Forecast was for rain today, today and tomorrow– and lots of it. Flood watches and whatnot.
The first job was a 2014 Chevrolet Cruze that was overheating at stop lights and stop signs and drive-throughs and whatnot. That’s normally a telltale sign that the car’s fan has gone out, but in this case, he was lucky. He just had a hose that hadn’t been clamped tight enough that was leaking coolant, and it had gotten to the point where there wasn’t enough coolant in the system to keep it cool with low RPMs. So I tightened all of his hoses, verified the leak had been taken care of, and finished just as the rain started to sprinkle.
The second car was a 2007 Ford explorer that wouldn’t start. It had a relatively new battery, and the starter was only a month old, but it was from O’Reilly’s, and I’ve not had the greatest experience dealing with O’Reilly’s parts lately, having to change out quite a few of their bad parts that are on my customer’s cars.
I’m not going to say that AutoZone is any better, because they probably all use the same Chinese and Mexican factories and just slap different labels on the same parts, but it does seem to me that it’s more often O’Reilly’s parts that I’m having to replace.
Anyway, everything was pointing to a bad starter out of the box, but I wasn’t confident. The click was super loud like the starter was trying to engage but couldn’t, but I manually crank the engine over, I jumped the starter directly at the starter itself and not through the relay, and it was always the same result. It wouldn’t turn the engine over. So I pulled the starter out, bench tested it, and it tested beautifully.
Ugh.
So I put it back in, and when I put it back in I realized there was a possibility that the customer might have put his own starter in just a tad crooked. As I was putting it in, I noticed that it kept wanting to put itself just a tiny bit crooked, and I had to be really careful to hold it in the perfect way in order to get the bolts in without it slipping back to be a little crooked. So I put it in, cleaned off all the connections, jumped it again directly from the starter, and it crank the engine over just fine. So I put everything back together, and she fired right up.
I don’t know if it was because the starter had been in slightly crooked or if my cleaning all the connections made the difference, but she was good to go.
The next car was a pre-purchase inspection. The inspection was for a 2015 Chevy Sonic. Had I known that ahead of time, I would have saved him the trouble of going out to inspect the car. There’s no way on God’s green earth, But I will ever recommend any Chevy car to a customer– especially not a Chevy Sonic. Anything with that little 1.4 turbo in it is bad news in my opinion.
But since I didn’t know until I got there, I went ahead and did the inspection, found lots of issues that made it easy to say it was a bad car to buy anyway (for example, the trunk was misaligned, and so was the hood, indicating that it had been in at least one accident, If not multiple.
I emailed him a copy of my pre-purchase inspection sheet to help him make a better choice and be better prepared and save more money instead of paying me again and again and again.
I’m going to make some YouTube videos to help people, comprehensive stuff. I see lots of videos online to teach people how to deal with their car stuff, lots of great channels, but I haven’t really ever seen anything that’s comprehensive, especially for diagnostics.
It’s funny, if I had started making videos about car repair 7 years ago, I’d probably have a pretty massive YouTube channel by now. 🙃
But I don’t want to be locked into feeling like I have to do videos all the time.
Anyway, I only did one more car today, finishing out with a total of four. Haven’t done more than four since Monday. Pretty weird since I’ve been working so much, just not getting a lot done.
Anyway, the last one was a car that was stuck at a movie theater in Fayetteville that wouldn’t start. No crank, no start. Had plenty of battery voltage. But it wouldn’t do a thing. It was a 2013 Kia optima, I knew there was a chance it had a bad engine. From I think 2011 or 2012 until like 2019, the Hyundai and Kia 2.4 engines were absolute trash. Poor manufacturing caused internal problems that ruin the engines. And for at least some of those years, they extended the 100,000 mi warranty to 150,000 mi for the engine.
Anyway, she was super super low on oil, so it took two and a half quarts just to get her into the safe range. Which means she only had one and a half to two quarts in the system. I tried to manually turn the engine over by hand, but it wouldn’t crank.
Bad sign.
I loosened the belt to check all the pulleys to make sure it wasn’t just a seized up AC compressor or something like that, but nope, all the pulleys were spinning just fine.
Seized engine. 😕
She might be able to get a free engine out of the deal, though, with that extended warranty. A quarter didn’t have to 2 quarts of oil, though not good for the engine, shouldn’t be low enough to seize the motor, I wouldn’t think. It’s a fairly common thing for me to go out to cars that have super super low oil levels and are just fine.
If I had to guess, I would guess that it was the motor issue that those cars had and not the oil level, but it’s only a guess. I let the customer know about the possible extended warranty and also that I didn’t know whether it was the motor issue or the low oil issue but thought that probably more likely was the motor issue.
Anyway, that was the day. I was worn out and could have done more cars, but nothing was promised, and so I headed home at a relatively decent hour, getting home somewhere around 7:00, I think. I stopped off before I went home to get some parts for a family member’s car I’m going to be helping with.
Oh! I finally bought some shoes!
My shoes were so worn out that the souls on the one pair on one foot had come completely apart, so my shoe was basically an open mouth with my foot sticking out. 🙃
The other one was similar, but had holes in the sole on the bottom, so anytime I stepped in anything wet, my feet were automatically wet even if it wasn’t deep enough to come in through the top.
So, I have cheap new Walmart shoes. 🙃
I bought some cheap Walmart basketball shoes as well, as I’ll probably start playing basketball with the old church group I used to play with when I was an active church member. I started playing with them again before I left on my trip for New Zealand, and I think I’ll do it again here once my joints calm down a bit more maybe. They might be calm enough at this point.
Mouse traps… Unfortunately my efforts to get humane mouse traps have completely failed–They are so humane that they can’t even catch the mice. 🙃
Not sure what the next step is going to be…
Let’s see, what else… Oh, the wipers don’t work on my favorite little work band. So that’s not so good. They’re stuck straight up and down, but it’s actually good that they are because the view on the left side of the driver side wiper is actually decent enough to see enough to not crash. 🙃
Anyway, home in a decent hour like I mentioned. Dinner. Vegging out a bit. And bed.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 