I called it early-ish again today. 😊
Actually, I didn’t even start working on cars until noonish, I think. I spent the morning working on taxes, as I need to have everything to my accountant by Monday.
Gratefully, I was much better during 2022 at keeping track of everything and staying on top of things. They’re still a lot to do, but so much less than I had to do last year.
🥳🥳🥳
So yeah, I headed out sometime around noonish to go to the first car. Gratefully, it was an easy one. The young man had run over a rock and damaged the under shield. Honestly, it wasn’t a big deal at all. I wouldn’t even really thought twice about it myself, but he was concerned and bought the piece he needed, or so he thought, from somebody on eBay.
After taking off the old under shield, I started trying to put the new one on, but it was about 2 in longer than the old one, with the holes toward the rear just The tad out of place, so I couldn’t use it without Jerry rigging it.
So he asked me to put the old one back on, so I took a razor blade and cut out the part of it that was damaged so that it wouldn’t hang down since it couldn’t be held in by the fasteners, and we called it good. Don’t even really know why they put those under shields on. Pretty weird, honestly. We’ve gotten along without them for decades and decades and decades. Why put them on now?
That was a 2021 Honda Civic. The second car was a 2004 Honda Civic that was surging. He had replaced the idle air control valve himself because it was dying when he turned the AC on, or coming close to dying anyway. He had googled around and found that the IAC valve was probably the cause, so he had changed it. But after he changed it, the car had bad surging issues.
I tried to get it taken care of for him, trying to run some scans and get some things figured out, but my scan tool would stop every time I tried to run the service procedure for the idle air control valve. It would say that there was a check engine code that was prohibiting the service from being performed. So I looked at the check engine code, and I diagnosed the cause.
And had an issue with the part I’d never even heard of. Thank goodness for identifix and the mechanics who take the time to post the troubleshooting steps to diagnose things. Really grateful for those people.
Anyway, showed him how to replace the part, and send it on his way since it was a part that was in another city and wasn’t going to be able to be done by me that day.
The next car, the last one, was a 2009 Chevy Malibu. He had the check engine light come on again, apparently he’s had issues with this vehicle and is taken it to multiple different mechanics, and every time, the mechanics say they think they have it fixed, and every time the issue comes back. He’s been to Miguel’s shop, he’s been a regular customer of one of my main competitors on the mobile side, but no one’s been able to solve the issue.
So I went out there, and I checked the codes. There was a code for a rich condition and a code for an issue with the charging system. He’d had the alternator replaced twice in the last two years, once by the other mobile mechanic, and once by Firestone.
I started with the rich condition code, cleaning the mass air flow sensor, cleaning the throttle body, checking there filter, etc. After clearing the code, it went away and didn’t come back while I was there. So I started on the charging system code. I started troubleshooting, and everything that I tested pointed to the alternator being bad yet again.
The last test I did involved disconnecting the cars computer to check voltages to see if there was a short, and there wasn’t a short, which meant that the issue was with the alternator. Except, when I hooked to the computer back up and hooked everything else back up and started the car, the charging light was gone, and so was the check engine code.
🙃
Great. I may well be mechanic number three who leaves him with a car with no problems but that will likely reappear in the future. Unfortunately, there’s not really any way to diagnose a car if you can’t reproduce the problem.
Joy. 🙃
He’s to the point with the car that he said he’d eat probably either junk it, even though it doesn’t really have any drivability issues, or just pay me or someone else to remove the check engine light bulb from the dashboard, so that even if the check engine light is on, he’s not bothered by it. 😆
After that I headed to a Ford expedition that had some kind of a noise when braking. I got to the car and found that the noise that it was having was brakes metal on metal grinding. He needed a new pads and rotors, but it was something like 6:00 or 6:30, and even though I could have done the job, I wasn’t about to do it this time. I was too tired, and I have taxes that need to be done, so I needed the rest and to focus on other things. So I headed home, ate some dinner, managed to stay away from TV and everything once again.
I’m feeling better about that. I’m still having some pretty good withdrawals these last days coming home and not vegging out in front of my computer screen.
It’ll get easier, And I’m grateful to myself discipline is returning, at least in some areas.
So it was dinner, some tax stuff, oh, and I went to the grocery store and got my mom some dark chocolate. She can’t do chocolate but one little tiny square of time, so it’ll last for quite a while. 😊
I mentioned wanting a programmer. Saw a YouTube video yesterday of a guy using artificial intelligence to build a video game. He just told the artificial intelligence what he wanted, and it did it.
These artificial intelligences are going to turn the world on its head in the next couple years. I think, at least. I think it’s going to be nutty what happens these next couple of years. Between that and all of the research going into de-aging, some of it extremely promising, we are on the verge of one heck of a crazy world.
Given all of that stuff, I’m reminded of what a customer of mine mentioned the other day how he never would have guessed that in 2023 we’d have all of these amazing technological advancements and still have trench warfare playing out in Eastern Europe right now.
Crazy times.
Oh! Before going to bed, I drove down to where I’ve been de-vining and de- dead-treeing the woods (as well as thinning out the overly crowded forest), and I took out a huge dead tree that’s been dead and an eye sore for quite a long time.
Just picture a tree with a pretty thick base that goes up about 40 feet or so. About 20 feet up, it splits into like 5v massive limbs, each as big around as i am, but they’re all just stubs that go up another 20 feet or so. So I got that all cut down, and it came crashing down across the road, so I grabbed a tow rope, hooked up sections of the tree to my work van, and pulled it off the road to the side both up and down the road.
Gratefully, lots of the big sections broke into pieces when it came crashing down.
(quite an enjoyable sound, that crash at the ground. 🙃)
Anyway, the other part of the visual is that the huge stubby tree was so covered in vines that it was basically just a huge spider web of vines.
I should probably take more pictures and attach more pictures. I would if I didn’t have a cap on my data, but whatever. I’ll start adding more pictures. 😊
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 