Hola, folks!
It’s been quite a sideways day today. I got up and left fairly quickly after getting up to go work on cars. First car was an issue with the key not coming out of the ignition with the customer having broken his gear shifter trying to force it out of park. (he was successful at getting it out of park, but at the cost of breaking an expensive part… and still, the key wouldn’t come out of the ignition).
I spent like 2 1/2 hours working on it, and in the end, I ran out of time and had to settle for making it easier for him to drive it and get his key back out but not… fixed. Add the 40-minute drive, and it was a lot of time, most of which I didn’t want to charge for, so I only charged the service call (the first hour).
Second car was… oh what was it… uh… Okay, just looked at my schedule to remind me. It was a 2009 Silverado with a busted window regulator. They didn’t want to pay for a new regulator, just wanting the window up. Usually, when I get a request like this, I have them get an old blanket or old towels and stuff the door cavity with those, forcing the window glass to stay up. Today, I had a new idea that would work with the particular design of this truck’s regulator assembly. I grabbed a hose clamp, unscrewed it, wrapped it around the part of the regulator the glass slides up and down on, raised the glass to the top, and tightened the clamp around the regulator just below the glass. That locked the glass in the ‘up’ position super solidly, no chance of even budging, and most wonderfully, no old towels/blankets needed.
Wahoo! 😊
That was my easy job of the day.
The next job, which turned out to also be the last, went sideways. And then sideways again. And again. and again. It was… ridiculous.
First of all, the customer wanted to provide the part, which… I don’t like because they often get the wrong part, and that messes up the day. I think I’m going to just start saying, “no” when people ask to provide their own parts. It’s… such a pain in the butt when they get the wrong parts, and it happens so frequently. I can easily understand why plenty of places have policies that they won’t use customer-provided parts.
I’m almost ready to adopt that policy. Almost.
Anyway, so the part they provided… wasn’t the right part. So I gave them the option, I can teach them to finish the job themselves (I’d done half of it before unboxing the part), or we could get a local radiator and finish the job (they’d ordered an all-metal radiator online, and all locally-sourced radiators are the regular plastic/metal combination).
They chose to have me order a local one and finish it up today, so I ordered one from my home store (Bentonville) to be picked up at the regional hub (Springdale). It’s very common for me to order from my home store to be picked up at another one because it makes it so much easier to keep track of, but sideways occurrence #2 for the day… my home store screwed up the order and instead of having it be a pickup at the store I requested, they ordered it as a transfer, so when my customer went to pick it up, there was no radiator paid for, so they just bought it themselves, which meant they paid more for it than if they had gotten it from me, they wouldn’t get my labor warranty since I didn’t provide the part, and I wouldn’t make any money on the part, since it wasn’t on my account.
Ugh.
I tried to get it taken care of over the phone, but they couldn’t do it, so they ended up going back to the store, and we tried it all again. They returned the part. I bought it on my account, and they brought it back. That meant they’d get my labor warranty. It would cost them less buying it from me, and I’d get to make a little bit on the part as well.
So that part was remedied.
Accept when they got back, I they didn’t bring the right coolant with them. They’d wanted to provide their own coolant, but they’d gotten the wrong kind, so while I was re-ordering the radiator on my account, I asked them to put three jugs of coolant on my account, as well (the right stuff). But when they returned with the radiator… they didn’t come with any coolant.
Ugh.
I called the store, and even though I told the store employee I wanted to order the three jugs on my account, he decided after he got off the phone that because the customer said she already had bought coolant that he wasn’t going to order the coolant I requested, even though I told him we had to buy coolant again because what she bought was the wrong stuff.
So… they ended up driving back to the store yet again to pick up the coolant they should have sold me in the first place.
Ugh.
So that was sideways #3, I think?
So then I put in the radiator, had to spend a lot more time filling the cooling system because I was trying to get out as much of the junk that was in the system as I could (blowing the coolant out of the engine as much as I could and not just leaving what didn’t drain out by gravity still in the engine). They’d put straight water in it as well as a cooling system sealant.
So, between having to work extra hard to fill the system anyway, it was even more challenging because it wasn’t building heat in the cabin with the heater on like I would expect, and I didn’t know if that was because of air pockets or because of the crap that might still be in the system clogging it up)
Please, don’t put cooling system sealant in a car to seal a radiator or water pump leak. Maybe for a heater core leak, but mostly, just use it as a last-ditch effort to seal up a head gasket issue. Please.
After getting it all together, I realized that one of the tranny cooler line fittings going into the radiator was leaking (which brought back a nightmare issue with another chevy truck where I had the same problem and spent hours trying to seal the darn thing on a Chevy Tahoe, I think it was.
I again spent a good little while trying to get it to seal, trying three different potential remedies before having the last one (regular teflon tape) doing the trick.
I think I spent something like four or five hours there for what should have taken about 2–max.
After all that was done, they had a quick question about one of their other cars, wondering if the people who changed the oil last didn’t tighten the filter all the way. I was teaching their recent high-school grad daughter about fixing the truck as I was doing that (she’s interested in being a helicopter mechanic and pilot), so I decided, why not, I’ll show her where the oil filter is, and we can do a quick check on it.
So we looked. The filter wasn’t loose enough to worry about, so I figured I’d do them a quick favor and see if it was leaking from the valve cover. So they popped the hood, and that’s when the fireworks began. They’d just bought the SUV (2002 Lincoln Navigator). First thing I noticed was they needed a new belt, as it was badly cracked. Then I noticed that the heater hoses were completely cut, the heater core having been bypassed (meaning the vehicle has neither heat nor defrost capabilities). Then I noticed that the coolant was low, and worst of all, when I opened the coolant reservoir, it had a nasty milky residue on top.
😬
Most likely a blown head gasket.
Poor lady.
Please, folks, when you find a car, and you’re ready to buy it, call a mechanic and have them look it over before you do actually buy it. It’s so worth it.
The last job of the day I forgot had rescheduled, so I was grateful to head home, as it was already after 8 by the time I finished that radiator job.
Got home around 9 ish, I think? Maybe a little later. And here I am, almost 2 a.m., just finishing up my entry for the day.
Part of me is regretting having broken my writing streak, but… oh well.
Haven’t had much luck getting the other phonetic people to be available for a meeting, so it might just be two of us this first time. We’ll see. Crossing fingers.
I’d better go to bed. It’s late.
G’night, folks!
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 