It has been a day. 😶
I got up pretty much immediately began to finish transferring all of my tools and supply from my backup Dodge van to my Ford that just had the transition rebuilt.
I had paid for my nephew to get a new bed for his truck with the understanding that he was going to work off the money that I gave him, and today was the day he was to begin. The job I needed him to do first off was to sand the rust off my backup work van.
So I got everything transferred from the one and over to my other one, then I dropped the beater Dodge over at my nephew’s place. After walking home, I headed out to go to my first job.
The guy who rebuilt the transmission told me to check the fluid for the next few days or so, so I pulled into AutoZone to buy some fluid is to be ready, and then I checked the transmission fluid level, and there wasn’t a drop reading on the dipstick.
So instead of going to my job right away, I spent the next probably 30 minutes in the parking lot checking fluid levels, adding more, checking in, adding more, etc.
It was two quarts low.
Then I realized that I something at home that I needed, so I drove all the way back home. After getting what I had forgotten, I’m starting to drive back out to go to my first job, but on the way, the transmission gave out.
Yeah, that transmission. The one I just barely had completely rebuilt.
Ugh.
I managed to look at
I managed to limp it home, but then I had a dilemma: I had a day of work ahead of me, one screwed up van that I couldn’t you at all, one beater van that my nephew was supposed to work on to make more presentable as a work man, and then I had my third stringer, a 1998 Dodge ram 2500 van that was an absolute mess–broken exhaust so that it pretty much deafening when you put the gas on, super squishy brakes, a bad wheel bearing, super loose suspension, and on and on.
So, what was I to do? Do I cancel all of my jobs for the day and leave people hanging in the lurch? Or do I go back up to my nephew’s house, transfer all my tools back over to my old Peter van that he was supposed to work on, tell him that I can have him work on it today because everything just fell apart for the day and it will have to do it another day and use that van for the day, or do I go get my 3rd stringer Dodge 2500 double beater van, and try and make that one work for the day?
I’ll give you a moment to decide what you think I chose to do. 🤔
I bet you guessed it: I walked over to where my third stringer has been parked, fired it up, drove over to where my Ford van was, crawled underneath to see what the damage to the exhaust was going to take to fix, decided I could probably fix it in the AutoZone parking lot with a bit of creativity, spent the next 30 minutes or so transferring tools and supplies over to little mister third string, and then drove away–destination AutoZone.
Once at AutoZone, I started removing temporary repairs that hadn’t worked that someone else had tried to fix it with. I had to disconnect the exhaust the entire way from the catalytic converter back to the end of the tailpipe in order to have the room I needed to get the parts apart and to put the new parts on.
One of the reasons I like doing my repairs, at least those kind, if not all, in the autozone parking lot is that I’m right next to my source of parts. Because they know me, they let me walk outside with parts without paying for them so I can match them up with my vehicle.
Gratefully, I was able to find a connecting piece that would fit over the broken pieces of the tailpipe and the catalytic converter. I had to take a grinder to the catalytic converter to cut off a couple of flanges that were in the way of the pipe going over the top of them, but fortunately, that wasn’t a big deal (although, given the massive increase in the number of catalytic converters stolen in the last couple of years, I was a bit self-conscious being underneath my van, grinding on a catalytic converter, wondering who might call the cops on me 🙃).
Kind of funny that nobody did and nobody stopped me. That’s one of the reasons why people get away with stealing catalytic converters. I would guess that few people want the embarrassment of making the wrong call in situations like that.
Anyway, I managed to sledgehammer the part I bought onto the one end, realized I needed to cut about a half an inch off to get it to fit on properly, cut that half inch off, and slid it into place onto the catalytic converter. Because of how tightly it fit, I didn’t even have to put clamps on it, at least not for the temporary repair. I’ll put clamps on it another day and then I’ll probably cover the clamps and the fitting ends with exhaust weld material.
