Yesterday… Let’s see…
Ha! Right!
The day definitely did not go as planned. 🙃 0 The first job that I went to was supposed to be just a simple misfire on a four-cylinder Sentra. But… It’s Nissan… Which means that simple doesn’t really apply.
You’ve heard my feelings about Nissan many times before, but case in point was this 2012 Nissan Sentra. She had a misfire on cylinder too. Almost certainly that’s going to be an ignition coil, because that’s what most misfires are these days. People always turn to spark plugs, but it’s usually just the ignition coil.
Anyway, so I was expecting to go over there and have basically a 20 minute job and be done.
😆
Right. Uh… no dice.
Why?
Well because for whatever reason, and I have my guesses, Nissan decided to put the intake manifold right on top of the four cylinder engine. Pretty much everyone else in the entire world seemingly just leaves it bear on top so you can actually access the spark plugs without having to take apart All that crap just to get to the spark plugs.
But no, not Nissan. They put it right there on top, so in order to change the spark plugs, I have to remove the entire intake manifold That’s my house The throttle body.
Oh, and this car was the first one in my entire experience as a mechanic where both the upper and lower intake manifolds we’re bolted in using the exact same bolts. So the lower one comes off when you take the upper one off.
Wish I had known that ahead of time. I wasn’t expecting that, so a whole bunch of crap went into the intake ports from the lower intake manifold.
😬
I ended up getting my vacuum and vacuuming out the intake ports, and then looking down the spark plug holes to make sure that I couldn’t see any crap inside the combustion chamber.
Good gravy, Nissan. Why? Just… Why?
Anyway, so what goes from being an expected 20 minute job turns into a multiple hour job with storm clouds on the horizon threatening at any moment to dump rain all over me.
So I have to give the poor young woman the bad news that it’s a pain in the butt to deal with her car, and the the fact that it takes so much effort just to get into where the spark plugs and coils are, I recommend it something that I pretty much never recommend, and that was to go ahead and change all the spark plugs in all the coils, because otherwise she’s going to end up needing to have to pay all the labor to get back to them the next time.
Ugh.
So basically we pull out good parts because they’re likely going to go bad in the near future, and we don’t to have to pay the labor to do this all over again just replace another coil. So yeah, it went from being this quick job that would be maybe a couple hundred dollars with parts and tax and everything, to being this $600 job.
Then As I’m taking stuff apart, I find that her intake air boot is busted, and of course that’s $117 just for the part. It’s not any extra labor, because I have to take it off anyway to do the job, but still…
And then after finally getting everything apart and pulling the spark plugs out, I realized that she had an oil leak at the valve cover gasket spark plug tube seals.
Ugh.
I hate when things like this happen. Then I feel like those money grabbing mechanics who just tell you things that aren’t actually true so they can make more money.
Anyway, after lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of work, I was just starting to wrap up, with maybe five or 10 minutes worth of work left, when the heavens finally opened up and absolutely dumped on me. Gratefully, the wind was such that nothing super important inside the engine was getting soaking wet, and gratefully, I had all of the most important things already buttoned up, so it was just the last minute stuff that I had to do.
The end result was that the car got done, and little Mr Stephen might as well have jumped in a swimming pool. 🙃
The water pulled up in that part of the parking lot, so my shoes were stopping wet, and the rain was coming down so hard that it didn’t take long for me to be drenched.
Fun fun fun. 🙃
I almost made it to the end without getting wet. Almost!
I did one more car after that (only because it was a car that happened to have its window stuck down) before going home and calling it a day, postponing everything else because I was soaked to the bone.
I left little puddles everywhere I stood in AutoZone. 🙃
Anyway so the next car was going back to that Dodge avenger with the messed up window regulator that I had busted the bracket that holds the regulator to the window glass itself. Gratefully, the rain had stopped by then, and I was able to get the window glass back in and everything put back together without any issues. 🥳
Gratefully also, he was okay with the fact that the window tint on the new glass was lighter than it was on the old class. It’s actually probably legal whereas the other stuff likely wasn’t.
Still, I gave him another $20 off for the different shade of tint, And he was grateful for that as well as for all the work I did to get everything taken care of for him.
After that, I went home!
Dropped my wet clothes on the ground, and dove into the shower. Nice to get an early shower. Usually don’t get my weekly shower until Saturday. 😅
Anyway, I sent most of the rest of the day sort of just vegging around not doing anything important, and honestly, mostly wasting time, which for me carries its own kind of stress, but whatever.
Funny, I ended up putting off my sales taxes until way late, forgetting at one point and then having to do them way late at night, so I didn’t even Get to bed at a decent hour. 😅
Go me. 🙃
Anyway…
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 