Good gravy! Has it been a week already?!?!?
Whoops!!!
Business gas had me slammed–so many calls I am losing lots of jobs just because I can’t get to them quickly enough. That’s nice because the back account is breathing a sigh of relief!
It’s nice to have money going back into the account instead of watching the account drop precipitously.
🥳
See, I have a week to catch up on…
I’m just going to write it all in this post.
I guess we’ll start with gratitude, because that’s probably going to be a good way to start most of the time. 😊
- I’m grateful to have it be raining today. I have plenty of cars that could have kept me busy, but I’ve worked so many days in a row, including two straight Sundays, now that I’m ready for a day off, and a rainy day is a reasonable day to take off. Yesterday felt like a Saturday, but it was a Monday. 🙃
- I’m grateful that my business has been very busy lately.
- I’m grateful that my toes are mostly healed back up. My big toe that started the whole mess is still messed up for whatever reason, but the rest of everything is mostly cleared up now.
- I’m grateful that my van is still running and doing just fine. It’s still ugly as ever, and one of these days the column shifter isn’t going to let me change gears, but it still gets me where I’m going, even if I do feel the need to send apology texts in advance for how blasted ugly my old rust bucket is. I thought about writing a message on the side that says something like “If I can keep this one going, then certainly I can keep yours going!”
- I’m grateful that my stomach acid heartburn whatever issues, GERD, have been a bit better lately. I’ve been experimenting with a few things, and I think I might have found some things that are helping it.
- I’m grateful that my knees and hips have been improving. They’re still regular pain, but they’ve been better the last week or so, with no days where it’s been significant pain all day. 🥳
- I’m grateful to be able to be getting some things done here around the house today. The house has been pretty much falling apart while I’ve been working so many hours. 😬 But today is progress. 😊
I’ll call that good for the moment. 😊
Let’s see… Do I want to give you a rundown of the last several days of cars? That’s pretty much the only thing that I’ve done over the last week. Fix cars. Work on taxes. 🙃
On the 8th, I just did one car, a 2011 Honda Pilot with some weird electrical issues. I was able to figure out a handful of things for them, and I wasn’t able to reproduce the other issues that they wanted worked on, if I’m remembering correctly.
On February 9th, I did four cars, a battery for a Jeep compass, a flat tire repair on a 2013 Ford escape a diagnosis for a crank no start on a Nissan pickup truck, which turned out to be really bad distributor cap, and a brake hose replacement on a 2016 Ford edge.
The owner of the Ford edge was from Ukraine, really nice lady, and interesting to talk to about everything that’s been going on. It was also kind of funny because her husband called and made an appointment with me, and she also is coworkers with my Hill sister-in-law, who recommended me. She had said she’d give me a call if the person her husband hired didn’t work out, but we were the same person… so… It worked out. 🙃
As I’ve been getting back into the swing of things, I’ve accidentally undercharged on a bunch of different things, forgetting what all since jobs take to get done, so I’ve been doing a bit of extra work and not billing for it, but some of the people that I’ve accidentally undercharged have given me decent tips, so that helps a little bit. 😊
On the 10th, I did three cars a 2005 Chevy Silverado that cranked but wouldn’t start. That one turned out also to be a really really bad distributor cap. I ended up stuck at the hotel where they were for quite a while because the credit card that they had given their boss to give to me was expired, so I had to wait for like an hour before I was able to get the payment taken care of, but at least I got it taken care of and got paid. I’m always nervous about doing jobs and hotels because so many of the people who ask for help from a hotel in the past haven’t paid. I even had one customer a few years ago who got arrested literally just before I was about to take payment from them for the job I was working on, so I never got paid. 🙃
Needless to say, hotel jobs have proven themselves to be high-risk jobs. Gratefully, the last couple I’ve done have paid.
The second job was a 2018 Jeep compass that was having all sorts of weird issues, burning oil quickly, odometer flashing the mileage instead of holding it solidly, starting issues, etc. I was able to fix the odometer flashing issue even after the dealership couldn’t figure it out. That felt pretty good. 😊
The last job was a Honda Accord. I honestly can’t even remember… Oh yeah, alternator. I replace the alternator form in the parking lot of a financial place.
I did five cars on the 11th, and I took my nephew Stevie along with me as a helper more to help him out than to help me out, but it was nice to have him along.
