Another early start gone to crap. 🤪
Went to the Hyundai sonata they needed the fuel pump, and one would have thought that it would have been a pretty quick and easy job. Didn’t have to drop the tank. Didn’t have to remove any seats. Just had to pull the junk out of the trunk, remove the spare tire covers, and go to town.
Good freaking gravy.
So, for whatever ridiculous reason, Hyundai decided to use a fuel pump lock ring with gaps in it instead of a solid one. They also decided to use one that was smaller than the standard lock ring, and since the fuel tank was set about 4 in below the ring access hole, and the access hole was only large enough to get the pump out, it took me like maybe an hour? Just to get the lock ring off.
Did I already say good freaking gravy? 🙃
Let’s just say that those three words were not part of my vocabulary during this Hyundai sonata fuel pump affair. 😅
Once I had the property off, I had to break the fuel pump just to get it out. 😶
Fortunately, though not super easy, putting the new one back in wasn’t anywhere near as hard as getting the old one out, at least as far as taking the pump out of the tank and putting the new pump back in the tank.
The lock ring, on the other hand, was a completely different story.
The new fuel pump came with a new lock ring. Bang, bang, bang, bang. I try to get and again and again to get it to go on, causing superficial damage to the tank itself as I tried.
After who knows how long of trying to get it on, and thinking I finally did, I realized that the new lock ring was too small. It had popped out of one of the retainers because it was a smaller diameter lock ring than the original.
The original was even harder to get on.
Gosh I hate how ridiculously engineers design cars and parts for cars. It’s absolutely asinine. You’re engineers. This is what you do for a living. The only reason I can come up with for how these parts can be so awfully designed is that it’s just on purpose. Make it harder. Require special tools for as many jobs as possible, so more jobs get back to the dealership.
I don’t think I finally got done with that job until something like 3:00 p.m. My first job of the day. What was supposed to be less than an hour job by labor hours. So after all that work, only got paid for my normal service call.
Ugh.
Did I mention that it was raining? 🙃
I had my canopy set up to keep me dry, but that didn’t stop the water that ran down from the top of the car around the curves and into the trunk area and then down along the bumper, so every time I leaned into the trunk, I got a crotch full of water.
It was lovely. 😶
My sailor came out full bore with that job.
The next job was a 1999 GMC Savana that was making some kind of a weird sound. I couldn’t get it to reproduce the sound at first, so I was going to just call it good.
But then just as I was about to leave, it started making the sound. I got out my stethoscope and tried to find the sound. The best I could come up with was that it was a pulley of some kind or the water pump. It sounded like it was coming from the idler pulley, so I replaced that, and the sound remained, so I put the old either pulley back on. I dug around a little bit more, and it seemed like maybe it was the water pump, but that was an expensive job, and I wasn’t 100% sure, but there did seem to be a little bit of play in the water pump bearing as well, and the coolant level was low, so that all seems to point a little bit towards water pump issues. So I gave her an estimate for a replacing the water pump, and headed off to my last job.
Only three jobs but a morning until night day. Not the most productive of days. 🙃
Gratefully, the last job was an easy one. The car wouldn’t start. He assumed that because the lights were on inside that it couldn’t be the battery, which is a common assumption, but it was the battery. For all of you out there, just because the lights come on inside the car does not mean the battery has enough juice to start the car.
So nice to have that job be an easy one.
Home. Dinner. Veg out. Sleep.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 