, she's become a capable and confident engineer who helped develop the fastest suborbital thruster the world has ever seen^note Capable of reaching speeds in excess of Mach 23 and is actively working on a spacecraft able to make the journey to Jupiter within her guardian's lifetime.
• Metal Max 3: The female mechanic.
• Monday Night Combat has Combat Girl and Pit Girl who are good with using and maintaining turrets.
• Onigiri Hiraga Gennai, full stop. She basically drops into a full-on fit of Squee when given the chance to study Benkei and help repair him, but also makes her own line of robots based on his designs.
• The Outer Worlds has Parvati Holcomb who is a mechanic that can be the player's companion who can help the players mechanic abilities in addition to doing her normal duties.
• Overwatch has Brigette, daughter of Gadgeteer Genius Torbjorn, is a textbook example. She puts this skill to use as her godfather Reinhardt’s Squire—much like the Squires of old, her biggest task is maintaining her knight’s (Power) Armor. She later develops her own Powered Armor, and serves as a Paladin-esque fighter.
• Persona:
  • Persona 3: Fuuka Yamagishi likes to work on electronics.
  • Persona 4: Naoto Shirogane likes building detective and spy gadgets.
• Ava Azniv and Adisa Mostafa from Planet Explorers, mechanical and computer engineers respectively. Ava can supply the player with robot parts while Adisa specialises in vehicles.
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet has the Tinkatink line, an all-female species of Pintsized Powerhouse blacksmith mons who forge their own hammers and homes out of scrap metal.
• Prey (2017):
  • The game has a female Morgan Yu with the repair skills the player uses to fix various things on the Talos space station. She has a wrench, too.
  • In Mooncrash, Joan Winslow has the best mechanical skills out of the five playable characters. Her available Neuromod skills include repairing and salvaging, and she has the ability to summon a turret companion. She also always starts with a Wrench.
• In Project Zomboid the player can make a female character and choose the mechanic occupation to become good already at maintaining vehicles in addition to simply working on them to build the skill.
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart has Rivet, a lombax mechanic from an alternate dimension who's good with maintaining her ship and working with computers and robots.
• Samanya in Red Faction: Guerrilla is the chief engineer of the Red faction organization and creator of all their weapons.
• Red Wings American Aces has Cateline, who is the beautiful blond haired mechanic who repairs the planes the player will use to take on the enemy.
• Relic of War: Jeanice's portrait has her literally holding onto a wrench.
• Ginny from RPG Shooter: Starwish, who is always seen with a wrench, papers and a pencil. After protagonist Deuce crash-lands near her home, she fixes his space fighter and then applies as engineer on the mothership he and his fellow pirates do business with. Neferiti, who built the massive ship Firebolt by herself and Mare, who constructed her own superior space fighter, are also this but decidedly less open about it.
• Scrap Mechanic is dedicated to this trope if you choose a female character.
• Scum You can be a female character and fix vehicles in the game just as the male ones can.
• Septerra Core has Led Campbell who is a genius mechanic, her weapon is literally an enormous wrench, and she's so hot that total strangers will give her money or items.
• Shop Heroes has, the Artificer character who you can hire fits this archetype. So does Louca, one of the heroes who visits your shop, although in her case it doesn't actually have much bearing on gameplay.
• The Sims allows you to make your Sim male OR FEMALE into an appliance master via the mechanic skill.
  • The Sims has it so your sims can level up the mechanic skill by repairing appliances.
  • The Sims 2 expands upon the repair skill by making it so certain careers require certain levels of mechanic skill.
  • The Sims 3 replaces the mechanic skill with the handiness skill which allows sims to upgrade appliances in addition to repairing them.
  • The Sims 4 furthers the repair skill by allowing the sim to be able to craft better quality items as a result of their increased repair skill.
