2023-04-25 — God in the Rain

Super tired. Ready to crash.

It’s just after 10:30, but I want to get this post written before bed.

I was a little slower going this morning, getting out later than normal. The first job I was going to go to decided they didn’t want me after all because I wasn’t ASE certified.

Good luck to them…

I gave the owner of the vehicle a tip on where he might want to start looking with his Jeep that was dying while driving. Those older Grand Cherokees can have issues with the crankshaft position sensors, and that can cause them to die while driving, so I pointed him in that direction, as he said he was going to try and DIY it. Hopefully that helps him.

It’s super uncommon to lose a customer because I’m not ASE certified, but I have absolutely no desire to go spend the time to take the tests and get certified. Why bother? It only really ever matters with one customer maybe every six months or something, or if I have an organization that wants to hire me to service their vehicles, and I think I’ve only ever had maybe one or two that had a problem with me not being ASE certified.

Their loss.

I hadn’t done scheduling very effectively last night, so when that first job canceled, I was pretty much left scratching my head as to what to do and work to go. Certainly there were plenty of cars on the schedule, but I didn’t have any structure set up for the day at all.

So I ended up taking a whole bunch of time trying to figure out what to do, finally getting to my first job I think somewhere around 10:30 or 11:00. The first job was a pre-purchase inspection for a guy who had put some money down on a 1997 Chevrolet lumina.

Well, it had been an accident in the front and rear, judging by the misaligned hood and trunk. It’s tires were dry rotted. It’s transmission fluid was brownish when it should be red, and The biggest issue was that there was oil residue inside the radiator.

No bueno.

So I told him not to buy it, and then he started asking me if there were any other cars on the lot that I would recommend, and it was a lot full of junk cars, so basically I told him that walking around a car lot is about the least effective way of finding a good car.

I talked to him more about all of that, and then I asked him why he was getting a new car, and he said because the dealership that he worked for, that even with the employee discount, had quoted the repairs on his car at like $4,000. I asked him what all they said was wrong, and he gave me the list, and I convinced him to not buy a new car. He had a good car, Mercury Grand Marquis, and those are tanks that oftentimes last for a long long long time.

Not to mention, if you ever get in an accident with them, that tank part really helps out.

Anyway, so he’s going to keep his car, and I’ll help him fix it for a heck of a lot less than the dealership that he worked for that even with the employee discount was… yeah.

The third car was going to a 2006 Ford e450 traveling pet grooming vehicle. She said she thought she had about alternator, which was what the O’Reilly’s people told her, and for once, they were right!

Unfortunately, swapping out the alternator was a good bit more of a pain than I expected. The new alternator that they sold me had damaged threads in the case where the alternator bolts to another bracket. So I couldn’t use that alternator. So then we got a brand new alternator instead of remanufactured alternator, but the new one had an 8 groove pulley on it and not the six groove pulley that the original had.

Lovely.

So for the first time in my life I swapped pulleys on alternators.

But I ran into the hiccup without as well. The pulleys themselves were super easy to take off. Instead of being press-ons like power steering pump pulleys, they’re just screwed on with a nut, and when you loosen and take off the nut, the pulley can be pulled right off without any issues.

The problem is tightening them back down. How do you torque a nut that’s on a pulley? The pulley just spins and spins. How do you hold the pulley still when you’re having to put significant torque on the nut, and that’s trying to turn the pulley? Water pumps have a little holes in a special tool to hold them in place. Power steering pumps are press-ons, so you don’t need a nut.

Nor could I find a torque spec to torque it to even if I could hold the pulley still.

In the end, I was reminded that the original nut and pulley had a paint mark on them. So I grabbed the not that corresponded to the pulley I was putting on, and I used my impact to tighten it down a little bit at a time and tell it was clear that it lined up exactly with the paint mark.

Done.

🥳

The last car that I did today was a 2011 Ford crown Victoria, going back to that one that I worked on late at night in the CVS or Walgreens or whatever it was parking lot. They had bought a new combination switch and a new radiator fan control module, so I went to put those on, and after putting them both on, the stupid car still had all the same problems.

Lovely.

