Hiyah, folks! Slept in a little bit today after being up quite late working on finance stuff. Really didn’t get much of anything done, as y’all know. Think I got up about 8:30 or 9 ish after that.
I had a full day scheduled, hoping to dig in today and finish the last of the cars on my schedule, so I could spend the rest of the week on finance stuff and preparing for my trip to Costa Rica.
Well… It… didn’t quite go as hoped. I had seven cars left to do (I’ve been telling everyone else that it’ll be a couple weeks before I can get them in, and amazingly, I had one or two people today tell me that was fine 🙃). Anyway, today was the last day to send out 1099 forms to the IRS and to my contract worker from last year. So I filled out the forms this morning, organized some paperwork, and headed out.
Big shout and and thanks and gratitude to my mom who mailed those forms off for me and who also went to the store to get me some manila folders to help me organize all my finance stuff.
Her help was so nice, especially given how the day went today.
First job should have been super quick. It was a no start, and when I got there, the battery was dead, so I disconnected the battery, connected my jump box, and it fired right up. I let it run for a few minutes, before going inside the car to look at something. I don’t remember what I went in there for, maybe to check for codes or something. Anyway, what I saw was a “Check Gages” (yeah… makes me smile, too, to see an improperly spelled word frozen in time on an instrument cluster 🙃).
Anyway, as I looked at the various gauges, I noticed the oil pressure was reading a big, fat 0 PSI.
Lovely.
I quickly shut off the car and spent a while trying to verify if it was just a bad sensor or a bad cluster, or if the engine really didn’t have any oil pressure (which, of course, could well have caused catastrophic damage).
I decided it was most likely the oil pressure sensor, so I ordered one to be delivered to me. When I called them, they said they had a driver right there ready to come to me. In the meantime, I noticed that the mating surface the oil pressure switch mated to had either a really bad casting or had been damaged. Metal was jutting out maybe a millimeter outwards on a couple spots on the mating surface.
Really?!?! I don’t even really get how that could happen, unless it was bad casting, like I mentioned, but that would seem… odd. Anyway, I spent a while with a file filing down the metal bumps to make a smooth, even mating surface. After waiting for 45 minutes or so without my parts showing up, I called again, and they said they were on their way, halfway to me (I was only about 7 minutes from them). 20ish minutes later, I called again. They said he was right on top of me, should be there any time. After about an hour and a half of waiting, I called again and found out they drove 30 minutes away to the wrong city.
😶
Ugh. I’d told them the address. Even military spelled some of it out for them, but they still wrote it down wrong. Anyway, that was pretty frustrating, set me back a decent bit on the day. Once I got the oil pressure sensor, I put that in, and the oil pressure read properly again.
Then I set out to try to figure out why the battery was low. It was a nearly brand new battery, and over the last year or so, it’d drained down to nothing something like five times. Here it was again.
Several months ago, they’d had me do a parasitic draw test to see what my be causing the drain, so I did one, and there was no draw. But I decided to do another one today, since they’d had the issue again. I did the test, and… no draw. So why was the battery draining down again and again? Were they really just leaving stuff on that often?
The boyfriend was with me, and so I showed him how the draw test worked. I showed him that there was no draw, and then I opened the driver’s door to trigger a spike in amp draw, so I could show him how the spike goes away after a minute or two after closing the door, but guess what? I didn’t go away completely.
It did have a draw–an intermittent one!
So I did a full draw test again, going through all the fuses in both main fuse blocks, and I found the culprit. The hood light fuse circuit had was drawing about double the accepted draw limit–just over double; so I gave them their options and my suggestion (you can track down the draw and fix it [which can get expensive], or you can buy a quick disconnect battery cable terminal connector, and when the car is going to sit for a week or more, you just quickly disconnect the battery, tool free.
It’s a small hassle, but weighed against having to pay to have an electrical issue tracked down and fixed, it’s a cheap, easy workaround.
Anyway, that was that job. Took over two hours, I think maybe 2 1/2, almost 3? and should have taken like… yeah. Anyway. So I was way way behind already.
Went to the Hyundai dealer to return the part I bought for the lady who didn’t tell me that her dad had come to pick up the car and try to fix it himself. Then it was off to the Toyota dealer to pick up the parts for another eternal car that’s been sitting there on my to-do list but finding me sans available parts.
I wanted to go home right there. I think it was almost 3:30 by then, and I still had to drive to Fayetteville, meaning I was going to get there by nearly the time I should be finishing up the day. I was sorely tempted to head home, but I headed south. I put a starter in a 2009 Saturn Vue. The lady was grateful. I tend to do a lot of teaching about cars and whatnot with my customers, explaining how things work, and sometimes, with cars like this Saturn Vue, I give the warnings for the major repairs that are almost certainly near on the horizon. Not a happy thing to communicate, but I think it’s helpful for people to be aware of what’s likely coming down the pike.
After that, again I wanted to go home. It was about 6 at that point, and here was this eternal car (today was the day of eternal cars, it seems (the first car had been waiting for me for a couple weeks, I think). The third car (the one I’m about to talk about, has been waiting for me to finish the car for over a month, waiting on parts). I really didn’t want to do the job today, not at all, honestly, but I forced myself over there, and I got it done. Someone had stolen his truck and busted up all the ignition parts, so I was finishing putting it all back together and getting him going. He wasn’t in town, but he’d left me with his key back in December, so I got it opened up and put back together, and going.
Scared me a good bit when I started it up. I’d forgotten that someone had stolen his catalytic converter as well, so when I finally got it back together and started, it was like an angry lion on a bull horn. Startled me pretty good.
Sounded pretty cool, though. 🙃
From there it was home, dinner, and working more on finance stuff. It’s almost 1:30. I have four cars left to finish before leaving next Monday. Weather is turning very sour very soon–rain starts Tuesday, goes to Wednesday. Then the crazy cold. Gonna be low single digits for lows, though I haven’t checked the weather today, so you never know, could change to anything in this part of Arkansas. So unpredictable. Being the weather person around here has to be the easiest job. It changes so fast that not even the current weather and temperature is right sometimes. 😂
Well, folks, I best be gettin’ to bed. I’m still makin’ progress–little by little.
Loves and hugs.
Lift the World.
~ stephen
Lift the World 
Happy Year of the Tiger!
😊😊😊