One of the bolts holding up the exhaust broke when trying to take it out, just so rusty that it snapped. Gratefully, I was able to find a bracket that would work, and gratefully the other bolt holding in the bracket didn’t break off, so I was able to use the same threads to hold up the new bracket that I used for the old one, only needing one bolt for the new one instead of the two bolts for the old one.
I fired up the van wondering how loud the exhaust leak might be since I hadn’t actually fully sealed it, just smashed it together, and it was super quiet!
🥳
Unfortunately, I realized that in my haste to leave, I had forgotten to transfer over some important stuff (all my clamps and tubes of various chemicals and a bunch of other stuff, so I went all the way back home for I think the third time after having left to go fix cars, got all those supplies, and finally got to my first job of the day about 2:30 in the afternoon.
Gratefully, every single one of my customers for the day was understanding and nice about may not really getting there on time.
I guess part of that is because the first customer was the only one who actually had a specific time. Either way, it was nice to not have angry customers.
I myself had been pretty angry, spending quite a bit of money to get my transmission fixed, only to have it be still broken with the same issue as before. I also found out that the guy who rebuilt my transmission didn’t use my same transmission to do the rebuild. He used one from the junkyard. When all you’re getting is new clutches and seals, that means you’re getting the valve body from the old transmission. The old transmission had 30,000 more miles on it than the valve body I had in mind, so I feel pretty screwed out of that as well.
I guess that’s what I get for going to a budget transmission guy, right? 🙃
Anyway, the first job of the day turned out to be exactly what I thought it might be. The car was cranking and not starting, and by the description over the phone, it sounded to me like it might just be a completely worn out engine that had bad compression. As I asked questions, I found out that the long cranks that it had taken to get started prior have been going on for a long time, and over time it just taken longer and longer and longer to finally get started.
The engine had over 300,000 mi on it, so it seemed pretty reasonable to me that it was just slowly wearing out, and the compression was getting worse and worse and worse until finally it didn’t have enough compression to even start it all.
When I got there, I didn’t really bother doing any testing other than hearing it crank for a handful of seconds, during which I heard the sound the engine made which tentatively confirmed my diagnosis of a lack of compression.
During the test, however, I was a little surprised because cylinder one PSI was 135. Then cylinder two was 180, so obviously cylinder one was bad, just not as bad as I thought it might be. But then came along cylinder 3 which only had 50 PSI for compression. Cylinder 4 had 190 or 195 or something. So… Worn out engine.
Man, I’ve had a lot of blown engines to diagnose these last few weeks. Pretty nutty.
The next car of the day was a 2011 GMC terrain that was dying sometimes when accelerating from a stop. It had three different codes, some of them overlapping codes, But after doing a bit of research on the codes for that car and seeing timing chain issues as one of the main causes, and having owned a GMC terrain myself and knowing full well that that particular motor had lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of issues with timing chains, I checked the oil, and cranked it up, and heard the familiar rattling of timing that’s going out. There wasn’t much point in my mind doing any further diagnostics because that’s an interference engine, so if the timing goes out, the engine is blown, so I told her she needed to get her timing fixed ASAP. When you do the timing on that one, you just replace all the timing components, and given the codes she had, replacing the timing components would almost certainly solve all of her issues and needed to be done anyway.
The third car was a 2010 Mercury Milan that had an O2 sensor code. O2 sensor codes are usually O2 sensor issues themselves, but there are several different causes for those particular codes. This customer, however, just wanted me to swap out the O2 sensor and not do any diagnostics, so I swapped out the O2 sensor, the old one being covered in oil, and called it good. It was then that I found out that the reason he wanted to change the sensor was because of a very loud noise that was happening when he went above 75 miles an hour.
A bad O2 sensor isn’t going to make a very loud noise going over 75. So he had two completely different issues. He had me listen to a recording he made of the sound, and it sounded to me just like maybe he had a loose splash shield flapping around in the wind, and my guess was that over a certain mile per hour, it no longer stayed stable and started flopping around, in this case 75 mph.
The splash shield was indeed loose, so that very well could be, and likely is, the issue.