• Claret from Skyborn fixes airships and is all too ready to chew out anybody who mistreats their ship. She also built herself an R2-D2 type robot sidekick.
• Penelope of the Sly Cooper games specializes in remote-controlled vehicles, so the gang try to hire her on. However, she later betrays them in the fourth game.
• Sonic Riders has Wave the Swallow, who is the one responsible for building the boards for the Babylon Rogues.
• Shardlight Amy, like her father before her. Her knowledge of machinery helps many times throughout the story. Additionally, she can distinguish any car, including their model and year, should the player examine them.
• Spacelords has Mika, who even has a mechanic outfit shown here.
• Sparklite Ada fights with a wrench, much like Robin of Iconoclasts, except in Top-Down View.
• Stardew Valley has Maru as one of the potential female romance options who is the local scientist's daughter. She bonds with you over building a robot as a pet project, and eventually accidentally electrocutes you with it. Fortunately, she doubles as a Hospital Hottie. If you marry her, she moves in and often can be found tinkering with gadgets in the bedroom.
• Star Wars The Force Unleashed: has Juno Eclipse, whom when Starkiller first lays eyes on, is working on his ship, The Rogue Shadow. The comics also show her working on other equipment.
• Stasis: Bone Totem Charlie is the family's engineer, and much more adept with machinery than her husband. It's even her unique skill to be able to repair inoperable machinery as part of the puzzle-solving.
• In State of Decay 2 your female survivor can be one of these with the ability to repair weapons, vehicles as well as crafting in general. You can even wear a mechanic outfit with gloves, boots and a boiler suit.
• In Stella Glow, Rena is a young one who's training to one day take over her father's business (essentially a combination of jeweler and blacksmith). She's forced to take over the business far earlier than anticipated and proves to be every bit as competent as her father—and produces a powerful new Orb to ease the Final Battles along.
• Tales of Graces has Pascal, who despite being a Ditzy Genius who frequently reverts to Buffy Speak, she's a mechanical genius who can fix almost anything.
• Terraria has the Mechanic NPC as this. She carries a wrench and sells them too.
• Touhou Project has Rika in its second installment, who builds tanks and is rarely seen without her wrench in fanart. Also, Kawashiro Nitori from Touhou Fuujinroku ~ Mountain of Faith, like most kappa in the series, is a Magitek engineer who dons optical camouflage, extendible robots arms, and missiles. She's really fond of human technology that falls across the Great Hakurei Border and, according to common fanart, has her own lines of electronics.
• Ty the Tasmanian Tiger has Shazza, a dingo who's good at working on things like her truck.
• Valkyria Chronicles has Isara Gunther. She's also the one to first appear at a gun fight with her father's customized heavy tank! Yes, a Moe tank operator.
  • In the 4th game in the series, Riley Miller qualifies, being your squads engineer as well as having been a research scientist prior to the game, she also goes out in the field as a mortar expert.
• Valorant has Killjoy who specializes in building weapons such as turrets. She's German so she comes from a country known for its engineers which includes her.
• Verdant Skies: Rosie Martinez is a talented mechanical engineer, though she's new to being a space mechanical engineer.
• Switch from A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky is one; her father Gunther is An Engineer in his own right as well.
• Warhammer Online: The female Dwarf Engineer is a pretty literal example.
• The Wing Commander series has two: Janet "Sparks" McCullough in Wing Commander II and Rachel Coriolis in Wing Commander III/Wing Commander Prophecy.
• XCOM 2: Lily Shen, like her father before her, is XCOM's chief engineer, in charge of maintaining the Avenger, building new facilities, fabricating and repairing equipment, and developing experimental technology.
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon: Craftable equipment is made for you by Sumire, a young woman in a pink boiler suit.