First job was a rewiring job with squirrel chewing damage, but the part that I bought wasn’t the right part, so I wasn’t able to do the job. The first job we actually got to do was a 2009 Honda Pilot that died while driving and then wouldn’t restart, wouldn’t even crank. It had all the power it needed to, and the starter sounded like it was bad, but having a starter kill a car while it’s driving is such a rare issue that only happens if there’s a significant short that I ignored that and tested other things doing my best to try and figure out what on Earth was going on. After a long time of testing other things that seemed more reasonable, I finally relented and looked into the starter as a possible cause, and I found that the ground strap between the solenoid on the starter and the body of the starter was fried.
Go figure… So it had a bad starter, even though it didn’t really make sense to me.
Second car was a BMW X1 that needed a battery, so we swapped that out. Third car was somebody who had gotten in an accident and needed to know how bad the damage was, so I went and found a completely mangled lower control arm on the front passenger side. Fourth car was a Subaru legacy outback that supposedly had a really strong smell of gasoline. She’d had someone else come to fix the smell, but she said she thought they made it worse. But when I went out there, I couldn’t reproduce the smell at all, so I just inspected a lot of the rest of her car, gave her a list of things to pay attention to for the future, and we headed out. Fifth car was going out to the Dodge truck that I had diagnosed a week or so ago that needed a new fuel pump. Started working on it with stevie, and before I even got started I accidentally smacked myself in the face with the Jack handle giving myself one of those really deep cuts right between my eyebrows. It’s kind of funny, but the cut was right perfectly along a wrinkle, so at first, before the blood started flowing out, it almost just looks like part of the wrinkle, until you pulled it apart and realized it was really deep and started blood running down. 🙃
“Chicks dig scars, right?”
The last car was a 2010 Mazda 6 that they said needed a belt, but again, as my regular readers are aware, cars don’t just break belts. 95% of the time if the belt is broken or shredded, something else has caused that to happen. It was no different this time: the tensioner pulley had completely seized up, the powerful engine had kept the belt spinning around and around and around heating the belt up until it was deformed and shredding.
Sunday the 12th I ended up working, doing five jobs. I went to a 2000 Toyota tundra that wouldn’t start, and found that it had a bad fuel pump. I made an appointment to fix it another day. Then it was a 2014 Ford focus that a gentleman needed help putting a new brake caliper on. He had already done a lot of the other work, but he wasn’t sure how to do the brake caliper, so I swung by, swapped the caliper out for him, bled the brakes and was on my way. After that it was back to that 2010 Mazda with the belt tensioner issue. Swapped out the belt tensioner, tried to replace one of the other pulleys that was making a little bit of a grinding noise, but for the life of me couldn’t loosen the bolt and was afraid of snapping something off or rounding the bolt head. Didn’t want to risk that, so I didn’t replace the pulley like I had planned to.
Next car was a 2012 Toyota Prius that wouldn’t start, and I got there after dark, but gratefully, it was just a battery, the 12 volt kind, that needed to be replaced and not the main hybrid battery.
Last car on the 12th was a 2013 Hyundai Elantra. It had a weird issue where it would start and everything would work except for the dashboard wouldn’t light up, and the shifter wouldn’t get out of park. Gratefully, my identifix membership had some entries from other mechanics who had run into that issue and posted about it. Turns out that the instrument cluster itself shorts out, and that shorts out the shifter as well. After removing the instrument cluster, it lit itself back up, and started working again, and I explained everything to the customer, what they would need to do to have it repaired if they wanted to repair it, and what they would need to do to be able to drive the car if it decided to do the same thing again (how to bypass the shift lock assembly, and get it out of park and into drive, etc).
Yesterday was another super busy day, doing six cars. I pretty much wake up in the morning, fix cars, come home late, eat, try and get tax stuff done, go to bed, wake up, do it again. 🙃
And the night before, I had stayed up late cleaning two gas tanks for the two fuel pump jobs I needed to do finish yesterday.