Car number for was a 2008 Ford fusion, basically the same as that mercury Milan, and supposedly it was having starting issues. I went over there, ran scans on the car and saw 11 different check engine codes. One of the codes was a computer code that pops up when the computer recognizes it has a problem. If you have that particular code, there’s really only three things to do. First, you try and reset the system by disconnecting the battery and draining all the reserve power out of the modules so they have to reboot. Kind of like doing a full shutdown in full restart on your computer in order to get everything to reset.
That didn’t work.
The next thing you’re supposed to do is reprogram the computer, and the last thing to do if the reprogramming doesn’t work is to just replace the computer. Well, I found him a pre-programmed computer online for something like $160, and I taught him how to replace the computer himself, so that should save him a little bit.
Speaking of which, well I was doing the mercury Milan, I had one of the apartment neighbors of the guy whose car I was fixing come over and ask me what I would charge to replace the radiator in his Pontiac Grand Prix. He was afraid of taking the motor mounts off because when you do on that particular car the engine rocks backward. Being very familiar with that engine, or at least enough to know what happens having done it myself, and knowing that he was a DIY guy, I just told him how to deal with the motor mounts and the engine rocking back and how to get it back forward again.
He was super surprised that I was willing to teach him how to do it instead of just scheduling an appointment so I could get paid for it.
Lift the world, right? Don’t need to make money on every job, in fact, I’ve thought about making YouTube videos just to help people with the basic things. There are lots and lots and lots of YouTube videos out there, but I’ve never seen any that are detailed enough to really help people properly diagnose their cars. There are lots that give you most of the information, but there aren’t really any that I’ve seen that give you all the information. One of the things that I want to do is to help people be able to help themselves so that they can get where they want to go financially. People talk a lot about opportunities, and helping people fix their own cars can increase people’s opportunities, allowing them to use the same money they would have used for car repairs and to put it toward education, or investment, or some other thing. Obviously, not everyone will use the saved money to help them create a better future for themselves and their families and others, but all I’m interested in is giving people the opportunities, helping them recognize them, and then letting them do what they want to do with their opportunities. I’m not interested in trying to make people change. It’s about opportunities.
Anyway, so after teaching the guy who owned the fourth car how to replace his computer, looking up all the information for him and everything to make sure that he wouldn’t have to reprogram his keys and all that jazz, I headed off about 8:00 to the last car.
The last car was going back to that 2009 BMW 750Li. He needed more help with his shocks, so I spent the next couple hours helping him over there. It took a heck of a lot of effort, even with two people to get his new air struts in, but we were able to finally get it done, and I only charged him for an hour and 20 minutes or so and not over 2 hours, which was the amount of time that I had spent there. He gave me a tip, and that was nice.
I got home sometime after 11:00 and found that our internet had been out all day, so I did some unwinding with my phone instead of my computer, ate dinner, which is pretty much the only meal I’ve been eating for the last I don’t know how long, and then went to bed.
I’ve got some internal stuff going on. In reading my friend’s new blog posts, it’s really good to see that she and her husband and family seem to be doing really well and seem to be really happy. She seems like she loves her life.
It was nice to see myself happy for her, happy that she’s happy.
Truthfully, it’s also pretty hard, but maybe it’s what I need right now. It’s not as hard as it used to be, and it was really nice to see myself be genuinely happy for her even if there are a lot of mixed and conflicting emotions and a lot of history that I still don’t understand and still don’t know what to do with.
But I’m glad to see that part of myself poke its head through during even the most-challenging of experiences.
Hopefully, I can get it to be absolutely dominant and not just poking its head through.
Thoughts… 🙃
I think I’m forgetting stuff, but whatever.
Love you all. 😊
Lift the World
Oh, score one for that intuition/feeling thing. I was going to have my nephew remove the shelves out of my third string beater van the other day, and I just got a bad feeling about it like I shouldn’t do it. Well, fast forward to today, if I had had those shelves out, it would have made it a much more challenging day.
🤷
~ stephen
Lift the World 