Another run and gun day. Seven cars, 10 billable hours. Rocked it pretty good. First car was a 2007 Hyundai Accent that had died while driving. But just as I was getting started, and had already been on the ground looking at stuff, I realized I had been right next to a snake curled up right on the edge of the driveway.
At first, I thought it was a copperhead, but it’s head wasn’t the right shape, and it wasn’t even feigning strike postures when I started to try to move it out of the way.
As best I can tell, it was a prairie king snake… probably 2-3 feet long. The customer wanted to kill it, but I got it moved to across the street… to the neighbor’s yard. 🙃
Back to the car… Turned out it had three loose belts, and one of them (the alternator belt) had snapped off because of it–breaking in half. The shop that had put the belts on just two months ago had neither properly tensioned the belts, nor were all the bolts even tight.
Oops.
So I replaced the broken belt, tensioned all three belts, and made sure all the bolts were tight.
One down.
Second car was the same customer, but this one was a 2011 Ford E350 van that wouldn’t start. This one was easy peasy, bad battery. He wanted to save a little bit, so I told him the best way to save the most money (not having me finish the job and getting the battery not from me but from the Ford dealer [which, believe it or not, is the cheapest place to get a battery here if you’ve got a Ford. Pretty nutty. Usually the dealer is really expensive with parts, but the Ford dealer here sells batteries at a great price.
Anyway, gave him a little path forward to save money, and then I headed out to my second job.
Car #3 was a 2012 Hyundai Genesis that was parked at the Hyundai dealer. He’d had it diagnosed but didn’t like the price quoted for the replacing the alternator, so he called me. Somewhat surprisingly, the Hyundai dealer was ok with me fixing the car on their property, so I did (for about $620ish).
Ran into some issues with the part (bad threads out of the box that I didn’t realize were bad until I’d almost installed it completely (which on that car is a bit of a pain), so I had to pull it back out of the car, get my tap kit, and redo the threads.
That wasted a good bit of time, but whatever. Got that one buttoned up, snagged some pallets from by the dealer’s trash dumpster (with their enthusiastic permission), and then I headed to car #4. That one was taking me back to the Avenger I put the fender on a couple days ago. It was a crank no start that, after some testing and checking and whatnot magically decided to start. The car had been in a small accident, and I’m wondering if maybe I reset something in the system when I manually powered on the pump with my jump box, because after that, it worked perfectly, every. single. time.
Go figure.
But hey, that meant car #4 was in the books.
Car #5 was a Chevrolet Tahoe that he just wanted me to put a battery in. The old battery was already out. He’d already bought the new battery. All I was doing was installing it.
Easy peasy. Done.
Car #6, thank you, very much. Car #6 was a 2010 Ford Taurus that wouldn’t start. The ignition wire post on the starter was damaged and wobbly, and as best I can tell (the car started working without me knowing exactly why it suddenly started working) the wobbly post might well have messed up the electrical connection internally and caused the issue.
Car #7 was a 2003 Hyundai Sonata (guess it was Hyundai day?). The belt had broken off. She had been begging me to come all day, and I finally got there about 8 p.m., and I waited… and waited… and I called and texted, but she didn’t answer. After 20 minutes, I finally decided to head home, but as I was driving away, I noticed that the car I was supposed to fix was in a different part of the parking lot. I’d driven past there. I’m not sure how I missed it, other than the car was about the same color as the parking lot asphalt.
So it had a broken belt, which was caused by the AC compressor pully bearing going out. But that wasn’t all, when I went to put the new belt on, I realized that the tensioner pulley was pressed up against the timing cover, causing even more issues.
So I pulled the tensioner off, cut away the damaged parts of the timing cover, put the tensioner back in, put the belt on (not necessarily in that order, as… the lovely design of this Hyundai 2.7 V6 motor in the Sonata required that I loosen up the tensioner to be able to get the belt behind it and where it was supposed to be.
Eyes are closing on me. Time for bed. Almost 1 a.m.
Gonna have some fun stories to share here starting in the next entries.
Love to all.
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 