Visual Novels

• Morgan of Double Homework is mechanically inclined enough to make repairs on a motorcycle.
• Maria Custard from the Rance Series. She creates weapons so powerful that other characters from the series have to seal her memories away.

Webcomics

• Robyn, in 1977:The Comic. She knows her engines and doesn't mind getting her hands dirty
• Angela in At Arm's Length works as an auto mechanic. Does this basically for fun since she's a nigh-immortal sorceress, and admits to her sister she does it because she gets satisfaction accomplishing things without magic.
• Yun-Feng from Claude & Monet. Standard clothing is a pair of mechanic's overalls, and a complete polar opposite with her refined twin sister Yin-Feng.
• Emergency Exit has one too, complete with Wrench Whack [1].
  "Oh, I love the smell of oil on a sexy woman."
• Freefall gives us two, Florence Ambrose, a genetically engineered wolf with a string of degrees, and Niomi, a human colonist.
• Girl Genius, being set in a world of mad scientists, has plenty.
  • Agatha Heterodyne, the titular girl genius, is this as well as many other things. Although at the start the Restraining Bolt that prevented her from really getting going with the mad science meant that she couldn't build anything without it breaking, she adjusted pretty quickly after it was removed.
  Krosp: You didn't have to bring all those tools.
  * beat*
  Agatha: I don't understand what you mean.
  • Sleipnir isn't a Spark, but she is a mechanic, and a very good one too.
• KK built and maintains her own steam copter amongst other toys in FreakAngels oh and has wicked Psychic Powers.
• In Impure Blood Mac comes running to burble over the car.
• Pella the dwarf, from Looking for Group. She fashions Rayd a replacement arm after the Black Dwarves dismember him while torturing. Rayd then uses it to "keep a promise" that he made them in a subsequent battle with the Black Dwarves.
• Pop's Autos from Nip and Tuck. The main drawing feature are the Pop's girls, all working on your car in daisy dukes.
• In Pulse, before becoming an busty armored super-heroine, possible Ms. Fix It Annie's previous job at her Superhero School was repairing equipment. She sometimes returns to that as therapy. She can be known to be Curious as a Monkey and have almost a compulsive urge to take thing apart.
• Questionable Content:
  • Faye entered these waters when she built a mini T-Rex that poops espresso, and was originally going for a two-ton T-rex with Hemi power. In more recent comics, Faye has switched jobs and become a full-time robot mechanic.
  • Dora, too, has managed to do similar, but from a more computer nerd end of the spectrum, like fixing Pintsize back together after an unfortunate cake mix incident.
  • Marigold builds her PCs, has taken over the Pintsize fixing, is a webmaster as her real job, and seems to be rather skilled at all things computer.
• Sasha in Sluggy Freelance is able to understand and often improve on Riff's inventions.
• Roboticist Para Ventura of Schlock Mercenary converted a damaged tank into a robot that performed WAY beyond specifications. She also killed eight opponents in hand-to-hand combat while defending herself and two badly injured comrades from an angry mob.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: The crew's mechanic, Tuuri, is female.
• Tales of the Questor: Quinton's childhood friend Kestral is a mechanical whiz; while they are both drunk she helps create his magical sword Wildcard.
• Shelly from Wapsi Square worked at a garage earlier in the strip's run.
• Dr. Anne Koa from "Xenospora" is established as one during the prologue as she repairs her ship's engines.