Anyway, yesterday I was absolutely slammed once again. Turning down jobs because I didn’t have time, etc. First job was a 2017 Isuzu NRR. Somebody had put a tow strap around the brake line and torn it, so they ordered the parts, and I got it replaced for them. That one took a little bit longer because I don’t have any service information for medium duty trucks. It’s a little nerve-racking working on the bigger stuff, because it just feels like there’s more riding on it, so to speak. 😁
After that, I put the gas tank back in the 2000 Toyota tundra. That job dragged on quite a bit longer than it should have because he didn’t tell me not to lock his truck, so when I got there, I couldn’t open his truck and had to Jimmy rig inside. Then, as I was leaving, I noticed that he had coolant leaking as well, so I didn’t feel good about leaving him with a truck that was now running, but wasn’t able to actually be driven, but I didn’t want to charge him anymore because he was already borrowing the money to pay me to do the job, so I ended up staying longer just working for free.
Already quite a bit behind, I headed out to do the next gas tank job that’s been waiting on me for several days. When I got there, I figured it would be a quick slap in and be done because I had already cleaned out the tank installed the fuel pump and just needed to get there and bolted up, but my heart sank when I looked at the fuel pump and realized that the new pump didn’t come with a new retainer clip to connect it to the fuel line, and I had just barely taken the old pump out of my van before I drove away from the house in the morning because, who needs the old bad fuel pump?
Right.
Aftermarket clips tend to not be trustworthy, popping apart fairly easily in my experience, but gratefully, after looking through the extra parts that I carry with me, I found the exact clip I needed. 😊 Yay!
I really was not looking forward to having to tell the customer that I was going to need to delay fixing his truck yet again because I didn’t have that little clip.
Phew!
After that I went to a 2005 Ford f150 that had the steering wheel so locked up that the key wouldn’t turn. He had already tried the little tricks of jiggling the steering wheel while you wiggle the key, but he couldn’t get it unlocked. I tried myself for 5 or 10 minutes with no luck before deciding to start taking apart the steering column. However, after deciding I was going to take everything apart, I decided to give it one more go, and instead of quickly jiggling the steering wheel back and forth or pulling it all the way to the one end, as the tricks go, I decided to very slowly turn the wheel the little bit that was able to turn, and gratefully, it allowed me to turn the key and start the truck. 🥳
That was nice not only because I was able to get his truck back going again, but it was also nice because it only took probably 15 minutes, and being so behind from how long all the other jobs took today, it was nice to have a quick one. It was almost dark, and I still had three more cars on the schedule.
The next job was that 2009 Honda Pilot that died while driving and then that I found the fried ground wire on. So I replaced the starter, which was absolutely a bear. The starter was in an awkward place that I never done before on one of those, and it fought me every step of the way. Not only that, but Honda decided to put a gasket between the starter and the transmission, and having it be in such an awkward place facing down with a whole bunch of crap in the way, it probably took me an hour or more just to get the starter properly in position after having removed the old one.
I was… not happy. 🙃
Then, after getting it all back together, what would I find? It still wouldn’t start.
😶
I ended up spending nearly 4 hours, I think, on that dumb SUV replacing the starter and then trying to figure out what on Earth was still wrong with it. What would cause the car to die while driving AND fry the starter?
Somewhere around 9:00 at night, with two cars still left on my schedule, I threw up the white flag, charging them only to replace the burned out starter but not for any of the additional time that I spent working on it.
It’s a mess. And I was at a complete loss.
The next car, which turned out to be the last car of the night because I postponed the next one because my headlamp burned out and wouldn’t recharge, and it was 10:00 or so by the time I finished the last job.
Anyway, the last job was a 2005 Toyota Camry that he thought had a blown head gasket because he said the oil was really milky. Turns out that the oil was completely clean and looked extremely fresh, the coolant was pristine, and the reason he was losing coolant appeared to be because he had a bad radiator cap which was allowing coolant to just continuously flow out of the radiator into the overflow, and that was likely causing coolant to be pushed out of the overflow bottle and onto the ground.
So after thinking he had a catastrophic problem with his vehicle, it turned out to be perhaps one of the simplest fixes he could have hoped for. 🥳
And there you have it. That’s the last week. I haven’t really done much else but fix cars and do paperwork stuff. I’m sure there’s more than I’m not remembering that it’s probably important to write, but it’s just not coming to my brain. It’s pretty much just been cars cars cars. 🙃
I’m going to post this now for the last week, and then I’ll post another one tonight for today… hopefully. 🙃
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 