Well, ummm…
Lots of stuff on my mind, so recalling the days events is a little difficult right now.
I’ll get to that in tomorrow’s post, though.
Let’s see… First job was a Chevy truck that the brake went all the way to the floor on.
Supposedly.
But when I got there, the battery was completely dead, and the oil pressure was pegged at 80, meaning that it wasn’t reading properly. And on and on. I couldn’t even properly test the brakes with all the other stuff that was going on. So I did what I could for the day, gave him a discount on the time that I spent working on it, and gave him an update to see what he wanted to do from there.
The next job was going back to the brake job that I had postponed because it was so late last night. I got that one done with nothing really going sideways, which was nice, other than that I put the caliper bracket on before I put the rotor on and had to take it back off because you can’t put a rotor on when the bracket is installed.
🙃
Third car was a 2009 Nissan versa that was having sputtering issues, supposedly. It had a couple of check engine codes, and she described some issues that sounded a heck of a lot like a vacuum leak, and the other shop had kind of guessed and replaced her mass air flow sensor and throttle body, but she was still having issues. I looked into the issue and found that she had a really dirty air filter, and she also had a clamp that was loose that might have been letting air in where it shouldn’t have. So I blew out the air filter, told her to get a new one, tightened up the clamp, and wasn’t able to reproduce any of the problems at all.
Cross your fingers that she’ll be good from here. It’s always a little uncomfortable when you can’t recreate the problem because it sort of feels like you haven’t really done anything, even though you have, so it’s hard to bill for it, but it is what it is.
Third car, oh wait, that was a third car, fourth car was a 1997 Ford ranger that he had put plug wires on but couldn’t get it to start. He had accidentally switched a couple of the wires.
Funny thing, though, after replaced the wires, his Ford ranger had exactly the same issue that the other Ford ranger that I worked on the other day had. Super super rough idle.
I don’t understand. Why on earth would it have a super rough idle after replacing spark plug wires. I did a little bit of research, and some people say that the computer has trouble adjusting, and it takes time for the computer to reset. But I’ve never heard anything like that and don’t honestly have any clue why the computer would freak out about new plug wires. They are just plug wires.
🤷
But that’s two Ford Rangers in a row with the same engine with the exact same issue after replacing plug wires. One with me replacing the wires, and one with my customer replacing his own wires.
Weird.
I told him to go ahead and drive the crap out of it like you were a teenager again for maybe 30 minutes, so we’ll see if everything sort of resets itself.
The last car, which gratefully, I finished sometime around like 5:00 or 6:00 was a 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee that just needed a battery. It was a little challenging for them, they having tried to do it themselves, because it was underneath the front passenger seat, and you have to take out the auxiliary battery before you can take out the regular main battery. I guess it’s a pretty good compact design, but putting a battery underneath a seat is kind of a dumb place to put it, in my opinion.
Anyway, I came home and did car number six. Sometime during the day, a tow truck showed up with a car at our house.
Not sure what the deal is–people having cars towed to shops without calling first. And… I’m a mobile mechanic, so there’s no shop. 🙃
Oh well, the car was there, so I went to diagnose it. It was a 2021 Toyota Corolla that they thought had alternator issues, but it fired right up, in the alternator was doing just fine, so… Maybe just a battery issue. We’ll see how it does after letting it sit overnight.
I ate dinner, chatted with my mother, and then was planning to go to bed early when my nephew called saying his fiance wanted to set me up with her cousin. I told him that I’m not really quite in the space for extra complications in my life at the moment, though I guess if the right situation came along I suppose I could be. But her cousin is in Thailand and… That’s a lot of complication. 🙃
After chatting with him, I actually swung up to his house, about 10:30 p.m., because the AC companies head quoted him $3,000 to fix his broken AC stuff. So I went up to take a look because I’ve been able to fix our own AC stuff most of the time that it’s had issues.
I don’t trust a single professional that comes out anymore. They nearly all seem like money grubbing companies with under-trained employees.
And my nephew got the distinct impression that the HVAC worker who was on site to diagnose the issue was uncomfortable sharing the price after talking to his home base because he knew he was completely gouging him. His demeanor completely changed after he talked to the home office and asked how much he was supposed to charge. My nephew said he looked super uncomfortable, like he knew that he was charging way way way too much.
I still haven’t figured out the issue, but his AC unit has an h3 error code, and one of the most common causes of an h3 error code is simply super dirty filters. Guess who never checked the filters when he diagnosed the problem with the system?
Yeah. Bet you guessed correctly.
His filters were absolutely filthy. The code still remained, but really? You don’t even check one of the most common causes, and you go right to one of the super-expensive causes?
And you’re going to charge $1,400 to evacuate and recharge the system and to fix a leak in a little tiny line that’s literally 5 minutes to do? Unscrew the connection, put sealant on the threads, and re-screw the connection. The end.
I’m probably going to end up buying the equipment to do the job for him and fixing it for him because it will be cheaper for me to buy all the equipment and do the job myself than it will be for him to have to pay to have it fixed.
Good gravy.
Anyway, I got home after midnight… dead tired.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 