I was totally dragging today. 🙃
I guess you could say it was a bit of a burnout day.
Honestly, I don’t even remember how it started. I just know that I was just not in the space to work today. I spend time just hanging out in autozone in Bentonville. Just chatting with people because I didn’t want to go out and work.
Gratefully, I realized that some of the people I had on my schedule were people that I had said either today or tomorrow, so I was able to bump them to tomorrow. 🥳
The first job was a 2000 Infinity QX4 that she wanted a knock sensor replaced on. She said it wouldn’t start, and someone I guess told her that it was the knock sensor that was causing it not to start. The reality, though, was that she wasn’t getting any spark.
So, she being someone who really didn’t want to call for mechanic anyway because she always fixes her cars herself, I told her to just go ahead and replace her distributor and not just the cap and rotor, so that should get her going, and that should be a lot cheaper than what it would have been. If she paid me to replace the knock sensor. She’ll save many hundreds of dollars.
🥳
It was really nice to be able to have a good reason not to do that huge job. I would have been at that car for probably 6 hours doing that knock sensor job. Yay!!!
That makes us both happy, especially for me when I’m on a day where I’m dragging.
Next job was a 1999 Jeep Cherokee that was a no crank, no start. She had already replaced the battery, and given her description, it sounded like a bad starter, so I brought a starter with me.
As expected, it did turn out to be the starter, but unfortunately, the remanufactured starter that I brought with me had the bolt hole and threads drilled diagonally, so I couldn’t use the starter.
Ugh. 😶
Additionally, the bolt hole in the starter used a different thread pitch than the bolt hole in the block.
😶😶
Gratefully, the AutoZone that was nearest to me had another starter available, and double gratefully, they actually had a commercial program that had started, so they were able to deliver me another starter.
For as long as I’ve been a mechanic, that store has not had a commercial operation, so it was pretty sweet that they finally do now right when I needed it most. 🥳🥳
Triple gratefully, the next job that I had to do on my schedule was literally like six houses down from the one I was working on that had the bad starter out of the box, so I was able to go over to that job.
Quadruple gratefully! 🙃 That job turned out to be a simple battery replacement job, so I swapped out the battery, and I got back to the other job with the new starter having been dropped off for me while I was gone.
🥳🥳🥳
It was very nice to have that on a day where I was already dragging and dreading having to drive all the way to the parts supplier and back because they had another part that was bad out of the box because of bad threads.
Unfortunately, I still had to fight through the bolt problem, because even the new starter still had a different bolt thread pitch then the bolt that came out of the truck itself. The old bolt was stripped and a different thread pitch anyway, probably because they tried to force the wrong bolt into the hole.
Gratefully, I keep my trusty little stash of bolts of many different shapes and sizes, I couldn’t find the right size that I needed, but gratefully again, I was able to use my grinder to cut off a bolt that had the right thread pitch but was too long. Long. I cut off the extra threads with my grinder, smoothed out the edges, and managed to make a fully functional bolt of the correct length and correct thread pitch.
🥳🥳🥳
Oh, did I mention that it turned out to be a really really really really, really really bad idea to eat those crackers?
Not sure exactly what caused the issue, thinking maybe salt in the crackers, but my stomach esophagus acid. Whatever issue returned with a vengeance this morning. It’s been bad all day.
Ugh.
Apparently, not very smart on my part.
🙃
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 