Back at it bright and early. First car was a 2015 Dodge ram diesel that had suspension noises. I found that it had, after a long test drive and some crawling around diagnostics in the rain, then it had a bad wheel bearing and bad tie rods. It also needed new shocks.
The gentleman was a native Spanish speaker, so it was fun to practice my Spanish a little bit. But car talk isn’t my best arena for vocabulary, so it makes it quite a challenge to try and talk about what’s going on with a car when I don’t know the names of the parts in Spanish. 🙃
Second car was a 2016 Chevy Cruze that had an oil leak that she was concerned about. When I got there, I noticed right away that there was also a leak at her thermostat housing. Stupid Chevy Cruzes are designed to run insanely hot, something that I think is what causes all of the cooling system issues in those cars. Cracking plastic, blown head gaskets, hoses that leak and whatnot. Such crappy cars. Poorly designed. Just don’t understand how engineers come up with a designs they do when they are clearly not going to last. It’s one thing to have planned obsolescence. It’s another thing to design cars that are inherently crappy and are going to give you a bad reputation.
Anyway, next car was a 1998 Ford F1 50 that was having issues starting. My mind is completely blank on this one. Why can’t I remember?
Oh! That’s right. He had almost no coolant in it, and obviously had been filled with water because there was rust inside the overflow bottle and Rusty stains all over that side of the engine bay from people opening the system while it was hot and spraying hot rusted water everywhere.
I’m guessing that one has a blown head gasket as well. Poor guy. I’ve done work for him before and he bought this not that long ago, so it’s a new car for me to work on, but poor guy. 😕
His battery had been drained down, and what we found was that he had two parasitic draws. One for the horn, which wasn’t working, and one for his instrument cluster. The truck had been cobbled together with all sorts of things to make it work. They even had electrical connectors used for house wiring connecting some of the wiring in the car. 🙃
Wish I could say that was the first time I’d seen that. 😆
The next car was a 2004 Pontiac Sunfire that he said he heard a bang, and suddenly the car stopped going. Well, there was a very good reason it stopped going. I got there, found that there was no oil reading on the dipstick, started to put oil in, and after a couple of quarts of oil, I was putting in the third court, I looked under the car, and all the oil was just pouring right out the bottom under the ground. I jacked up the car and found that he had thrown a rod through the case. That was actually what I had suspected in the beginning when he first called me, but you don’t want to give that kind of a diagnosis over the phone when it means a motor is completely trashed. You want to make certain that’s what it is because customers’ descriptions often don’t match what is actually going on.
Anyway, another blown motor. 😕
Lots of those lately.
The last car, which I didn’t want to go to and didn’t have to go to because I had told him that it might end up being Monday, was a 2001 GMC Sierra that needed front brakes. Unfortunately, I forgot how much I hate doing breaks on those Chevy trucks. They designed the guide pins as one pin that goes all the way through, and so it’s easy to get guide pin grease all over everything. Specifically, it’s easy to get the grease all over the threads, and it’s not good to torque bolts that are covered in grease. It messes up the torque, and I wouldn’t feel confident that it’s going to stay tight, although it probably would because, well, I’m sure people get grease on those threads all the time.
Not only that, but the guide pin boots are press fits into the caliper, which makes them an absolute nightmare to put in without splitting them If you need them.
Inside of being just a quick pad slap, I think it ended up being like a 3-hour brake pad job. Just pads. Part of that was because the rubber boot inside one of the calipers, that I honestly didn’t even know existed until tonight, was damaged, and it took a while to figure out what was going on and that there was a boot inside there that was damaged. So he had to go to the store and go get more parts. I had been hoping to end the night early, as it had been a crazy hundred-hour week of work. I didn’t have to go to that last job. I didn’t want to go to that last job. But it was only 4 minutes away from my last one, and it didn’t make much sense to bump it to Monday when it was just right there.
Fortunately, I had a great conversation with the owner of the car pretty much the entire time that I was working on it, so that was nice. Nice guy.
By the time I got home, I was exhausted beyond exhausted. Long, 100-hour work week. Honestly, I don’t know how many hours, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was easily and possibly more than that.
(sigh)
Exhausted.
Good night!
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 