Web Original

• Sharon from Darwin's Soldiers used to work in the magnetic materials research division at Pelvanida. After she got fired, she worked as an electrician and a mechanic in Southport.
• Gaia Online has Sam, the young lady who runs the automotive shop "Sam's Body and Parts".
• YouTuber Lost Pause (a.k.a Noble) has Lily the Fox Mechanic as his channel's mascot. Lily was created for Noble by Winged Cloud, in addition to his channel icon.
• Tex, actually, of Red vs. Blue. She's repaired Sheila at least twice, built a bomb out of spare parts (including some more ... personal items), and even upgraded her own armor while wearing it. Apparently, this was part of her Freelancer training. It tends to be overshadowed by her repeatedly kicking everyones' asses, though.
• The SCP Foundation has Cassy, the living drawing who wishes she could exist in the 3D world. Her hobby is a car she's building from drawn parts, and when photographed with the camera that shows what the subject wishes to be doing, the result — nearly everyone else's being Nightmare Fuel or Tear Jerker material, or a couple humorous exceptions — has her in the real world... doing exactly the same thing.
• Katherine Blanco from Survival of the Fittest version three was the best mechanic in her school until she was killed by a hornet's sting on the island.
• There are quite a few female gadgeteers, devisers and general scientists in the Whateley Universe, but special mention goes to Loophole, whose power is 'understanding rules'. Any and all rules.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: Polly becomes one in Season 3 when she takes it upon herself to learn engineering in order to repair Frobo. The IT Girls, Ally and Jess, from whom Polly learns the finer points of robotics, also qualify.
• Ivy in Carmen Sandiego; she built and maintained Zack's race car during his stint as a race driver, and built Carmen's grappling hook and concealed hang-glider, as well as the Red Drone.
• Charlene "Charley" Davidson in Biker Mice from Mars, the resident mechanic and owner of her own garage "Last Chance". She's also the Token Human.
• Ketta from Breadwinners is the super-speedy genius mechanic of the Breadwinners, and always has some sort of new invention up her sleeve.
• Gadget Hackwrench of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, proving that when it comes to ingenuity and mechanical marvels, size doesn't matter. And while she may not be the Ur-Example, she might be one of the Trope Makers, at least where Western Animation is concerned, as there were very few examples in that medium before her creation.
• In The Deep (2015), Kaiko is the one who performs all of the maintenance on the Aronnax and its gear. Fonatine is shown to have inherited her mother's knack for pulling things apart and putting them back together.
• Jenny 10 from Dex Hamilton: Alien Entomologist. She maintains the insect's habitats and builds the weapons used by the team to capture new bugs.
• Dinosaur Train: Tricia Troodon discovered solar power and built the Solar Train by herself, and she also knows how to fly the zepplin.
• Cover Girl from G.I. Joe (especially in her Devil's Due comic incarnation). After all, when your primary duty is as a missile tank driver, it pays to know how to keep your fighting vehicle in good condition.
• Luanne in King of the Hill was bad in beauty school and the community college, but she was good with a wrench. In early episodes, the men in the alley would move out of the way and let her fix cars.
• Asami from The Legend of Korra repairs a damaged airship downed in the desert with minimal equipment and then builds a sand-sailer when the airship is destroyed by a giant sandshark.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • in "One Bad Apple", Scootaloo is shown doing mechanical work on a parade float. Later, in "Twilight Time," she's shown developing these skills further under Twilight Sparkle learning how to disassemble and reassemble unicycles and scooters.
  • "Rainbow Roadtrip" has Torque Wrench, who fixes the Mane Six's hot-air balloon after it crashes and rebuilds the rainbow generator.
• Molly from Ōban Star-Racers is a competent mechanic. She even figured out the problem with a pod-racer when it had previously stumped a professional.
• Shy Violet from Rainbow Brite has a knack for science and mechanics.
• Ready Jet Go!: In One Small Step, Sydney is shown to be an expert mechanic, fixing the super saucer with ease.
• Resident smart gal Gretchen Grundler in several episodes of Recess, though Ashley Spinelli is no slouch either.
• Robozuna: Livia, and Feronia, as well as most of the female Robozuna competitors. Basically, most people who work with robots have some proficiency in repairing them.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Ahsoka has apparently taken a level of this over the course of the series' sporadic timeline; by the time of the Mortis trilogy of episodes, she's capable of fixing a badly crashed shuttle by herself and modifying it as needed.
• In Star Wars Rebels, both of the two lead female characters fall into the category. Hera Syndulla, aside from being the Ace Pilot, maintain and repairs her own ships. Sabine Wren is also a talented vehicle mechanic, but her backstory is as a child prodigy genius in developing weapons technology.
• Strawberry Shortcake: The 2009 version is the only generation to avert this entirely, due to the increase in femininity.
  • In the 1980s, T. N. Honey, who could repair a malfunctioning oven in seconds.
  • Banana Candy^note Banana Twirl's counterpart and Ginger Snap in the 2003 series, the former being a skilled mechanic and the latter being a Gadgeteer Genius.
  • Strawberry Shortcake: Berry in the Big City characterizes Lemon Meringue as a talented mechanic and inventor, building impressive machinery nearly every episode, and is usually seen repairing the underside of her and Lime Chiffon’s juice cart. She also has a rival in her former business partner Lemon Tort, who is likewise a skilled inventor mechanic, but much more of a Mad Scientist.
• Pearl from Steven Universe has shown good abilities at being a mechanic. She even created a relatively working spaceship from random spare parts Greg had in storage.
• The second season of Transformers: Prime involved finding ancient Cybertronian weapons created by Solus Prime, one of the 13 original Primes created by Primus, who was also the archetype for female Transformers to come. She preferred a big hammer over any old wrench. The 13 original Transformers are treated as semi-divine, communicating from a higher realm and being the patron saint of whatever type of 'bot they're the first of; repair bot Fixit has been known to say "Sweet Solus Prime!" when surprised. Every nigh-magical Artifact of Doom in this series (and maybe others) is her personal handiwork.
• Urban Vermin: Coco is the mechanic of the GLF and the sole female member of the team.
• The Weekenders: Tino's mom would sometimes be shown working on her car.
• Wing Commander Academy: The mechanic usually fixing up Blair's fighter is Maya McEaddens. Blair not only trusts her with his ship, but also with a letter to send to his family if he doesn't make it back from a mission.
• Work It Out Wombats!: Super almost always fixing things, and always has a nail and wrench on her person.
• Zig & Sharko: Marina is often shown working with cars and engines.

