Coming up on midnight tonight, and I’m tired–eyes are tired, and a yawn just came and went. I’m gonna crash here shortly, but can’t do that until I write here.
I slept in today, sleeping until about 9ish. I still didn’t get that much sleep because I didn’t even go to bed until about 3 a.m., so… sleeping in is sort of relative.
Got up, ate breakfast, and headed out to work. Still haven’t gotten used to my shaved face. Haven’t shaved since summer of 2020, I don’t think? But I shaved it yesterday, and looking in the mirror is a bit weird still.
Sorry, non sequitur.
Five cars today. First one was a fuel pump replacement on a 2000 Ford Excursion stretch limo. The job was relatively straightforward, except the tank had about 40 gallons, or so, of fuel in it, and I only had 4 5-gallon gas cans. So I had to get a little creative, using a huge tote I had recyclables in as a receptacle. Getting all the fuel out of the tank and getting the tank cleaned out was easily the longest part of the job. Overall, I think it took about 4 hours and 15 minutes, and I quoted 3.5 hours, so didn’t quite get that one right, but the massive amount of fuel was a challenge to figure out.
Anyway, second car was a 2006 Chevrolet Trailblazer that had a broken shift cable bushing. You know, it’s appalling to me that when a little plastic bushing brakes on these vehicles (and many others that General Motors makes), that you have to buy an entire new cable instead of just a cheap plastic bushing. I mean, what waste–in so many ways! So I put in a new cable, and that was that on that car. Then it was a no start that turned out to be a bad key. He’d bought a blank on Amazon and didn’t realize it had to be programmed, so he’ll get that programmed or put the innards from his other busted key in the new housing. That was a 2006 Honda Accord, I believe.
Fourth car was… right, a 2008 Saturn Astra that was running really crappily, leaking oil, and he said smoking out the tailpipe really badly. I couldn’t reproduce the smoke issue, the oil leak was from the valve cover, and the poorly running engine was from a bad valve cover (another joyous waste of so many things by General Motors). It used to be that PCV valves were little plastic $5 valves you could remove and install in like 2 minutes. General Motors? Oh, they decided to integrate the PCV system into the valve cover itself, so when it goes bad, you don’t just replace a $5 part in 2 minutes, you replace a mult-hundred dollar part that takes 1 to 2 hours.
I highly suggest boycotting or loudly verbalizing and sharing the distaste for such behavior. It’s… ugh. It’s wasteful. It’s greedy. It’s… yeah.
Anyway, I didn’t fix that one tonight because I thought he’d already had someone replace the valve cover and gasket, but I guess I was mistaken, so I’ll get him on the schedule to replace the cover.
Fifth and final car was a 2017 Hyundai Elantra with a blown motor. He said the engine was knocking a big, and when I got there, and he fired it up, it was so bad it was about to throw the rod through the case, it sounded like anyway. There were little glitters in the engine oil. Fortunately, he’s got the motor under warranty from Hyundai, so… hopefully, he’ll get a free engine out of the deal.
Filled up my CNG tank on the drive home, as always. Stopped off at the recyclers and recycled all the stuff I’d been collecting from the various jobs I’ve worked on–got that all divvied up into the appropriate bins, and here I am. I ate dinner, and now I’m gonna crawl into bed and crash.
G’night all.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 