Brain not working so well…
Let’s see… First car was going back to that 2005 Chevy 2500 from a couple of weeks ago or so that he wanted brake work done on but had no oil pressure reading on the gauge, and a gazillion other things wrong with it.
So I couldn’t even test the issues with the braking system until I got the oil pressure issue figured out, but I didn’t want to do that without permission, so I gave the diagnosis of everything that I found and let him make his mind up on what he wanted to do.
He messaged me a couple days ago asking that I go ahead and replace the oil pressure sensor, so I did that first thing this morning.
The second job was a pre-purchase inspection on a 2004 Buick LeSabre. It had a gazillion things wrong with it, but he just wanted a cheap little car to get around in, and it’s probably going to do him fine for a little while. I told him all the gazillions of things that were wrong with it, but he didn’t seem too fazed by it, so there you go.
I accidentally had my jack in the wrong place when I jacked it up, and it broke a little plastic clip. Fortunately, it wasn’t damage that actually caused a problem, and the owner gratefully, didn’t care. Basically just superficial, and on the bottom of the car, so no one would really see anyway.
Third car was going back to that 2004 Infiniti FX35 from the other day. I went ahead and put the new cam sensor in after picking one up from Nissan.
I’ve had bad luck with aftermarket sensors when dealing with Nissan products.
Anyway, got that put in after a nice long struggle trying to figure out how on earth to disconnect the electrical connector. Seriously, it’s a one-bolt job, but I spent probably 20 or 30 minutes just trying to get that connector apart. It’s on the back of the engine, and I couldn’t see what the connector looked like to figure out how to take it apart, and it was just… Dumb. In the end, I realized that in order to get the connector off, I had to push in at the same time I was pulling out.
Boy, that’s intuitive. 🙃
Even after I figured out how it worked, it took probably another 10 minutes just to get it apart.
Thank you, Nissan product.
There’s not really much room back there, so you’re doing all that with one hand, blind, unable to see the connector, unable to get both hands back there to push with one finger while you’re pulling the connector apart, so you’re having to push in the one part of the connector with one finger well using the rest of your hand to try and pull the connector off, but of course after years and years and years, it’s sort of welded on there, so… It’s a fight. Gratefully, it’s a fight that I won.
The last car of the day, all the way down and Fayetteville, was going back to the Honda Accord that I did the valve cover job on. She said that ever since I did that job, she’s had lights on the dash and collision warnings.
Super weird.
Replacing a valve cover has nothing to do with those particular lights on the dash, and definitely not with collision warning stuff either.
So I went back and looked anyway because what else are you going to tell the customer when those issues weren’t there before but apparently are after?
What I found was that I never noticed that she’d been in a friend and accident, well not her, but the people before she bought it. Looking closer at the vehicle, I could tell that the front end had been smashed in pretty good on the corner of the driver’s side. The radiator support was bent up and had only been sort of bent back, not properly repaired or replaced. The headlights weren’t sitting in properly nor were they fully bolted down.
No wonder she was getting weird collision warning messages and lights on the dash.
Still, I don’t get why those would pop up right after I do the valve cover job. There’s literally nothing that is in the same system at all.
🤷
What I found after going through everything was that it looks like her on the might need a software update. Those… I can’t do. So I sent her off to somebody who could, and I called it a day.
I had one more car on my schedule, but they didn’t want me to come after 7:00 p.m., so that was a no go.
And that was the day.
Oh! I did ask some of my customers if they liked the name of my non-profit, the tentative name, and each of them replied that they did. So… That’s positive. 😊
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the World
~ stephen
Lift the World 