Hey all, sorry for the un-thought-through April Fool’s joke. Even my poor mother, who lives in the same house here and was home got a tad taken by it.
Probably should have done something a bit less… serious?
😬
I’ll be better next year. 🙃
I’m awake again early after going to bed again late. My body is just waking up without getting enough sleep and being wide awake. Not sure what the deal is. It’s like suddenly it’s decided that between five and six hours of sleep is enough.
Maybe I’m finally old-people sleeping?
Maybe it’s the stomach acid issues. Maybe it’s the billion things on my mind. Maybe it’s that I think I’ve got at least one and possibly two torn rotator cuffs.
(That trip to New Zealand is getting more and more expensive. 🙃)
I’m tired 😴.
It was a long day yesterday, not getting home until around 11:00 or so I think.
And a long day on little sleep.
But I’m here. 😊
Let’s see, I was up early and out quickly and off to my first job. The first one was a 2019 suburban that I put a battery in last week way down at the Fayetteville airport. I got there later than I had hoped, but it turned out that was a good thing because the person who had the keys to the vehicles I needed to look at didn’t arrive until 9:00 a.m., so I would have just had to have waited longer had I gotten there earlier.
I worked on putting in a battery quick disconnect because they drive those vehicles so infrequently that the batteries get drained down. I had tried, if you remember, to put in a battery quick disconnect, the same that I had previously installed, last week, but the new battery was a slightly different size and made it impossible to install properly.
So I went online and found a different style of quick disconnect that I hadn’t seen before, one that should be perfect, waited for it to arrive, and when it did, was ready today to do the job.
Unfortunately, though it was a brilliant idea, the new battery quick disconnect style had two inherent flaws.
Did I mention it frustrates me that people even sell stuff that they know is junk? Like those paint rollers that leave so much lent that it’s almost as if they leave more lint than paint. Why would you even make those?
And in this case, why would you even make a product that has a design flaw so egregious that it makes it so the designed function and purpose of the product can’t be fulfilled?
Anyway, the quick disconnect fitting was so loose that when you unscrewed the knob to disconnect the power to the vehicle, the fitting was floppy and would just flop back over and touch the part you just unscrewed, creating a brand new connection That allowed power back to the vehicle.
😶
So that was designed for law number one.
Design flaw number two was at the metal was so weak that the amount of force needed to tighten the cable end to the new fitting cracked 1/2 of the fitting completely.
😶
Fortunately, I had two quick disconnect assemblies, so I cannibalized the good one to replace the broken part on the other one, knowing now that I had to hold the floppy piece in place when I tightened it because it couldn’t handle the stress of having lateral pressure put on it while it was being tightened. I also took some epoxy and epoxyed the internal rotating component to the metal shaft so that it couldn’t flop itself back against the quick disconnect portion of the assembly and reconnect power.
Gratefully, that all worked as I hope that it would, which created a fully functional quick-disconnect setup for the customer.
🥳
The second car was a 2008 Ford focus with the p0128 code, which 95% of the time is a stuck open thermostat.
It was an absolute beast.
There were only three bolts holding the thermostat in, and I could access all three without having to take anything else apart, but getting the hoses disconnected from the housing was an absolute nightmare, and then when I finally got the part put together back in, you’re supposed to torque the bolts to 89 lbs. Well, The housing cracked at 48-in pounds.
So… All that work, and feeling like I was finally done with the nightmare, and crack!
Back at square one.
I… Wasn’t happy.
Gratefully, I was able to have another part delivered to me, so I tried to make myself productive while I waited, cleaning up what I could clean up, doing other productive things, etc.
Got the new part. Installed it. And then got to deal with a car that didn’t want to accept coolant.
Good gravy.
It’s possible it’s got a clogged radiator or something, but the heater worked just fine, so it would be odd for the radiator to be clogged but not the heater core.
Who knows.
The car seemed to be working fine and getting up to temperature just fine once I finally coaxed enough coolant in it for it to have what it needed.
By the time I finished that job, I think it was already something like 4:00, and I still had I think six cars on my schedule left.
😶
Not how you want the day to go. 🙃
Car number three was a Suzuki Grand Vitara, one that’s been blowing the stoplight fuse over and over again. I went over, and I followed wires and all sorts of things, but no matter what I did and no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find any reason for the short in the system that was causing the fuse to blow, not anything concrete anyway.
I readjusted the break switch, just to see if that would make a difference. I found that the rear passenger tail light assembly wouldn’t fully plug in to the car because, as best I can tell, since the vehicle had once upon a time been in a rear and collision, they assembly no longer fit properly and couldn’t snug itself down properly. It left me wondering if maybe water would get inside and short out the bulb housing enough to blow the fuse?