Real Life

• In the first half of the 19th century, the only legitimate daughter of Lord Gordon Byron, Ada Lovelace. Her mother directed her education towards maths since she thought the "poetic tendencies" from a typical education of the day were dangerous (which is to say she thought poets were trouble; having married Lord Byron, she was probably right), a course of action with which Lord Byron totally agreed, since young Ada was excellent at maths. As an adult, she became one of the first computer programmers. That's right; even before the first computer, she invented algorithms for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, the "ancestor" of modern computers.
• Rosie the Riveter from U.S. World War II propaganda. And, obviously, all the female mechanics. Elizabeth Hawes' book about working in an aircraft plant during World War II is titled Why Women Cry; or Wenches With Wrenches.
• Rosie's Canadian counterpart, Veronica Foster a.k.a Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl◊.
• At the beginning of World War II, Hedy Lamarr co-invented US Patent 2,292,387 (referring to this), which was used in the blockade on Cuba. Her discoveries have also been used in cell phone technology. ^note "That's "Hedley!"
• Back when she was just a princess, Elizabeth II enlisted in the waning moments of World War II, where she was trained as a mechanic, earning the nickname "Princess Auto Mechanic" by the Associated Press.
• Automotive pioneer Bertha Benz, partner and spouse of Karl Benz, was the first person to drive an automobile a significant distance, taking one of Karl's machines and two of their sons on a 66 mile journey from Mannheim to Pforzheim to visit her mother, without telling anyone. After an all-day journey in which she had to refill the car with petroleum solvent bought from pharmacies, unblocked a fuel line with a hat pin, and used a garter to insulate a wire, she telegraphed her husband from Pforzheim. Rather than getting angry, Karl asked Bertha for her suggestions on improvements, including a lower gear for climbing hills and use of treated leather brake pads to increase stopping power. Her exploits led to greatly increased sales and recognition of Benz's machines.
• Katherine Johnson (née Coleman), whose calculations of orbital mechanics were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. During her 35-year career at NASA, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. Since these were early computers, many astronauts like John Gleen didn't fully trust them for their first missions. Gleen insisted that Johnson personally check and sign off on them, as she was the only one whose word he would take. Note this was 1961 in the American South; NASA had only been desegregated 3 years earlier.
• Grace Hopper was this for software engineers. She found the original software bug (it was literally a dead moth in the circuitry), wrote the first compiler, wrote what may have been the first case of open-source software, and was the main designer behind COBOL.^note Although most computer scientists would say that sharing any of the responsibility for COBOL is something that a person deserves to be forgiven for, rather than admired for. She also served 42 years in the United States Navy, is the first woman to be awarded an Admiral's star, and was the only living woman to see a US Navy warship named after her.
• Deep under the Russian city of Norilsk is a mine called Mayak. The duty of supervising the fuel, and fueling the machines, falls to Irina Martinets, the "Queen of the Filling Station". In some of the pictures, she is personally pushing some large vehicles and handling oil drums.
• Lady Catherine Sarah Percy, eldest daughter of the 12th Duke of Northumberland, is a professional gunsmith and motorcycle mechanic:
  I'm dying to get a machine-gun mount so I can rest a .22 on one and shoot rabbits.
• Rosie's Girls is a day camp for preteen girls that teaches, among other things, welding, carpentry, wiring, engineering, and presumably advanced badassness.
• There are self-help bike repair shops in Germany (and possibly other places in Europe) where you have to repair your bike by yourself and only pay for the materials used. They are run by volunteers who help you if you're stuck, and many of these volunteers are girls who do this in their free time.
• An all-female auto shop has opened in Mississauga, Ontario.
• When "Jungle Jim" Lieberman was match racing Funny Cars in the early 1970s, his girlfriend "Jungle Pam" Hardy was a regular sight. While she was definitely there for eye candy-Pam favored short shorts, hot pants, go-go boots, and tank tops-she also wrenched on his race car, spotted him at the starting line, and was the ONLY one he would trust to pack his parachutes.
• Victoria Drummond OBE was the first woman certified as a Marine Engineer in the United Kingdom. Despite being born in an upper-class Scottish family and being named after her godmother, Queen Victoria, she developed an interest in machinery and engineering, taking an apprenticeship at a shipyard. She went on to serve aboard a number of freighters during World War II, even helping to boost the speed of one ship to evade a German air attack.
• The United States Army has a longstanding tradition of referring to female mechanics, particularly those who go into combat situations to repair damaged vehicles, as "wrench wenches", which they wear as a badge of honor.
• There is a professional organization, Society of Women Engineers, dedicated to helping more women get into engineering.
• The wife of celebrity steeplejack and steam enthusiast Fred Dibnah gave into reality and got heavily involved with the steam engines, figuring this was the only way she'd get to see anything of him. Sheila Dibnah became quite knowledgeable in her own right and enthusiastic about the preservation of old steam engines, carrying on the work after Fred's death.

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