So I spent I don’t even know how long over there doing all that stuff only to find out that the vehicle still had issues, and was acting even weirder than it did the other night. Having additional issues that it didn’t have the first night I looked at it.

So there I was with two parts installed that my customers had purchased on their own that they didn’t need because I got the diagnosis wrong with this gremlin vehicle.

Miguel had swung by to chat with me while I was working on it, so we talked for a good while about stuff that he’s trying to figure out with his business.

After he left, and after my customer got home, gratefully, I was finally able to figure out the issue. She had had some body work done on her car after a recent accident, so I started pulling off some of the parts to look at something that she had thought might be the issue. Funny, what she told me was actually not what she was meaning to tell me, but it was exactly where the issue was found.

I started pulling the parts off where she said she thought there might be an issue, and once underneath the parts that were in the way of seeing what the body shop had done, I was able to find a set of ground straps that had been Jerry rigged. They weren’t tight, so they didn’t have a good connection, and they were the ground straps, all of them, that came out of the main wiring harness bundle.

The body shop people had tried to use a regular bolt to fasten all three ground straps to a little hole in the new fender they were putting on.

😶

Ummm… Folks, that ain’t gonna work.

You can’t put a bolt into something that doesn’t have threads. If you’re going to try and screw something into sheet metal, you need to sheet metal screw. But a sheet metal screw isn’t going to be able to get ground straps tighten up to safely trust it as a ground!

Good gravy.

The whole body work in paint job had been cobbled together unprofessionally. Stuff was misaligned all over, bolts were missing because they couldn’t be put in because it was misaligned, etc.

Fortunately, I carry hardware with me, so I took a bolt and a nut and instead of just screwing the bolt into the fender, I put a nut on the other side so it could clamp the ground straps directly against the fender solidly and tightly.

Problem solved.

Car fixed.

🥳🥳🥳

I was actually worried about that car even before I went back out there, concerned that what actually did happen might happen.

So I knocked off a whole bunch of money on the price to cover the cost of the parts that they bought, charging them only $50 today for probably 3 hours worth of my time. But I didn’t feel like it was fair for them to have to eat the cost of the parts that I told them to buy. Would have been nice or had I bought them, as I could just take them back, but they were heck a lot more expensive locally than they could get them online. They were able to get a refund for one of the parts, and I gave him a huge discount anyway.

The lady was super grateful, and then she wanted to talk to me about god…

Super nice lady. I have been missing god more and more lately. Hurts my heart a little to not have that relationship anymore. I’m just afraid to go back. I’m afraid god’s going to once again tell me that I was following the right path.

I just… (sigh). I think it’s a lot like all the other areas of my life. I just can’t handle more failures, or in this case, more waiting with so little to hold on to.

There’s an anxiety even in thinking about it.

That’s something seems to be pulling me back.

And today the lady said she felt like she had a message for me… She said the word acceleration came to mind, that if I do go back, That there will be an acceleration toward… yeah.

Anyway, so that’s on my mind a little bit. I guess time will tell. Or not. Who knows. I’m a bit afraid to go back to the dog that’s bit me so many times. But it’s also possible that it never bit me. It’s possible that It was my issue all along.

Who knows.

I chatted with her, in the rain, for probably 20 minutes. It’s always weird to talk about meaningful things that are deep and personal with somebody who’s married. But she wanted to talk about it, and those things have been on my mind anyway lately…

After talking with her, I headed over to AutoZone to take some parts back. I ended up staying at the AutoZone for over an hour, I think, because one of the employees who works there has a no contact order with somebody, and that person showed up at the AutoZone like there wasn’t any problem at all, sort of Just doing what they wanted and going against the no contact order. So I got the person to leave, and I stayed until the store closed and the employee was able to go home in order to make sure that the other person wouldn’t be there to cause issues or a scene or anything.

After I got home, I heated up some leftover spaghetti, helped my mom with the garage door opener stuff, wrote the one post, and now I’m finishing this post. It’s now 11:00, and I’m off to bed.

G’night, my lovelies. 😊

Love and hugs. 😊

Lift the World

~ stephen