Who knows? I spend an hour there but charged him for less than an hour’s worth of work. I gave him some instructions for the future, and headed off to the next car.
The next car was a Nissan Maxima with a busted oil pan. I went over there, but they didn’t have a gasket for the pan that they had purchased. Technically, I think the original came with just gasket maker as the gasket from the factory, but I’m not comfortable doing that job with just gasket maker again. Give me a gasket, thank you very much.
So I did a good bit of the work, but we rescheduled for tomorrow.
The next car after that was a 2011 BMW 5 series that needed a door actuator replaced. Super nice lady. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the job done. I got the first trim panel piece off, but the second trim panel piece wouldn’t come off. The left side would pop off like it was supposed to, but the right side wouldn’t come. I gave it all the force that I dared, but it just wouldn’t come off. She gave me permission to give it even more force, and I gave it more force than I was comfortable with, and it still didn’t break, but it still wouldn’t pop out like it was supposed to. It was like somebody had glued it in or something. So I politely threw up the white flag, didn’t charge her anything, even though I was probably there for close to an hour, and headed to the next job.
Gratefully, the next job, and no start owned by a previous customer, turned out to just be bad battery cable connections, super corroded. I cut off the bad sections, installed a new cable end on the one end, and it fired right up.
The next car was a 2014 Chevy Cruze that also wouldn’t start. No crank, no start. Turns out that when they replaced the battery, they didn’t tighten down one of the many power cables. So I tightened down a nut on the positive side, I tightened down a nut on the negative side, and after working on the car for 60 seconds or so, it fired up. 🥳
I looked at a few other things for them, and I walked them through how to effectively purchase a used vehicle, and headed out. They were super grateful and had already given me a five-star review before I even got home.
Of course, I still hadn’t gotten home because I still had another job I needed to go to in centerton. So I drove to the last job, getting there sometime around 10:00, I think. It was a Lexus that was a crank no start, and I knew pretty much immediately exactly what the problem was as soon as he handed me the key. He had lost the innards to the key.
Modern car… Can’t start it without the key innards. They’ve got computer chips, and if the computer chip isn’t present, the immobilizer will… immobilize the car. 🙃
I looked at a few things for him as well besides that, and he was happy, and I left my last job I think about 10:30 or so.
I am grateful that the rest of the jobs were all pretty quick jobs after that brutal one. That made it so I was able to get to all eight cars, even though I only charged for seven of them, with steep discounts on two or three of them.
After going to the last job, and seeing that I was close to the tranny shop where I dropped off my van, and having realized that the big stain on my gravel driveway was from transmission fluid, I went back to the tranny shop, crawled underneath my van, and found that fluid was leaking quickly from The transmission pan. Why? Well, because it was missing a bolt, and I could see that the threads inside the transmission were damaged. I’m guessing that he probably stripped out or damaged several of them so that the pain couldn’t be tightened down. Not only that, but I found metal shavings in the bell housing. There was no access plate for the bellhousing, he not having put that back in apparently either, and I ran my finger inside to see if there was any fluid inside the bellhousing, and it came out with a bunch of metal shavings.
So, not only did this guy mess me over, but he may have damaged my engine as well in the process.
Lesson learned.
I see it all the time with customers of mine who find “mechanics” on Facebook. They get crap work, and I have to clean up the mess.
I guess it was my turn. Tried to save a buck, possibly lost thousands in the effort.
Dishonest crooks. Just boggles my mind how people can be so selfish.
I hate money. So sick of it. So sick of needing it to survive. So sick of needing it to be able to do what I want to do in my life.
I hate money.
Anyway, I went home, and gratefully, for the first time in a long long time, managed to not waste my life in front of us a TV show or movie.
A good portion of you who read my blog know that I have been cycling between staying away from TV and movies and then getting depressed and coming back.
I don’t want them to be a part of my life.
It’s funny, I’m only 41, but I don’t measure life the same way that I used to. I measured it in time. And there’s a bit of an anxiousness to it. Not a lot. But I’m watching my life fly by. I feel like I have so little time left, and I’m wasting it? Wasting it on TV and movies? When I could be making a difference…
(sigh)
I’m human, and I make mistakes, but wasting my life is, to me, one of the costliest mistakes that I can make in my life. I only have one life, and it’s going so blasted quickly.
So last night I ripped myself away from that addiction.
Cross your fingers for me that may be finally I’ll be able to leave behind all of those self-medicating escapes that Rob my most precious resource, the little time I have left in my life.
Throwing away what is priceless for that which is nearly useless if not damaging.
(sigh)
But I don’t have any strong feelings on the subject. 🙃
Eat, bed.
Oh! Yes, I think I’ve got poison ivy all over. 🙃 Face, arms, legs. I’m itching in a lot of different places. Hopefully, it won’t be too bad in any of them.
🤞
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 